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Crystal added a patch of grass to Route 36, allowing you to encounter Pokémon on this route before the 1st Gym. To accomodate to this, they lowered the levels drastically, and added Growlithe as a morning encounter. Yes, in Crystal you can catch a Growlithe before Falkner.
It was sadly removed in HGSS, not likely due to ignorance, but probably because they strictly used the GS encounter tables and it would have been weird to have a random Crystal encounter table just on one route. I do wish HGSS would have taken some of the improved Crystal tables though and blended them with the GS ones to keep version exclusives.
Oh well, at least we can get Mareep and Wooper before the 1st Gym in HGSS.
