2nd Gen Why were the new Pokémon so hidden?

One of the Gen 2 games' biggest flaws, IMO, was their complete reluctance to feature the new Pokémon. The addition of 100 new Pokémon was a very big deal at the time and was extremely hyped, and yet, the vast majority of them ended up being rare, unavailable until the post-game, and practically nonexistent on NPC teams.

I mean, one of the most overhyped Pokémon of Gen 2 was Marill. Not only was it the infamous "Pikablu," but it appeared in the Pikachu short before the first movie, and a main character in the anime had one on his team for an entire season, and yet, Marill ended up being a very rare swarm encounter that only a few generic NPCs in the entire game even used. I find it both hilarious and sad that Marill ended up being more common in Hoenn, long after its hype had passed, than in the region it was introduced in!

And, then, you had things like Murkrow, Houndour, Sneasel, and Misdreavus that were completely unavailable until the postgame for seemingly no good reason. Yeah, they went through the trouble of introducing this new type, and yet, made it so we couldn't hardly take advantage of it in the main game. Want to use a Dark type in GSC? It's Umbreon or nothing. :rolleyes2:

And, the Johto Gym Leader teams were just... bad. Only four of them used even one Gen 2 Pokémon, and two of those (Steelix and Kingdra) were evolutions of Gen 1 Pokémon. Would it have killed Falkner to use a Hoothoot instead of Pidgey? Or, for Bugsy to have Ledyba/Spinarak instead of the cocoons? And, Morty's entire gym could've used more Misdreavus. Yeah, I know Ghost was low in number at the time, but they weren't even using all that was available.

Gen 2 has many good qualities, but its Pokémon distribution was far from ideal. I can really see why they invented Regional Dexes in the following Gen and started pushing the new Pokémon more heavily. (For a comparison, Wattson was the only major NPC in Hoenn that didn't use any Gen 3 Pokémon, and that was only in RS.)

Yeah I totally understand what you mean.

I was a bit disappointed to see Marill so hard to find. Pokemon babies were hidden as well since you needed to breed to have them. And like I argued on the baby pokemon topic, no one wants to breed breed those babies and then train them until they're happy. Maybe it would have been much more attractive to make them available at the beginning of the game.

But the most hideous thing they've done in GSC was to put some Stone Pokemon at the beginning (e.g. Nidoran, Bellsprout, Oddish,...) and Stones Post-game with the Bill's grandpa event! That's a waste really. Oh and not to mention the Clefairy/Moon Stone event that happened only the Monday at the Night and Post-game, s'il-vous-plaît.

The big deal with Stone Pokemon is that they have zero learnset possibilities compared to their NFEs, meaning that if you miss the right level to evolve and learn the consolation "bonus" move, then you're screwed. It's total crap (and I'm fixing this in my ROM hack).

About the Stone Pokemon in GSC, the things have been failed IMO. GameFreak should have had chosen between :
1/ Stones available as soon as their appropriate Pokemon as it's been done in RBY (Celadon Store FTW)
2/ Stone Pokemon available post-game so you don't get frustrated with a lv. 63 Weepinbell (or lv. 63 Nidorino which is much worse because it doesn't have Thrash) while all your other Pokemon are fully-evolved.

Doing a playthrough of Pokémon Crystal right now and to be honest I'm kind of surprised at how relatively quick I'm able to plow through everything, even at 3x speed. I managed to beat the Elite 4 with just Crobat and Suicune and the Johto/Kanto gyms were pretty pitiful.

d4rk said:

But the most hideous thing they've done in GSC was to put some Stone Pokemon at the beginning (e.g. Nidoran, Bellsprout, Oddish,...) and Stones Post-game with the Bill's grandpa event! That's a waste really. Oh and not to mention the Clefairy/Moon Stone event that happened only the Monday at the Night and Post-game, s'il-vous-plaît.

Click to expand...

They kind of fixed it in Crystal. You could get stones from a kid just passed the Bug Catching tournament every few days.

d4rk said:

I was a bit disappointed to see Marill so hard to find. Pokemon babies were hidden as well since you needed to breed to have them. And like I argued on the baby pokemon topic, no one wants to breed breed those babies and then train them until they're happy. Maybe it would have been much more attractive to make them available at the beginning of the game.

Click to expand...

And, Cleffa and Pichu, specifically, were also unavailable until the postgame because Pikachu and Clefairy were only available in Kanto. And, none of the babies appeared on any trainer teams, not even early in the game.

It also kind of annoyed me how we didn't see any trainers (besides our rival and the guy in the Trainer House, that is) using any of the Johto starters, even though we saw tons of trainers using Kanto starters. If you picked, say, Cyndaquil, it was literally possible to go through the entire game without seeing any of the Chikorita line, all the while seeing all three stages of all three Kanto starters. What was up with that?

d4rk said:

But the most hideous thing they've done in GSC was to put some Stone Pokemon at the beginning (e.g. Nidoran, Bellsprout, Oddish,...) and Stones Post-game with the Bill's grandpa event! That's a waste really. Oh and not to mention the Clefairy/Moon Stone event that happened only the Monday at the Night and Post-game, s'il-vous-plaît.

The big deal with Stone Pokemon is that they have zero learnset possibilities compared to their NFEs, meaning that if you miss the right level to evolve and learn the consolation "bonus" move, then you're screwed. It's total crap (and I'm fixing this in my ROM hack).

About the Stone Pokemon in GSC, the things have been failed IMO. GameFreak should have had chosen between :
1/ Stones available as soon as their appropriate Pokemon as it's been done in RBY (Celadon Store FTW)
2/ Stone Pokemon available post-game so you don't get frustrated with a lv. 63 Weepinbell (or lv. 63 Nidorino which is much worse because it doesn't have Thrash) while all your other Pokemon are fully-evolved.

Click to expand...

Yeah, the lack of evolutionary stones in GS was awful. It only worsened the scarcity of Fire types because it essentially made the Vulpix and Growlithe lines useless for the main playthrough. While trading back with RBY to evolve them was an option, that wasn't always a possibility. (What if you didn't own the older games or a Link Cable? What if the Growlithe knew Flame Wheel?)

Crystal attempted to fix this with the phone calls, but they were still pretty unreliable. They should've just let you buy the stones in Goldenrod Dept. Store.

BettyNewbie said:

One of the Gen 2 games' biggest flaws, IMO, was their complete reluctance to feature the new Pokémon. The addition of 100 new Pokémon was a very big deal at the time and was extremely hyped, and yet, the vast majority of them ended up being rare, unavailable until the post-game, and practically nonexistent on NPC teams.

I mean, one of the most overhyped Pokémon of Gen 2 was Marill. Not only was it the infamous "Pikablu," but it appeared in the Pikachu short before the first movie, and a main character in the anime had one on his team for an entire season, and yet, Marill ended up being a very rare swarm encounter that only a few generic NPCs in the entire game even used. I find it both hilarious and sad that Marill ended up being more common in Hoenn, long after its hype had passed, than in the region it was introduced in!

And, then, you had things like Murkrow, Houndour, Sneasel, and Misdreavus that were completely unavailable until the postgame for seemingly no good reason. Yeah, they went through the trouble of introducing this new type, and yet, made it so we couldn't hardly take advantage of it in the main game. Want to use a Dark type in GSC? It's Umbreon or nothing. :rolleyes2:

And, the Johto Gym Leader teams were just... bad. Only four of them used even one Gen 2 Pokémon, and two of those (Steelix and Kingdra) were evolutions of Gen 1 Pokémon. Would it have killed Falkner to use a Hoothoot instead of Pidgey? Or, for Bugsy to have Ledyba/Spinarak instead of the cocoons? And, Morty's entire gym could've used more Misdreavus. Yeah, I know Ghost was low in number at the time, but they weren't even using all that was available.

Gen 2 has many good qualities, but its Pokémon distribution was far from ideal. I can really see why they invented Regional Dexes in the following Gen and started pushing the new Pokémon more heavily. (For a comparison, Wattson was the only major NPC in Hoenn that didn't use any Gen 3 Pokémon, and that was only in RS.)

Click to expand...

I believe fullheartedly that the second part of the game was not meant to be "post" game. it was just the second episode of what should've been. There was almost as much story as kanto region. I also believe that if they didn't add in any 2nd gen pokemon in kanto region it may cause us to not explore it and just transfer all the pokemon over.

I definitely agree Falkner could've used at least one Hoothoot or a pre-evolved Noctowl. Misdreavus i wasn't so excited about, but then again, it would've been nice to see.


I also want to say that there was still a lot to look for. both old and new pokemon looked increibly well, i still wanted them all.

I actually agree with OP, concerning both RBY and GSC. There were tons of Pokémon that were just never seen. Just off the top of my head... the last remaining starting Pokémon, all the fossil Pokémon, Sneasel, the majority of the last 25% of the Pokémon in each Pokédex, etc.

That's why I'm glad there's a romhacking community. Games like Pokémon Complex Crystal or 151 patches of Gen 1 games really fix the issue.

I know this might not make much sense concerning how Pokemon games work now, but I might have an explanation for their rarity: they were recently discovered.

GSC takes place in Timeline A, where instead of these Pokemon just existing forever and are just now being cataloged, they literally were just discovered. It's been 3 years since RBY, and if you take Professor Birch's exclamation that the starter Pokemon were just recently discovered, you could also stretch that to apply to all the other Pokemon. It appears like these Pokemon, like Marill, Phanpy, Unown and others are just slowly appearing, and the way people are talking, it started to happen recently. After all the Dark and Steel types were also recently discovered as documented by Jasmine, and in RBY only 6 Pokemon even had genders (and that's because of sexual dimorphism), and it seemed like the idea of breeding Pokemon was also a very recent discovery; your whole quest is started by Birch's errand to get a Pokemon Egg, which apparently was a very new thing and had to be studied. It's a theory that's full of holes and doesn't account for legendary Pokemon, but it would explain why the Unown are being studied so extensively that they're given their own Pokedex segment, why Gym Leaders tend not to use Johto Pokemon, and why the Professors are so interested in the native species. It would also explain a bit why there are so many Pokemon in Kanto that are suddenly less rare in Johto; they may have increased in numbers a bit in the past 3 years.

Of course this was retconned with RSE and the remakes, which is why GSC is in its own timeline. It still doesn't explain everything, like the Pokedex entries or the native NPCs having those Pokemon (perhaps it's some kind of conspiracy or... it could just be a lot of Kanto people moving over since there's now a road, a boat route, and a train route leading to Johto. If I'm not mistaken your family just moved to Johto at the start of the game.)

mew_nani said:

I know this might not make much sense concerning how Pokemon games work now, but I might have an explanation for their rarity: they were recently discovered.

GSC takes place in Timeline A, where instead of these Pokemon just existing forever and are just now being cataloged, they literally were just discovered. It's been 3 years since RBY, and if you take Professor Birch's exclamation that the starter Pokemon were just recently discovered, you could also stretch that to apply to all the other Pokemon. It appears like these Pokemon, like Marill, Phanpy, Unown and others are just slowly appearing, and the way people are talking, it started to happen recently. After all the Dark and Steel types were also recently discovered as documented by Jasmine, and in RBY only 6 Pokemon even had genders (and that's because of sexual dimorphism), and it seemed like the idea of breeding Pokemon was also a very recent discovery; your whole quest is started by Birch's errand to get a Pokemon Egg, which apparently was a very new thing and had to be studied. It's a theory that's full of holes and doesn't account for legendary Pokemon, but it would explain why the Unown are being studied so extensively that they're given their own Pokedex segment, why Gym Leaders tend not to use Johto Pokemon, and why the Professors are so interested in the native species. It would also explain a bit why there are so many Pokemon in Kanto that are suddenly less rare in Johto; they may have increased in numbers a bit in the past 3 years.

Click to expand...

That's a good theory, actually, even if it made for gameplay issues. Most of these Pokémon were only recently discovered, so it makes sense that they would be rare and that few trainers would use them. I can easily see why Gen 3 retconned this and introduced the Regional/National Dex divide, although, sadly, not nearly enough to keep FRLG and HGSS from having the same Pokémon distribution problems as the originals.

mew_nani said:

It still doesn't explain everything, like the Pokedex entries or the native NPCs having those Pokemon (perhaps it's some kind of conspiracy or... it could just be a lot of Kanto people moving over since there's now a road, a boat route, and a train route leading to Johto. If I'm not mistaken your family just moved to Johto at the start of the game.)

Click to expand...

I don't think there was any mention of Gold/Kris having recently moved to Johto from Kanto, although it's a possibility since nothing was ever said, otherwise.

There's enough evidence to show that Johto is a poorer region than Kanto (and possibly the poorest of the regions, overall). It's far more rural, it lacks its own League, and it has fewer large cities. And, things like the Radio Tower, Magnet Train, Fast Ship, Routes 26-27, and Safari Zone (HGSS) all seem to be VERY recent developments for the region, as if they were part of a larger revitalization project for Johto.

Because GSC were meant to be direct sequels to RGB, they don't wanna rub in too much new Pokémon to make the older fans go away (just look what happened at the beginning of RS). Just my two cent, haha.

The new Pokemon were sort of emphasised, but it wasn't obviously meant to be the only point of the game. Evidently, the placing of emphasis upon new Pokemon by having them be the last or major (or practically only) Pokemon in the gym leader's team was something that would go on into the next game to some degree, for instance with Roxanne's Nosepass (which was a bit underwhelming in a sense, but), and it's not entirely clear if it's meant in the wild - where obviously there were quite a few, but Pokemon with importance to the region, or who were just considered fairly important to the type or generally could be kept around, such as Bellsprout. Obviously, Johto was supposed to come across as a new and interesting region, in a way which often used established Pokemon - Bellsprout, for instance, or Lapras - while admittedly there could be some distrubution issues with certain Pokemon being underplayed or left fairly unimpressive, nonetheless these are there in other and more recent generations and aren't necessarily worse in Gold and Silver as such, as it happens. I quite liked how Marill was incorporated in a sense, it increased the interest in them in a sense and made them seem significant, which you might want to do rather than just throwing in Pokemon haphazardly, especially if they evolve as well. Evidently there may have been other reasons for that as well, however, nonetheless in a sense that sort of thing needn't be an issue. The starters were meant to come off as relatively rare and important, so having many of those around might have trivialised that slightly or appeared to, while they didn't mind throwing out the Kanto starters per se, although that could still be a bit rare. That was a bit weird at times, anyway.

The Gym Leader's selections were treated as a question of what they use rather than as a question of design or displaying such, which could give the thing a display of uniformity which isn't actually present there.

The Kanto section wasn't necessarily treated as post-game, so evidently some Pokemon were made more available there. Generally speaking, Pokemon such as Sunkern, Hoppip, Hoothoot, and so on do tend to show up, and there was a lesser emphasis on simply replacing previous Pokemon and their role as there would be in future generations, with new Pokemon just being drafted in to fill the role of new Pidgey, Caterpie, etc., which can in a sense lessen the impact or interest. The previous Pokemon were, however, quite maintained or popular in a way, and hence they didn't necessarily get replaced or removed, while in future games Pokemon were more replaceable to a degree.

I find it annoying I can't use some personal favorites, like Houndoom and Tyranitar, until postgame because of their availability in Kanto rather than Johto. However, I've always imagined the reason for this to be that because there's such a large postgame, it's a way to be like "hey the game isn't over and there's still more to discover!" which is nice, but I think a lot of people want to have their team finalized when they fight the Elite Four/Champion rather than by the time they face Red. That way, they'll have had that team through the whole game rather than only half or for a few Kanto gyms.

Just my perspective, of course. While I think that's a good and clever reason it might have been done that way, doesn't mean I like waiting for my precious Houndoom, haha. <3