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#91 Stupid pokéballs...
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Looking Back:
Like I said in the last commentary, no matter how much you stack the odds in your favor, there's still a small chance that the pokémon you're trying to catch will break free. Usually, throwing another ball or two will do it but sometimes (generally a couple times per game for me), you'll run into a weak ordinary pokémon who just keeps breaking out of pokéballs no matter how low its HP is. Not sure if it's just the law of probability at work (despite the low odds it's bound to happen that a pokémon repeatedly succeeds in breaking free once in a while since it's all random chance), or if it's the game's random number generator glitching and getting stuck (in video games most luck based events are decided using the virtual equivalent of a dice roll, and yeah, some of them actually do 'get stuck' on one number from time to time). Either way, it gets extremely annoying when you waste a large amount of pokéballs on what should be a really quick and easy capture. The worst I had so far was a low level onix in Diamond that broke out of about twenty balls in a row despite having only a sliver of health left. Naturally, legendary pokémon are another matter entirely, they routinely break out of large numbers of balls because they're special and supposed to be very hard to catch.
The more observant of you might be wondering where May got all those pokéballs, considering that in the game the professor only gives you five to start out with. You might have already figured it out by reading later strips, but May actually starts out with quite a large collection of pokéballs and healing items. Being Professor Birch's daughter, she always knew she'd be going on a pokémon journey someday so over time she slowly began stockpiling useful items to take when the day finally came.




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