We start off with the return of an NPC we've helped before, cute little Caterpie! His friend, Metapod, is lost in the woods! Which is impressive for a dang immobile cocoon to do! And while Caterpie is panicking for his friend, I like that it's obvious he's fanboying over us a little.
But it's at this point that Team Meanies show up, and start talking shit about doing the job instead of us, Team Rocket. Gengar initially raises a point that I thought was good -- it doesn't matter who does the rescuing as long as Metapod is rescued. Which is true! But then Gengar goes into a bit of a spiel about how he wants to make it a competition. One small problem -- Caterpie says that he doesn't actually have money to pay back Gengar! Mudkip and Bulbasaur, presumably, either does pro bono or accepts payments in installments. Gengar then laughs and gives Caterpie a bit of a forced ultimatum -- he can just join Team Meanies and be their gofer. Yep, it's basically protection money, and a bit of an enforced recruitment into the ranks of what's essentially a gangster team!
I manage to recruit a small horde regardless with Swinub and Bulbasaur, including Sunflora and a pair of Shroomishes, but turns out that Swinub's Powder Snow doesn't have as much PP to last for such a long dungeon, and two of his moves are completely useless. The Pokemon later on in the dungeon is a bit stronger, too, with evolved Pokemon like Linoones and Exeggutors starting to show up. Ultimately, being ganged up by a Scyther and a small horde of Ledybas takes out my Swinub, and Bulbasaur gets taken out by the most primal of all factors... hunger. I ran out of apples!
And the game brings me back to the home screen, where two Pelippers talk to me about the potential of putting a rescue request myself, which is such an adorable way to engage with other players and to get a friend to come and rescue me. Or I can even do it myself... but I highly doubt that Magnemite and like, my level 9 fresh recruits can withstand all the way down into the floor that my team was taken out. So I take the loss, and let my items be lost in the dungeon. Hey, after Shining Pearl was so easy, it's nice to have a little bit of bite to the challenge, yeah?
After confirming with the internet that there isn't a penalty for delaying the Sinister Woods quest, I go for a couple of days of just item-farming and quest-farming, and trying my best to recruit Pokemon. They don't seem to want to follow me as much as my previous quests, though. I did a day's run through Thunder Wave Cave, and another in Oddity Cave, and the only Pokemon that I recruited was a Poochyena that wasn't even a wild Pokemon -- he's a quest-giver!
After that grinding, I finally enter Sinister Woods... and this time, I try and go for a more cowardly route. I try and get by with minimal recruitment or enemy-hunting, while bringing a backpack filled with oran berries, max ethers and apples. Avoid the sleeping Ledyba swarms by all costs! Recruitment seems to be a bit better in this dungeon, and I think it's a function of me doing the main story since there aren't these many 'biters' when I was doing a non-story-relevant dungeon. Could just be a bias, though.
Anyway, an Oddish (who dies halfway through the dungeon) and a Sunflora joins within the first two floors, and eventually a fallen Paras, a Linoone, a Farfetch'd and finally a Scyther joins my growing army of bully hunters. The Farfetch'd has the rare quality of Riled Up, which essentially gives a free attack and special attack pump any time a member of my party gets injured, which is insane and probably a reason this run went so smoothly.
I gang up on Gengar, and since we're working on a post-Gen-VII world, Gengar does not have Levitate. Which means he actually takes super-effective damage from Mudkip's Mud Bombs. He's still tanky as all heck, though, and even taking damage from four characters, he takes a while to go down. After Gengar gives up the ghost (heh), I start ganging up on Medicham -- with Magnemite's Signal Beams lancing from halfway across the battlefield to snipe him. Ekans is last, and a 7-to-1 battle isn't particularly good for him. The Paras gets knocked out by Medicham during this, but honestly I don't have the right habitat for him, so nothing of real value was lost.
...You could still ask mama Butterfree for payment, though. Know what I'm saying? No? Okay.
But as Caterpie and Metapod leaves, Jumpluff shows up. The Jumpluff that got bullied before! Apparently, Shiftry the bully has not returned. And Jumpluff is worried. Jumpluff gives a bit of a backstory -- a different Jumpluff got stuck because of a lack of winds (which, in turn, is due to the unnatural weather), hence the need for Shiftry's help.
As we go into town, Caterpie and Metapod's now hanging out on Whiscash's Pond. Diglett and Dugtrio are also on the cliffside next to the post office, looking into the distance. A dynamic overworld is one of my favourite features in a video game! But all the villagers in the square are gossiping, with some making the not unreasonable assumption that Shiftry has abandoned the job and is being a meanie. But hey.
Maybe it's a type matchup thing, or maybe it's just the slight bit of grinding before Sinister Forest, but I had a much easier time throughout Silent Chasm. Instead of waterways, this time there are chasms in the levels that only flying or floating Pokemon can get past. Which in my team's case, means Magnemite. That's kind of cool, even if ultimately there's not much I did with the chasms sine splitting up the party is a super bad idea.
Recruitment is also quite nice in this cavern. A Teddiursa and a Weedle joins, and I found a Larvitar who I gave an apple to and he joins the party. Larvitar feels rare, so near the end of the dungeon I opened up the Wigglytuff Orb and purchased his habitat. Later on, a Dustox, a Houndour and a Trapinch also join up, but as we go we lose the Farfetch'd, the Weedle, and even poor Magnemite, who falls to a critical hit.
At the peak of Silent Chasm, Jumpluff #2 shows up and panics about Shiftry, who's fallen on the tip of the chasm. Shiftry actually tells us to run, despite being built up as a bully. And what follows is an amazing upgrade to the original GBA game's pixel art, as clouds gather, lightning bolts sparkle... and Shiftry's body is covered with a cage of red lightning.
A monstrous spiky figure descends from the storm-clouds, with glowing eyes... and it's motherfucking Zapdos, the Embodiment of Lightning. What a badass entry, what a cool sequence.
Zapdos monologues like a goddamned Dungeons & Dragons boss, growling about how Shiftry has disturbed his slumber, and then summons a gigantic lightning bolt that slams down on the trapped Shiftry and he disappears! I genuinely thought Shiftry got vaporized completely, despite the characters yelling about how Shiftry has 'disappeared'. Which would've been so metal... but no, Zapdos just kidnaps Shiftry away. By summoning a thunderbolt down and seemingly vaporizing him. Sure.
Boss fight, right? No, not quite. Zapdos doesn't want to bother with us right now, and tells us that if we want Shiftry back, we need to scale Mt. Thunder.
Alakazam, Tyranitar and Charizard show up in surprise, and Alakazam hypes up Zapdos for a bit. He's one of the three legendary birds, and Alakazam also notes that Shiftry isn't the cause of Zapdos's awakening, merely the trigger and the target of Zapdos's wrath. According to Alakazam, the unnatural disasters and weathers have been likely to interfere with the strange lack of winds, and that's likely to be the cause of Zapdos's awakening.
Team Alakazam gets ready to scale Mt. Thunder to rescue Shiftry, but Bulbasaur is indignant at being left behind. Alakazam mentions -- not wrongfully -- that we're too low-level of a rescue team to even be involved. I mean, sure, we just got our asses beat in Sinister Woods not to long ago! But Bulbasaur is, of course, as indignant as any anime protagonist. Me, the Mudkip? I can pull the 'ow ow ow, my stomach hurts' card, which is hilarious. Bulbasaur brushes it off as a fake symptom immediately, though, since she's not having any of these.
Alakazam accepts our resolve, but decides that the two groups will take different pathways up Mt. Thunder. Mechanically, I get it, of course -- the player needs to do their own thing. But in-universe, it really would make sense for us to go in a full party of six to bulldoze through the dungeon and gang up on Zapdos at the end, right? Eh, whatever.
We have plot now, plot and legendary Pokemon! I'm quite excited!
Random Notes:
- One of the harder things for me to do is to remember to hold R or Y to aim diagonally without actually moving. I've wasted so many single turns accidentally burning it to move instead of just tilting my Pokemon's head so they can shoot a Water Gun or a Vine Whip properly.
- Confusion is particularly cool in the Mystery Dungeon game, and extra debilitating on a player's side because you actually spin around and shoot out attacks randomly, potentially hitting and killing a weaker teammate. That makes so much more sense and is a lot cooler mechanically than just 'it hurt itself in confusion'.
- Post-defeat, new dungeon, Illusory Grotto, also appears -- with a note saying it's time-sensitive. Apparently it's a dungeon that appears and vanishes, and I go in and am a bit puzzled when it's the exact same Pokemon as Oddity Cave. Turns out that Illusory Grotto copies whatever dungeon you visits last, and is just a dungeon with an extra amount of reviver seeds (and apples, too, I guess?) in case you get wiped out and don't have enough reviver seeds in your inventory. That's a cute little catch-up mechanism, I suppose.
- Also, my increased rank ends up awarding me with a Bonsly statue which is placed next to the Pelipper Post Office. I remembered Bonsly was one of the few Pokemon that made appearances in ancillary media -- like the movies and side-games like XD: Gale of Darkness. Remember how cool that was? Manaphy appearing in Ranger, Lucario being the star of a movie, Munchlax, Bonsly and Weavile showing up in random movies? There's a certain magic similar to Togepi, Lugia, Marill and Snubbull foreshadowing the third generation.
- I didn't realize it until quite late, but Gulpin also does move tutoring for free... and a lot of my recruits have terrible movesets. Houndour, for example, only had Smog and three status moves. So was Sunflora. Worst is probably Dustox, who had Gust and only Gust, despite having a half-dozen moves on his learnset via move tutoring! Needless to say, simply by giving them some STAB moves, my little camp of recruits have grown a bit more useful.
- Whiscash mentions the existence of an 'ultimate dungeon', where our levels and toolboxes are reset so it ends up being a huge endurance quest. I assume this is the game's equivalent to a Battle Tower.
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