Maville City gym was a very hard challenge for me, but I managed to win, in the end. Obviously this was one of the moments I was mostly afraid of. An electric type gym against my monotype water team lol. During the exploration, my team got stronger and magikard finally evolved into Gyarados, You can't even imagine how game changing this was and it still is right now. Intimidate and a strong attack and quite good defense, Gyarados is indeed a great pokémon and it was the one I was mostly scared back to when I was doing the other challenge in Emerald. What made the things even easier was the move Dragon Rage. It's truly over power: it always deals 40 hp of damage to the foe. It's thanks to Gyarados and Dragon Rage that I could do more than 5 hp of damage to Magneton. Manectric was a problem only because its attacks are really strong. It was an incredibile win. I was lucky but things were balanced. The foe got a paralysis on me and I wasn't blocked by it in the right turn. It's mathematical that I managed to resist the attack. That 1 hp is scenic lol, because in general it would have been more probable to get less damage than 87, so I wasn't too lucky with that either in some way.
Well, so I finally got my third medal. Now, I won't talk a lot about the rest because it didn't happen much tbh, except for tentacool evolving into Tentacruel. Flannery was really easy, so I just straight up went to the gym, defeated all the trainers and lastly the gym leader. The easiest win of the game after the first gym. No doubt about this.
Now, there I was scared lol. In gen 3 our dad is pretty strong. It's one of my fav gyms, firstly for its design and the fact that it simulates a dojo, since you can choose the trainers and the kind of battle you want to make. I obviously backtracked and defeated everyone lol. It's good for exp points too. I was really worried, but Gyarados and Tentacruel did a pretty good job and I did it second try, but the first one I lost because of a roll. Dad's Linoon remained with 1 hp, rip me lol. So, anyway it's crazy how things change. In the other run I had crazy problems with Dad and 0 with Rudy, but this time all the opposite! That's a sign the game is balanced, I guess. Anyway, I got the 5th badge.
Thanks to the badge, I got Surf and this was the second huge change in my run till now. I could finally get the good rod and surf on the water, so I ended up catching other two members of the team: barboach and wailmer. With my surprise, it took just a couple of attempts to get an acceptable nature. I am really ok with the neutral ones, because it's definitely worse when you randomly get one that decreases a stat that you need. I know it's not a competitive thing, but considering I am having to compete with a mirror team, those little things help a bit. Anyway, I trained my team and I got to the next city. In the middle of the badges there was the story but I could beat everyone quite easily, so yeah. The route before Fortree City is where Feebas can be caught. I want to say something a bit controversial, but it's real.
Maybe it was the moment and how exciting this kind of game has been for me till this moment, but I actually found it a pretty nice idea how Feebas must be caught. Basically, Feebas spawns only in 3 or 6 tiles in the water randomly and to get it, you need the good rod. The tiles are indeed a lot and it requires some patience. Moreover, there's only 50% chance for it to spawn in the tile, so maybe you found the tile but you were unlucky. I decided to go tile by tile and in case I didn't find anything, I'd had restarted over. After some time and about less than half tiles checked, I found Feebas. Catching it was literal pain because I was unlucky with the level, but especially with natures. After all the work to find the tile, I wanted at least a good nature! I went for the one +def -spe. The reason is that Milotic has a nice sp def and a lower defense and it's not fast. Moreover, Wallace's Miloic is more suited to get in battle take the hit and use toxic. He doesn't really use it this way, which is really interesting because I want to use his team better than him lol. Anyway, despite all odds and the fact that it's a crazy method to find a pokemon, it was actually cool and I had a lot of fan. It really gave me the vibe of "a strong rare pokemon and you have to work to get it" and I like it. I haven't evolved Feebas yet, but I will soon.
After catching feebas and spending the whole time to make her fill the 7/8 levels gap between her and the rest of the team, I defeated all the trainers in the 6th gym and finally won against Winona. A very warm thanks to Wailer and its rollout that kinda made it unstoppable, except for Pelliper that with protect destroyed everything. It's still unclear to me why they use protect in a single battle lol, anyway yeah, the rest of the team sorted it out against Winona. Altaria with dragon Dance was really strong. I kinda controlled it by switching Gyarados with Intimidate.
Lastly, barboach evolved into Whiscash. For now, both Whiscash and Wailmer turned put to be a good resource for the team, maybe not as bulky as the others but still good. Lombre kinda became useless because it deals very few damage. Feebas same, it's just a Majikarp 2.0, but at least I could teach it Surf lol.
