Chapter 12 - Gunning for Victory

Wallace proved to be a pushover in the end. I was expecting to have trouble with his Milotic due to its high Special Defence rendering my Electric attacks less deadly, but Major cleaned up with little trouble. I’d earned the final badge, and now nothing stood between me and the Elite 4, and success!

I Surfed east on Route 128 to Ever Grande City, the site of Victory Road. For those that don’t know, Victory Road exists in every Pokemon game as the final area before the Elite 4. Victory Road is a long, tough series of maze-like caverns, containing high-levelled wild Pokemon and lots of tough trainers. In short, it’s not particularly easy to navigate when you’re not allowed to heal your Pokemon.

With that in mind, I decided to do some more training before I gave it a go, and cleared out a few areas I’d not yet visited, including the Dragon Trainers at the top of the waterfall in Meteor Falls. I couldn’t catch any Pokemon here – so no chance of adding a super-powerful Salamence to my team before the Elite 4 – but a few trainers provided some valuable experience. I also picked up the Dragon Claw TM, which is one of my favourite moves, but none of my Pokemon could learn it. Darn.

By the time I’d cleared these trainers out, my team were looking fairly handy and I decided to brave Victory Road, leaving Swift in the PC because I wouldn’t be needing Fly. In her place I withdrew Curly, so I had all the HM moves covered in case I needed them all. If all went wrong I had some Escape Ropes so I could flee back to the relative safety of the nearest Pokemon Centre anyway. So in I went, and the first Pokemon I bumped into was… a female Golbat.

Now, Golbat can be very useful, because they evolve into Crobat, which are awesome. But the trouble is they don’t evolve in the normal way – by hitting a certain level – instead evolving when their “happiness level” gets high enough. The happiness level is one of the many hidden stats in Pokemon, increasing every 255 steps by 1 point. When the level gets high enough that the Pokemon loves you, it will evolve when it next levels up.

The trouble is, the threshold for happiness evolutions is something like 250 happiness points – meaning that if I wanted to evolve Golbat, I’d have to walk something like 60000 steps with her in my team. That’s a lot of steps and would take a lot of time, and frankly I couldn’t be bothered. I caught the Golbat anyway (JUST in case) and called her Succubus. And on I went.

On a side note – how to the trainers in Victory Road expect to beat the Pokemon league with a single, lv.40ish Pokemon? The Champion’s Pokemon are above level 55, for God’s sake… How did they even beat Wallace?

Anyway, I realised/remembered a few important things during my time in Victory Road. One – I’d never got this far in a Pokemon game without a Fire-type Pokemon in my team. Fire is my favourite type. Sadly Tiny hadn’t made it, so no Fire for me. Sorry Tiny. Secondly, not being allowed to use Repels is annoying. It would have been very handy to deter all wild Pokemon instead of being attacked every 5 steps. Third, at one point Crash was reduced to 14/161HP because I took a risk and assumed he’d survive another hit. I remembered that such risks were ridiculous, especially with my number 1 Pokemon and so close to the finish line. Fourth, there were rumours of a tough little kid around, who came from Petalburg City. Could it be… Wally?

I reached the end of Victory Road. I could see the daylight shining through the exit door. I was mere seconds away from freedom and safety…

“Locke!”

It was Wally. He attacked.

First out was his Altaria. Major paralysed him with Spark, and finished him off with another.

Next out was Delcatty, renowned for Attract-based annoyance tactics. Major threw everything he had into one powerful Thunderbolt, to finish the pussycat off in one. It worked.

Third, Wally sent out Magneton. I switched in Crash for his immunity to Electric-type attacks; Magneton used his free turn to fire a Thunderbolt, which had no effect on Crash. Then Crash used a quadruple-effective Mud Shot, and Magneton was no more.

This was going well.

Wally threw out Roselia, which was a Grass-type and therefore had moves 4x effective against Crash. Despite what I said before about not taking risks, I decided to use Ice Beam – super-effective against Grass-types, and Roselia was down.

Wally’s last Pokemon was the first her ever caught, now fully evolved and a Psychic-type to be reckoned with. Gardevoir.

Crash hit Gardevoir with his strongest attack, Surf, which only took about 40% of Gradevoir’s health off. Clearly the Psychic-type had a good Special Defence, especially after it used Light Screen. A change of tactics was required, so Crash hit Gardevoir with Mud Shot for some Physical Damage. It didn’t finish Gardevoir off, but while Wally was using a Super potion I had a chance to switch in Spice. Time for a super-effective Shadow Ball; if that didn’t finish Gardevoir off, nothing would.

It missed. Gardevoir had used Double Team to raise its evasion. I feared for Spice.

But there was nothing to fear. Shadow Ball hit second time, and Gardevoir was down. Wally – about 20 levels on average stronger than the last time we fought – was defeated. He said something about how he’d beat me one day, but I wasn’t listening. I left Victory Road and headed to the nearby Pokemon Centre.

I had made it to the final stage of my journey.

The Pokemon League.


-Samwise