January 12th: Doubling Up for the Battle Tower

- Visited the Battle Frontier since that needs to be done before Wi-Fi BF can be done.
- Conjured an extremely strong Pokemon to help with the Battle Tower.
> Magic: PxSCIZOR [F] (Lv. 100 Scizor; All IVs at 31)
- Went to the Wi-Fi Club to link up with Aar for the Battle Tower
- Took Peep and the save-edited Scizor into the tower. Aar's team was a Latias and a Drapion, both created using Magic.
- Made it through almost 25 battles over the course of about three hours before losing.
- One battle was extremely close, with Peep securing the final 2 KOs with very little health left. The first was against a weakened opponent, and the other came out fresh right after.
- Decided to do the minigames while we were in the Club. I lost a lot.
- Even though I wanted to do it with more people, we decided to check out the Wi-Fi plaza.
- Waded through many technical difficulties, likely caused by the A.R. codes we used to speed up the battling process.
- Once we got through that, we did the survey, played some minigames, and checked out the Plaza.
- We missed getting on the floats before the end of the parade and we got booted out of the room the boring way.
- We called it there for the day. We'll be giving the Battle Tower another try at some point. I think.
- Went to the Global Terminal and put up the other hatched Cyndaquil for trade, this time for a Chikorita.
- Received a Mystery Gift after I remember to try for that.
- Got a fuckin' Mew!
> Received: MEW (OT: FAL2010/10160) (Level 5)

YouTube Screen Recordings

I don't know much of anything about competitive Pokemon and neither does Aar. Winning 50 battles in a row wasn't going to be an easy task, so we needed to come up with something. That would take too long, so Aar just checked around on Smogon and looked for some team builds. After looking through a few, we decided on a build shared in a post from May 2009 by user Jumpman16. It was a build meant for single battles of one trainer with three Pokemon, while we were going to be doing double battles of two trainers with two Pokemon each (total of four).
Link to Smogon Forum Post by Jumpman16

We used the post as a template and made changes that we thought would work better for us, as we were conjuring them through the dark arts of save editing anyway. The time it would take to actually build this legitimately wasn't something we were willing to commit to. Given that this is the only thing these hacked Pokemon were going to be used for, it shouldn't be a problem. I decided to go with the Scizor because I thought it would be the best option of the three. I think Scizor is cool and I wanted to try having one for once, so that probably helped influence my decision. That left Aar with the Latias and the Drapion.

Aar's Drapion didn't receive any changes to the listed moves, but the other two did. My Scizor got Rest instead of Swords Dance. Aar's Latias got the more significant change, with Charm switched out for Mist Ball and Roar being replaced by Dragon Claw. These changes seemed good to us, but realistically, we wouldn't know if there was some big problem with our decisions. In retrospect, I think I would have been better off running exactly what was listed, as Swords Dance would help mitigate the attack stat debuffs from using Superpower. I might go back and make that change, since I can totally just do that.

Due to our not legitimately catching these Pokemon, we somehow both came to the conclusion that we shouldn't give them nicknames. Aar didn't nickname his at all, but I gave mine a "Px" prefix to the default name "SCIZOR" to mark it as a hacked Pokemon. There's a possibility I'll get attached to this Pokemon, and I'm not sure how I would feel about that given the circumstances of how I got it. It might be fine. I might feel bad about it. There's even a possibility that I'll see that as a cool part of what it is. I think only time will tell.

Of the battles we had fought there, I don't think any of them left quite the impression that Peep's big clutch had. We really thought that battle was going to be the end. It was nothing short of a miracle that she took an Earthquake from a Lairon and a Sky Uppercut from a Combusken to secure the win before she could be stopped. Simply incredible. Unfortunately, we did lose later on, but we were only around the halfway point then. I'm just glad we didn't lose near the end of the 50 point streak necessary to beat it. Overall, the Battle Tower has actually been fun and I'm looking forward to more of it in the future.

After that was the Wi-Fi Plaza. I had done my research before hopping in, so I knew what would be there. The minigames were fun, although they would clearly benefit from a real stylus. I actually like the limited time functionality. I could see how it would have been a good way to make sure that people were getting shuffled around. The fanfare for the room being near the closing time is also a nice touch. It feels like there's a progression of time that actually leads up to something that isn't just an arbitrary time limit before everyone gets booted out.

As part of my funny save changes, I modified my Pokedex and ensured that all the starters from all four generations were marked as "seen" so I could trade for them in the GTS. Somehow, Chikorita wasn't marked as seen, which is baffling to me. Anyway, this allowed me to actually put up the second Cyndaquil to try for a Chikorita and complete the Gen. 2 starter trio. Might also try for a Mudkip at some point down the line.

I actually wanted to get a Mew at some point and now I have one. It's Level 5 and only knows Pound. Works for me! I probably won't even end up using it anyway.