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.

Part 2: Gateon Port

Setting-wise, Orre's geography may be based on Arizona, but Gateon Port's always given me a central Florida vibe. It has a nice face as an access point to sea trade that also works as a natural water feature, and a lot of technology is worked into that to encourage tourism, but it's humid as hell and of course, where there's humidity

there's angry white people looking for a fight.

After Chobin, this is the second candidate for our rival, and also the one that I feel has the least gameplay but most storyline precedence. Well, bring it, thunderhead. I'll show you what wonders Timid does for an Eevee's base stats. I am pretty sure that any effects the nature would have on Eevee's stats at this point are invisible.

This is the perfect time for the blink animation to kick in. Michael embodies my feelings on Zook completely. Although, rather than just a Florida beach bum, the pompadour sticks out as a stereotypical yakuza influence to me, just westernized by the blond color.

Zook comes at us with what the game makes no attempt to hide as a Shadow Pokemon. His Shadow Zangoose is at a much higher level than either of our Pokemon, coming in at 28 before we actually have the chance to train, but she's also alone so teamwork will be the key. Her ability is Immunity, which prevents her from being poisoned, but that won't be relevant here. She knows two Shadow moves, the first being the classic Shadow Rush, with Rush having been severely toned down since its original debut. Rush used to have a base power of 90, but its BP is just--

hahaha no as crazy fun as that would be, XD is not gonna just let you walk into Gateon Port and get trashed by a level 28 Shadow Zangoose in your fourth battle of the game. This nice old guy and two mystery men drop by to mop up Zook, as he's having none of the peace talk.

Jiminy cricket. Ardos' Alakazam is almost twice the level of Zook's Zangoose, and it opens the battle with Psychic. Even assuming that Alakazam has a neutral nature like Quirky or Serious, you're looking at like 150+ damage with a kind RNG.

The Shadow Zangoose goes down in a single hit. Zook flies the coop after that, although I can guarantee that this won't be the last that we'll see of him.

The old man, Mr. Verich, tells Ardos that this won't be necessary as Zook won't be coming back.

An interesting point about Mr. Verich is that his character design uses a lot of Buddha iconography. There are 32 or so physical attributes of the Buddha used as guidelines in making art--a lot of them are visible in colossal Buddhas like the one at Todai-ji--but the major ones you can see in Verich are the stretched earlobes and perpetually serene smile. I don't think Verich ever stops smiling in-game, which gets more than a little unnerving at some parts, but we'll get to that when we get there. The earlobes typically symbolize wisdom now, but because they originated from Sidhartha's life as a prince and the heavy jewelry that stretched his ears, they also represent a casting away of material wealth.

Mr. Verich heads over to the Krabby Club, and I take the opportunity to follow him in because there's a cutscene in the opposite direction and I've been button mashing through those for four days. We're stopped at the door by this sailor, Navigator Berk, who only allows strong trainers to enter the Club. Mainly because their job security is dependent on how many ships are going out, Gateon Port is absolutely flooded with idle-handed sailors, and naturally there are some that are a little too ready to battle.

This one flew over my head as a kid playing XD for the first time, but as an island nation Japan has a much more nuanced relationship to the sea and seafaring. The perception of sailors waiting for work to turn up can be pretty much equated with how unemployed construction workers are seen over here. The east side of Gateon is something of a dive as a result, although the sailors that we meet are generally harmless because Michael's just a kid.

Sailors as trainers generally prefer Water types, because seriously you're out on the ocean do you think that like, a Charmander that's gonna die if its tail gets wet is a good seafaring companion? Berk sends out a Wingull and Lotad, Water and Water/Grass respectively.

Lotad is weird. Even though she looks Water/Bug and Water/Grass and Grass/Bug all at the same time, and is typically encountered paired with the Water/Bug Surskit in the third generation games, she's actually Water/Grass. I bypass the whole searching-Bulbapedia-business by having Teddiursa go at her with Shadow Blitz for a OHKO, while Eevee uses Bite to flinch Berk's Wingull for him to go down without fighting back on turn 2.

These nameless sailors are some of my favorite characters in the whole game. The one at the right goes on about current events, Mr. Verich, the ships going in and out of port, the economy and how if we'd only lock up the bankers and his buddy just nods and

We see "I'd say so, matey." about four times and it's adorable.

The Krabby Club in its current state is about what you'd expect going off of who the doorman was. There's like four or five sailors loitering about, a two girl stage magician act--get too close and that sailor on the right berates you for being too young to be sitting up front for this show--and a bartender willing to gossip about Mr. Verich. Verich is apparently footing the bill for the whole town to eat and drink as much as it likes while he's in port, so he's quite the celebrated figure. That tells me that the Buddha iconography is deliberate, particularly the elongated earlobes since while he hasn't renounced his material wealth, Mr. Verich instead puts it to feeding the public in an informal charity.

Artists.

You can watch ONBS reports throughout the game, and there's multiple unique TV sets for each area. It's a neat way to catch up on the plot if you've put the game down for a while. While the SS Libra getting attacked was all over the news before, right now the Professor Krane kidnapping is all over the airwaves.

We can't even get to the man himself, but Ardos is happy to have offered his help...if we thank him once. Talk to him twice and he tells us to go home before another guy like Zook shows up. Jovi's a little put off by this.

Next to the Krabby Club is our first Pokemart. Unlike in the handheld games, every Pokemart in the GameCube games has a unique design. We can't actually buy Poke Balls yet, since they're not native to the Orre region. Because of its heavy desertification, pollution and general inability to act as a stable ecosystem, Orre doesn't cater well to wild Pokemon, so all of the ones within are imported or bred through imports. Unoccupied Poke Balls aren't in demand except by breeders, and aren't stocked by regular shops as a result. They still carry vital medicines though.

This is status problems 101. Poison decreases a Pokemon's health by 12.5% each turn in battle, and every step taken out of, and will eventually knock out that Pokemon if it goes untreated. There is a poison variant that starts dealing progressively greater damage each turn, starting at 6.25% and going up by the same number each turn until hit caps at 93.75% damage. It sounds amazing and along with other forms of progressive damage it is when it goes off, but in addition to Immunity described above, there are other abilities like Natural Cure that heal poison automatically, and moves that cure status effects, and the counter for the Toxic version of poison resets when the afflicted is switched out. It still has logistical uses since being able to predict a switch also means having some knowledge of what the type matchups on the next turn will be and what you should switch into, and status curing is a turn your opponent spends not attacking.

Paralysis has a 1/4 chance to stop a Pokemon from attacking in battle, and causes the afflicted Pokemon's Speed to be reduced to 25% until the problem is cured. Mainly because of the Speed reduction, it's the most competitive of the status problems and still sees play in the World Championship and the like. A Pokemon that's asleep will be unable to attack, with the number of moves that it's left asleep determined at the moment that it's put to sleep, between 1 and 6 turns. This is another status problem that sees a lot of competitive play, and there's actually been a Sleep Clause instituted since the Red/Blue/Yellow days that prevents you from putting more than one Pokemon to sleep at a time because this would be a very powerful strategy otherwise.

Sleep is oftentimes inflicted on oneself through the Rest move. Rest restores a Pokemon to full HP at the expense of going to sleep that turn for two turns, and there are a couple ways to wake up immediately or even attack while asleep in competitive play, so you see a lot of people self-sleeping then immediately waking up to compensate for item use being banned.

There are other status problems, but we'll get to them when it's appropriate.

This is a throwback to Colosseum, where this old lady sold herbs and roots that would restore HP and status effects at a better rate for what you paid compared to manufactured medicine, but would decrease the happiness of the Pokemon that they were used on because of their bitter taste and because American Pokemon don't trust that funky hippy traditional medicine in The Under. Her shop was creepy and had dried roots and ChuChu juice and crap in it but since the overhead camera in Colosseum zoomed in basically never, you could shop there without losing your lunch.

She's since adopted this Munchla...

...

...this fourth generation Pokemon in a third gen game. Right, so this was a big deal when XD came out. It was that one game where you could see two Pokemon that would be in Diamond and Pearl! And you could even battle with one! Everyone who bought it not for Colosseum bought it for that. Then Serebii put all the info on the web and nobody bought it anymore. And we have never gotten a sequel since.

Gateon in a nutshell.

So finally heading to Gateon's west side to advance the story, we run into Jovi's friend Emili and her single mother Acri. In the first generation of Pokemon it was just assumed that the main character's dad was a typical absentee Japanese salaryman father on perpetual overseas business of some kind, in the third the father was a gym leader, but in the Pokemerica setting that is Orre what does it say of the global perception of the United States that every young parent we meet is a single one? Writers write what they know as well as what they think they know, and with the ever-rising trend in the media to focus on coming-of-age stories surrounding young fatherless teens, the USA's media output has likely affected the view that other countries have of it. We will meet a happily married couple soon, but they are ancient and their kids have been out of the house for at least twenty years.

My ruminations stem wholly from how boring this scene is because Emili and Acri are flat characters among a cardboard cast. They don't have Pokemon, can't be battled, never turn up in a cutscene again until the very end of the game, and Acri exists to give you one of four optional items later, two of which are one-off consumables that you can buy, one of which gives you more money in a world of money, and one of which is banned in competitive play. Sure they flesh out Gateon just by existing, but we didn't really need to meet them in a cutscene. You can visit their house at any time as things are.

Despite its small size, Gateon Port is clearly divided down the middle by its lighthouse, into eastern and western sides. The western half is where you find Emili and Acri's house, as well as a luxury liner and the access point for the lighthouse, while the eastern half is full of unemployed sailors, the Krabby Club and a couple of the more sordid trainer classes, the type of people that you'd see hanging out in Mirror B.'s hideout back in Colosseum. This might look like social commentary, but the eastern side is also the center of commerce with both the Pokemart and Pokemon Center located there.

All of the really interesting stuff is in the middle, though. The lighthouse, for one.

"At times a generous tycoon, but his true identity--a swashbuckling thief! How's that for a story premise? Doesn't it get your heart racing?"

This is the kind of storytelling that I think that cutscene could have been better put toward. Rewarding exploration and talking to optional characters is one thing, but actively making the other scenes less interesting to make exploration more important is bad form. The fact that Acri has inherent suspicions about Mr. Verich, that in spite of his serene nature, feeding sailors that are down on their luck and breaking up street fights to keep the peace, the first thing she thinks about him is that he's secretly a thief tells us more about Verich without actually having Verich tell us anything at all.

To get to the lighthouse I have to go the machinery shop that we're supposed to be going to and sit through another cutscene and then walk out and go through yet another cutscene and I don't feel like doing that so I'm going to harass another sailor. This is one of those points where XD shows that the developers really know what they're doing this time around, as the closer you get to the edge of the pier the closer the camera gets to Michael. I absolutely love the scenery in Gateon because it captures all the scenic points of a beach town with none of the cigarette butts and it's beautiful in a saccharinely picturesque way.

The water is gorgeous in motion, it's clear enough that you can almost see right to the sea floor, you can make out the base of the piers and the lighthouse as well as the areas where the foundation is decaying from water exposure, and because of the close-in camera you get to see all the little details of the liner. XD, and GameCube games in general are not beautiful in the way that PS3 games are beautiful, because they are not photorealistic. They're beautiful because the graphical abilities of the GameCube are limited and seeing the developers strive to achieve a perfect presentation with limited tools is much more interesting than seeing them effortlessly succeed now that they can do everything. The imperfection is part of the GameCube's appeal. Like the deliberate lack of curvature in a Raku tea bowl, although nothing made in 2005 can be as rustic as Wabi-sabi artworks.

Sailor Bost opens with Whismur and Marill, Normal- and Water-types. At this point Teddiursa's Heart Gauge is also low enough that I get access to her first non-Shadow move, Lick. Lick has just 20 BP but also comes with a 30% chance of paralyzing the target, inflicting the aforementioned Speed reductions while also interrupting their attacks. If it had a BP of around 60 I would use it, but to be honest Bite is useful with my Eevee because it does decent damage with a 30% flinch as icing on the cake, where with Lick, paralysis really is the goal of using the move. In that case, it would be better to have something like Thunder Wave, which does no damage but inflicts paralysis 100% of the time except on Ground-types while Lick just does mediocre damage and doesn't paralyze very well at all.

Marill actually has too much HP to OHKO, so Teddiursa Shadow Blitzes Whismur for an instant knockout while Eevee tries for a flinch on Marill. This is another battle that ends in two rounds.

Bost gives us TM45 for beating him. Technical Machines are used to teach moves to Pokemon that can learn them, but are one-use affairs up until the fifth generation, and not every Pokemon can learn every move. In XD, TM45 is Attract. I was going to explain it now, but I'm not going to teach it to anything yet and it's really more relevant next time.

The guy that we're looking for is out, but the sailor that's watching his shop for him will give us a free evolutionary stone for listening to him talk about his Eevee studies. This is important because Eevee's special characteristic is that her unstable DNA allows her to evolve into one of eight different Pokemon, five at the time of XD's release. In the first generation she could evolve into one of three core types, Fire (Flareon), Water (Vaporeon) or Electric (Jolteon) and Pokemon Yellow actually exploited this by having a rival that adjusted his Eevee to your play style. The second generation added Psychic (Espeon) and Dark (Umbreon.) The fourth generation added Grass (Leafeon) and Ice (Glaceon) while the seventh added Sylveon who has literally been guessed as every type under the sun, including types that don't exist and some that never will. For the record, my guess is on Toilet Paper-type and her species will be the Power Puff Pokemon.

The Moon Shard and Sun Shard are actually exclusive to Pokemon XD. Normally, an Umbreon evolution is triggered when Eevee develops high happiness during nighttime, and Espeon does the same for daytime. The Shards act as substitutes for an actual time of day because there isn't an in-game clock for the GameCube games, enabling the corresponding evolutions.

What Pokemon will my Eevee evolve into? For a while Umbreon was the competitive evolution of choice, and she does have good type coverage and strong defense while Espeon has easy access to the Psychic move and can wipe out a lot of heavy hitters just by glaring at them, but both of them are available from Colosseum, Umbreon has actually fallen pretty far since her glory days and Espeon is outclassed in XD by early access to a different Psychic Pokemon. Flareon has strong Attack but is (and always has been) disadvantaged by a move pool that doesn't want to use that stat. Jolteon and Vaporeon are in the Over Used tier as of generation six and that speaks volumes on its own for how impressive they are compared to the other evolutions, although this game lacks access to Hidden Machines so teaching the always-amazing Surf to Vaporeon requires trading her into one of the GameBoy Advance games.

...to be honest I'm going to have to reveal my choice much earlier than I want to, or the nicknames I'm planning will make zero sense.

After choosing an evolutionary stone and walking out, we can find this guy finishing up maintenance on the Gateon bridges. He's the son of the machinery shop owner, the guy that Lily sent us to get a part for the purify chamber from. Meeting him automatically sends us back to the shop, where he fixes us up with the part.

This is another callback to Colosseum, although most Colosseum fans won't recognize Perr because he was a child back then. Perr was part of the Kids Grid, an organization of juveniles that worked to overthrow Cipher's criminal hold on Orre from the inside. Because the Grid was mostly children, some of which actually had parents compliant in the first Shadow Pokemon plot, they could move about essentially undetected and fight an information war. The joke is that toward the tail end of Colosseum, Perr asked the protagonist to deliver a machine part, while here we're picking up one from him at the beginning instead.

The idea with the rotating bridges is that you use the two buttons on each platform to momentarily retract them and spin the platform in the direction indicated, then extend the bridges into their new place. They each have interchangable locking mechanisms, so the bridges can be made to connect either to the platforms or to one another. The main reason to do this is to access the lighthouse. It seems a little silly as a system when you could just have solid bridges going everywhere, but one of the locals points out that the bridges need to be mobile to let ships dock, so it seems to be a necessary part of Gateon Port because the lighthouse can't be moved.

This is probably my favorite side area in Gateon, it's a very irregular area on the fringes of the port accessible only by configuring the bridges in the right way, but it shows a form of experimentation with the graphics engine that wasn't done in Colosseum. For a long time I was in love with the idea of a full 3D mainline Pokemon game, like Red and Blue/Green remade on the GameCube, as this could easily be part of a Seafoam Islands area. Now that we're actually getting a completely 3D Pokemon game with X & Y in six months...well, it's on my Christmas list.

At the top right you can actually see part of Gateon's exterior wall. The designers took pains to render the entire area, because we'll actually see the entire town at once later on. The reason that we're in this area right now is because it contains an optional trainer battle.

 

The Aura Reader acts up the moment a Shadow Pokemon is detected. Now, Cyle may have a Shadow Pokemon, but he's not a Cipher operative. Unlike in Colosseum, the Shadow Pokemon industry is many steps behind production and there are only a handful of Shadow Pokemon not in the hands of Cipher agents. They've just begun to distribute them, but these Pokemon are out there in the hands of totally innocent persons that have unknowingly become compliant in a criminal activity. Normal people cannot see Shadow Pokemon.

This opens up one of the more understated moral quandaries of the GameCube games. Is it right to snag these Pokemon? There's no one telling us that it's wrong, but we're also the only ones that can tell ourselves that it's right. This is one of the benefits of the silent protagonist at play. It is entirely up to the player to decide whether or not this is the right thing to do. You can only guarantee that those Pokemon will be purified if you snag them, but in theory any kind and loving trainer can open a Shadow Pokemon's heart up over time, and it's only the final purification ceremony that requires any kind of esoteric knowledge to complete. And in-game, if you leave a Shadow Pokemon at a Pokemon daycare, its handlers open its heart just as well as traveling with you would have. This is the greatest shortcoming of Cipher's Shadow Pokemon plot, and one that Ein was diligently working to overcome back in Colosseum; the entire thing can be undone by simple human goodness. If human beings are inherently good, the entire plot will come unraveled through the Shadow Pokemons' natural exposure to kindness and love.

You'd think that a franchise like Pokemon would be idealistic enough to guarantee that point, but that's just not the case. This is the series that turned out characters like Cyrus and Ghetsis, and even the anime had lesser trainers like Damian/Daisuke that were simply petty and willing to throw away Pokemon that didn't meet their standards for power--a practice that's common in the real world. Whether to snag or not then becomes a question of if you can trust other people to be good to their Pokemon, and given that the final ending scene only plays if you snag all of them, XD pretty much expects you to come to the conclusion that no, you can't trust other people. This is America Orre, after all. The duology isn't as dark as TVTropes would like it to be--it tends to get overhyped to the point that people assume the games are Warhammer 386k--but the darkness is there.

Cyle battles with his Taillow and a Shadow Ledyba that's of a noticeably higher level. I find it interesting that his Shadow Pokemon is actually the only thing that makes Cyle serious competition, as his Taillow gets OHKO'd by Teddiursa every time, but Ledyba can actually Shadow Blitz Eevee into submission within just two turns if Cyle plays it smart. In this battle I have Eevee use Tackle on Ledyba each turn, and have Teddi chip away with Shadow Blitz once Taillow's down for the count. Another characteristic of Shadow moves is that they all deal half damage against other Shadow Pokemon, which can actually make for some pretty tense and drawn out battles when you're trapped in all-Shadow Pokemon matchup.

The advantage to this is that it lets us gradually reduce Ledyba into critical HP range before throwing a Poke Ball. The basic mechanics behind Pokemon capture operate on a catch rate. Each Pokemon has a rate of how catchable it is, with higher rates making them easier to catch, capping at 255. The Poke Ball that you throw functions as a multiplier, so for example basic Poke Balls have a 1x catch rate.

The probability of catching a Pokemon starts with its catch rate being divided by 255, and the result is then multiplied by a fraction based on the remaining health of the Pokemon, then the type of the Poke Ball, and then additional multipliers from status problems (Sleep and freezing induces 2x, all other status issues induce 1.5x). Health carries the most critical impact on the formula, since at full health you have 1/3rd acting as a multiplier which with Ledyba as an example reduces the catch rate to 0.33 on the spot, which translates to a 33% chance to succeed. If the final number calculated is 1 or greater, then the Pokemon is guaranteed to be caught. Ledyba has a catch rate of 255, so we start with 0.33 and reducing his health to the point that I take it increases that up to .97. If we induced Sleep somehow, the catch would be 100% right there.

Like the original model from Colosseum, this Snag Machine converts every Poke Ball put through it into a Snag Ball, but the only thing stopping us from robbing the world blind in that game was our conscience and girlfriend. In this game, the Aura Reader is an actual morality lock that prevents non-Shadow Pokemon from being targeted.

With regards to Ledyba, his main claim to fame in the Never Used tier is through his evolution Ledian, who in the third generation can be used as either an underpowered setup Pokemon, or pinpoint attacker that uses his large movepool to hit the weaknesses of seven of the seventeen types. Only his defensive setup role has really survived into the Black and White era, and he was never effective competitively in the XD era, let alone now. Ledyba evolves at level 18, which is relatively low in the grand scheme of things because it only evolves once at all, but is actually pretty high for a bug Pokemon which typically evolve seconds after you catch them.

There was a Ledian available in Colosseum too, and my entry for him in my notes are blank. I'm pretty sure that most trainers went through Colosseum without ever snagging that one.

At this point the Heart Gauge is finally low enough that I can see Teddiursa's nature and save the game three times.

We pick these up outside of the lighthouse. Because Poke Balls aren't available in shops right away, and XD removed the ball replication glitch from Colosseum, picking them up from supply chests is the only way that we're gonna get additional ones. XD's early game has a lot of resource management bits like this, where everything more resembles a typical dungeon-crawling RPG because you don't have access to instant unlimited healing everywhere and the most important items just can't be bought.

The lighthouse has some pretty dynamic camera angles, which as a whole is part of the contrast between the Colosseum areas and XD areas; the areas made specifically for XD have a much more mobile camera.

This is helped by the blown-away structure of the areas, so that only some of the walls are visible at any given time, as if the player is looking into a dollhouse. I'm interested by this because the blown-away roof is actually an art technique native to Japan that was already very highly developed in the 12th century. It was used in the Tale of Genji emaki to portray the space that the characters of the hand scroll lived in, and one of the noted features of the emaki was the highly realistic architecture in comparison to the figures, although the natural scenery was also more stylized compared to the manmade structures. Pokemon has always applied old ideas using new technology, so the areas of XD being presented as a blown-away structure situated inside a void that the player is expected not to take notice of during gameplay shows a kind of silent agreement that the players and designers have come to. Compare it to the curtains of an opera house, the walls of a movie theater or the stagehands in kabuki--all "invisible elements" of the medium that the viewer voluntarily ignores to enhance the experience.

the entire port

the entire port.

why they built a wall around their fake Seafoam Islands I have no idea but here it is, all of Gateon rendered on one continuous screen.

While I was still working on getting the site live, I was talking with some French friends of mine and we noticed that XD's French title, Le Souffle des Ténèbres, actually has a couple different meanings. It could be "Wind of Darkness," or "Breath of Darkness" but...well, even English speakers are pretty familiar with the term Souffle. The French name can also mean "Cake of Darkness."

This very nearly became the blog title.

The lighthouse has the third Shadow Pokemon of the game.

Teddiursa's Heart Gauge has dropped enough to reveal her final move! Metal Claw is a Steel-type move with 50 BP and 95% Accuracy instead of the 100% we've been dealing with up til now. When it hits, it has a 10% chance to increase the user's Attack by one stage, which works pretty well with Teddiursa's stats but is definitely not as consistent as I'd like. While neither Ledyba nor Poochyena are going to be a part of my core team, I am going to purify every Shadow Pokemon in order to complete the game because I've never actually done a 100% run of XD before.

The strategy in this battle is pretty much as straightforward as the previous ones; Teddiursa OHKOs Zubat with Shadow Blitz, then we use Tackle and Blitz to bring Poochyena down to critical HP and start snagging. Poochyena has a catch rate of 255 like Ledyba before her, so we will have her in the 95-99% capture range. The reason that we're not using Bite in this battle isn't for caution, but because Poochyena is a Dark-type and so takes half damage from Bite because it is a Dark move.

Poochyena introduces a new Shadow move, Shadow Hold. Hold has an 80% chance to hit, and targets both Pokemon in a double battle, preventing them from switching out. This basically forces the opponent to accept a bad matchup, although there are in-battle moves that can circumvent Shadow Hold, they just cause the Pokemon that switches in to then be affected by Hold.

There isn't a whole lot to be done with Poochyena because like Ledian, she's confined to NU. At level 18 she evolves into Mightyena, and if that was early for Ledyba it's amazing for Poochyena, but it also means that she's a Jeigan character with higher than average stats at a point in the game when lower stats are acceptable, and lower than average stats toward the end when we'd really prefer them to be higher. Her movepool isn't great, so the most that she does in the third generation games is make use of Poochyena and Mightyena's shared ability, Intimidate, to cut both opposing Pokemon's Attack by one stage when she enters the battle and then go to town with a small pool of offensive moves. By switching Mightyena in repeatedly, you can cut the opposing Pokemon's Attack multiple times so that she can survive long enough to use those offensive moves. As of Black and White, Intimidate is generally traded for the Moxie ability, which increases the user's Attack one stage every time that it knocks out a Pokemon. Mightyena's still hurt by her lack of a varied movepool, but she can still be brought out toward the latter half of a battle after most major threats to her have been neutralized in order to pick off the opponent's Pokemon in succession. She's in a better position than Ledian as of B/W, getting neutral and supereffective matchups most of the time with the right moveset, but the problem with the Moxie build for our poses is that Salamence does it better, does it in OU and is available within this game.

Oh yes. We will be getting our Salamence back.

Before I leave the lighthouse, there is a glitch that I should show off. This will be old hat to Colosseum veterans, but there is a way to make the protagonist walk in place despite being in contact with a wall, which allows you to purify Shadow Pokemon without actually touching the controller. Most people only know of this as it pertains to Colosseum's Agate Village, but you could actually do it in a couple other places like in Pyrite Cave. A lot of the old areas have been paved over now or remade to no longer allow for the glitch, but the lighthouse has a new one of its own.

First, I have Michael walk up against this area and while still holding the control stick forward,

then plug the controller back in and let go of the stick. Michael goes flying backwards, running into this area continuously, and he keeps it up as long as the controller remains plugged in. Simply unplugging and plugging it back in resolves the glitch, so you can leave the game going and go do something else while your party of Shadow Pokemon purifies. I probably won't bother with this at all since I can't make the Heart Gauges drop any faster like I could in Colosseum, and since I'm hunting around exploring all of the areas and fighting all of the battles anyway it wouldn't do me any good as things are. But it is there.

Now that we've activated this once, from now on we get to take the elevator any time that we want to go in and out of the lighthouse. I'm almost wondering if the above glitch is a deliberate Easter egg and the elevator is specifically here to facilitate it.

Back at the Lab, we ditch Jovi again and Lily gives us our new orders. The purify chamber is still being prepared, so we're going to have to seek an alternative method of finalizing Teddiursa's purification process. Lily's worried about how far away Agate is from the Lab, but she trusts us to handle this on our own.

Next time: Agate Village! And maybe rescuing the professor.