Let's Play Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu, Part #2: Koga to Blaine

So last we left off in Let's Go Pikachu was... the Snorlax segment? There's a whole lot of long routes that opened up in Kanto after that, both of which lead to Fuschia, and I always do love how Kanto has technically-redundant routes between cities, making the world feel a lot less linear than, say, Unova or Kalos. Interestingly, Route 17, previously known as the Biking Road, has been abolished and turned into the "Pokemon Road".

It's a bit weird, but apparently the winds here are so powerful that when riding a Charizard (which I owned at this point), you just fly up and can bypass ledges and trainers! It's interesting. Also, the bikers have basically been driven out of this road and sent off sulking in adjacent areas, which is... interesting? I'm not sure what to make of it. It's just different for the sake of being different, I feel, and honestly kind of a bizarre way to get around the fact that the Bicycle isn't available in the Let's Go games. 

Fuschia City's Safari Zone has been taken out, though, replaced with the Pokemon Go Park, and I am... I'm very sad, honestly. I've always felt that as annoying as the Safari Zone minigame was, as a set piece, the fact that there's this nature reserve where rare Pokemon thought to be extinct hide around, and that you have a set amount of time to capture them as this little minigame... it's always been something that many fans find annoying, but I has always personally loved the Safari Zones. It's kind of a shame that they're not here. 

I tried doing some Pokemon importing with my Pokemon Go. It's neat, I guess? Like, you can ultimately only send over Generation I Pokemon, but you do unlock this 'mystery box' in your Pokemon Go account that allows you to have a weird little box that gets active for 30 minutes and allows Meltan spawns. It's a bit weird, though, that you can only evolve Meltan into Melmetal in the Go games? I'm a bit baffled. The gimmick's nice, but I really wish that when we do get Generation VIII, Meltan wouldn't be reliant on this side-game to obtain and/or evolve. It's a decision that I can totally see Gamefreak doing, but I really wish they didn't. 

Anyway, I then fight Koga! I do like the little update to the invisible walls of his gym, where the walls briefly become visible periodically when little smoke machines come up from the floor. That's kinda neat! Koga himself gets to ham it up with some Naruto-style kage bunshins before the fight. It's neat.

Fuschia City is where I find both the Strength and Surf HM equivalents, and it's... it's honestly kind of silly, honestly, since without the Safari Zone making a whole deal of it, I really feel like both of these secret skills or whatever are just straight-up handed to me. Although we do get a Jessie and James little cutscnee, which I thought was kinda precious. 

With Surf... a whole lot of areas are basically unveiled to me. The route to Seafoam Islands, the route to Cinnabar Island... I basically backtrack to the Power Plant, though, to pick up Zapdos! The Power Plant is kind of a fun area, and I do love the goopy Grimers and the Voltorbs and Magnemites just rolling around the place. Of course, at the end of this pretty short 'dungeon' is the legendary bird Zapdos, and the way you fight him is the same with Snorlax. Get his HP to zero in a battle, and then go through the capture mini-game. Zapdos is strong, and at level 50, he wiped out most of my level 40 team with relative ease until I finally brought him down. I still am not the biggest fan of the capture minigame deal, but I do love the brief cutscene that we get of us encountering Zapdos.

Anyway, next up on the gym train is Saffron City, which I actually did explore a while back, but never had the chance to go into the actually important buildings. It seems that the Team Rocket Trio are the plot-movers, because they arrive from Fuschia City to barge their way into Silph Co and knock the random Rocket Grunt dizzy while doing so. Okay, then. 

After a brief detour to beat up the Fighting Dojo, who are pretty much a joke for my Butterfree, I go into Saffron City and meet... both Blue and my rival. And it's honestly kinda weird but also cool to have both of them show up. Blue basically notes that the two of us will storm Silph Co and crush Team Rocket, while Blue himself will go off and take down Team Rocket's operations all over Kanto simultaneously. It's kind of an excuse to get a brief (and honestly disappointing, he's got like two dudes) fight against Blue.

And Silph Co is huge! I love the animation with the teleport pads that turns you into digital pixels, too, and it's... it's a pretty huge area for sure. The Rocket Grunts and Scientists make it a bit more clear that Team Rocket is there to force Silph Co to mass-produce Master Balls for the evil team.And then we get a tag-team with our rival and the Lavender Town Cubone against Archer later on in the building, which is also pretty fun. I'm surprised how much Archer ends up being a recurring character here! Jessie and James become another roadblock, and then we fight Giovanni again. It's actually a pretty fun -- if extensive -- dungeon to fight through. I've always loved Silph Co and the feeling of rushing into the enemy's base (well, the enemy's current biggest operation, at any case) and crushing it completely. 

Anyway, after that is Sabrina's gym, which... it still has the teleporters, but holy shit it looks a lot prettier with giant platforms and all that stuff. Considering that all of the previous gyms are basically just revamped-into-3D versions of their original ones, Sabrina's got a pretty drastic makeover that is still pretty true to the layout of her original gym. Sabrina herself is a pretty fun gym battle, especially since we've got a somewhat revamped team that swaps out her silly Venomoth from the Generation I games for a Slowbro. 

After that... after Saffron City, I just sort of goof around, beating up trainers on the Pokemon Road and the various sea routes, building up my team and catching Pokemon. And that's honestly what I think is one of the biggest appeals of the Let's Go games... the fact that you just wander around this beautiful overworld and capture Pokemon as they spawn out of grass and water and caves and stuff.

I did go through Seafoam Islands, which is still pretty barren and even more boring now that the wild pokemon battles are gone. I find it pretty interesting that the Strength blocks are like, pillars, now. The puzzle seems slightly less complex, although I don't really remember much of the first-generation Seafoam Islands... other than getting Articuno (which I did do here), there really isn't much incentive to go into this maze.

Next up is Cinnabar Island, which I thought was... fun! We get an easter egg of a poster in the Pokemon Center warning people of the active volacno, and canonically it did erupt before the timeline of Gold/Silver, which is a nice little easter egg. The game leads me into the Pokemon Mansion, which is all overgrown and looks pretty fucked up. One of the biggest gripes I had with the old games -- which is that the game really doesn't give much of an indication to tell you where to jump off the ledge to get to the next floor -- is gone now. It's as much of a Rattata and Grimer-infested place... but Pokemon Mansion now actually properly looks like an abandoned lab where experiments on Mewtwo took place. In the original games (both Gen I and the Gen III remakes) there are always hints of the Mewtwo experiments, and that the fancy mansion was actually a base used by Team Rocket, but it's never quite as explicit as it was here, I think. Particularly the basement segment, which is just straight-up a pokemon laboratory out of the anime, complete with Mewtwo's tank. Suddenly it's clear that it was Mewtwo that fucked up this entire mansion and tore it apart.

Not sure why Blaine put his goddamn gym key here, though, telling kids to spelunk into the crumbling building owned by gangsters that engage in genetic experimentation. What an irresponsible man!

Blaine's gym was always the most unmemorable gym to me back in the Generation I games, due to the pretty lame puzzle of being a quiz... but now they updated Blaine into a kooky old man who's all about quizes! His gym has been turned into a goddamn Japanese quiz show, with Blaine as an emcee, and even the little Deadrock statues in front of the gym has Blaine mustaches! You are asked questions, and you get Blaine dolls that rocket off as a prize, before challenging Blaine himself, which is hilarious. Blaine's always been a pushover compared to the others before him, I feel, even on a Bulbasaur run on Red/Blue, but this definitely makes his gym a lot more fun.

Next up, which I reckon will be the last part of this short let's play... Giovanni, the Victory Road and Indigo Plateau.