>>36552759After a series of unfortunate events involving me losing a new teammate aduring grinding and failing two more Flying-type encounters due to crits (I'm going to have to use Pidgey, aren't I?), I at least managed to complete my FWG core with a Swampert from the Armor Fossil, which is probably the best possible mon I could've gotten at this point. Those reporters in the Pokemon Center surprised me with a level 28 Dialga and if it weren't for Shrek's Ground moves and Miracles' Thunder Wave I probably would've wiped.
I wasn't confident about my chances of beating Fantina at this point so I decided to fully explore Wayward Cave and take advantage of Mina healing my team to do some mild grinding. I was still slightly underleveled by the time I got to the Gym and had a brief moment of panic when my game froze, but luckily I'd saved after Wayward Cave so I only lost two trainers' worth of progress. Fantina's team was really, really bad. Her only threat was Nidoqueen, and Shrek took care of it easily.
And then my game crashed and sent me back even earlier than it had when it froze. Apparently NO$GBA stores the current save data in RAM and only updates the SAV file when the emulator is closed, so when I had to restart it kept my post-Wayward Cave save data, but when it crashed I got booted back to the earlier save when I'd only finished the main cave. So I had to go through the hidden cave and the entire Gym again. Fan-fucking-tastic.
