Breaking News: don't want to miss this
Expert Evan's Emerald game now has the 7th and final gold symbol after almost 3 years since getting the previous gold.
So here's a recap from when battle factory got to 21 wins before: was able to make successful swaps for jynx (lovely kiss, attract, substitute, dreameater), shuckle (double team, toxic, substitute, ????) and hariyama as hariyama usually got the job done.
So as we were waiting for our plane at Kennedy airport on New Year's eve, my son started playing the emerald battle factory as we had to remind each other that dragon claw was a special attack while shadow ball was physical, and he was successfully able to make it to 28 wins with a starting team of snorlax, umbreon & lanturn as I don't recall there being any swaps. I believe there may have been at least one close call but was always able to make it through the end.
At the start of rounds 29-35 was an abundance of legendaries and strong pokemon to choose from as the starting team was latias (special sweeper), regirock (herb-sweeper) & metagross. latias dominated most the matches though few swaps included metagross for salamence, and regirock for dusclops.
So #36 was where my previous streak had ever ended, and my son still kept going. So latios (thunderwave, recover, calm mind, dragon claw) was an easy choice, and among the starters, (meganium, blastoise, typhlosion & one other) meganium was another easy choice after we saw that it had the annoying moveset of substitute, leech seed, grasswhistle & double team, and final choice was the same adamant snorlax from rounds 22-28 with curse, double edge and few other physical moves. At the beginning it looked like another hax as foe dodrio got in a few critical hits. I walked away at first not wanting to see a possible disappointment though when I came back a few minutes later, meganium had already setup on a foe charizard as it needed to avoid getting hit from any fire blasts at least. So after that match, my son was able to get a few more in before boarding the plane as match #38 had meganium already sucking the life out of a scizor. So there were 4 more matches to go, for the gold, just win 4 more matches. Shortly after the plane made its departure, the final 4 went underway, and latios had no trouble setting up and dominating most the matches. I don't recall if there were any swaps as I may have recalled seeing a regirock up against steelix, or was that from any of the matches from #29-#35, can't seem to recall.
Finally, the re-match with Noland after I last easily beat him over 3 years ago with breloom would now go underway. First up was latios against his meganium. I recall all other meganiums besides the sub-seed set were quite bad, so latios started with a thunderwave, then proceeded with 3 calm minds while meganium did endure and only got in one poor flail before latios started to sweep with dragon claw (a special attack in emerald). Next up is houndoom whom goes first with a non-stab physical attack shadow ball which does not do half-damage to latios before it gets OHKO'd by dragon claw. Final pokemon to face was hariyama as latios went first with dragon claw for the OHKO to secure the win. Once hariyama went down did we realize that the emerald game finally accomplished what seemed to be frustratingly impossible for the past 3 years, and all on New Year's eve.
Since we kept the battle record of the Gold symbol match, expect a youtube video of it to come soon.
I can now finally join my co-owners as now having 7 gold symbols along with the gold shield.
Expect a youtube video coming soon as I'm sure there may be some interesting comments to be posted there.