Pokémon SoulSilver Review
Ohhhhhhhh baby issa pokemon game. And no, that start date is not an error. I originally started this playthrough during my first couple of weeks at college for cross country preseason so I had a file I could start working towards filling out the Pokewalker on. I played it off and on up until Chuck and comitted to beating it recently when a bunch of my friends all dove into doing some pokemon playthroughs. Even though I wasn't that consistent on checking in with it, this Staryu was in my backpack for my entire college career, what a little trooper.
This was a pretty special runthrough to me because, believe it or not, this was the second time I've ever beaten SoulSilver! That doesn't sound crazy by itself but I've beaten pretty much every pokemon game at least 2 to 3 times so this is pretty unusal for me. So what caused that? Well, mostly FOMO combined with some cheater's lament from being a dumb kid with an action replay. I was lucky enough to get this copy pretty close to release day on Easter of 2009, which let me get the cool Wi-Fi events like the Yellow Forest and Winners' Path Pokewalker routes in addition to stuff like a Mew and Eon Stone download. I really didn't want to lose those Pokewalker routes, which in hindsight was really silly considering that I could just unlock them with the same Action Replay I used to rare candy my entire party up to level 100 with. (In all honesty I actually couldn't because I was a dumb kid and had no idea how to enter my own codes in). But the advent of a mostly functional frontal lobe and the creation of Pretendo style services let me reset the game with no more FOMO woes. So I'd like to memorilize my original SoulSilver team of Typhlosion, Skarmory, Lugia, Red Gyarados, Raikou and Entei, all levelled up to 100 via rare candy in my Platinum save (because I was too dumb to add SoulSilver codes and the device came with Platinum cheats by default). It was a hilariously unbalanced team that let child me live blissfully unaware of the fucked up Johto/Kanto level curve which I attempted to make my bitch this playthrough. They will be missed.
So how about this playthrough? Well the pokewalker is probably one of my favorite gimmicks that's ever been attached to a pokemon game and since I was lucky enough to never lose mine, I set my sights on a couple of pokemon to use for this run. I unlocked all of the normal routes naturally but Action Replay'd all of the event routes in. I knew for certain that I wanted to catch a Beldum from Winners' Path since I could never seem to catch it as a kid so that was an instant lock. The same goes for Elekid which I caught from the Suburban Area. I picked Cyndaquil as a way to make amends for my crimes against my last Typhlosion for making him sit on the sidelines while I repeatedly Aeroblasted Red off of Mt. Silver. I could've caught Murkrow from the Pokewalker but settled on using the Safari Zone instead, I like having Pokeball variety. A Gloom was caught just outside of the Safari Zone due to my complete lack of grass type coverage. And my final team member was a Wooper from the Primo eggs. It may come as a shock considering I'm pretty open about Wooper being my favorite pokemon, but this was my first time actually using one on a team. For some reason, every time I've used one, I end out dropping the playthrough for one reason or another. And that's my team! I tried to used pokemon I've never used before (With the exception of Beldum) and I had a lot of fun with them, it's a shame the pokewalker is so rare because it adds a lot of fun variety to potential teams in this game.
My run through of Johto was fun but very splintered, I played the game off and on several times over the past 5 years. I would play about an hour or two and then get sucked up into an assignment or whatever so I never made much consistent progress. This also led to a general lack of thorough training, meaning I was a complete victim of the Johto level curve. I was barely scraping by when I made it past Pryce so I knew the Elite 4 was going to be trouble. Against all odds, I had made it to Lance on my "lets just fuck around and see what happens" run of the Elite 4 with the following team:
Considering that Lance's ace was a level 50 Dragonite and that my only Ice type attack was Blizzard on my Quagsire, the odds were pretty well stacked against me. I had 5 revives and 7 hyper potions left in addition to 4 rare candies. These rare candies proved to be my most important tool as after some experimenting, I found the optimal distribution to be 1 candy to Gilbert to learn Discharge and the other 3 to Bingo to maximize bulk which allowed him to tank 1 Outrage from Lance's ace Dragonite. Another item key to my success was the Choice Scarf that gets sent to the player by their mother after they accumulate enough cash. This let me send Gilbert in to deal serious damage to the Gyarados (if not kill it outright) and then from that point on I could revive him to send him in to discharge and immediately get pounded in hopes of triggering static. Static plus Discharge made Gilbert one my most valuable assets as a paralysis grenade, giving me a fighting chance by allowing most of my pokemon to outspeed his in addition to giving Gilbert more chances to hit the unreliable Blizzard on turns where the paralysis activated. After much trial and error, I was finally getting past all three of his Dragonites consistently and figuring out the method to beating his Charizard and Aerodactyl. By sheer conincidence, following a failed attempt on his Aerodactyl, I revived Bingo at a weird time which allowed him to level up mid fight, this ended out being what won me the Champion fight because it made Lance use aerial ace which was only capable of 3HKOing Bingo, giving me the easy win after a couple of Waterfalls. I had done it!
I was very proud of myself for being so stubborn and hard-headed to force my way to victory. It felt as though it was only right to struggle my way through it as I had breezed by way through it with a team of 6 level 100 pokemon over a decade ago. And next up was Kanto! Admittedly, Kanto isn't that vast or deep as it once seemed as a kid but it really succeeds at feeling like a sort of victory lap. I was pretty underleveled for most of my trek across Kanto so it presented a fun but less grueling challenge much like my battle with Lance. I also managed to get the Dusk Stone (Via pokeathlon) and the Electrizier (Pokewalker item) without having to trade for them which was a fun little personal challenge. Oh, little sidenote that I also managed to get to the final Pokeathlon room which was another thing I never managed to do as a kid
Other than that, I had a pretty uneventful run through Kanto. I had a pretty easy time knocking out the 8 final Gym Leaders, Blue gave me a run for my money but the Choice Scarf once again saved my ass. Of course this all came to a halt when I hit Red.
These levels just weren't cutting it. So I went back to the drawing board and grinding out some more levels in addition to some item hunting on the pokewalker. I managed to nab not only the Choice Band but also the Choice Specs from Winners path in addition to a Heat Rock from Icy Moutain Road. I started by using Ferris' Sunny Day to get rid of the Hail while setting up for Red's Venusaur. Once Pikachu was down, I'd send in Cinder with Choice Scarf to get max Eruption damage off, this wouldn't quite kill but it got close enough to burn two of Red's full restores. Once Venusaur was down, I managed to get really lucky with Choice Specs Gilbert just barely dealing enough damage to 2HKO Red's Blastoise with Thunderbolt while it fumbled two Blizzards right in my face. Next up was Snorlax, having really no idea what to do, I sent in Grug and spammed Iron Defense up to +6 while I let the Hammer Arms rip. This got Snorlax down to 1% where instead of healing, Red opted to switch. In came Charizard, where due to some weird logic in the Expert Trainer AI, spammed Air Slash repeatedly. This was pretty lame damage and even the one Flare Blitz it tried dealt less than 50% to my defensive monster. Of course this led to a devastating Blast Burn which easily 1HKO'd Grug. Thankfully, it was low enough to get demolished by a Thunderbolt from Gilbert. After that it was as simple as spamming Iron Defense and Meteor Mashing until I saw the credits roll.
Important to note that I renamed "Grug" to "Gruglewis" to celebrate his status as the Metagross of Absolute Defense. And that was my second ever run of SoulSilver! It was an absolute blast and made me terribly happy to play through the game legitimately for the first time ever. It's got such a lovely musical and visual style that makes the whole game a treat to the eyes and ears. I like that the sprite have all been redesigned from Generation 4 to give the gen 1 and 2 pokemon a much "sharper" look that makes them feel more in line with early Sugimori concept art. I really had such a fun time so I'll just leave you with some of the photos I took along the journey. You'll even notice I considered adding a Nidoran and Chatot to my team before settling on Soop and Ferris.
