Return to New Bark Town

The Return to New Bark Town

The Case of the Redheaded Stranger

Now that you have completed obtaining the egg from Mr. Pokemon take a moment to examine the Pokedex that you received from Professor Oak.  The main page contains a summary of how many Pokemon you have seen and how many you have obtained, as well as options to open the Pokedex, Search it, or quit.  Go ahead and open it, then hit the A-Button on your Pokemon.

This opens up a data screen that shows you the area that this Pokemon can be found in if it is known, with selections to change the time of day in case that is one of the factors in finding the Pokemon in the wild.  The next screen gives you a relative size comparison, and the next after that shows you the various forms of this Pokemon.

As you exit the house you get a phone call from Professor Elm -- something has gone horribly wrong and he needs you to get back to the lab as fast as you can!  Well?  What are you waiting for?!  RUN!

Okay I was kidding about running -- seriously.  Now if you look to the left of the house you will see an Apricorn Tree - go ahead and grab the Pink Apricorn from it, and then follow Route 30 back to Cherrygrove City.  If you had any fights on the way stop off at the Pokecenter to heal before you continue back to the lab.

As you approach the eastern exit from Cherrygrove Town you are confronted by the red-haired stranger who was previously looking in the window of the Pokemon Lab -- and they force you into a Trainer Battle!  This is your first experience with this sort of fight, but it is little different from a wild fight, so use your best moves and keep your Pokemon healthy!

You should be able to beat him easily -- but you will likely need to heal your Pokemon now so after you peak at their Trainer Card head back to the Pokecenter and heal up!  As a general rule I make it a habit to save whenever I heal in a Pokecenter and I try to remember to save after pivotal events as well, and you may want to too

If you use the ledges and paths you can get back to New Bark Town without having to fight any wild Pokemon, the choice is yours, but either way, once you are back head to the Lab and talk to the Professor!

Inside you find the Professor with a local cop who is there to investigate the theft of one of the Poke Balls from the lab!  It seems that while you were away a strange boy broke into the lab and stole one of the two balls that you did not choose earlier.  The cop pretty much decides that you must be the person who did it when Lyra arrives to defend you, and reveal that she witnessed the break-in!

Remember that kid we had to fight back when we were leaving Cherrygrove?  Right!  That Pokemon we battled was the stolen one.  Now, we saw his Trainer Card, so here is where we are given the opportunity to name our rival!  Being a big fan of the previous set of games, I named mine Gary, but you can choose any name you like -- your little brother, ex-significant other, or even that jerk of a shop teacher at school, it is your call!  I was briefly tempted to name him Ron Weaslby but I hear that JK Rowling might not like that so, well, nuh uh.

We give the Professor the egg and he is very surprised to learn that Professor Oak gave us a Pokedex -- well, clearly Elm did not think as much of us as it seemed that he did before.  Harumph!  At least now he knows we are something special, right?  The Prof jokingly tells us to do the gym challenges and then fight the Elite Four -- something that we will be doing, no joke -- and then he tells us to talk to Mom.  Right, off to home and Mom!

Now, Mom is not exactly thrilled that we are off on another adventure, but she decides that if we want to she will have us send half of any prize money we win so she can hold onto it for us -- that is really nice of her -- and I would not be at all surprised if Mom factors into our adventures later, right?  So we should go ahead and tell her that we want her to save money for us, yeah!

To start the next phase of our adventure let's head back to Cherrygrove City -- hey look at that, as soon as we leave here is Lyra and her Pokemon!  Well what do you know, we get a timely lesson on how to catch wild Pokemon -- hey this could come in handy! If we only had some Poke Balls!  After Lyra walks us through a capture in careful detail, she tells us that it is better to lower their health as much as we safely can, and then what do you know?!  She gives us some Poke Balls!  Excellent!

On our way back to Cherrygrove we can probably catch our first new Pokemon -- I caught a Level 3 female Sentret who I named Rockie and a Level 3 male Pidgey I named Scoot myself but YMMV. 

After you heal-up at the Pokecenter head to the Poke Mart next door to discover that they have new Poke Balls in stock!  Excellent!  But a word about buying balls?  When you are purchasing the regular balls you should buy them in increments of 10 -- the reason for that is simple: every time that you buy 10 Poke Balls you receive 1 free Premier Ball as a bonus!  Right now we only have limited funds so just buy your first 10 balls to go with the 3 or 4 you have left from Lyra, and then note the second salesperson behind the counter who was not there before.

She sells Air Mail  and a special type of ball called a Heal Ball.  This is actually a useful one to have if you do not have a full party, because it instantly heals any Pokemon that you catch!  That is not all that useful if the Pokemon is going to be deposited directly to the Storage PC, since they are automatically healed when that happens, but it is very useful if they are going into your party, so why not buy 2 or 3 of the Heal Balls while we are here?  We can use those to catch our next few Pokemon and thus have them ready to help us fight if needed!

Now would be a good time to save -- so why not do that?

-- A Pause for Development --

This is a good time for us to do some strategic development before we continue on with our adventure.  First we want to gather a full party of Pokemon, and there were some areas we previously visited that would make that easy.  Second, we will want to level the entire party to around 8 to 10 now just to save time, as that will be helpful later.  So, what we are going to do is revisit the dead-end past the Gatehouse at Route 46, where we can obtain a Geodude, a Spearow, or a Rattata (or all three if we are feeling lucky!).

Back by Mr. Pokemon's house were some interesting bug types, so we may want to return there and catch one.  Now that we have a full party, we should spend some time leveling them all to at least 8 but preferably 10.  That is going to take some time though, so why not do that now?

If you caught a Spearow and a Pidgey you should pick which you actually like best since they are both Normal/Flying types and you only need one of those for your A-Team.   If you caught both a Rattata and a Sentret you need to pick which of those you want to use since both are Normal types and you only need one in your party now.  Because the flying Pokemon are also Normal types you could in theory not even bother with another Normal -- remember you want to have as many types in your party as you can manage in order to have the right variety to handle most situations.

An ideal party at this stage should consist of a Flying/Normal, Fire, Water, Grass or Bug, but at a minimum you should have been able to capture and choose from the following Pokemon:

- Caterpie #024 (Bug Type)
- Geodude #034 (Rock/Ground Type)
- Hoothoot #015 (Normal/Flying Type)
- Metapod #025 (Bug)*
- Pidgey #010 (Normal/Flying Type)
- Rattata #017 (Normal Type)
- Sentret #019 (Normal Type)
- Spearow #013 (Normal/Flying Type)

* This is the evolved form of Caterpie, and when it is caught in the wild it lacks any offensive moves, so this should only be in your party if you have evolved a Caterpie, as then it would have offensive moves.

Back?  Cool!  And wow, your party looks great!  Good on ya, mate!  You should be back in Cherrygrove City now, so heal up and then we can continue on our adventure!