Part 3: Agate Village

Agate Village is the green Amish utopia that the HQ Lab is not. Unlike every other location, it's a mythic place where the Earth comes alive as a supernatural force, shrouded in a fog both literal and of legends.

Pokemon has never been what you'd call a self-aware series, moreso prior to Black & White--just look at how straight the fourth generation played its ridiculously overblown legendary Pokemon--but the Orre games have a clear commentary on their own setting by establishing that Agate, a hidden mountain village of mythical trainers and champions, is also a glorified retirement home. It's where legends go to sit in recliners and rocking chairs, watching the history channel and trying to get their grandkids to answer their phonecalls.

Agate is also exploding with side areas. This one right here won't be instrumental just yet, but in the mid 30s Eevee will be benefiting from it immensely. Of course, by then she won't be an Eevee anymore!

This area houses XD's move tutor. Move tutors are characters that can teach Pokemon moves that they couldn't learn otherwise, and they're an essential part of competitive play. The catch is that each move can only be taught once per save file. Right now we just have Mimic, Thunder Wave and Seismic Toss available. I go ahead and replace Eevee's Tail Wag with Mimic because I'll never use Wag, but Mimic is situationally usable against the computer. It copies the last move used by the Pokemon that you target with it, replacing Mimic with that move for the rest of the battle. More on this in a bit.

I like this alcove because it brings together water, earth and forest life at one cross section, and these are the key elements of Agate. Just like at Gateon, the water effects are beautiful and it's great to see the different streams merge around the base of these tree roots. Screenshots don't do justice to all the little details of life going on in the Orre games.

The trainers in Agate are mostly retired trainers that are well past their prime, with their students making up the remaining population. Someone near the entrance actually described it as a retirement village, so this is presumably where all the old Florida retirees that would have lived in Gateon go to to escape the crime.

Fun Old Man Clerr sends out an Oddish and Machop, Grass and Fighting-types. The battles in Agate don't reward a lot of experience and mainly serve to help purify your Shadow Pokemon, so I do a lot of switching out when the opponent only has one critical HP Pokemon left in order to help get Ledyba and Poochyena ready. After the SIM battles it's actually a little disappointing to have to deal with the game constantly throwing neutral matchups with no type advantages at me, since these battles basically boil down to selecting Bite and Shadow Blitz and eyeballing if I can OHKO something or if I should double up on one target.

We're supposed to be heading to the house of the village's most celebrated trainer, Eagun, but I want to explore more. Behind his house is this side area, where we see the foreground coming into play again. In older video games, the common technique was to have the protagonist constantly centered, so that rather than moving your protagonist what you were actually moving was the environment, giving the illusion of controlling a character. This is how the 2D Pokemon games were designed, from Red and Blue up until Diamond and Pearl. Black and White still had elements of it, but your character would sometimes break away to showcase the polygonal environments. In Gale of Darkness and its contemporaries, you have a truly mobile character that can go to the left and right of the screen, move further away from or closer to the viewer, and duck around objects to leave and reenter visibility. It would be impossible to see a bridge being actually closer to the viewer than their player character in the first two generations, and even in the handheld third you could only create the illusion of it--it wasn't until the GameCube games that the player character had the free range that allowed for scenes like this.

For most people, this is all overshadowed by the shortcomings of the GCN. I admit, that bridge looks like it was ripped from Ocarina of Time's Kokori Forest and painted over with 600 extra polygons in the transition from the Nintendo 64.

This nice lady's the reason I looked into the side area. In Colosseum these types of trainers were called Fun Old Ladies, which is a more accurate translation on the whole, but now they're called Matrons. Matron Belish's main strategy is to use Nincada's Leech Life to prolong its longevity. Leech Life has a base power of 20 and does benefit from a Same-Type Attack Bonus with Nincada's Bug typing, and its main characteristic is restoring 50% of the damage dealt as HP to the user.

Like at Gateon, we get a Technical Machine for winning. TM09 is Bullet Seed, a Grass-type version of Fury Attack. It has just 10 Base Power but connects twice, with a 37.5% chance for an additional hit, and a 12.5% for two or three additional hits after that, for five possible in all. Every hit can crit, but one critical hit won't guarantee another, unlike in Red/Blue/Yellow where if the first hit was a critical all of them would be. It's not especially useful in Gale of Darkness, but in Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald it was great to teach to your Pokemon if you had a type disadvantage against the first gym leader, and in Fire Red & Leaf Green it's amazing if you're trying to train a Zubat to become Golbat early on since it gives you something to wear down Geodudes with.

Off to the right of Eagun's house is the Name Rater. This guy can look at the nicknames of any Pokemon that we own and then let us enter new ones. Pokemon with a different Original Trainer ID (traded Pokemon) can't be renamed, and unpurified Shadow Pokemon can't either because they don't trust us yet. However, this does let me rename Eevee!

Hm...a Pokemon that serves to set up for more offensive monsters, lackluster individually but powerful when paired with a strong attack that it can support by rapidly swapping out mid-battle...

"Break ride! Eradicator, Electric Shaper Dragon!"

 dumb elec names dumb elec names dumb elec names

I love training Electric-types because dumb elec names!

I will be sticking with ElecShaper for now, although I'm open to suggestions and Electric-types are fun to name so if I think of something better I'll probably come back to this point.

One issue that I have with Agate is that unlike at Gateon, you never get to see the entire village at once, not even in the flyover. This is problematic because you have parts of the scenery like the waterfall off to our right and the massive mountain wall that it's set around that don't make a lot of sense if you try to consider the entire shape of the village. Where exactly does all that water come from? The flyover shows that it starts at the far northeastern side of the village, but we never see the spring of itself and the shape is only vaguely alluded to by the game. The scenery just trails off the edge of the screen.

This guy shares an Oran berry with us. Neither XD nor Colosseum make use of the GameCube's internal clock, so growing berries the Hoenn way is impossible. Instead, every ten minutes this man gets another berry from his Taillow that he can give to us.

Since Lily sent word ahead of us, Eagun's been making preparations to help us finish purifying our Shadow Pokemon. 

Multiple books! This lets us study up on the upcoming battle a little, though Eagun needs no introduction to Colosseum veterans. So we know that Ground-types or Ground moves would be effective, but we have neither of either.


The separate beds are not the first thing I notice when I walk into this room. It's that poor Pika has to sleep either in a Poke Ball or on the floor.

This guy is either the first or the last of the above-ground trainers that you battle in Agate, depending on whether you move clockwise or counterclockwise through the village. Surprisingly few characters in the video games are actively aiming for the championship, although it can't be that hard in Orre since there's little to no league presence there and we'll probably be qualified to be called champion by the end of this LP.

Uh.

You're not getting to the championship with those Bug-types, buddy...

The major danger about Rider Hebon is that every Pokemon on his team uses Poison Sting exclusively, which inflicts minimal damage but has a 30% chance to induce the poison status problem. It's a weakened, poison version of Lick and won't take him to the championship, but it's problematic for us because he might KO our Pokemon out of battle.

This is one of those out of the way areas that you can only really find if you have a good understanding of how XD's terrain works, because it's not very visible from the other parts of the village.

This guy is lost. So I'm gonna beat him up and take his money.

Bodybuilder Dosk (there are worse names in the duology) has a Grimer and Zubat, both of which we've seen before, but his Tyrogue is what really needs to be watched out for because it's a Fighting-type and would be dealing 2.5x damage to our Normal Pokemon. Tyrogue can only learn Tackle by this level normally, but given that this is the same franchise that gave us Lance's Barrier Dragonite and there are a number of ways to give Tyrogue Fighting-type moves by either breeding or TM, I take no chances and Shadow Rush him.

Down here is where the magic happens. The second fastest way to purify Shadow Pokemon is to send them out into battle for that first drop of the Shadow Gauge and call to them in Reverse Mode, so Eagun's arranged a gauntlet of five battles to help ready them for the final purification ceremony. The absolute fastest way is to pour money into the Heart Gauge, but battles go along with that.

So let's talk about Mimic. The developers thought ahead and made the move automatically fail if you try to copy a Shadow move. While it's mostly situational, the real reason to use it is to copy the moves of team members that outspeed the user (so of course, as the only Pokemon on my team that can learn it, Eevee outspeeds everyone!) or to follow up on an attack that they made the previous turn. That way when you have one Pokemon that hits an opponent's weakness, your other one can mirror it and you can have two Pokemon dealing double damage that battle for what will pretty much be a one-turn or next-turn kill. Right now my main use of it is to copy Metal Claw if necessary, but in a bit I'll be able to grab one of the most powerful STAB moves for ElecShaper off of Teddiursa e for more drawn out battles, long before the game wants me to actually be able to do that.

Switched out Pokemon still gain XP, so ElecShaper climbs to level 13 while these two mop up the battle.

The underground area has been around since Colosseum, although I don't recall that treasure box being there before. One thing that I'd like to see from a future game or a remake is a more freeform camera, because being able to move around these objects from a perspective that's closer to the protagonist's would give it more of a presence and since of interactivity, and make finer details more clear. And I really do wonder what the ceiling looks like given that this is supposed to be both a cavern and a forest.

Supertrainer Jols has our first Corphish of the game. I got a little paranoid about contact moves here because I couldn't remember if Corphish has the Rough Skin ability or not, and it turns out he doesn't! Corphish can only have Hyper Cutter or Shell Armor (and in BW, Adaptability) as his abilities. Hyper Cutter prevents his Attack stat from being lowered, negating the effects of Intimidate and the Growl move, while Shell Armor stops critical hits. Adaptability outstrips the others by a wide margin, because it turns the 1.5x STAB bonus into a 2x bonus, but with that unavailable the rest is a matter of what you want him to do. I would probably favor Hyper Cutter for disrupting Intimidate teams, as Shell Armor is a very situational ability that won't see regular use--in fact, you can't tell when it's working or not!

As long as we don't defeat Eagun, these first four trainers can be battled and rebattled just by walking in and out of the underground pass, so I exploit this to catch up on the experience that ElecShaper missed out on by not fighting Aferd before. For the record, Shadow Pokemon don't gain EVs even though they do get to store XP gained prior to purification and apply it later, so only ElecShaper is having her EV spread ruined by story mode benefiting from any knockouts.

This is a good as time as any to clarify how Effort Values work for uninitiated readers. Essentially, EVs are a type of stat point experience that you get from defeating certain Pokemon; each Pokemon gives 1-3 EVs in a particular stat, and when you amass 4 EVs in that stat it gives you 1 extra point toward it. Any Pokemon's EVs are capped at 510 with a max of 255 allocated to any one stat, but because it takes 4 EV points to increase a stat, putting 252 EVs into a stat is the same as putting 255 in. Since EV drops are specific to each Pokemon, in some areas you can defeat the same Pokemon over and over to EV train, getting lots of EVs in a single stat, but as with Individual values your actual EVs are invisible and measurable only by the extra points in a stat that you have.

If you haven't been keeping track (and I don't blame you), after repeating these battles ElecShaper's sitting on 3 HP / 3 Def / 5 SpD / 11 Atk / 9 SpA / 7 Spe. The recommended build of the day has only HP, SpA and Spe EVs, but I doubt that ElecShaper's IVs are good enough to merit competitive use in the first place. My long-term plan with the Orre team is to aim for the right natures and breed them once I've opened up trading, so that their offspring will be the truly competitive Pokemon rather than our actual first generation of snags.

 The semifinal opponent, Cron, has a Horsea, Abra and Shroomish.

I went after his Abra first because I remembered her as knowing all three elemental Punch moves, Fire Punch, Ice Punch and Thunder Punch. Each of these has a 10% chance of inflicting a corresponding status problem, burn, freeze and paralysis. That chance is low, but it's still incredibly dangerous if one of them goes off and it lets her pinpoint Ledyba's 2x weaknesses to each of those elements. I might be confusing her with a different Abra or one from Colosseum, though.

Cron gives us this very important item for defeating him. The Cologne Case allows us to hold special consumable colognes sold exclusively in Agate village, each of which can be applied at to a Shadow Pokemon to decrease its Heart Gauge by a percentage. These do have a use with non-Shadow Pokemon, increasing their happiness, so it can make getting an Espeon or Umbreon very easy if you didn't have one already, and it's also useful in happiness-based evolutions.

The three colognes' effectiveness is proportional to their expense, so before I leave Agate behind today I buy three Vivid Scents. The main use that we'll be getting out of them is in determining our Shadow Pokemon's nature on-the-spot, which while it won't save us from any resetting it will make the process go by a lot faster.

Myth Trainer Eagun is one of five trainers in Gale of Darkness to battle with only a single Pokemon. That Pokemon should be very familiar to trainers that experienced Colossseum.

His Pikachu's lost about 40 levels since the old days, but he's still a threat. He knows Thundershock, which like Thunder Punch has a 10% chance to paralyze when it hits, and Eagun's Pikachu will receive a 1.5x STAB bonus for it (2.5x damage against Ledyba; Flying is a really bad type to have in an Electric matchup and there's actually a defensive move that removes Flying from your type for a turn in the fourth generation because of that, but Ledyba and Ledian don't have access to it in this game.) His main feature is his incredible Speed, as Eagun's Pikachu will outspeed even ElecShaper, but two on one is really not how the double battle system is supposed to work and without a partner this is just a practice battle after all.

ElecShaper goes for a STAB Tackle, but Pikachu's Static ability activates after he takes the damage. Static has a 30% chance to inflict paralysis when a Pokemon uses a contact move, meaning any move that touches the target of the attack. Oh, and that up there is how much damage a single Thundershock did without making a critical hit.

Pikachu can't stand up to Teddiursa's Shadow Rush though, and goes down in the opening round despite utterly crippling ElecShaper within that round. Really, if Eagun had a full team he'd be pretty dangerous here if only for the wanton paralysis spam and my lack of access to Ground-type Pokemon.

As long as we have at least one Shadow Pokemon's Heart Gauge fully reduced, we can progress with the plot. I took the extra mile to purify them all.

The relic stone is a familiar site to anyone that spent the summer of 2004 repeatedly renting a certain GameCube prequel out of Blockbuster. It's part of the regalia of Celebi, a legendary Pokemon of nature and protector of forests, and is known as a place that it once touched down upon. Because of this connection to Celebi, which acts both as a forest guardian and as a timeless creature that travels through different time periods at will, Shadow Pokemon that make contact with the stone can recall memories of their lives from before their hearts were closed off, completing the purification process.

The Shinto influences on the relic stone were a lot more apparent in the original Japanese release, where it was referred to as a shrine in the sense of Japanese shrines where kami reside within, and the relic forest was referred to as the sacred forest. What I find interesting about that is that they use the term 叢祠 hokora instead of 神社 jinja, which is the more common term for that kind of place of worship. Hokora is normally written in kana rather than kanji, but the kanji that exists for it is a little more naturalistic than jinja, since it has 叢 "thicket/bushes" (jinja is like "company of the gods") and is used for smaller shrines that hold minor gods not connected to a major shrine. The word is also older than jinja and while there isn't as much of a disconnect, I think you could compare the situation of Christian cathedrals and house churches to these types of places. The surprising thing about this is that while the "relic stone" in English sounds like an important, unique location essential to fighting Cipher, in Japan hokora are relatively common so the sacred forest's hokora is not supposed to be unique; Ilex shrine in generation II is another example of one. 

If you're wondering why Teddiura is paralyzed, Static activated even in death. Eagun's Pikachu is hardcore.

The purification ceremony for each Shadow Pokemon is the same. The darkness in his or her heart is dispelled, Celebi's light envelops the Pokemon, and it then receives all of the experience points that it accrued while in a Shadow state, as well as relearning the moves that that Pokemon's Shadow moves were replacing.

Shadow Blitz is replaced by Return, god's (Celebi's?) gift to Normal-type Pokemon. Return's base power is equal to the user's happiness divided by 2.5. At maximum happinness this is 102, and as a Normal-type move it's the damage dealer of choice for Teddiursa and her contemporaries. Prior to Gold/Silver/Crystal this move didn't exist, so even though there were a lot of powerful Normal-type Pokemon in the original core games, they lacked a go-to damage dealer and generally had to choose between Body Slam's 30% paralysis with lower base power and Hyper Beam's 150 BP with recharge time.

Refresh replaces Shadow Mist. This is a very useful move and it's exclusive to our (former) Shadow Teddiursa, as lesser bears cannot learn it. Refresh can cure burn, poison and paralysis but only works on the user. I've not heard of an Ursaring build that calls for Refresh, but given the limited availability of Ursarings with it, we may still see some use from it.

Teddiursa gains three levels and tries to learn a dumb move that I don't let her learn because it's dumb. In total she gets +6 HP / +4 Sp. Attack / +7 Attack / +4 Sp. Defense / +4 Defense and +3 Speed. Finally, she receives a special ribbon, "National Ribbon" to commemorate her purification, which serves to remind us that she came from XD so that even if we delete or replace her unique moves, after transferring her to another game we will still be able to tell where she came from. Ribbons are an artifact of the contest system introduced in generation III, a nonviolent means of competition between Pokemon where you basically got to use them as showdogs. I think it's genuinely impossible to get every kind of ribbon on a single Pokemon, but Shadow Pokemon are the best place to start if you want to try.

I'm naming Teddi because I picked her as a core team member for at least up until the desert lab and I'm the one who has to deal with yelling these names when I send Pokemon out every time I battle. However, Poochyena and Ledyba are ready to be purified, and they need names of their own! I leave this responsibility to the internet and my comments' section below. We're limited to ten characters.

Eagun explains that he has a friend, Vander, who works at the Mt. Battle training facility to the northeast. Vander recently saw suspicious characters out in the desert, so we're going to investigate his claim and see if he can point us to where Professor Krane's kidnappers are hiding out.

Next time: Mt. Battle, further ruining my EV spreads.