Generation IV Pokemon

[✝AngelSacrifice✝]

I haven't posted an update here in a little bit, and that's because the last time I tried to, I got very distracted and ended up writing a 4000 word blog post (which isn't even done yet) and started working on a little game! The scope of the game is pretty small so I hope I will be able to show it to yalls soon. Yes it is a Pokemon game.

I'm excited to both play the game your working on and read your blog post!!! Lmk when you post it!

But just as an update on my progress in HG: I have all 16 badges now! The gym leaders were tough but I did it! I battled pretty much every trainer in Kanto and my team is pretty solidly in the mid-to-late level 50s. The final Thing to do in the main story is to go to Mt. Silver and battle Red, but iirc he is Tough. I think he has a level 80 Pikachu. I can't deal with that yet haha. In fact I'm not sure how I'm going to get strong enough to deal with that. Ummmm.

LEVEL 80???? THIS PIKACHU IS JUST JACKED TO HELL???

I also got Rock Climb after getting the last badge and now I'm excitedly going back to all the places in the game that have climbable rock walls so I can figure out what secrets are hidden hence!

ah! I didn't realize there was even more locked content! I really love how many secrets and surprises there are in pokemon games! I should play heart gold or soul silver sometime. I'm really nostalgic for that era of Pokemon graphic since my first game was fire red!

[hatkirby]

OK like i looked it up and i was WRONG it's actually level EIGHTY EIGHT. i believe it's the strongest trainer pokemon in any pokemon game other than ones where their level is just set to equal your level. It makes sense because Red is the protagonist from the original games Red and Blue, and he's supposed to be this living legend. But like jfc there's like a 25 level gap between Blue (the 16th gym leader, and the rival from Red and Blue) and him.

i will for sure link to my game here when i finish it !

and yeah I feel like HGSS has a lot of unlockable stuff! There's a bunch of stuff that's like "here's how you get Cool Legendary Pokemon from one of the other games". like one of the rock climb things goes straight to a place where you can get Groudon or Kyogre, but bulbapedia says it won't do anything until after I beat Red lol.

[hatkirby]

Okay so Red is really hard. I can't get a single hit on his level 88 Pikachu . So even the X items strat won't work. The next idea is to train against the Elite Four, since they're at higher levels now that I've beaten all of the gyms, but now they're too strong for me . There's probably somewhere else I can train (maybe even in Platinum, since I can trade between them), and then I train against the Elite Four, and then I survive against the Pikachu long enough to get some X items in. Alternate solution: use my level 100 event Arceus to obliterate his entire team with the wrath of god .

Currently what I'm doing is trying out the Battle Frontier. I loved the Hoenn Battle Frontier and spent months getting all Gold Symbols back in 2017/2018. And three out of five of the facilities in this gen are new, so I get to try out interesting stuff! The problem is that I currently don't feel very much like prepping and training a new team of optimized Pokemon, especially since my repetitive strain stuff is so bad rn. Luckily I do have a few good Pokemon on my Platinum from a few years ago when I was ribbonning. I have a Garchomp and a Starmie that are EV trained and have good movesets, and also I have my Heracross from this playthrough that doesn't have optimal EVs but still has good moves and can be there while I come up with another strategy. I got far enough in the Battle Tower (so, Not a new facility lol) with this team to fight and beat Palmer the first time (the Silver Print), but I've thus far lost a couple of battles after him twice now. The difficulty kicks up! Like maybe it's the point at which I need to have a better strategy than "have Garchomp spam STAB Outrage and if it gets confused then it's holding a Lum Berry". Like, Choice Band is a tried and true method and maybe it'd help Garchomp sweep but like it's kind of risky since you can get trapped into using a move that won't work against the opponent... I don't like competitive Pokemon or metagaming but I do like doing it for these in-game battle facilities because they're not real people so it's like solving a puzzle rather than playing mind games or really knowing strategies inside out.

I also tried out the Battle Hall which is interesting because you only take in one Pokemon at a time and you have to do ten fights against individual Pokemon and you can choose what type they are each time, and each time you choose a type then that type increases rank up to 10 (at which point you can't choose that type anymore and you have to choose other types). The weird thing about this is that you actually have quite a level advantage over the other Pokemon when they're not fully ranked up yet! Most battle facilities force all of the Pokemon to exactly level 50, but in this one your Pokemon keeps its level and the other Pokemon start out at like a 20 level disadvantage, but then get stronger.

I think the Battle Hall is fun, except for when you lose because there's so many short battles so it gets really repetitive and slow to get started again. I've tried a bunch of runs with my Garchomp and the thing about it is that if it gets hit with a single Ice type move it goes down. I can't skip fighting the Ice type Pokemon since you have to get to level 10 with all 17 types in order to fight the leader. So I try to get Ice fully out of the way first since the opponents are additionally disadvantaged the earlier into your overall run you are. And it's sort of manageable with a Yache Berry because that usually allows Garchomp to survive one Ice type attack, in case Garchomp's first move didn't KO or the opponent outspeeded. And then I move on to the other types, but the problem is that there are dual type Ice Pokemon so you still end up seeing Ice Pokemon in the other type rounds and the stronger they are the less likely a Yache Berry will save you, and also I don't know if I want to keep a Yache Berry the whole time anyway because a Choice Band would be so good in this one-on-one format since you'd be more likely to sweet with a single attack, BUT it's a big problem if they outspeed you, which maybe means I should use Choice Scarf instead to increase speed but then what if I don't sweep............ People online are recommending either Yache Berry or Choice Band OR Focus Sash so that's another option and actually on second thought I think Focus Sash is strictly better than Yache Berry in this case because the point of the Yache Berry is to make it more likely that I can survive a single Ice Type move, and Focus Sash *ensures* that you can always survive one hit from full HP, no matter the type. So if I'm mostly concerned about being outsped or needing two turns for the KO then Focus Sash is just better. It does mean that Snow Warning would take me out but idk.... Pokemon is hard!! Like it's just kind of annoying to get like 30 battles into the Battle Hall and then lose to a single Ice Fang, and the downside of having only one Pokemon is that you have no backup like you would in the Tower.

Ok so maybe that's enough thoughts for now haha.

[hatkirby]

OKAY SO!!! I DID complete the Battle Hall!

The Focus Sash was the right choice, holy hay. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. It prevented Regina the Garchomp from fainting if it would take KO damage from full health. I did actually encounter a Snover with Snow Warning, which Is scary because it is a situation where Yache Berry is better than Focus Sash, but it also does not matter if I manage to OHKO the Snover, which I did!

It is cool how the Battle Hall works. Like I said, you have the choice of a type to go against for each battle, and the rank for that type increases every time, up until 10, and after you do the rank 10 battle, you can't fight that type again.



The Silver Print fight against Hall Matron Argenta happens after 50 fights, and the Gold Print fight is after 170 (which is 10 fights each for all 17 types). Each battle is only 1 Pokemon, but like I said, losing far in is devastating because it is so tedious.

The strat is to get the scarier types out of the way first. The Pokemon are weaker the earlier on you are in the challenge, and also you wouldn't want to do the riskier stuff so late in the run anyway. For Garchomp, a Dragon/Ground type, that's very obviously the Ice type. I lost in the Ice round way more often than in any other round. Then I did types where I knew there were prominent dual type Pokemon where their other type was Ice. Ground has Mamoswine, Grass has Abomasnow, Water has Cloyster and Walrein. These were also scary rounds and those Pokemon did show up, but I made it through.

I think I did Steel next, because Steel resists Dragon. It's not a huge problem because Garchomp also knows Earthquake, but there's still the risk of encountering a Steel/Flying type (Skarmory), a Steel type with Levitate (Bronzong), or a Steel/Bug type (Forretress and Scizor). Earthquake does not work at all on the first two, and is neutral against the Steel/Bug types. I don't think I ever came across a Skarmory or a Bronzong. I came across a Bronzor, but they're weaker than Bronzong and Outrage took it out even those it resists Dragon. I did come across multiple Forretress (but no Scizor) and in those cases, the strat is still to use Earthquake for neutral STAB damage. So Steel was kind of scary, and I did Bug soon after mainly because Forretress.

I did Dragon type at some point in here. Garchomp's Outrage is super effective against Dragon, but their moves would be super effective against Garchomp too. But it didn't really present a problem. My Garchomp is pretty fast.

Then I did more types where I knew an Ice type could appear, although it was less likely: Dark (Weavile), Psychic (Jynx), and Ghost (Froslass). Dark has Weavile which is very scary because it's fast, but my Focus Sash allowed me to survive its hit and then finish it off with a Brick Break. Weavile is pretty much the only reason Regina even has Brick Break, because it's quad effective against Dark/Ice. I don't remember Psychic being a problem even though I did see Jynx, and I didn't see Froslass but Ghost was a little scary anyway because Haunter has Levitate so I can't use super effective STAB Earthquake. Outrage worked fine though.

There WERE scary things that happened in some of these fights, like weird situations that I barely survived, and I tried to save them to my Vs. Recorder but it didn't seem to work. At least once, late in the run, I remember getting hit by an Ice Shard after I'd already taken a hit (so Focus Sash wouldn't help), that took me to like 6 HP. I still beat it though! Oh gosh yeah actually, when I did Fighting there was a Medicham who didn't go down in one Outrage, and just spammed Double Team the whole time. So my second and third Outrages missed, and Regina got confused. The Medicham then used Recover, and went back to Double Teaming. The chance of winning this fight was so small because Regina had to both 1) not hit itself in confusion, and 2) manage to hit the very evasive Medicham. And yet I somehow beat the odds!

After all of that, there weren't too many rounds left. It was like 1am at this point so I made myself go to sleep instead of continuing to fight because I didn't want to make a mistake while sleepy. In the morning though: Flying was a little spooky because I was worried about seeing Skarmory, but I never did. Normal felt like a wildcard but it ended up being fine. And then the only types left were ones I hoped were going to be easy because they were weak to Earthquake: Fire, Electric, Poison, and Rock. And they all went down very smoothly! It's funny how much more stressful the first half of the run was than the latter half.

Finally, as the 170th battle, I had to fight Hall Matron Argenta a second time.



Wonder why they named this lady after one of Tooth's OC's.

She was able to send out any random strong Pokemon and... she sent out an Empoleon. A Water/Steel type. So, weak to Earthquake. With a mightly rending of the earth, I won the battle and got the Gold Print!

===

So, there's my long rant about the Battle Hall. That's one out of five battle facilities gilded. We were talking about Black and White and it made me think about what I want to accomplish in HeartGold before moving on to Gen 5. I think these are my goals:

• Beat Red
• Get all five Gold Prints in the Battle Frontier
• Complete the National Pokedex
• Do all the Pokeathlon stuff
• Get all five trainer card stars

Beating Red is a no-brainer, since it's like the true ending of the game, and is also required for unlocking the place where you catch the Hoenn legendaries. He's so tough though because like I said, his Pikachu is level 88. I have to think about whether I feel okay with just sweeping him with my level 100 Arceus lol.

All five Gold Prints is going to be tough. Battle Hall turned out to not be that difficult, but the other facilities are going to require very different strategies and I have to figure out whether the Pokemon I have right now are good for them and I might end up having to train a new team. I certainly can do that, and will probably use the sneaky strats I've done in the past to achieve this (trade into Diamond, put Pokemon into daycare center, tweak into the void, tape down left button so you just bike through the void infinitely until you take enough steps that the mon in the daycare gets enough exp, then fly out and pay the bill). But optimizing a Pokemon is def a time sink so I'd want to feel good that a strat will be worth it before committing to it. I'm glad I already have this strong Garchomp. The other facilities are going to require three mons though, and the Factory... The Factory is the reason why I'm not sure I'll go for all five. You don't use any of your Pokemon in the Battle Factory. You use rental Pokemon which suck and it's all SO very random and it was the worst facility out of all of them for me in Emerald. I literally had to do RNG manipulation in Emerald in order to beat it, after months of trying. I have shame in my heart.

Completing the National Pokedex will be time consuming but it's like the classic goal of any Pokemon game. I have mons to catch, mons to trade from Sinnoh, mons to level up and evolve, etc. Once again I'm gonna bug Ori so we can trade version exclusives haha. You're usually considered to have completed the National dex when you have all Pokemon except the Mythicals, so in this case, you get a star on your Trainer Card when you have all mons except Mew, Celebi, Jirachi, Deoxys, Manaphy, Phione, Darkrai, Shaymin, and Arceus. I can do a little better than that. I already have Jirachi, Deoxys, Shaymin, and Arceus from trading them off of people who went to the events back in the day. I have a Manaphy egg from Pokemon Ranger. And I bought My Pokemon Ranch before the Wii Shop Channel went down. My Pokemon Ranch is just a little game where you get extra storage space for your Pokemon because there's limited PC space in the main games. You can store up to 1000 Pokemon in there. When you get to 999, the NPC in the game offers to trade you a Mew, so that's how I'll get a Mew! I mean, catching 999 Magikarp and putting them into the ranch is going to be annoying and tedious as hell, but that's how we do it. Anyway, this means I can get very close to fully completing the dex. Celebi and Darkrai are the only ones I have no way to legitimately acquire. I can tweak onto Newmoon Island in Diamond to get Darkrai, but I don't want to because that's cheating.

The Pokeathlon is something exclusive to HGSS and I haven't fully explored it yet, but I know there's a Trainer Card star for beating records in all of the events. So I'll look into that some more later!

And then the two remaining stars are for 1) showing a Pokemon with five shiny leaves to Lyra, and 2) beating 100 trainers in a row in the Battle Tower. The shiny leaves shouldn't be too hard; you just walk around with your Pokemon in the grass on certain routes and they find them. I can look up which routes are right for each Pokemon. The Battle Tower is harder. You only need to win 49 fights in a row for the Tower's Gold Print, so getting the star requires *double* that. We'll see how doable it is haha.

[hatkirby]

I decided to rename this thread to Generation IV Pokemon so that it can cover my exploits in the Gen 4 games overall. I think most of my gameplay is still going to be in HeartGold because it's the newest to me, and I did a lot of what I wanted to do in Sinnoh back in 2022, but the Sinnoh games are still going to be involved at least a little, and I might want to do more Super Contests in Platinum to get more ribbons on my beautiful Dunsparce "Gabe".

Anyway, I had a terrible migraine last night, and I don't feel my best today either, so I'm taking off of work. Instead, I'm gonna talk a bit about the process of optimizing a Pokemon for the Battle Frontier!

I'm interested in raising a Scizor for my Battle Tower team, because it's very strong and very defensive. There's a website for competitive Pokemon strategies called Smogon, and it's useful for in-game battle facility strategies too. If you go to the page for Gen 4 Scizor, you can see a bunch of different strategies. Here's the one I'm going to go for:



There's a bunch of things to look at here. First is the stuff that can't be changed once you've caught the Pokemon: Nature, Ability, and although it doesn't mention it: IVs.

IVs are random numbers between 0 and 31 that are assigned to each of your Pokemon's stats when you catch it. The higher the IV, the stronger your Pokemon will be in that stat as it levels up. The problem is that until Sun and Moon, these numbers are pretty much invisible to you, and there's no good way to influence them either. Ideally, you'd have 31 in all six stats, but it's just not feasible, especially in Gen 4. So honestly I don't care very much about IVs. Once you get your Pokemon to level 50, you can figure out a range for your IVs using math, and I like to check just to see and hopefully they're good. But otherwise I just don't really do anything about IVs. They are what they are.

Nature and Ability are more important here. Some species of Pokemon only have one possible Ability, in which case you don't have to worry about it, but some have two, which means you only have a 50% chance of getting the one you want. This is true of Scyther/Scizor, because they can have either Swarm or Technician.

There's 25 Natures and your Pokemon gets assigned one randomly. Each Nature increases one of your stats by 10% and decreases another by 10% (which means 5 of the Natures increase and decrease the same stat, resulting in a net zero change). You usually want a Nature that's going to increase an important stat for your build and decrease one that's not so important. In this case, we want Adamant, which is +Atk and -SpA (since Scizor uses physical attacks and not special attacks).

Getting the right Nature is a 1 in 25 chance, but there's a way we can influence it. If you have a Pokemon with the ability Synchronize in the front of your party, there's a 50% chance that any wild Pokemon you encounter will have the same Nature as the Synchronize Pokemon. I happened to have an Adamant Abra with Synchronize in my Platinum, so I ran around in the grass on Route 210 catching Scythers until I got an Adamant one with Technician. There's only a 25% chance of getting the right Ability + getting Adamant from Synchronize, and it took 7 Scythers until I got the one I wanted. I neglected to take a picture of it when I caught it, but pretend there's one here.

It's also worth noting that I need to trade Scyther while it's holding a Metal Coat in order for it to evolve into Scizor, but I already had two of those in Platinum so it was no problem to do this while sending it into HeartGold.

---

The next thing to think about are the EVs. EVs are one of the other numbers that factor into your stats, and unlike IVs, these can be controlled. Your Pokemon gains EVs from fainting other Pokemon in battle, with the number of and type of EVs it gets depending on the Pokemon you faint. At level 50, every 4 EVs in a stat converts to 1 point in the stat value. You can have a maximum of 255 EVs per stat (although at level 50, only 252 of them matter), and a maximum of 510 overall. This means you have to decide which stats you want to partition your EVs into. Here, we see we want 248 HP, 56 Atk, and 204 SpD.

Most Pokemon only give out 1 EV in a stat. Fully evolved Pokemon can give out 3, but they're much rarer in the wild and are harder to beat anyway, so it's not usually worth it. Battling 510 Pokemon for EVs would take a really long time though! Luckily, there's ways to make this grind easier. First is a set of items called Vitamins. There's a Vitamin for each of the six stats, and what they do is add 10 EVs to the stat. They can only get the stat up to 100 EVs though before they stop working (at least until Sword and Shield, when they changed it so that the Vitamins are unlimited). They're also kind of expensive moneywise (10,000 Poke each), and I need 25 to get to 100 HP, 50 Atk, and 100 SpD. Luckily, you can also buy them for 1 Battle Point each, and I have a bunch of Battle Points from doing Battle Frontier attempts as described above. So that's 250/508 EVs done and handled!

For the remaining 258 EVs, we're going to have to fight wild Pokemon. There's another thing that makes this easier though: in Gen 4 they introduced a set of "Power" items. There's one for each stat, and holding it halves the Pokemon's speed but also makes it so they gain 4 EVs in that stat every time they gain experience. So, if I fight Slowpokes (which give out 1 HP EV) while holding the Power Weight (the HP one), Scizor will get 5 HP EVs per fight instead of 1! This really helps expedite the process.

In order to make use of this, we have to find wild Pokemon to fight. For HP, we can use the Slowpoke Well in HeartGold. Surfing on the water in there has a 100% chance of Slowpoke encounters. So I did 30 fights with the Power Weight on to get to 250, and two with it off to get to 252. Yes I wasn't paying attention and accidentally got 252 HP EVs even though I was only supposed to get 248. This just means I'll have to take 4 away from another stat, which'll be SpD in this case.

Next, I'll do SpD. The Power Band does the equivalent of the Power Weight for SpD, and Route 27 in HeartGold only has Tentacool and Tentacruel, which give 1 and 2 SpD EVs respectively (and thus 5 and 6 respectively with the Power Band). It's tedious, but it's not too long before I get up to 200 SpD EVs. A positive that I haven't mentioned yet is also that since I caught my Scyther in Platinum and I'm training it in a different game than the one it was caught in, it gets double experience from fights! So it's leveling up a bit faster, which is nice since I need to get to level 50 eventually.

Finally, there's Atk. Scizor is already at 50 SpD EVs, so we only need 6 more. I traded it back into Platinum because I already have a Power Bracer there and thus wouldn't need to spend 16 BP on it in HeartGold. I fought two Shinx, which give 1 Atk EV each on their own. And voila! A fully EV trained Scizor. There's an NPC that gives the Effort Ribbon to fully EV trained Pokemon, so I went and got it to celebrate Scizor's hard work!



(I accidentally jostled my 3DS in a weird way after this and it shut off, which meant I had to do the Atk training again. Lol.)

---

Next thing is level. I need my Pokemon to be at least level 50 to do Battle Frontier stuff. I actually want to get my Scizor to level 57, because it learns Swords Dance then, which saves me from having to buy the TM. So, how do we level up our Pokemon? Battling Trainers and wild Pokemon, right?

[edgy anime boy voice] Heh, that's what you think.

I mentioned this in a previous post, but I have a sneaky way for leveling up Pokemon in Gen 4 totally idly, although it takes a while. It makes use of the Pokemon Daycare Center, as well as a glitch called tweaking.

In the gen 4 games, the overworld is supposed to be continuous and seamless, but it's really made up of 32x32 tile chunks. These chunks are loaded in and out of memory as needed when you cross load lines. By riding your bike in a weird pattern across load lines, you can get the game to incorrectly load a chunk where it's not supposed to be, or unload a chunk that's supposed to be there. You can utilize this pretty easily to get into T H E V O I D. Notably, this is at its most useful in Diamond and Pearl, because in Platinum, HeartGold, and SoulSilver, they added invisible walls everywhere inside the void, so you kinda just get stuck in there immediately.

Anyway, how is this helpful? Well, when you put your Pokemon in the Daycare Center, they gain 1 EXP for every step you take. What I do is put my Pokemon in there, then tweak into the void, and put something heavy on the D-Pad so that my character keeps moving left continuously. There's nothing to block you in the void, so you can just keep going, taking steps and gaining EXP for your mon.



Pretty sneaky! Note the area title popup that says "Mystery Zone". Out-of-bounds maps in the Sinnoh Gen 4 games are called "Mystery Zone", which is the namesake of the members-only forum category on this website!

(In case future me wants a reminder of the exact steps I take: tweak from Jubilife City starting from near the building below the Trainer School, on the second tile from the top of the thingy, slow bike right to the east edge of the path, one down one up one left then up. There should be a grassy area chunk loaded over the Poketch building. Go around the trees then stop two tiles above the ledge. Open the Pokedex then close it again. Step down into the door, then one tile down into the void, 17 west, 14 north, and proceed west for as long as you like.)

It's not without its risks. The main one is that you are going to need to get out of the void at some point. The only real way to do this is by Flying. However, you cannot open the pause menu in the Mystery Zone for some reason. As you move through the void, you end up passing through void versions of other maps, which are still blank and collisionless, but which do allow you to open the pause menu. You have to hope that you end up passing through a non Mystery Zone map once you've gotten the steps you want. At some point, the other maps stop appearing, so you can't go too far.

In my testing, the non Mystery Zone maps stop appearing after like 46k steps, so it's safest to Fly out somewhere around 45k. Then you can save and then head back into the void for more exp. It's EXTREMELY convenient that the Sinnoh games have a built-in step counter in the Poketch on the lower screen. Scizor needs 157k EXP to get from level 30 to level 57, so this process takes a while. It's nice that I don't have to pay much attention to the game though. I just check every once in a while to see if I'm getting close to a point where I should leave the void.

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The last thing to do is the moveset. For some Pokemon setups, you have to think about this way earlier because you might have to breed moves onto the mon that can't be gotten otherwise. That would unfortunately also prevent you from using the void glitch to level up your Pokemon, because leveling up in the Daycare Center would overwrite your moveset with levelup moves. Luckily, our Scizor doesn't have to worry about that.

We've already got Swords Dance from getting to level 57. Roost and U-Turn are TMs. I happen to have them both already in HeartGold. U-Turn can be purchased for Battle Points anyway, but Roost is a little frustrating because you only get one per game. So hopefully this Scizor ends up being good on my team!

Finally, it needs Bullet Punch. It "learns" this at level 1, which realistically means that the only way to get it is by using the Move Reminder, which means I need a Heart Scale to pay the Move Reminder. Heart Scales can be tedious to acquire because the main way to get them is by either digging in the Sinnoh Underground or catching wild Luvdisc. However, there's a fixed number of Heart Scales hidden in certain areas in each of the five games, and I found one on Route 226 in Platinum and traded it into HeartGold so Scizor could learn its last move.

Sweet! Our Scizor is fully configured! That only took most of the day!



Also it turns out that it has a 28 Atk IV and a 28 Def IV, which is pretty sweet. 14/15 HP, 19/20 SpD, and 13/14 Speed which are kind of middling. The only bad IV is the one I care the least about, Special Attack. Nice!

[hatkirby]

I've conquered my second facility in the Battle Frontier: the Battle Castle!



This place was pretty weird! It also ended up being much easier than I expected. In the Battle Castle, your Pokémon aren't healed between fights, and you aren't allowed to bring held items for them. Instead, you are granted some number of Castle Points (CP) depending on how well the battle went. If it went quickly and none of your Pokémon fainted, you can expect something in the high 20's. And then between fights you can spend your CP on various things, such as heals for your Pokémon, the ability to rent a hold item, and the ability to see what Pokémon your next opponent has. Your CP carries over between rounds, so you can save them up if you want.

And that's what turned out to be the strategy. You can spend 1 CP each to increase an opponent's Pokémon level by 5. This increases the amount of CP you win after the battle. So, for rounds 1-3, you don't spend any CP on yourself (except for an occasional heal if necessary), and instead just spend 3 CP each time to level up the opponent's mons. The Pokémon are weaker in the early rounds, so if your mons are good then you should be able to sweep them even when they're at a higher level than you. Then you can expect to get like 49 CP after the battle. This really adds up! By the end of the third round, I had like 800 CP.

The last battle in the third round is the Castle Valet Darach, fighting in place of the Lady Caitlin, who is too regal to fight but watches over all of the fights and is responsible for doling out the CP.



He canonically has a crush on her but represses it because of his Duties. And we learn this because of a random NPC in the Castle who has a crush on *him*. This is all kind of adorable to me. Also apparently Lady Caitlin is in the Unova Elite Four?? I guess I'll be seeing her again when I play Black/White then! I guess she gets over the "too regal to fight" thing haha.

Anyway, Darach wasn't too difficult, so that was good. Here's where the strategy changes.

After the first Darach fight, you gain the ability to spend 50 CP to skip the next fight. So, for rounds 4-6, the strat is to spend 1-3 CP seeing what Pokémon the opponent has, and if you don't like them, then you just skip the fight instead. It's good to do fights when possible, even if one of your Pokémon ends up fainting, because you'll still net like 10 CP or break even at worst, whereas skipping always loses you 50 CP. This is a pretty cool feature though because it lets you choose your battles (like the katy perry song).

Then we reach round 7. This is important because the last battle of this round is the second fight against Darach, after which you receive the Battle Castle's Gold Print. At this point, I had like 650 CP left. I spent 250 CP right there to unlock the ability to rent a hold item. I spent 20 CP getting a Choice Band for Regina the Garchomp. And then I spent 300 CP skipping the first 6 battles in the round (Darach is unskippable of course). All of this meant that I was now going into the Gold Print fight fully healed, and with an item that would hopefully make Regina unstoppable. Let's see how it went.

It went well, actually! Darach had an Entei, which could've gone down in one Earthquake but it took two because it had a Shuca Berry. It used Sunny Day on its turn though which was a waste of a move lol. Next was Empoleon, which I was a bit scared of because it could possibly know Blizzard. However, I outsped it, and my Choice Banded STAB super effective Earthquake took it out in one! Finally, he had a Gallade, which went down in one hit too. We did it!

Honestly it's pretty funny that you can do this. Stockpile CP in the first half, choose your battles to survive in the second half, and exchange all of your points near the end for a photo finish.



It's a little hard to tell which are Silver and which are Gold, but the top left and bottom left ones are the Battle Hall and Battle Castle respectively, which are my Gold Prints. The top and bottom right ones are the Battle Tower and the Battle Arcade, which I have the Silver Prints for but haven't yet managed to get the Gold. And the last one is the Battle Factory, which is where hopes and dreams go to die.