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Mini Notes: Mt. Battle Prizes
We've got the TMs of Psychic, Ice Beam, Thunderbolt, Flamethrower and Double Team, all of which can't be obtained otherwise. Then we have the four pinch berries that can't be obtained in the other Gen 3 games at all, so you need to buy them from here to then send over and plant to get more. Then there's a load of cool of battle items that were, at the time of this game, only obtainable from RS's Battle Tower random streak prizes. Now you can get them in Emerald easily enough from the Battle Frontier (if you grind at the Factory a little). So there's a lot of good stuff here. Too bad we won't be getting any of it!
You remember I mentioned those TMs as being postgame, even Double Team? Well, okay, you could get Double Team before the postgame, but you probably shouldn't. So you can easily see how easy it is to obtain Poke Coupons in this game, here's the amount you get for clearing an area:
If we went through the whole of Mt. Battle in the Story, then we'd only get 6900 coupons, which is enough for... a single TM. You can get over 4000 coupons by beating Area 8, where trainers have Pokemon in the low to mid 50s, which is a little much for us right now, especially since you need to fight all 10 trainers in one go before you get a chance to stop, get a free heal, etc, you won't be doing that until the postgame, cause you'll just be too weak otherwise.
The Battle Mode rewards are better, getting 14,950 after 100 battles which, hey, is barely enough for a single berry. Sure, you can grind this by restarting your challenge over and over, but goddamn it takes a while to climb 100 battles over and over, why the hell would you want to? We can't do Battle Mode right now, since there's either level 50 or level 100 mode and our Pokemon wouldn't be brought up to that level. So yeah, we're not getting these TMs to use in the story. Maybe at the very end of the game, you could get Psychic, but uh, that's about it.
Oh yeah, if you try and use legendaries to make it easier in Battle Mode, each legendary you use reduces the amount of coupons you get by 13% for each one. I don't think they wanted you to get every prize in that list even once, maybe you could get like two or three things at most if you wanted to. But it really sucks.