Part 17: The Ridiculous Rabbit Hole of the e-Reader (Part 3: Of Course There's More)

Part 17: The Ridiculous Rabbit Hole of the e-Reader (Part 3: Of Course There's More)

Hello everyone! I'm Admiral H. Curtiss, and I'll be showing off just one more litte thing that exists in Pokémon Colosseum.



Like many games released by Nintendo around its time, the Japanese version of Pokémon Colosseum supports the e-Reader GBA accessory. So let's take a look at what that is in this game, shall we?



I got Crosspeice's LP save for this showcase. Pokémon Colosseum saves are cross-compatible between regions if you just edit the Game ID on the memory card to match the correct region, so we can just load it in Japanese Colosseum without issues.



We need to head over to Phenac Stadium for this. Take a last look at our incredible bike while we're going there. I still have to laugh at that whenever I see it.



In all non-JP versions, both doors here just lead into the Stadium battles after registering at the counter, but in the Japanese version, the left door leads somewhere else.



It's the Card e Room! Here you can connect to a GBA with the e-Reader+ and scan Pokémon Colosseum e-Cards, which were sold separately in four packs of six cards each.



Each pack included five trainer cards as well as one Colosseum card. We'll take a look at what these do exactly in a bit.



You register on the left here to establish a connection with your GBA e-Reader+. Just select the option to connect to a GameCube, plug the GBA into the GameCube's second controller slot, and there you go.

You can do this on emulator using Dolphin and newer versions of VBA-M, but it's pretty finicky.



The game will push a Pokémon Colosseum card scanning application to your GBA, with, as far as I can tell, one of three random background images:



After the e-Reader has been connected you can enter the capsule in the back.





The three options here are Panel Battle, Endless Battle, and Quit. For now we'll take a look at Panel Battle.



In Panel Battle, you just scan any of the Trainer e-Cards to initiate a battle against them. We've scanned the #01 card here.



Unfortunately, these battles are painfully easy for an endgame party, so they're not particularly interesting to show off... yet, anyway.





For winning a battle you get 50 PokéCoupons.


So you might be wondering, if the saves are cross-compatible between regions, what happens if we save in here and load the save in the English version? Well, let's try just that.







As it turns out, it works! All the content is still in the English version, just inaccessible and only somewhat translated.




All this text clearly only got an initial translation pass, which is kind of interesting to see.

Do note that, despite us using the English version of Pokémon Colosseum now, we still have to use the Japanese e-Reader+ to connect, as none of that code was modified from the Japanese version. All the text on the GBA application is still Japanese, even.





Anyway, let's just continue where we left off, just this time with text more of our readers can understand.



I figured this would be boring if we just steamrolled all of the trainers, so I swapped our party to something weaker.



Yeah, that should work.



Maybe that was a bit took weak...



As a side-note, none of these e-Card battles allow you to use items; the message here is slightly mistranslated, it should say something like 'Items can't be used now.' instead.



I manage to barely win this one.



Let's try a slightly better team and see if that helps.



You can scan the Colosseum cards at any time to switch what Colosseum battles take place in. I think this is purely aesthetics, except it might affect something like Secret Power. Maybe. I'm not sure. This is Pyrite Colosseum. The other three scanable Colosseum cards are The Under Colosseum, Deep Colosseum, and Realgam Colosseum, respectively.






Anyway.



Okay, first hit almost killed us, so let's Endure the second one to buy some time...



Or not.



This is still surprisingly hard with this party...






After defeating a full row of trainers, you get thrown into an extra fight right away.



Unlike between regular fights, they don't heal you for those. This could be difficult...



It worked out somehow.



Beating the extra trainers gives you 80 PokéCoupons instead of 50 as well as a bonus item of usually questionable worth.




At some point I switched back to our main team because these fights weren't particularly interesting with the weaker team either, just more tedious.




Oh, and do note you don't have to scan the cards in order, you can fight them in any order you want.




The rewards for the remaining rows aren't so hot either.




After beating all trainers you get this message. Hm, I wonder who that is?




Ah, an untranslated trainer. The difficulty is roughly on par with all the trainers we've fought already, so he's not so bad. But!



This guy has a Shadow Pokémon! I didn't quite think this through so my party is way too strong to actually weaken this thing, so let's just hope for the best I guess.



I also didn't think about stocking up on balls either. This might take a bit!



It eventually stays in through sheer luck.




So, what now?



Well, astute readers may have noticed that there are three tabs in this window. If you scan a trainer from a row you have already cleared once more...



You get to fight the same trainer again, but with an updated team. Sadly not strong enough yet to actually be interesting, but hey.

Let's just skip ahead a bit.



For clearing the red row in this difficulty level, you get a Nugget. Blue row is a Full Restore, yellow row is a PP Up, and green row is an Ether. Oh, and the PokéCoupon rewards don't change, so you still get 50 per card trainer and 80 per end-of-row trainer.

Clearing all of the trainers on this difficulty level makes someone else show up outside the capsule.



I disagree with that assessment.



This time I'll take a few weaker Pokémon with us so we can weaken the Shadow Pokémon.



Yeah that's much better.







Okay, on to the third difficulty level!






These fights can actually be kinda difficult! Their level is roughly on par with an endgame party's, and most of them have some kinda strategy that may or may not cause you troubles.

This trainer, for example, wants to annoy you to death. Shuckle takes forever to take down in general, and this one also carries Leftovers and has Toxic and Wrap, while the Sableye over there also has Toxic along with Confuse Ray and Recover.



Oh just die already!



You still generally have the upper hand in these fights since you have six Pokémon to their four, but there are still some interesting and rough battles in here that kinda make it worth slugging through the first two sets.






This trainer is themed around Rain Dance, with 100% hit Thunders and abilities like Swift Swim.



Of course all their water mons have Ice Beam for coverage, which is not great for our team.



And Earthquake, gotta have Earthquake. Pretty decent movesets all around.



I barely manage to win this one.






And then there are fights that are just the worst. This one is similar to the Shuckle fight from before except much more effective. Milotic can be pretty annoying, and while this Armaldo isn't that bad it carries Sword Dance so you want to take it down quick. But the real problem is what comes after that.



This Cradily here was the bane of my existance, with Toxic, Barrier, Amnesia, Recover, and Leftovers, combined with a helping of Light Screen from Meganium, it would just not go down. So I figured, okay, let's inflict Toxic and beat it with its own weapon, right?



Goddammit. In case you're not aware, a Synchronized Toxic decays to regular Poison in Gens 3 and 4, so I actually had to either run it out of Recover PP or consistently inflict over 50% of its health in a single attack.



Neither of those happened and I had to slowly but surely await my death.



Thankfully you can just retry, and since you know what's coming up you can adjust your team to deal with that, but damn, I was really not expecting to get stalled out by the CPU.



Second try goes better, but he still manages to wipe most of my team before the fight is over. Oh well.






This guy does the classic poison your own team mate for Guts move, which is cute. Doesn't help him much though.






This is just a solid sweeping team with Blaziken/Miltank/Heracross/Donphan, Salac Berries, and lots of Earthquake.



It goes poorly for me on my first attempt.



And on my second attempt, for that matter.



Third attempt goes a lot better by adjusting my party a bit. I can take out Blaziken and Heracross before they even get to do anything by leading with Espeon, and the rest is just kinda cleanup in comparison.






This team counts on luck by boosting evade and using OHKO moves. It doesn't quite work out for them in the end.






The final trainer of each row on this difficulty can be especially hard since you don't get healed and they tend to have pretty good teams.



And sometimes you just get unlucky.




But sometimes you can also be lucky when you're unlucky.






And some trainers just...



oooh noooooooo



How often do you see fucking Bright Powder actually work? Gaah!



Well, this might be a problem.



Oh right, I forgot about you, whoops.



It takes sacrifices of half my team, but I manage to take it down.



Wait, what are you doing? I think this Alakazam only has Skill Swap...



And this Xatu is only slightly better.



Yeah I'd be frustrated too if my partner kept using Skill Swap for no reason.



Oh you can do something else, how about that!



Well that was a close one, even with the silly wasted Skill Swap turns.




This is pretty unremarkable, but I have to point out:



Really? Type correct Hidden Power in-game? Come on. Did they have this as Thunderpunch until they realized Typhlosion can't actually learn that in Gen 3 at the time of Colosseum's release and just hotfixed it?






Oh, the Regis. Well, I only have two Pokémon left, but Regis aren't that bad usually, maybe...



Nevermind!



The worst part of losing to an end-of-row trainer is that you have to re-beat the last trainer you beat before that to retry. Well, that's annoying.



After reshuffling my team slightly to prepare for Explosion I try again, this time with four Pokémon surviving the previous battle and a savestate so I can retry faster.



Oh wow, I would have expected that to survive a Regice's Explosion at least. Welp.



Of course. I hate using attacks without 100% accuracy...



Well, one Pokémon left, maybe I can manage to...



Nope, don't even get a turn.



Well, if you're gonna play like this I'm gonna just protect myself. Unfortunately our Umbreon does not have Protect, so I'll just swap in Ho-oh.



This thing does have enough defense to survive a Regice Explosion at least, so that's cool.



This time I manage to take out Registeel before it can explode.



Can't prevent this but that's fine, our remaining two Pokémon should be able to take care of a lone Dusclops.



Sure enough.







As you might be able to tell from their Pokémon selection, this is another trainer that tries to just explode on you. This one is much easier than the Regi one though.








This fight can be very rough, Lati@s are pretty powerful. Her Latias uses Helping Hand to buff the Latios which all but guarantees OHKOs from Latios' Dragon Claw, Luster Purge, or Ice Beam. The Latias also has Dragon Claw so even that can deal respectable damage when it's not buffing her partner.



The first attempt goes badly.



Second attempt I try to predict her lead by going ahead with Octillery's Ice Beam, but as it turns out Latios also has Thunderbolt! Gaaah.



I choose to abandon that one and instead go with Umbreon's Confuse Ray and Bite. That works much better.



After the Lati@s are down the fight goes a lot smoother.






The last SP trainer is kind of a joke compared to the rest. I suspect this fight is intended as a Sunny Day strategy but his AI does not appear to understand that so he never manages to get one off and it goes poorly for him.






The final battle here is kind of unremarkable too, but it does have a neat thing that kinda sorta makes it worth going through these I guess?



It's a Shadow Scizor! Being a Bug Pokémon makes it really easy to catch too.









Your reward for doing these battles is those three Shadow Pokémon, two of which are kind of useless because you already get their evolved forms in the regular game.






You also can do the 'Endless Battle' option in the e-Card menu after beating all trainers, which pits you against the exact same high-level fights except you don't get healed between fights.



No thanks.


And that's about it! It's a shame that all this content exists but is essentially locked out for most people playing the game, especially since the card scanning aspect is kind of superfluous and could really just have been replaced with a menu. Still, if you find a way to do it, it's a surprisingly neat way to spend a few extra hours with the game.


Hope you enjoyed seeing this content, and Pokémon Colosseum in general!