I bought this very recently in my quest to get all the Pokémon in Pokémon Home (thanks to those who helped) and honestly, I really prefer this look. If they remade the earlier games like this, I'd be all over this like a rash. Also, am I the only one who doesn't have any issues with these games?! 😂  I started with Chimchar (I think that's his name?) because I like a fire starter (twisted fire starter) and my rival's name is Slag.

All badges obtained and I've also settled on my final team. I remember very little about this generation of Pokemon other than I didn't care for it, so it was a shock when Minato from Naruto showed up as the final gym leader. Dude even uses lightning Pokemon. Obviously I'm LTTP with this but the design and type choice can't have been a coincidence.  Dunno if I can stomach going through another cave area and so will probably leave the Victory Road/Elite 4 until tomorrow. I may do a bit of exp farming in preparation for it though.

This game's amazing!

I just assumed you misremembered where the transformation from Click Clock Wood was.

Bidoof is a silly Pokémon, and in the original DS games, it was pretty useless in a fight. Every Pokémon has an "ability", some kind of passive effect, basically, like blocking the Sleep status, or making all Ground type moves miss, there's loads of them. Bidoof's ability was unnoteworthy in the original games. But the next games after those (Black/White), introduced "hidden abilities". Wild Pokémon don't have these naturally, you have to go out of your way to give them those. How you do that depends on the game, but most of the time, it's by using a pretty rare item called an "Ability Patch" Use that item on Bidoof, and it changes the normal ability to Bidoof's hidden ability, Moody. The general strategy with that is to stall using moves like Protect while you hope for Moody to raise the evasiveness stat. (At the end of every turn, Moody raises a random stat on Bidoof 2 stages, while dropping another stat 1 stage). It's requires a lot of luck, but if the gamble pays off, you get a Pokémon that becomes almost impossible to hit. Naturally, this works better if you evolve the Bidoof first.