About a decade ago, when I was playing Ruby for the first time as a kid, I just beat the Mossdeep gym and was on my way to Sootopolis. I had played for about 5 days, 3 hours each after my after school but before bedtime, at this time.
I had no internet or player's guide at the time, but I knew enough to know that I was looking for a town with an underwater entrance. Sounded easy enough--how many underwater cities can there be? So I dove. At first, the spots I chose were isolated and empty, save for an item or two. I found a bunch of Shards and a few Pearls and Heart Scales along the way. I spent about an hour wandering around these spots before I came across one that didn't have anything in it. That was strange. Even with the Itemfinder, I couldn't find anything nearby. Shrugging it off as some sort of mislead, I surfaced and surfed around for a bit until I came across the next circular diving hole. I dove. Nothing there. This kept happening and happening, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why. Why would this game put dozens of empty diving holes next to each other? By the time my three hours were up and it was time to go to bed, I must have checked out at least 70 or so diving spots, with the majority of them turning out empty, especially torwards the end. I was thoroughly perplexed.
The next day, the same thing happened: dive down, find nothing, surf to another spot, repeat (and every so often use a Repel to drive off those pesky Tentacool). It must have taken at least another hour of surfing before I finally found something. Except this diving hole was different. It wasn't a circle with a few rocks that led nowhere--it was a path! I had finally triumphed, making my grueling way through the hundred diving spots between Mossdeep and Sootopolis, before finally reaching civilization. I giddily began swimming my way through the path, but after a mere two steps...
Repel's effect wore off! No big deal, just use another one, right? I checked my bag to replenish my steps, but much to my surprise, I had none. In my tenuous trek through the vast sea between the two cities, I managed to use up all 70 of my Max Repels. Glorious. What's worse is that I couldn't fly back to Mosdeep, since I had just switched out my Swellow for a newly-caught Trapinch I was trying to train. But it shouldn't matter, I thought. I was almost at Sootopolis already. I was wrong. Terribly wrong.
I began swimming my way through the path--more of a trench, really, given the canyon-like appearance of the trail. It was much shorter than I thought it was; I made it to the other side within a few seconds. On the other side was a light patch, where I could surface. Sootopolis City, here I come! ...except when I surfaced, I was still stranded in the middle of the ocean. But it looked a bit different. Rather than the splotches of dark waters I had seen on the other side of the trail, the darkened areas here took more elongated shapes. Swimming around a bit (and running into my first Pelipper of many), I noticed there were quite a few of them. I chose one at random and dived into it. The first thing that hit me was that this trench had grass at the bottom of the sea. Grass! I took a second to think about it, and then realized it probably was more likely seaweed or something similar. I swam into it eagerly--after seeing only Tentacool and Pelipper in other water routes, what diverse range of Pokemon could one possibly find underwater?
My first encounter was a Clamperl. My first reaction to it was thinking, "It's a clam. That's it?" But in my quest to catch 'em all, I caught it anyways. It didn't seem very useful, but at least it was different. The next thing I found was another Clamperl. No need for another one when I just caught one. Then another Clamperl. And another. "That's my fourth one in a row," I thought. "Is this gonna be worse than regular surfing?" Luckily, my prayers were answered with my next encounter. It was a Chinchou, a familiar face from Gold and Silver. I gladly caught this one, seeing that Lanturn had one of my favorite designs from Johto. I found another Chinchou next. Then three more Clamperl. Then a Chinchou, then a Clamperl, then two Chinchou. Then came something different--Relicanth. Three Pokemon? That's already better than what it's like on the surface! And just like that, i was sold. What else could I find down here in the depths? By the time I found a few more Clamperl, my time was up, but I was eager to find out what else I could catch beneath the sea.
I spent my entire third day in that single trench, scouring back and forth to see what I could find. Clamperl, Clamperl, Chinchou, Clamperl, Clamperl, Clamperl, Chinchou, Relicanth, Clamperl, Clamperl. I started keeping a tally of each of my encounters on a sheet of paper. I gave myself 100 encounters to see what I could find--if I couldn't find something in 100 tries, then it statistically has less than a 1% chance of appearing, so it's probably not there. Of course, young me had no idea about that principle, and was just following a rule of thumb an older cousin gave to me. So I gave it a hundred shots. Clamperl, Chinchou, Clamperl, Clamperl, Relicanth. Over and over again. On my hundredth try, all I found was another Clamperl. These things were worse than Zubats. But I still had about 15 minutes of play left, and I had a gut feeling that there was something special here. A patch of seaweed underwater where you can find Pokemon? I was sure I stumbled upon a mystery area equivalent of catching Safari Zone Pokemon off the coast of Cinnabar Island back in Red and Blue. By now, I had memorized the underwater music, and was humming along as I played. Every once in a while, you could hear a Pokemon's cry within the music, like you could in all the routes of Hoenn. Most of the time it was Clamperl. I might have heard Chinchou once or twice. I don't think I ever heard Relicanth. But the vast majority of the time, it was Clamperl. Nevertheless, by the time my 15 minutes were up, I found nothing new. I surfaced and saved the game.
The next day I chose to dive in a nearby trench, hoping to find an item or two. To my vast surprise, there was more seaweed in this trench! How fortunate of me to find two underwater patches of grass within surfing distance of each other. I didn't hesitate to explore this patch as well. The first thing I found was a Clamperl. I shrugged it off. "They're probably like Zubats," I thought. "In every cave to get in the way of all of the actual rare stuff." So I spent the whole fourth day in this trench. Clamperl. Clamperl. Clamperl. Clamperl. Maybe a Chinchou every once in a while. Clamperl. Clamperl. Clamperl. During the whole three hours I spent in that trench, I found one Relicanth. One. At this point I started playing a game where I would look away when I encountered a Pokemon and would guess what it was before it appeared. If I guessed right, I would eat a marshmallow from a bag of Jet Puffs. I guessed Clamperl every time. There were three Jet Puffs left by the time I finished. In the last five minutes or so of the time I had, I had already given up on trying to find anything new, but I felt uneasy about exploring another trench without being able to finish--what if I went to bed and forgot where I went the next day, and then ended up going backwards and having to start over? So I just relented to continuing to swim back and forth in the trench I was already in, waiting agonizingly for the next day.
I blazed through the rest of the trenches within an hour on the fourth day. At this point I had given up on finding any new Pokemon underwater, and instead decided to refocus on my orignal goal: finding Sootopolis. After I scoured the remaining trenches clean of items, I went about searching for another potential dive spot. I hated surfing on water; it wasn't like a land route, where there was more or less a straight path to follow to get to your destination. The water routes were wide and open, with shallow water that fooled you into thinking you found land and dead ends that you think are paths but really only have items. After some surfing, however, I came across the familiar shape of a circular diving hole in the middle of the ocean. I dove into it and found nothing. Then I had a horrible realization--that whole day I spent checking out diving holes? What if they were all the same ones, and I had just been taking a giant circular route this whole time? I felt stupid after that. How could I think the game would put a hundred diving spots in a row and still expect to keep people who aren't as meticulous as me attentive? And the seaweed? That wasn't a reward for sticking it out through the so-called "path" or diving spots. It was just a regular old area that I happened to take a very, very long time to get to. But now I felt proud; I had figured out my mistake, and now I would be able to find Sootopolis in a breeze.
How wrong I was. The next two days were spent doing nothing but diving, realizing i had dove here before, and then surfacing to find another place to dive before realizing that I had already been there, too. The worst part was the stupid seaweed. Sometimes, in order to get to the other diving spot, I would have to swim through it, and much to my chagrin, spend tme encountering and fleeing from a wild Pokemon. Only at this point, it wasn't so much a "wild Pokemon" as it was "a Clamperl." In what must have been the shittiest luck on earth, every single underwater encounter I had for the next 12 hours of gameplay was a run-in with a Clamperl (admittedly, I did my best to avoid seaweed, but still). While there were Tentacool and Pelipper above the water, it was nothing compared to the nightmare that was diving. I was absolutely sick of the music, sick of the slow movement, sick of the lighting, and so, so sick of the Clamperl. The Clamperl. Even when I managed to thankfully evade any encounters with seaweed while diving, the game felt the sadistic need to further taunt me by playing that sickening cry over the music. Perlperl, I would hear every so often, even when I wasn't even in battle. The game was out to get me.
After three days of grueling search, I finally gave in and told my aunt to find Sootopolis for me. She obliged, but I felt as if my will to play the game had been sucked out of me. Not just my will to play the game, in fact, but also my soul. Clamperl had mocked me relentlessly with its saccharine cry, and now, it had taken my soul as well. To this day I haven't beaten Pokemon Ruby, and I have dutifully KO'd every Clamperl I have encountered in every game since. Sometimes, when I'm surfing in Emerald or Diamond or Black or Y, I still hear the sickening sound of perlperl ringing in my ears, and my spirit dies just a little bit more inside.