The Feebas Frustration

Okay, the folks at Nintendo obviously have started saying to themselves: "How can we make dedicated player of Pokemon want to completely tear their hair out?"

I'm unsure how many people are familiar with the Pokemon Feebas. Feebas is a Pokemon you can get by fishing. It is incredibly ugly. Like, think of the ugliest Pokemon you can and then think even harder. This one is much uglier. In fact, here is a picture of it.

So why on earth would anybody want to catch this thing? Well, there are two reasons. First of all, there's the whole "Gotta Catch 'Em All" slogan, meaning that in order to fully beat the game, you need to catch every one of the 490-some creatures that inhabit this world. Second, it evolves into one of the coolest looking Pokemon in the game, Milotic. (Even if you don't play Pokemon, you have to admit that that is pretty cool looking.) The only way you can get a Milotic is to catch a Feebas and raise it's beauty statistic all the way to the maximum. Once it levels up, then it becomes a Milotic, which is just so cool.

Now, we get to the frustrating part. Feebas can only be found by fishing in a specific area. This is not that unusual for Pokemon, as many of the rarer monsters can only be found in one area. However, Feebas is only found in 4 specific "tiles" of water in the entire area. This is a relatively large area, about 200 by 100 tiles, I think. This means that only 4 of the entire "water" tiles in this area will allow you to catch a Feebas. They are random and shift every 24 hours. That's not all. On top of all of that, there is only a 50% chance when you are fishing on the correct tile that you will actually get a Feebas on your line. So, if you are methodically going through each tile, there is still a 50% chance that you will miss one of the special tiles due to being unable to land a Feebas.

...and the Pokemon Company/Nintendo wonder WHY people have to cheat to catch these things.

I, however, (proudly!) did not cheat. I went to the area, and thankfully, it only took about 15 or 20 minutes of methodically going through each tile. I've got one, and it's female, which means I can breed more of them if I need to. Hopefully I can trade some over the Global Trade System for some of the Pokemon I'm having trouble catching, like Heracross and Cherrim.

Hanging out with the Guys tonight. Hope it doesn't go too late, I really need to get more sleep...