As The Grind Continues

So I am still playing more PokéRogue and I keep getting my butt kicked over and over again. Usually, it is because of something dumb I did because I got careless. It should be frustrating, but it feels more invigorating because I always feel like I make a bit of progress. However, there are a couple of things you should be aware of that I didn’t know last time. These aren’t necessarily going to help you out i you decide to play the game, but I figured I would share just in case. This also helps me clarify my own findings, so I am also doing this as a mental exercise. First off, you definitely shouldn’t waste time weakening early-stage Pokémon. You should just throw Pokéballs if you want to catch them. In the first area, they pretty much all get caught in one or two throws so you can save some hit points. Also, try and bring a fire-type starter since fire types seem to be scarce in the early game. They love giving me grass types early on and then smacking me with a fire-type leader. They are seriously evil for doing that.

Another thing, your rival is so annoyingly consistent. After showing up at the eighth encounter, she shows up again at the twenty-fifth encounter and then I believe every twenty or thirty encounters after that. She gets some really decent Pokémon later in the runs, so be prepared to face her always. She can be a big run killer. Also, if you can, always try and get shiny Pokémon in runs as that increases your luck stat which gives you better item options to choose from at the end of encounters. These can be very useful in the long run, even the temporary items. And please try not to rely too much on one Pokémon because if they die to an unlucky crit, then you might as well scrap the run there. I know this seems obvious, but it can be easy to fall into this trap so I am noting it because of that.

Anything else? Oh, make sure that if check the nature of the Pokémon to see if it is what you want. After getting the same Pokémon over and over again, you are bound to get some extra natures to use, so use them. Remember not to waste money and typically it is best to save it for rainy days. If you want to catch a Pokémon, but it is resisting too much, just move on and go for it in the next run. On every tenth interval, it does not matter how many Pokémon you lose so long as at least one remains. Is there anything else important that I am forgetting? Probably. At least this gives a general idea of what goes through my head now when I play this. I’m posting this a bit late in part because I was really into a run just now and I didn’t want to pause it. However, it is good to take a break every now and then. Anyway, I should probably go to bed and then get back to it. Hopefully, I won’t wipe this time. Have a good night everyone.

Playing PokéRogue

I have recently found out about this online rogue-lite game and I figured it would give it a shot. It’s called PokéRogue and as you might guess involves playing a rogue-lite based around Pokémon. This is a concept that has been touched on before, but this is my first time playing a full-fledged rogue-lite using Pokémon mechanics. Like all games in the genre, you do your best to travel as far as you can until you wipe and start again. Each attempt starts out with an encounter you can either defeat or catch and occasionally you will be met with a trainer battle or rival battle. Each time you beat an encounter you get a selection of items to choose from to help you on your journey. There will always be a boss encounter on the tenth encounter which is a leader or a stronger than normal Pokémon. After beating the boss, you get your entire party healed and an increase in the level cap. On occasion you will encounter double battles as well so make sure to have at least two reliable Pokémon on your team.

Do note that you have multiple files to attempt runs on so you can go back and forth between multiple attempts. At the start, you can only choose from the 27 starters from all Pokémon regions and you can unlock more as the game progresses. There are two ways to unlock more starters. The first is simply catching them during the run. Once caught they will be added to the roster of starters for later runs and can be added to your current party should you wish for it. Do note that this is a limited resource, but don’t sweat it too much as that is the benefit of future runs. Also, catching a Pokémon’s evolution will give you the base form as a starter.

The other way to add Pokémon to the roster is through the egg gatcha. Don’t worry, the gatcha doesn’t require actual money. Instead, you can get them by beating gym leaders and the like during your runs. These eggs have multiple tiers which determine the rarity of the Pokémon you will get. The five types I can confirm exist at the time of writing are common, rare, epic, legendary, and Manaphy. Hatching eggs is very useful because they can give you egg moves that allow you more options when using a starter. Just note that rarer eggs take longer to hatch. Remember that it is also good to catch or hatch the same Pokémon repeatedly and not only do they get better moves, but they can gain better stats as well.

Personally, I am having a lot of fun with the game right now, and it helps that the game is free and easily accessible online at pokerogue.net. It just requires a username and password to play and is easy to get into once you get the feel for it. The only problem is sometimes the servers can be a little wonky. Thankfully it autosaves after each encounter. Go check it out if you’re interested. I am getting back to my latest run. Have a good night everyone! See you next week!

A Funny Story #1

In case you were wondering, I didn’t get any other shiny Cleffa from the hatch day. In fact, I didn’t find too many interesting things this week, so I figured I would do something else to fill in for this week. So I thought of a couple of funny stories to talk about while I pray to the RNG gods that my luck gets better over the next couple of weeks. So let me start with some weird luck that happened in Pokémon Go. A few months back I found out coincidentally that Pokémon Go keeps track of any Pokémon you own with perfect stats. Once I realized this, I found out I had made a couple of mistakes. You see, sometimes when catching shadow Pokémon, you’ll find they have nearly perfect stats. If you are lucky, purifying the Pokémon can give it perfect stats. I did this with a couple of Pokémon, but I evolved them and then I purified them to perfect stats. This unfortunately meant I didn’t have the first evolution entries logged. One such example was Steelix. I evolved a shadow Onix with very good stats into a shadow Steelix and purified it into a Hundo Pokémon. That meant I couldn’t get a Hundo Onix. Until the other day when I got a very good Onix from a Rocket Grunt. It had 403 Combat Power (CP) which was six off the highest value I could get from a grunt. After purifying it to a 787 CP, I could finally complete the set. You might be wondering what is the punchline here? Don’t worry, you’ll see soon if you haven’t already.

Now, on my way back home on the very same day, in nearly the exact same spot I came face to face with another shadow Onix encounter. Now I wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about this encounter since Onix isn’t a great rock type and I had already gotten a perfect earlier in the day by purifying that 403 CP Onix. I still went and caught it though at 248 CP. I thought to myself that this one was absolute garbage and even though I thought there was no way I was going to keep it, I decided to check it away. It is just a habit of mine to see how good or bad the stats of a Pokémon are in this game. However, as it turns out I had a mistaken assumption. You see, that morning was one of the rare instances where the sun was actually out in the morning. In Pokémon Go, the weather will boost the CP of Pokémon with certain types. Sunny weather boosts grass, fire, and ground types. And while Onix is a rock type, it is also a ground type. Somehow I forgot this when fighting it because it was always with the rock-type Rocket Grunt. That means that the shadow Onix I got in the morning was boosted and needed to have a higher perfect CP standard. Since it was windy weather when I came home, a weather effect that doesn’t boost rock or ground, the second shadow Onix I caught didn’t have that CP boost. It in fact had a different Hundo CP altogether.

The way my brain froze when I saw this was absolutely wild. All that analysis I did previously was only after I saw this and wondered how I was so incredibly wrong about its stats. Plus not even a full day had passed and I had gotten another Hundo Onix. This one doesn’t even need to be purified which is insane. That is a 1 in 4096 chance of that happening and it happened on the Pokémon I had just taken care of that day. Seriously, why do I get this kind of luck on things that don’t really matter? I’m glad I got it and all, but I would have much rather have gotten literally anything else as a perfect shadow Pokémon. It is cool though at least. Well, that’s it for this story. Hopefully, next time it will end with something cooler than a third Hundo Onix.

The Hatch Day Hussle

Today will be a bit of a shorter post. The reason is that this post will be broken up into parts I think? Anyway, let me explain. Today from the hours of 2 to 5 pm in Pokémon Go, Cleffa would be the only Pokémon appearing in 2km eggs and it had an increased shiny rate. So I spent the past few days prepping for it and I hard as I could hatching as many as I could. I had a few goals for the event. The first goal was simple. Hatch a Cleffa. I didn’t have Cleffa yet in Pokémon Go but that was an easy target. The next target was to get a shiny. Unless I was very unlucky it was very unlikely that I wouldn’t see at least one shiny with the incredibly boosted rate. Thankfully that goal was also met. My third goal was to hatch a Hundo (perfect) IV Cleffa. Surprisingly this didn’t take me too long and I got it pretty quickly. In fact, I think I got the Hundo before the shiny Cleffa. My fourth goal was to get enough shiny Cleffa to complete the line. That means getting three shiny Cleffa. The results are inconclusive. My final lofty goal was to acquire a Shundo or shiny Hundo Cleffa. This was also inconclusive. The reason the last two are inconclusive is because of this.

Those nine green eggs are still in my inventory. Unfortunately, I could only prepare so much for this day when the announcement came out and I ended up with a few extra eggs from the event. Now I believe that once you get an egg, it is already determined whether it is shiny so these should still have boosted rates. The problem is that it requires much more walking than I am capable of in a few hours. So I decided that I will spend this week hatching the rest of these and seeing what are final results end up being. So far I have hatched 18 Cleffa and gotten two shiny Cleffa and one perfect Cleffa. As the week goes on I will update you if there are any significant changes with these last nine eggs. When all is done I should end with 27 Cleffa found. We’ll see if we manage to get lucky. That’s all for now but see you again soon.

Total So Far:

18 Hatched

2 Shiny

1 Hundo

Chained to Shining Pearl

As you may remember, I have been hunting for a Shiny Shaymin in my copy of Pokémon: Shining Pearl for quite some time. I would like to say that the hunt is finally over. However, that would make me a liar. Trust me, when it happens the title will probably be in all caps out of happiness. Today, I decided to talk about something else. Now, fairly recently I learned that there is no issue with leaving Shaymin to lounge in the grass while I leave to go do other things. I should have expected as much considering you can just run and come back to reset it, but sometimes I get tunnel vision. This discovery meant I could try out other things in the game again. There was one particular activity that I wanted to try, but I have never seen any success in attempting it. This activity is called PokéRadar chaining.

For those of you who are not aware, the PokéRadar is an item you can get after beating the Elite Four and getting the National Dex. There are certain Pokémon that can only be found in the game through this method. What you do is go to a large area of grass, use the item, and go into one of the shaking patches of grass. If you are lucky you will find a Pokémon you don’t normally see in the area. However, do note that it is best to use a Repel when doing this so that you don’t get interrupted by other wild Pokémon. Here is where things get interesting. If you catch or defeat the Pokémon that appears in the shaking grass, you may get new shaking grass patches after the encounter. Each time you do this it will have the same Pokémon as when you first started using the PokéRadar. This is called chaining and is a method used to shiny hunt because the longer you can keep your chain, the better your odds become. While it is a bit more streamlined than the original method in the Gen IV games, each streak has at least a 7% chance of breaking with each encounter. To get to the highest odds of a 40 chain, you do need a bit of luck. One day I decided to test it out during an outbreak. You might be able to guess which one.

As you might have guessed from the top right corner and the bird peeking out of the grass, I hunted for Doduo as a test phase and it went decently well. I managed to get a chain of forty and got the shiny patch. As you can see, the shiny Pokémon is indicated by a sparkling patch. No matter where you are on the chain, if you see a sparkling patch, that encounter is guaranteed to be shiny. I managed to get a couple shiny Doduo before the chain broke. However, I had another target I really wanted to hunt for: Nidoran.

Now both the male and female versions can appear in the grass on Route 201. However, I don’t know if it was because of my version or something but I mainly saw the male version in the grass so I went hunting for that. Unfortunately, this one took a bit longer. It took me seven or eight decent runs at it before I finally managed to get myself a chain of forty. However, having come this far, I was slightly worried. You see, unlike with Doduo, I didn’t have a good way of getting this shiny outside of this game. The only other place I could potentially encounter one was in Pokémon Shield as that would be with much worse odds. Doduo on the other hand could easily be found in Pokémon Violet, a game where it is very easy to get shiny Pokémon. So naturally I hoped I could get the three I needed to complete the line. The good news is, I managed to get four of them before the chain broke at forty-five. More than enough for my needs. I haven’t evolved them yet but I am glad I got enough when I need to do so. Let’s hope the female sparkles like this soon too. This is quite a welcome distraction from Shaymin after all. It also gives me hope since it proves that shiny Pokémon do still exist in my game. Until next time everyone!

The Stage is Set

So I played the new Princess Peach game recently: Princess Peach Showtime! I figured I should try it out to take a break from some other grinds and relax a little bit. We will get more into that later, but I should start out by saying that the game is fun. It is a kind of silly fun where you just do your best job cosplaying and taking the stage. The plot is pretty simple. A bad guy taking the name of the absolute worst artificial flavoring ( I like grapes, just not like that.) takes over the shows at the theater and Peach must stop her evil scheme. However, even if the plot is pretty standard, some of the antics in this game did surprise me. For instance, there are ten main transformations that you use throughout the game for the different plays. Some are combat-oriented, some are puzzle-oriented, and some are a mix of both. The combat transformations are usually pretty straightforward. I don’t think you were expecting any complex combat systems from Nintendo, but I thought I would give you a heads-up. The puzzle ones, on the other hand, can be a little tricky the first couple of times. There is one in particular early on that had me doing multiple retries, but the puzzles aren’t usually that bad. Do note that each play locks in which style you transform into so you only need to use that one until the stage ends. Which is beneficial since you don’t need to switch pretty control schemes. Not that it would make the game that much harder.

Now this game is fairly linear with not much room for backtracking. The number of times I missed a collectible and needed to replay and redo a level was quite a lot. Especially since sometimes taking too many hits or missing combos can cause you to fail. Also, each level has at least one secret collectible hidden in a little bonus area that you need to find and they can be easy to miss if you aren’t careful. Especially when you are just fighting through enemies and get lost in the rhythm. Although you do not need every collectible to beat the game. You only need 100 Gems to beat the game and the game has over two hundred so you should be fine. Again, the game isn’t really trying to make things difficult for you. It is just trying to have fun while showing Peach off in fun new costumes.

So with all that being said, I enjoy my playthrough of the game. I may do a quick play every now and then if I feel like it. I do think that while there is a lot of creativity on display, the game does feel a bit limited. After all, you could probably get away with playing this game on an SNES controller with the amount of buttons this game requires. A bit of an exaggeration, but with all the style the game has going for it and the number of cool moments you take part in, I do wonder if we could’ve had more. Again, I did enjoy the game. I do want more games like this in the future. Maybe not exactly the same style, but I do want to explore more with Princess Peach in future games. After seeing what she can do in this game, I am convinced she just plays along with Bowser’s kidnapping schemes out of boredom. I don’t want to spoil anything, but she can handle herself just fine. Have a good night everyone!

A Pretty Lucky Day

So, I managed to get a few shiny Pokémon today. It makes sense since this was Community Day Classic for Bagon, but today was a record for the most shiny Pokémon I have found in a single day. Let’s start with the obvious ones. I managed to set a new record for myself today and caught thirteen shiny Bagon. This is the first time I ever managed to succeed this well at a Community Day. My previous record was five. That’s a pretty big difference. I did evolve two of them to a Shelgon and Salamence just to have their shiny forms in the PokéDex, but that still left me with eleven shiny Bagon today. I don’t know if I will top that anytime soon, but it was a pretty lucky afternoon.

That was pretty cool, but finding shiny Pokémon on Community Day is meant to be. There are times when I have struggled more than others, but usually, things turn out well for me on Community Day. The bigger surprises actually took place in the morning. My first shiny in Pokémon Go today was not any of the Bagon. It was instead a random shiny Pokémon I found while lying in bed this morning. It was a Machop, my third shiny Machop to be accurate. Now normally, I would have used this opportunity to complete the line, but I will make an exception this time. After all, this shiny Machop was one I got after facing Team Go Rocket Leader Cliff in battle. That’s right it is my second shiny shadow Pokémon and the first one I got from a leader. I will keep it as a shiny shadow Pokémon right now, but it is kind of funny how both my shiny shadows are of Pokémon I already have. Maybe it’s an unlock requirement?

I know that is a great first shiny to get for the day right? Definitely a bit rarer than the boosted Community Day shiny Pokémon I got. However, I would still be lying if I said this was my first one today. Actually, my real first shiny was in a different game entirely. Well maybe not necessarily a game, but it was still in Pokémon Sleep. Yesterday night I was dead tired and turned in early, which led to me getting a perfect sleep score for the first time in weeks. Maybe to reward my diligence in sleeping soundly, the first Pokémon I saw when I loaded my encounters was a blue Swalot sleeping on Snorlax’s belly. It has been three months since my last shiny in this game, so this was a very unexpected surprise. What a beautiful way to start the day.

Okay, now I’m done. Fifteen shiny Pokémon in a day is wild to me. Sure thirteen were from Community Day, but that is still so cool to me. Here’s hoping others had a great Community Day as well. I just wanted to share that today was a great day and I hope others had a great day as well. Have a good night everyone!

Pokémon GO Gripes

Hey everyone! Hope Easter went well for those of you who celebrate it. It was pretty good for me. Well, aside from needing to do my taxes. Because of this, I wasn’t able to spend a lot of time doing much in the way of gaming. The grind is pretty real in both Final Fantasy V and Pokémon right now. However, I want to take some time to talk about the less fun grind in Pokémon GO. I only really started playing it last year. I had a coworker help explain to me how things worked and I slowly got into it. Surprisingly, this is the third easiest game for me to get shiny Pokémon in. The others should be fairly obvious. However, just because I have an easier time finding shiny Pokémon does not me I don’t have gripes. I definitely do. One of my biggest gripes is eggs. Hatching in this game is the worst.

In the mainline games, you have a chance to find an egg after a certain amount of steps when breeding Pokémon in the daycare and then you can just speed along on your bike to hatch it. However, this mobile game requires you to be… mobile. Okay, there is more to this I promise. The problem is you need to incubate eggs to hatch them. And you are given only one to use at any given time. There are even different distances you need to walk to hatch certain eggs. So you might have to walk for a very long time just to hatch one of your eggs. It can be brutal. Unless of course, you pay for more incubators which leads me to my second gripe: the cost of playing.

This in-game store is expensive for people. The in-game currency used is called PokéCoins and you can only accumulate fifty per day if everything goes well. The problem is that pretty much everything in the store costs more than that amount. Most items require at least three or four days’ worth of max PokéCoin quotas just to buy a single item in the shop. What does that mean? It means if I wanted to get enough incubators to hatch all my eggs while I walked, that would require over a month of just repeated grinding. Now, as you may be aware, I am no stranger to grinding. However, this just feels a bit more tedious. The same thing is true for raids since you can only do so many in a day without needing to buy extra passes. So you might have to pick and choose your battles.

Now, I’m still playing the game. However, it isn’t perfect. No one really expects it to be but I’m glad it can help enliven some of my more boring commutes to work. that is how I have gotten most of my shiny Pokémon in this game after all. Anyway, that’s all for my little Easter rant. I doubt these problems will ever get addressed, but I just hope it doesn’t get any worse. Have a good night!

I’m Going Back to Final Fantasy V

Now, I should preface this by saying that this is my first Final Fantasy game. Back when I first played this game, I wanted to get a taste of what this series was about and so I went looking on Steam. I eventually found out that this game has a unique mechanic that allows your party members to change jobs freely. This meant you could customize exactly how you wanted your characters to be built. If you wanted to focus on having magic builds, you could focus just on magic jobs. If you wanted to focus on attacking, then you could do that as well. If you wanted some all-rounder types, that’s fine too. So I bought Final Fantasy V. I made a little joke review about it too a couple years back. However, I never actually finished my playthrough of the game. I got past the beginning part of the game, but I got a little sidetracked and like most RPGs, haven’t gotten around to finishing it. However, I decided to play it a little more just because I felt like it. I’ll be completely honest and say that I honestly barely remember where I am supposed to go for the plot, but I’ll figure it out eventually. I hope so at least. Anyway, there is something else I realized after booting up the game. I was hunting for a few achievements.

So, there are achievements for mastering each job with each character in this game. So I thought the best way to do that was to have barely any party variety and have them all play the same job. Is this a good idea? I have no idea. Past me certainly thought it was and honestly, I might stick with it. Besides, there is a way to help diversify your characters. You can give characters abilities that you have obtained by leveling up previous jobs. So any ability from the previous nine jobs I completed have abilities I can use for the characters. Some are passive like the ones for not getting attacked from behind, while some allow you to use spells from previous classes. It is also worth noting that characters do have different strengths to utilize even if you do match their jobs and levels. For instance, Galuf and Faris have lower magic stats than the other two so I usually have them do damage while the others use elemental magic to assist. That is just one potential way to play. There are a lot of things to try and I can’t wait to maybe finish this game. We’ll see about doing the mastering jobs thing. There are I think 25 jobs total in the game and mastering the ninja job would put me at double digits. It seems like a long road to success. Wish me luck in actually completing it this time.

The Grind Continues

So it probably doesn’t surprise you to know this, but I have not had any luck with shiny Pokémon in my Pokémon Shield Badge Quest. Of course, I wasn’t expecting to get particularly lucky or anything. Ir would have been nice, but without the shiny charm, this is going to be quite the grind. I don’t really have any shiny hunting methods available at this point in time. That means every encounter is going to be pretty much at full odds. Also, as I mentioned before, I am limiting myself to only some specific encounters. The Pokémon I am going to choose are all found on Route 2. Here are the four main candidates.

As long as I find one of these four, I will be satisfied. Personally, I am hoping for Nickit the most out of the four just because I have no idea what its shiny colors are. However, if I get one of the other three, that would be just fine. Even if I don’t get my main target, as long as it is a shiny Pokémon from Gen VIII that is new to me, I will take it. I’m only at about 3,000 encounters right now so I’m still not at odds yet, but here’s hoping my first team member isn’t too shy about showing up. I don’t need another Shaymin hunt. That’s all for now, consider this a progress report of sorts. I promise that the next time I update you about this will be when one of two things happens. Either I get a team member for the hunt, or I go double over odds. Hopefully, it is the first one. Please let it be the first one. Anyway, have a good night everyone. Wish me luck!