My playthroughs of the VC games are more focused on giving pokemon i usually don't use a chance as well as the ones with the coolest sprites (for example, the coolest dragonite as ever looked was on red/blue). I picked 16-18 for each run. Some pokemon i had to drop out, like onix, whose attack stat is so bad for a fully evolved pokemon that i decided to just not use it. I try to use those awesome exploitable and dirty moves like the trapping moves and toxic seed. The 1st run was of the gen 1 game i never played, red.
I just finnished beat the elite 4. agatha's strongest gengar, lance's aerodactyl and BLUE's alakazam were the hardest to defeat.
Team(after defeating the E4):
lv. 44 weezing
lv. 44 dodrio
lv. 44 rapidash
lv. 45 slowbro
lv. 49 electabuzz
lv. 49 dragonair
I was thinking of grinding my team to level 55 but when i went back to victory road i found 90% level 20's zubat and machop and i got pretty bored. grinded dragonair to level 48, stocked up on revives and full restores and with my already bought 16 hyper potions i decided "what the hell, let's do this" lv. 47 electabuzz put lorelei's first 3 out of their misery with thunderbolt, rapidash's fire spin trapped jynx long enough to kill it, even with it taking one ice punch and lorelei healing her with some super potions. lapras, who i thought would be the toughest, went as easily as her other water types.
bruno was pretty easy with dodrio...or so i thought. the 2 onix were like paper to slowbro's surf and hitmonchan took 1 sky attack from dodrio but hitmonlee OHKO'd me with a crit hi jump kick. weezing took care of him and i revived dodrio to take machamp out with 2 flys. Agatha was not as though right until the last gengar. the 1st gengar took 3 psychics from slowbro, golbat took 2 ice beams from dragonair, haunter needed 2 psychics and as i switched to dodrio to take out arbok, she withdrew her after 3 turns for gengar. And then the nightmare started. i couldn't toxic it because it's a poison type and itself had toxic, which combined with confuse ray was the most annoying pokemon to try to defeat. get toxic'ed, switch to weezing, heal the poison, get confuse ray'ed, switch to slowbro, get confuse ray'ed, try to attack with psychic, fail, get toxic'ed again, switch to weezing, heal poison, get night shade'd, switch to slowbro, get toxiced, try to attack but get confused ray first, miss the attack...and since you can't full heal the confusion away in gen 1 i had to either try to hit through the confusion or keep switching out. but i finally passed through confusion and dealt the final blow with psychic. leveled up to level 45 and learned the key move amnesia, which i probably would have struggled a lot more without it.
next up lance. gyarados got OHKO'ed by electabuzz's thunderbolt, both dragonair (level 56) were slower than my dragonair (level 49) and used dragon rage, giving my dragonair chance to 2HKO them with ice beam. then came aerodactyl and my strategy was toxic'ing it but i got 1HKO crit hyper beam'ed and had to switch to electabuzz. i used max revive on weezing and aerodactyl anlost killed my electabuzz with take down. after that i switched to weezing and finally used toxic, sponging any other hits aerodactyl dished out thanks to that tank defense. and lastly came dragonite, which i thought i could OHKO it with dragonair's ice beam but i got crit slam'ed and got one shot'ed myself. i switched to weezing and would you look at that, ATV's strat works! toxic and chill while dragonite kept using agility and reflect. thanks gen 1 AI
. And weezing levels up to level 44. you deserve it.
And finally BLUE. pidgeot took a thunderbolt, mirror move'd it to me and got killed by thunderpunch. next was alakazam. i switched to slowbro, and got OHKO'ed by a crit psychic! damm alakazam, you're scary. i switched to weezing to max revive slowbro and surprise surprise weezing got killed in one shot by psychic. then i switched to slowbro again and tried amnesia. took 1 psychic and still had more than half HP. relfect and 2nd amnesia. recover and 3rd amnesia. OK now it's time to attac...WHAT!? alakazam hits a crit psybeam killing slowbro. NOOOO! i was losing hope at this point. switched to dragonair, sacrificing it to max revive slowbro and luckily i managed to get 3 amnesia and attack without any crit. 3 surfs and that's it. nest is poor poor rhydon who took all the might of a max special surf. he managed to be slower than slowbro XD. after that came exeggutor, which i took out with rapidash's fire spin. gyarados managed to take a 4x super effective thunderbolt, surviving with very little HP and in return, electabuzz managed to survive 1 hydro pump with 12 HP. gyarados got full restored and electabuzz took it out with 2 thunderpunch. and lastly, for the victory lap, charizard. he started dangerously with always crit slash on dodrio, taking a big chunk of his HP but then he decided to use the worst attack of gen 1, rage. and then i laughed pretty hard. revived weezing, revived dragonair, switched to weezing, toxic, switched to dragonair and dirty AF wrap toxic. GG BLUE. And that's it, with level 40's pokemon it's possible to beat gen 1's elite 4. I have to say, i gained a lot of respect for weezing, he tanked aerodactyl's hyper beam and that's very impressive. i'm glad i gave him a chance.
now, onwards to some actual grinding on the cerulean cave.