Motivated by Spite, A Pokemon Emerald Diary 11/6/21 (Patreon)

Last week I began posting in-depth blog posts about my journey through Hoenn as bonus content here for you Patrons. Here's how this week went!

To start with, I went ahead and finished raising Barnabas the Vileplume's friendship with Tomato berries and mixed some Pokeblocks for the Beauty contests. I've been following recipes posted by u/peterpansexuell on the Pokemon Ribbons Subreddit.

(from Pokéblock Recipes for good Conditions for specific Contests (Gen III))

Although it says 08 to 10 for the second one, you actually do want to blend three of those blocks instead of two. 

We ended up with a spread that looks like this:

I usually have Chaz help me with the actual blending process. Not that I can't blend, but my visual reaction time is pretty bad so he can get more Gold blocks than I can. Also he enjoys it, so win win!

He does end up carrying those blocks on his own shoulders most of the time. Laddie, Lassie and Miss sure ain't helping.

While we were at it, we also evolved Feebas into Milotic. This was accomplished without raising friendship, all we did was blend the blue blocks from the recipe table and that was enough. 

So next it was actually contest time. To recap, the only four Beauty moves Vileplume can learn are Sunny Day, Moonlight, Flash and Petal Dance. Sunny Day and Moonlight are a combo, but both moves rely on the crowd already being excited to work well. Flash disrupts other Pokemon's combos if used at the correct time, and Petal Dance gets four hearts of appeal and four black hearts of jamming potential but also makes it so you can't appeal the next turn. Well, this moveset was pretty much a bust. Barnabas's high condition meant it always moved first, which meant that it always had to set up the combo when the crowd's excitement was low. For some reason pulling off the combo only awards a single bonus heart, compared to the three that other combos typically give, so it was really necessary that the moves themselves be timed well, which was impossible to do. Not only that, but almost no other Pokemon in any of the Beauty contests were using Beauty moves. This is unique, in the high rank Cool and Cute, Cool and Cute moves were really common. Here in Beauty, the voltage never got high at all, Pokemon were using Smart and Tough moves left and right and lowering the voltage. Flash was impossible to use because it couldn't be reliably used on the turn when other contestants were setting up their combos, and Petal Dance wasn't something you could run an entire contest on. Barnabas did win every contest but it was purely because of the condition from Pokeblocks and the Blue Scarf he was holding and not because of his performance. There was one contest where it went so badly that he ended up in last place on the 2nd turn and was too nervous to move for the entire rest of the contest. That one we didn't win. For Master Rank I broke down and swapped out Flash for Solarbeam, so Sunny Day/Solarbeam ended up carrying us through, but it was not an easy time. Still we won by enough to get Barnabas's portrait painted and put up in the art gallery.

With that out of the way, the only remaining contest that I have a contestant ready for is Tough. I finally have enough Belue berries to blend some Pokeblocks, so maybe next week I'll give that a go. Camille the Beautifly's friendship is already maxed out, so there's nothing standing in the way of our macho butterfly's reign. 

For most of the week the RNG hunts I've been working on weren't going so well. So I took a break and EV trained my shiny Latias, Lulu. I caught her in an RNG hunt immediately after beating the Elite Four, and she has ok stats, the main thing is that she is Timid and shiny. I have a bit of a yellow and green color scheme going on. Lulu is meant for my Doubles Battle Tower team, and she is the only one ready at the moment so it'll still be a while before she gets to actually try her new moveset. 

In 2016, I took a trip to Japan and one of the first things I did was visit a Book Off Super Bazaar and go thrifting in Hirakata. Found a lot of really neat stuff there, including a loose Japanese Sapphire game and a complete in Box Japanese Emerald, all for dirt cheap prices. I for some reason never checked the Emerald game until this year, but when I did I was in for a really amazing surprise.

This game had three Event-Only legendaries (Mythicals if you want to be anal about it) on it, this Mew, a Jirachi, and a Deoxys. Though impossible to confirm the legitimacy of them 100%, I did dump the save file and everything that was in the PKHex database passed the legitimacy check. Also none of them have great stats or any other red flags, so I have no reason to believe they're not legitimate. This is really the closest I can possibly come in modern day to getting legitimate event legendaries in Gen 3 without cheating or downloading save data/event data to inject, so I will absolutely take them. They're certainly a much cooler origin story than "I downloaded and flashed the event ROM like everybody else." Additionally, this save file had PokeRus. So I traded over their Ninetails with PokeRus and spread that to Lulu for some EV training.

I raised her with 16 HP, 16 Def, 252 SpA and 226 Speed. At that point she was still in the level 40's and the team is meant to be level 50, so I thought I'd take her and my Lileep to the Elite Four for some level grinding. Unfortunately I forgot that the Elite Four in sequence are Dark, Ghost, Ice and Dragon, so this was actually the worst possible place to try to train a Latias. Still she did eventually hit level 50, and Lileep finally evolved into Cradily too. 

Although I do have some plans for some legendary Pokemon, I don't actually need all of the ones in the game to be specific natures or to be shiny. Some of them I planned on just catching normally, like Rayquaza. It's green already so it fits my color scheme, and I don't plan on using it for any of my teams so really any nature will do. But I did want it to at least be a good nature, because in Gen 3 specifically with the lack of physical special split, most natures end up just being a punishment, a debuff for no reason. And if I'm going to put in the work to catch a legendary, why would I want it to be worse for no reason? Especially since Rayquaza is already at the top of a really difficult area, Sky Pillar with its infuriating Mach Bike puzzle. Luckily I caught a bunch of Synchronize Natu in the Safari Zone and happened to have an Adamant one, so I thought I'd just have to catch it once and then I'd be done. I thought.

After taking literally all day to scale Sky Pillar, I finally encountered Rayquaza. I had only brought two Pokemon over level 60 with me, my Politoed and my Venusaur, and they had a really hard time standing up to the level 70 dragon's attacks. I had a ton of healing items with me thanks to my Linoone Squad, but Rayquaza has a really low catch rate and the battle dragged on and on. I had 40 Ultra balls with me and 20 Great balls, but didn't realize how hard this would be. So this Rayquaza ended up eating through every single one of my healing items, all of my Ultra Balls, and was at 1% health Struggling itself to death when I finally caught it with a Great Ball. I checked its nature and... Bashful.

I know that Synchronize is only a percentage thing, not a given, so I thought I just got unlucky. At the point that it cost me so many PokeDollars worth of items, I was not about to settle for a nature I didn't want. So I reset, left the tower, stocked my team with stronger Pokemon, bought 40 Timer Balls in Rustboro, and then scaled Sky Pillar a second time to try again. Thankfully this time I didn't have as much trouble with the Mach Bike.

Then I tried and failed and tried and failed to catch Rayquaza again for two more hours. It seemed like only every once in a while would I find a Rayquaza that had high enough Special Defense to not get one shot by Politoed's Ice Beam. In one fight, on turn 58, I crit it and it died and I had to start all over. Then finally, I caught another one.

It was Gentle.

Then I complained about it on Twitter, and found out that Synchronize does not work on Stationary encounters in Pokemon Emerald at all. So since the RNG is also not programmed correctly, the game always starts on the same initial seed. So you can't reset for Natures either, because you will always hit the same range of frames and get the same handful of Natures over and over. This means there is actually no legitimate way to get different natures on 99.9% of the Legendary encounters in the game, and the only thing I could do if I wanted an Adamant Rayquaza was start yet another RNG hunt for it and pick a specific frame. 

I struggled for a little longer into the night trying to get an Adamant frame without using up my Master Ball, which I was saving for Latios. But I couldn't reliably catch it often enough to accurately narrow down my frames. I finally got within a one or two frame range by using the Master Ball and just resetting once I got my delay, but at that point I thought... am I really going to all this trouble just to get a regular ass Adamant Rayquaza I'm never going to use?

So I picked a Naughty Shiny frame about 10 min in and the next day I got a Shiny Naughty Rayquaza that I wasted my Master Ball on.

Frankly it is a bit disappointing how many things in this game are actually broken, many of which in ways you'd never figure out unless you've already invested a lot of time and energy into doing them the way you're "supposed to" only for it to not work. I understand the kind of hell they went through trying to make Ruby and Sapphire, but Emerald was the bonus game, the version that they shouldn't have needed to rush to get out. But I guess they were still spread too thin working on Emerald and Diamond and Pearl all at the same time, and a lot of these things didn't get fully tested. Just a bit of a shame, since again they're all the sorts of things that only get in your way if you're actually trying to engage with the new features that Emerald brought to the table. Gen 3 is a special kind of hell.

I'll get another Master Ball without duping by trading Chaz for his once he reaches that point in the Ruby version he's playing. 

At the very least, after all that, it was encouraging to have an RNG hunt finally go well again. I've been struggling with Breeding and Colo RNG for so long. I was encouraged by my success and decided to pick up my Egg RNG hunt in Sapphire for that Female Bold Eevee I've been going for. 

Finally after weeks of trying, I hit my frames. Although incredibly, I hit an exact alternate frame with slightly different IVs than what I was going for. I wanted a spread of 31/3/30/29/30/20 and ended up getting 31/6/30/1/12/26 instead. But after reviewing the moveset I had planned for this gal, she doesn't actually use any of her attacking stats anyway, so the only bummer is the 12 in Special Defense. But again this is only for Mt. Battle, so the IVs were really overkill to begin with, and this is definitely good enough. So I traded her over to my Emerald, pumped her full of Tomato berries, and went to evolve her with a Rare Candy at 9pm last night, only for the silhouette of Espeon to appear on the screen. Turns out that in Gen 3, for some weird reason you get Espeon evolving between 12pm and 11:59pm and Umbreon if you evolve after 12am to 11:59am. So I evolved the other Eevee I had normal bred for Espeon last night and evolved Sabina into Umbreon this morning. Backwards AF.

I usually bother im_a_blisy about RNG while I'm doing it, and they mentioned to me this morning that switching to a different system while I'm doing Egg RNG might cut down on all the alternate frames I've been hitting lately. It occurred to me that I did my first and most successful Egg RNG on my GameBoy Micro and I've been trying every subsequent hunt on my GBA SP, so I will try again on my Micro for the next one and hopefully avoid this problem as much in the future. The alternate frames are caused by screen refreshes and the rates at which they happen depends on the hardware the game is running on, complicated stuff.

That brings the Pokedex total to 360/386. Chaz traded me the Torchic from his Ruby when he started the game (don't worry I gave him a Shiny Spinda in return), and that evolved super fast compared to all the late game Pokemon I've been working on day by day. That means all that is left is Armaldo, Glalie, Spheal's evolutions, Bagon's evolutions, Beldum's evolutions, and the rest of the legendaries I still need to hunt down. Also all the Pokemon from Colosseum still. I haven't made any progress on that this week.

But I figure this weekend might be a good time to try Blink RNG again, so who knows, next weekend I might have an exciting tale about catching a Modest Suicune in The Under. A few people on Twitter requested that I cover how RNG hunting works in the next post, and to give an overview of my GBA systems, so if you would like something like that, let me know! I usually just refer people to im_a_blisy's content since that is what I am using to learn, but I think I understand it well enough to give like a very basic introduction to the concept of RNG and the different methods I have tried so far. Probably not Colosseum though lol. Anyway, that's all for this week, see ya!