October 12th: Barnstorming

- Started grinding south of Goldenrod to get my lower leveled Pokemon up to speed.
- First wild battle with Gemini, leveled him up and got him evolved.
> GEMINI: Togepi -> Togetic
- Put Super! in the daycare to speed things up.
- Caught a Drowzee to trade it for a Machop.
> Caught: BERTHA [F]
- Took a picture with Gemini next to the daycare center.
> Caught RORY (Ditto)
- Probably got my first full board solved in the Goldenrod game corner.
- Cleared my first Level 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 coin game boards. Level 7 tripped me up.
- Got Zuma from Level 5 to 11 to respect him for being the Pokemon with Fly.
- Found and beat the Ace Trainers south of Route 34.
- Encountered Entei while surfing back to Route 34/Goldenrod. It fled after Peep hit it with a Thunder Wave (paralysis).
- Went to National Park for a Thursday Bug Catching Contest.
- Stopped with 12 minutes left because Sync III was too strong.
> Caught: YARS [M] (Caterpie)
- Started grinding on Route 37
> Caught: TUEBOR [M] (Stantler)
- Moved to Route 38 for grinding
> SUPER!: Wooper -> Quagsire
- Traveled from Route 37 to Cianwood by foot/surf to pick up more XP.
> Caught: SASHA [F] (Shuckle)
- Fought the Jasmine battle. Sync III got cheesed with status effects by the first Magnemite. Super!, despite only getting him to Level 25, took out all three of Jasmine's Pokemon, with the help of Gorb using Curse on the Steelix.
- I forgot there were no other trainer battles in Jasmine's gym. That's actually kind of refreshing. Then again, the Lighthouse serves that function in a way.
- Got the Strength HM. Replaced Charge on Peep with it.
- Went to Ecruteak's Burned Tower and picked up some goodies from the lower floor.
- Made it to Mahogany Town and encountered Entei again on Route 43.
- Got the Red Gyarados from the Lake of Rage
> Caught: MAROON [M]
- Started making my way through the suspicious souvenier shop.
- After the battle with Executive Ariana, Sync III got his final evolution.
> SYNC III: Quilava -> Typhlosion
- Completed the Team Rocket HQ thing.

Spent most of this day grinding to get the levels of my team up. I think I get why Sword, with its always-on full-team XP share was the Pokemon game I actually finished. It's a lot of tedious work getting the levels of six Pokemon up. Even with all of the grinding, I still feel like most of my team is behind on levels. The problem was much worse at the start of the day, but it's still time consuming and doesn't feel all that rewarding. I should probably just have my team split in half, with Sync III, Peep, and Ramelia getting more priority on levels and Gemini, Super!, and Gorb being leveled to a point where they can play good supporting roles and hold up for a little while in battles. I'm kind of doing that already, but dropping the pretense of having the whole team at a high level would probably help speed things along. Again, I'm not in a rush, but I'd really rather my time spent on this go towards things that move the story along.

I've really been enjoying the music. I remember a few tracks from the game being great, but playing it again is reintroducing me to songs I forgot about and really like. Another thing I'm noticing is that each town or city has some interesting element to it that makes the first visit there more special and helps to engage the player with the location. I don't really remember any particularly interesting parts of towns in Sword, but I played that years ago and I forgot about basically everything that wasn't Goldenrod in SS over the years.

I find it neat that the developers thought to have the volume of the music decrease somewhat when near a coastline to make the sound of the waves more prevalent.

I don't really get why I'm catching as many Pokemon as I am. Sure, I only have 24 added to the Pokedex and I don't even have half of one full box of Pokemon stored in the PC, but I know that I probably won't get around to using most of them in any official capacity. Honestly, I probably won't use any of them. Except Zuma, who has Fly. I could have Gemini learn that now that he's evolved into Togetic, but I feel like that's unfair to Zuma. I'm guessing most other players run into this same issue when playing any of the mainline Pokemon games. People doing Nuzlocks would probably be the exception, but only because they get forced into using other 'mons from their PC as "deaths" on the team occur. None of this stopped me from catching the Lake of Rage shiny Gyarados instead of just letting it faint, so I'm guessing nobody really cares to put much thought into this. I think that's fair.

The coin game in Goldenrod is something I never really figured out when I was younger. Now that I'm older and have experience with learning and understanding games like Minesweeper and Codebreaker, I can actually get through tables. I only made it to the level 7 board, but I probably never got past 1 or 2 as a kid. I actually enjoy playing it. I'm not going to put the time into it now, but I can see myself circling back to it later and really trying to make solid progress on the game.