Pokemon Y - Day 3. Oh dear it IS a diary.

[xyzzysqrl]

Woke up today after only five hours of sleep with a bit of a headache, so I lazed around in bed feeding pokemon puff pastries and rubbing their bellies vigorously. I am now basically conditioned to stuff my friends full of food and wobble their anatomy around to boost affection values. This may backfire horribly.

I also spent a bit of time trading with a friend to get my pumpkaboo Necrofiend to evolve into a gourgeist. So I've gone from Fat Ghost to Tall Fat Ghost. I consider this a decent step forward.

Ghost pokemon are tricky to raise, since most of their attacks do nothing against Normal type pokemon ... and you can guess which of the two are more common. They have a lot of resistances and immunities, though. I've actually never really used one before, not heavily, so this is a new experience for me. I'd avoided the type completely because of its complexity. ...Yes, I felt like raising a type of POKEMON was TOO COMPLEX. I am not a clever sqrl. Anyway, we'll see how it works out once I start getting into bigger gym battles.

One of the other things I did was get Vivillion evolved. I really love the concept of this pokemon: There's 18 known wing patterns for it so far, and they're different depending on where in the world you physically are. (Or, okay, where in the world your 3DS is set to announce itself as being.) I absolutely ADORE this.

To me, it embodies what's so cool about Pokemon in the first place. There's a sense of wonder as I look at those and wonder what kind of places they come from. I now want to meet people from far off lands and admire their butterflies. The Savannah and Meadow patterns in particular are absolutely gorgeous.

Of course ours is the Polar-colored Vivillion. Massachusetts is the frozen butthole of America.

After all that I went back to sleep for a few hours to finish resting up.

Several hours later we're well into the afternoon and I finally have a moment to pick the game back up. Parfum Palace it is, then! It... costs $1000 (in pokemon-world money) to go inside. "You see, the owner of this palace follows the school of thought that you can never have too much money." "THIS IS HOW THE RICH GET RICHER!" Shauna grumps. Damn right. Fight the power! Eat the rich! Take their stuff!

"The fee helps pay the cost of restoring and repairing the palace. Probably." the doorman explains. Oh well tha-- probably?

Sigh. Either way, we pay up and head in, and there is a miniplot about finding the owner's lost dog. I'm more interested in the palace itself, which is an enormous memorial of sorts to an extremely bloody war that went on thousands of years ago. THIS I want to know more about, but details are thin. There IS a book in the palace library about a mysterious tranforming pokemon whose trainer held a stone. Ah-ha, Mega Evolution details.

Why do I kinda feel like Nancy Drew might've been a better candidate for trainer this run? Or maybe Grace Nakamura...

Out in the palace garden we find the guy's lost dog, but I also find the disc for the move "Cut", which is kinda essential. Every Pokemon game has physical blocks -- waterfalls, big rocks, trees -- that can only be passed with the right move. I end up teaching Cut to Star Marmot, so now I can get past prickly trees in the path.

The dog's owner offers to reward us with a fireworks show on the balcony, so I head up there with Shauna. She awkwardly exposits that she really wants to get to be closer friends with Warrior Cat Xao. "We haven't even seen them yet, but... I know I'll never forget these fireworks, 'cause I watched them with you, Xao."

Uh, Shauna, I'm flattered but if you're expecting fancy cakes and a bellyrub... Maybe we could just hold hands?

Anyway eventually we talk to Rich McDickerson who runs the place, get the pokeflute, and trek on back to Snorlax down route six.

Catches in the extremely tall grass of Route 6: Keiss (Espurr), Zantetsuken (Honedge) Diremite (Nincada), Strago (Kecleon) -- wow what a haul.

It is on Route 6 that I encounter the biggest piece of crap in the game so far: A trainer with a Volbeat (cute little bug pokemon) that knows Confuse Ray (confuses your pokemon, makes them punch themselves in the face), Double Team (boosts evasion heavily), Moonlight (self-heal) and Tackle (basic damage). The little shit confuses my pokemon, boosts his dodge to MAXIMUM PERCENT and proceeds to dance around healing himself and lightly smacking my team while they flail at him and themselves. This fight takes an embarrassing ten to fifteen minutes. NOT my finest moment.

On the plus side, Star Marmot evolves post-battle to a Linoone. Sleek weezil! Azurill also evolves from a tiny spherical mouse to a ... larger spherical mouse, and from there to a mouse with big floppy bunny ears. I am super okay with this as well.

Quina the Snorlax is awoken, captured, and cleared out of the way. Onward.

Catches on Route 7: Wild Rose (Spritzee), Irma (Croagunk), Edea (Illumise)

Just over the bridge is the day care. Yay! The Day Care is where you leave pokemon to be raised. Then as soon as you're offscreen they bang each other silly and you get an egg VIA MYSTERIOUS PROCESSES which you can hatch, trade, whatever. I love the day care because I love trading pokemon around.

A little further down Route 7 is the "Battle Chateau", a complicated place where you earn noble titles by defeating other trainers and you can buy Writs and get expensive prizes... Viola the Bug Gym Leader is there, and she eagerly vouches for my trainerhood and strength, so Warrior Cat Xao is now Baroness Warrior Cat Xao.

This is a bit much for me to really parse right now. I'll have to come back later. Still, it kind of figures that Pokemon France has a complicated aristocratic system of nobility where you move up the ranks by conquering your fellows in battle.

At the end of Route 7, Calem the alternate main character grabs Xao and challenges Tierno and Trevor to a two-on-two battle. It's kind of a curb-stomp, because Calem's the only one who's all "YES BATTLE ALL THE POKEMON". Trevor just wants to research, and Tierno wants to dance. Tierno is kinda cute actually, he really loves watching pokemon move and he keeps talking about his "Crew". Trevor meanwhile seems faintly terrified by the world and prefers theoretical knowledge only.

It's weird because I actually LIKE Trevor and Tierno more than Calem. They're the ones I would hang around with. Calem is kind of... a little TOO passionate about WIN ALL THE THINGS. Chill, man. Anyway... then it's through "Connecting Cave" (AUGH ZUBATS AUGH) out to Route 8. SUDDENLY Sina and Dexio run up! They need to power up my Pokedex! Okay done! They run away!

What the hell was that. Did you kids give me a computer virus? No, I now have access to the "Coastal Dex", which is... just another chunk of the Kalos pokedex. ... I don't understand this game sometimes.

Catches on Route 8: Kain (Absol), Deep Eyes (Inkay)

Around this point I'm running out of batteries, and I've just hit "Ambrette Town". So I save and stop for the moment.

Comments

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

Oooh, nice catch on the Absol. Those things always looked incredibly badass to me.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I was lucky and had a ghost/steel pokemon with an ability that made its attacks always hit. It still took a long time to kill the Volbeat between confusion and it healing itself and not having any attacks that weren't weak against the target.

[xyzzysqrl]

Yeah I'm gonna have to develop a strategy for dealing with crap like that. NPC trainers are getting more aggressive and better at tricks and moveset-planning.

[vulpisfoxfire.livejournal.com]

If nothing else, you've now learned a highly abusable combination of abilities to put on one of your *own* 'mons...and hope it doesn't end up working as well as Status attacks in most FF games do...

[kjorteo]

Ooh, looks like my Vivillion if I ever played this game (or any game that has Vivillions I guess) would be the High Plains pattern, which I absolutely dig. Very Santa Fe.

Edit: Well, okay, to be fair, most Vivillion patterns are at least passably Santa Fe.

[xyzzysqrl]

Hey, that IS a nice one actually.

I think my favorites are Savanna Pattern or Garden Pattern.

[kjorteo]

Either Sandstorm or Continental are the ones I'd have guessed they probably should have used for New Mexico (hell, Continental is almost the state flag), but they're all good really.

I myself would have wanted Elegant, of course.