Last time, vampires! Now, vampires. Yay, vampires!
He wasn’t particularly tall, and he moved with a casual and dangerous grace that belied his crystal-blue eyes, styled blond hair, and the tennis whites he wore.
Okay, so I get the tennis shoes conflicting with the “casual and dangerous grace” bit. And I can sorta see the styled hair doing so, if it’s a silly look. But what about “crystal-blue eyes” makes them unlikely to belong to a dangerous predator?
He’s hanging out with a female double. I’m not sure if that makes them twins – I mean, if you’re a vampire and you want to have a doppelganger, you’ve got plenty of time to pick through the population until you find one.
“But,” she breathed, and licked her lips with a cat-quick tongue, “she didn’t tell us you would smell so delicious.”
Also as we see here, no, sexy vamps are not equal opportunity sexy vamps.
Harry immediately warns Rodriguez that the saliva is addictive and hm. Come to think of it, if it’s so dangerous that an accidental lick can put you in their thrall, shouldn’t they do more to weaponize this? Like spit into a glass container and then throw it at people.
Oh, and do they have any sort of mutation chance? Natural selection isn’t necessarily going to do anything with magical creatures, since it could be that they all come out the same because magic says so, but the addictive saliva suggests they’re functioning like biological organisms who are adapting to better hunt their prey. And in that case, if it’s so great, why not go the spitting cobra route?
I realize we’re getting away from sexy and into wtf, but the fact they turn into ugly bat monsters means there was already an attempt to be doing a subversion here, it just got tripped up over keeping them sexy enough.
Boy vamp says they’re not here for nomming, girl vamp says she’s definitely here for nomming.
She licked her lips again, and this time I could see the black spots on her long, pink tongue.
While Harry claims to be grossed out, the narrative doesn’t agree given she’s still doing this while the male one isn’t. Also, the guy goes on to say his “sister”‘s on a diet, so…maybe those spots aren’t poison spots, maybe she’s sick.
The guy finally explains that he’s here bearing invitations from Bianca. Harry continues to be pissed they’re here and says he doesn’t see why it takes two people to do that. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that, just as vampires are dangerous to him, he’s pretty dangerous to vampires. Indeed, he goes on to wave around his blasting rod and threaten to murder them on the spot. Under the circumstances, maybe she’s there because he wanted backup.
This is yet another time when there’s tension between how the book wants to pretend Harry’s an underdog but also wants to make it clear he’s baddest badass ever.
Boy vamp finally manages to get it across to him that he is trying to be civil and respecting of the whole wizard/vampire truce, and this is an invitation because Harry’s the local council guy.
“The safety of all invited guests is assured, by word of the assembled court, of course.”
Harry doesn’t give us a fun little infodump on what this means. Is this one of those fae-deal sort of things where there’s a million loopholes or is this like traditional host law where you’ve very well covered and don’t need to worry about fine details. He does grudgingly agree to take the invitation that we still don’t really know enough about.
The pair of them started toward me. I lifted my blasting rod and muttered a word. Power flooded through the rod, and the far tip began to glow with an incandescent light. “Not her,” I said, nodding to the herald’s sister. “Just you.”
Kyle kept his smile, but his eyes had changed from blue to a shade of angry black that was rapidly expanding to cover the whites. “Well,” he said, his voice tense, “aren’t we the little lawyer, Mr. Dresden.”
I smiled back at him. “Look, Sparky, you’re the herald. You should know the accords as well as I do. You’ve license to deliver and receive messages and to have safe passage granted you so long as you don’t start any trouble.” I waved the tip of the rod toward the girl beside him. “She doesn’t. And she’s not obliged to keep the peace, either. Let’s just say I’d rather we all walked away from this.”
They both made a hissing sound that no human could quite have duplicated. Kyle pushed Kelly roughly back behind him, where she remained, her soft-looking hands pressed to her stomach, her eyes flooded entirely black and empty of humanity. Kyle stalked toward me and thrust the envelope at me. I swallowed my fear, lowered my blasting rod, and took it.
While Harry’s description hides it well, their reactions aren’t all that in line with anger. What they are in line with is fear. Huge pupils are a fear response, so eyes turning solid black is in line with a sudden need to see as much as possible. It doesn’t happen in response to Harry being a dick, because he’s already done that, but in response to Harry charging up his murder laser, and after he aims it as the girl while explaining that she’s not covered by the agreement, the guy pushes her behind him so Harry would have to at least wing him in order to murder her. Hissing, same issue – the reason it sounds threatening to us is precisely because it’s coming out of things trying to scare you off.
Now, if you know the vampires are just assholes, this isn’t such a problem. Maybe the author knows that the girl was planning on trying to lick Harry if she got close, and that the guy was fully sure he was safe because of the rules and didn’t bring her along for support but for the sake of this very trick. But even side characters have their own feelings and motivations, and Harry not liking them doesn’t change that.
It’d have been easy to present them as actually arrogant and cocky. To have her sigh and say that fine, whatever, your loss, and leave. Instead what this comes off as is two people desperately bluffing their way through an encounter with a cranky tiger.
Harry tells them to fuck off now, and when the guy makes the mistake of responding on his way back to his maybe sister, Harry decides to teach them a lesson.
Energy flowed out of me. Wind roared up in response to my command, and whipped out toward the pair of vampires, carrying a cloud of dust and dirt and debris with it. They both staggered, lifting a hand to shield their eyes against flying particles.
As the wind faded I sagged, wearied by the effort of moving that much air, and watched the vampires gather their wits and blink their eyes clear. Their perfect tennis whites were stained, their beautiful complexions were mussed, and best of all, their flawless hair was standing up every which way. They hissed at me and crouched, bodies oddly balanced and held with an inhuman lightness. Then there was a blur of tennis whites, and they were gone.
At least on the scale of Harry dickery this is pretty light and it didn’t get aimed just at the girl. Still, god, what an asshole.
Here’s what we know about vampires: there’s one running one of those mythical good brothels, who actually cared about it when one of the prostitutes was murdered, and seemed to have long-term feeding arrangements with functional people rather than mindless thralls. Harry’s admitted he knows basically nothing about them and we know from the last two books that he won’t do research even with a gun to his head, so I can’t imagine he’s picked up anything new.
What it seems to come down to is that unlike mortals, vampires actually could harm him and he doesn’t like being around others in his own weight class.
Anyway, with the meany vampires gone Mister runs over and almost manages to knock Harry over but sadly, his girlfriend keeps him upright.
We then enter his house and he reminds us that he decorates with old wood and fancy tapestries and rugs, and I remind you all that a mere two books ago his house got demon-acided so Harry must be lying to us about his finances. He also explains about how he doesn’t even have hot water, boo hoo, he’s only capable of shooting fire from his fingertips any time he wants.
“Wow,” she said, and held the invitation inside up to the light. I couldn’t make out the words, but they had that white-yellow glint that you only get from true gold.
1) Harry, I think you are drastically underestimating our modern society’s ability to create pigments.
2) How the fuck have you seen enough gold to be able to tell anyway?
She thinks she wants to go, and FINALLY Harry explains the rules.
“Look, everyone in the old circles is big on the old laws of courtesy and hospitality. But you can only trust them to adhere to the letter of the law. If I happened to get served a bad batch of mushrooms, or someone drove by and filled the whole place with bullets and I was the only mortal there, they’d just say, ‘Oh my, what a terrible shame. So sorry, really, it won’t happen again.’ “
That’s…not really the old laws. I guess the problem is that everyone’s gotten bundled together as Nevernever critters, so everyone’s working off fae law, but fae law was bullshit and that was the point. The stories of mortals getting tripped up by fae rules aren’t about the fae being loophole abusing assholes so much as the fae having totally different rules so that mortals don’t know what they’re doing, therefore you have to stick to the exact letter of the law.
The idea that you can promise no harm will be done and then feed people poison is ludicrous, as is the idea it’s okay to have someone right outside the gates do the murdering. Do you notice how you never hear any stories about people getting around guest right by asking archers to snipe them? That’s because it’s fucking stupid. If they’re on your territory, if you promise they’ll be safe, anything that happens to them under your roof is your responsibility. This comes up over and over in stories, and we’ve even got a territory mechanic baked into magic itself in this story, so reality itself can tell if you’re invited into a place by its owner.
(Valid loophole – killing them after they leave. Having someone ready to ambush Harry is obvious, but given magic’s in play, a poison that’s not a poison until it’s combined with something normally harmless would work. That way it’d trigger after he’d left.)
“Bianca has a grudge against me,” I said. “She couldn’t just sneak up on me and tear my throat out, but she could arrange for something to happen to me more indirectly. It’s probably what she has in mind.”
Now, there is the possibility that Bianca hates him enough she’s willing to violate the rules. She did try to kill him before and he did burn her skin off before. It would be valid for Harry to weigh things up and decide that, while there will be horrible consequences for breaking the rules, Bianca may not care and take a shot at him anyway. (Especially if it’s kind of a grey area – if she does something to cripple him temporarily, it’s obviously harm but it’ll be something else that actually kills him.) We also don’t know Harry’s current standing with the White Council. Before, they were very split on if they should kill him. Morgan and his long sword eventually decided he should be left alone, but there could still be a large minority of the council that would like it if Harry met with a tragic accident. I assume they wouldn’t like vampires directly killing wizards, since failing to respond would make them look weak, but I can see them being willing to not investigate or even help cover it up.
Anyway, Rodriguez wants to go. She points out that getting that werewolf snippet aired did more than everything else she ever did put together, so If I could publish actual interviews with vampires—”…it wouldn’t matter too much because the point of the werewolf thing was you had proof. Some person saying they’re a vampire who met Napoleon isn’t proof. Harry doesn’t point out this actual flaw in her reasoning and just insists the vampire will eat her on the spot despite him admitting that the party has to at least pretend not to murder them. She reminds him that she’s sad about him neglecting their date to save babies and when do they get to do her thing?
She then asks if the White Council mentioned is the wizard version of a vampire court.
“Not really,” I told her.
“You’re a horrible liar, Harry.”
“The White Council is a group of the most powerful men and women in the world, Susan. Wizards. Their big currency is in secrets, and they don’t like people knowing about them.”
What happened to “I literally cannot tell Murphy or even tell her I can’t tell her because this is the biggest deal of all deals”, Harry?
He continues to explain how he’s a voting member and that I have to abide by their rules which is a bit interesting because it implies that there’s rules nonmembers don’t have to follow. Could Harry have not joined the council and been allowed to do all the black magic he wanted?
Rodriguez points out that it sounds like he’s supposed to show up and he agrees that yeah, he’s obligated to, but he’s still not going to and there won’t be any real consequences, which suggests Harry’s not too clear on what obligation means.
Harry finally ends the argument with makeouts. Also, she’s not wearing underwear. Given how very long he’s spent on how very short her skirt is, I find this a bit hard to believe. Anyway, then they do it, presumably while ceiling Bob watches.
What happened to “I literally cannot tell Murphy or even tell her I can’t tell her because this is the biggest deal of all deals”, Harry?
Susan has a higher clearance than Murphy, duh. But Harry still can’t tell her which level.
*dryly* I’m assuming Susan being on Dresden’s dick also helped up her clearance.
She needed higher clearance to get access to his dick. White Men Council considers it a justified cause to up her rank.
There are progressively more sordid things she has to do to get higher clearance. It’s a tough world in magic journalism.
I’m actually not entirely sure vampires’ appearance means anything. They look like bat monsters naturally, the human form is a magical construct they build, and they have at least partial control over it. While it’s never elaborated on, as far as I can remember, it’s entirely possible they can look like any human.
No, they claim authority over unaffiliated mortal magic users, at least when it comes to the Laws of Magic (I think by rules here Harry means other stuff like recognizing official truces, obeying orders of his superiors unrelated to the main laws, etc.). Most of warlocks they kill have never heard of White Men Council to begin with.
What Harry can do is join another faction recognized by the Council (like, say, fae). Then he would be able to do whatever his masters would permit without fear of the Council.
“No, they claim authority over unaffiliated mortal magic users, at least when it comes to the Laws of Magic (I think by rules here Harry means other stuff like recognizing official truces, obeying orders of his superiors unrelated to the main laws, etc.). Most of warlocks they kill have never heard of White Men Council to begin with.”
That’s about right, as I understand it.
It’s sort of like citizenship in a real-worl nation. There are some sufficiently severe crimes for which America, for instance, will hunt you down even if you aren’t an American citizen–war crimes, terrorism, etc. If you are an American citizen, then there’s additional rules you have to follow like tax laws (but on the flip side, you also have American in your corner–in theory–if another nation tries to push you around). Similarly, the groups like White Council, Red Court, etc., in the Dresdenverse function basically as nations, with their members as citizens.
The eternal paradox of Dresden. He’s so helpless and underpowered and beat up that it totally justifies him being a dick to everyone! But also super awesome and just the coolest and totally capable of pissing of everyone with no consequences!
Also, I love how it’s just assumed that the man vampire is just a guy who’s a vampire, while the lady vamp is automatically an evil sex monster. Have we had any non sex-monster female villains, out of curiosity?
Agatha? Her motivations are still traditionally feminine, just not sexual.
That’s about it at this point. I think there’s going to be one or two female villain that isn’t all about sexy times, but I’m not actually sure about it. Certainly, depraved bisexual predators are far more common.
“Then he would be able to do whatever his masters would permit without fear of the Council.”
Within limits. If Dresden went too far the White Council might decide it would make more sense to have him killed and deal with the punishment from whatever nation Dresden had joined (which could include anything from just paying a weregild, to having to surrender one of their own to be killed in exchange, to a war between the nations).
There’s an interview somewhere where someone asked Jim Butcher (paraphrased) “What would happen if Dresden joined [powerful group that shows up later in the series] and then just started breaking the Laws left and right, killing a whole bunch of people, etc? Would [powerful group] protect him?” And Butcher said “The White Council would mobilize everybody to kill him. Immediately. And the leader of [powerful group] would let Dresden deal with that on his own, on the basis of ‘you started this, you finish this.'”
Sure, but that applies to any person, not just dark wizards. It’s not like the Council would sit indly by if a vampire were to threaten to destroy the world or something.
On the other hand, I would say that a wizard officially backed by vampires should be able to get away with quite a lot as long as they stick to the traditional Red Court territory. It was described as hell on Earth, with vampires murdering humans nearly openly. Dark magic atrocities wouldn’t really stand out.
I don’t particularly want to hijack a comments thread, but I tried to contact Farla by email and the address posted in the contact doesn’t seem to work. Anyway, I thought you might be interested in my new follow-up review of Pokemon Uranium:
https://pointstick.wordpress.com/2016/09/22/pokemon-uranium-follow-up-and-in-depth-review/
Long story short, I ended up playing it to completion and, while it still has its flaws, it was a pretty good experience, I ended up enjoying it a lot and I do think it’s worth recommending now.
(For what it’s worth, I do continue to appreciate the firebombing of Dresden but, not having read them myself, find myself with little to say about them. Aside from making terrible puns that are probably in bad taste.)
Weird, no reason the emails should be offline. I’ll look into it.
Perhaps post it on her suggestions page?
I can cross-post to the suggestions page if you think she won’t see it here, but otherwise I’d rather not spam things unnecessarily :P
Do you want the error message I got from the gmail daemon, would that help with troubleshooting?
Nah, it’s fine. I can test it out my emailing myself from my gmail. But thanks!
It does sound interesting. I want to get back to my Yellow run first though.
Fair enough :) Even if you don’t want to put in the work to LP it, I do think there’s a fairly good chance you would enjoy playing it (certainly it ended up winning me and Loten over, in spite of our initial scepticism, though our pet peeves and yours may not be entirely the same).
If you do ever decide to give it a go, we’re also available for trading if that would be of interest. I completed the pokedex so I could theoretically breed a juvenile anything for you (though actually, it doesn’t have version exclusives, so the only things you can’t get yourself are your rival’s starter and whatever fossil you don’t pick, and with multiple save files – which the game supports natively – it’s actually easy to trade with yourself over their GTS to evolve things and such).
I am playing it currently! I’m on the second city. I think it’s pretty good, though I am baffled why they used those awful RTP attack animations instead of ganking Pokemon’s. The cries are also pretty weird, as there’s very little aesthetic consistency to them. The new pokemon are okay so far, but I really wish they had gone the Gen V route and stuck to them exclusively; they’re just so obviously a different art style, and the canon pokemon don’t fit in at all.
Also you totally undersell the beauty of the rival character, I love crushing stupid brats’ souls. =) Reducing him to a sobbing wreck after every battle is sooooo satisfying and that probably makes me a terrible person but I don’t care. I named the PC Chara and wow I did not realize just how appropriate that was.
(Some design decisions seem questionable, though. The fact that the fire and grass starters are doubly weak to their opposing types but the water one isn’t really rankles my OCD, especially when the whole point is that you’re supposed to be able to oneshot Theo’s starter. Combo breaker!)
It’s also really sweet that they show IVs and EVs upfront, but I’d have preferred they just removed IVs entirely. Why are people so dedicated to the “warts and all” approach?
Oh yeah, the attack animations are very much a mixed bag, I probably should have mentioned those (honestly, they do get a bit better later, some of the more powerful attacks look a lot better). I didn’t really mind the cries but I know what you mean… I thought the ones they used for the feline ones (Orchynx line, Feleng line) were really cute though. And a lot of them were recycled from official pokemon, I know Tonemy is Zubat and Palij is Pidgeotto or Pidgeot… Maybe I’m just less discerning about the art, because I didn’t notice the stylistic clash you describe.
I think Theo is definitely a YMMV thing, I always felt super guilty for inducing his tantrums but Loten’s reaction was closer to yours. And I actually thought his character development later in the game was reasonably well done. LOL at Chara though.
(I named my character Aristeia, on an odd whim, because I wasn’t crazy about the official names and it struck me as weirdly apropos for a Pokemon protagonist. It sounds like generic feminine name until you look it up and realise it’s the name for a combat trope in ancient Greek epics.)
Oh yeah, the weakness asymmetry bugged me too, though I think I justified it to myself by comparison with the first-gen starters (honestly, I think I was more annoyed that Orchynx doesn’t start with a typed move and the other two do). I almost wonder if they did it so that there was an easy way to see the alternate scenes for when you lose to Theo, because if you pick Orchynx it’s really an uphill battle. A new patch changed the fire starter’s mega ability to Drought, also, and they’re planning to make Earth Power available so that one doesn’t suck any more either. (If you don’t mind my asking, which did you pick?)
Oh yeah, the IV/EV display is great. It gets better later, too, after gym four you can buy the EV-reduction berries in Kevlar Town, and in the eighth gym town there’s a sidequest that unlocks free Super Training which makes it much easier to customise your EV spreads. I sympathise with you about not missing IVs if they’d remove them, though (I think I’ve even heard Sun/Moon might have ways to improve IVs!).
That said… if you use Mystery Gift, they gave out a shiny male jerbolta with perfect IVs, and a destiny knot, so it’s apparently reasonably straightforward to breed perfect IV mons if you want them? I don’t quite know how to do it, but lots of people are, and I think a lot of them also Wondertrade… I can’t be bothered, personally, but it’s apparently a thing.
I picked Raptorch, because the best defense is a good offense! I’m kinda regretting that, though, because pokemon seem really fragile in this! My pokemon are frequently getting at least a third of their health knocked off per attack. I’m leaning pretty heavily on my barewl right now.
they’re planning to make Earth Power available so that one doesn’t suck any more either.
I thought they had to discontuine future patches due to the C&D?
Hmm. It could just be where you are in the game – we definitely noticed the starters’ first forms started feeling really weak compared to everything else, until they finally evolved and started being awesome again. But in general I’ve definitely noticed things feel a lot more fragile, yeah.
It’s also possible you’re running afoul of a bug. Some people have reported that pokemon take around 30% extra damage if they’re holding an item; I honestly couldn’t tell if it’s real or not, I didn’t do rigourous testing or anything. But if you’re using held items you could try removing them and see if that helps.
About the updates: the creators have stopped working on it, yes. It’s not clear if it’s actually due to C&D or not, they didn’t give a reason. Regardless, the “unofficial team” are continuing to do updates and maintain a server for online features. They’re the ones who’ve been releasing the bugfix patches all along and they have the creators’ blessing to keep going. (1.0.2 added a move tutor with lots of moves but they forgot a handful, which sadly includes Earth Power right now)
So I just finished the Larkspur lab and oh, game, so close and yet so far. No, no I am not a good human, I use pokemon as meat shields and my battling style consists of subjecting them to a horrifying cycle of death and revival while I wait for the opponent to slowly exhaust itself and/or die slowly and agonizingly from Toxic! Also I forcefeed them bitter medicine even though I’m drowning in cash. I am definitely getting Farla to play this, I absolutely must see her reaction to that XD
(I actually think it would have been very workable for you-know-who — trying to avoid spoilers — to avoid joining you afterwards if the average happiness of your pokemon was too low. Especially because I really dragged my feet freeing them and read all the files multiple times first! But that would require challenging the genre and we can’t have that now can we.)
Edit: Oh, and on a similar topic, while Linkite is a creative and wonderfully messed up concept for a pokemon, it raises serious questions about why pokeballs haven’t been outlawed, or at the very least the manufacturers subjected to lawsuits. Given how the writers seem to have put a lot of effort into establishing there is a serious power structure with real law enforcement consisting of people who are for real friends with pokemon, it seems pretty glaring for that to be such a casual thing.
Oops, I somehow didn’t notice you’d replied to me again. Sorry about that… probably my fault for starting this discussion on a random post, lol.
Anyway, yes, very good point. I don’t know that I really thought about it much while I was playing the game, because the “player character is praised for being a good trainer and loved by their pokemon despite no evidence” thing is such a deeply ingrained trope in the official games, but it really doesn’t make any sense. Especially when a lot of players (like me), after this sequence, probably stuff ‘you-know-who’ into a box and forget about him, because that’s what you do with legendaries.
(Truthfully the problem goes further, I think. Pokemon games as a whole just cannot seem to grasp the idea that ‘battle’ is actually violent and painful rather than happy-fun-friendship-time. For example, I’ve been playing Colosseum and XD recently and while I like the gameplay, I can’t get over the fact that you literally cure pokemon who have been abused into ‘heartless fighting machines’, slight paraphrase, by making them fight a lot.)
There are a few things I actually liked about the Larkspur arc, admittedly, though they might raise more problems in the long run. For instance, I liked that he had his goons physically mug and kidnap the player character instead of just challenging you to pokemon battles, and I thought that worked better because Uranium doesn’t have a Team Rocket clone wandering around who conspicuously fail to do things like that again and again. It’s weakened somewhat by the fact you then escape via pokemon battles once you’re able to, but I’m willing to let that slide for the most part. I think the weakest part of that plot is the involvement of ‘you-know-who’, I really think your suggested change would help it a lot.
One thing I am really curious about is what happens if you skip Larkspur’s lab (it is supposed to be optional), or fail earlier and lock yourself out of the events (from what I understand, if you lose against you-know-who earlier in the game, that happens, I don’t know if this is intended behaviour or a bug). I seem to recall Professor Bamboo having some dialogue later that assumed the Larkspur events had happened, for instance. And there are some backstory revelations in the finale where he’s mentioned by name. I’m not curious enough to do another playthrough to find out, though, and I don’t have any backup saves that far back to mess around with.
Likewise, there’s a weird continuity snarl, I’m not sure if you’ve picked up on this one. Larkspur’s theme music is a remix of Team Rocket’s and some of his dialogue suggests he might be planning to found (or join up with?) a criminal organisation, I don’t remember it too clearly but it was obviously meant to be a TR reference. But the game also has Red and Blue existing as fictional entities within the gameworld, and NPCs explicitly mention Team Rocket being from the games. Whoops :P
Good point about Linkite, and the Rangers more broadly. I definitely noticed the weirdness of pokeball-using trainers existing alongside the Rangers without friction… honestly, I put it down to trying and not quite being able to reconcile two different canons, but I’m not familiar enough with the Pokemon Ranger games to know how much of their representation in Uranium is from there and how much is original worldbuilding (literally all I know is that Pokemon Ranger was how you get Manaphy in 4th gen).
Unrelated, but you may be interested in this lengthy blog post from one of the game’s creators:
https://oripoke.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/the-explosion-and-fallout-of-pokemon-uranium/
One more quick thing, if you’re still reading this: they’re apparently doing a special limited-time Mystery Gift event for Halloween that you might want to avail yourself of (I’m not sure if you know about it), as well as having just released a new patch. The mystery gift went up today (29 Oct) and is available through 1 November, so it’s a pretty small window.
Basically, you can get one of two pokemon with a Halloween reskin (different from their shiny colouration) and a special ability (not even their Hidden Ability, it’s unique to this form), with perfect IVs and a good nature. Or if you have multiple files you can get both and trade with yourself. There’s a Minyan recoloured to look like Dracula (which gets Speed Boost) and a Cocaran that’s pumpkin-based instead of a coconut (which gets Filter).
Not sure how I feel about the unique abilities, if these forms end up being competitively-viable it might be a problem considering how limited-time they are. But they’re cool and unique and I guess the devs might’ve thought it wouldn’t get as much enthusiasm if it was solely a cosmetic difference?
Anyway, that’s a thing.
Yeah, I saw. I don’t care that much (100% completion in Pokemon is a path to madness) but I’ll try to pick them up for Farla.
Also I finished the main plot. That was one heck of an anticlimax boss; I Toxic’d it to death, but other people say they managed to oneshot it with a speedy pokemon. Pokemon’s battle system just really isn’t built for one-on-one boss fights like other RPGs; there are just too many attacks that inflict % based damage, and pokemon are generally quite fragile even before you give the superboss a type that makes it weak to everything. Urayne would have needed both an immunity to poison and some kind of protection against nuclear weaknesses to be seriously threatening… but then it might have been too strong, since it can oneshot pretty much anything with its nuclear attacks. (Including Actan. Not sure why the game insisted you take him along when, as a dual-type, he’s far less useful than a gararewl. C’mon, why couldn’t he be a natural nuclear/steel type? He’s the god of radioactive metals! Why is he dark???)
I’m not really interested in playing further unless the new team plans to implement the postgame content (do they?), but I’ll definitely pass it on to Farla.
(In other news, I just found out that if you pick eletux Theo picks up a linkite and EVOLVES IT INTO CHAINITE??? WHAT IS WRONG WITH HIM. I really liked how normally it was restricted to unscrupulous folks like Larkspur but no, your buddy tortures a lost soul into evolution too? If you’re going to make messed-up unethical pokemon you need to commit to the implications!)
Haha, fair enough :P I liked Uranium enough to 100% but I don’t blame you for not wanting to, I just happen to be one of those crazy completionists. If you don’t manage to get them in time, I could probably clone mine into a save file and email it to one of you (it’s not hard to do).
I have mixed feelings about the last boss too; a lot of people seem to struggle with it but I didn’t have too bad a time either (my yatagaryu outsped it easily though he couldn’t quite manage a oneshot, and focus sash took care of the rest). I do think its ability/special weather condition is supposed to counteract its weaknesses, but maybe that’s not working right? It’s been a while (and several patches) since I fought it, and I don’t quite remember. I agree with you that Pokemon’s battle system doesn’t work well for that kind of boss battle.
(I may have to revisit that fight anyway, because it was recently pointed out to me that a ratsy/raffiti can sketch atomic punch, which is otherwise exclusive to enemy-Urayne. That sounds fun.)
And yeah, Actan is disappointing (I think I was most annoyed by the fact it screws one of your party members out of being in the hall of fame, heh; I ended up resetting to fix that). My guess is they didn’t give it the nuclear typing because it’s supposed to be a novel mutation in the gameworld, and Actan was supposed to be a preexisting being? Regardless, though, I like your suggestion.
From what I understand, the new team do intend to implement postgame stuff eventually (as far as I know, the creators have passed on their original plans to work from), but I’ve no idea what sort of timeline that would be on. There are a handful of postgame things already, but they’re pretty minor (you can go after Lanthan and Actan, fight the “Elite Trainers” – one’s in Lanthan’s cave, one’s on a secret island in Route 14, and a pair are up a waterfall in Victory Road, and you can redo the championship to fight Theo). I liked the elite trainers though, they had a few interesting gimmicks.
Very good point about Theo’s Chainite; that’s a very weird choice (honestly, they probably didn’t think about it, which is annoying because as you say they seem to have done elsewhere). Also annoying as I tend to think of that as the “canonical” team for Theo, because going by the different “personality test” results the player gets the raptorch seems to make the most sense for him. It’s really the same problem as a lot of the creepier canonical pokedex entries have, where it makes no sense to treat them as a normal pokemon (I’m thinking of e.g. spiritomb, it’s supposed to be 108 trapped souls but we can still stuff it in a ball and make it fight with no consequences? Or phantump, which is literally a dead child possessing a dead tree?).
I definitely want to know what Farla thinks if she plays this, though :)
Harry was afraid of the vampires because they knew they worked for Bianca,and Bianca wanted to kill him. he was being careful
Being afraid of someone isn’t a good reason to bully them.