So now I have to get to Dragonspiral Tower. Luckily this map shows you major locations and I determine that it’s near one of the various cities that are still greyed out. I have the choice of going through a tunnel or crossing a bridge, so naturally, let’s see if I can get across the damn bridge now.
Opelucid City! It looks better, by which I mean non-icy and more boring. All the people just talk about change and not the part where sky pirates shot an ice cannon into their city.
The truth people pursue is different from person to person and Pokemon to Pokemon, some idiot says. In this city, it seems the truth is in constant change. Then it’s not the truth! Truth is an objective thing!
Anyway, the area outside isn’t iced either, so now I can move around the route normally. The cave entrance to the side is blocked by rubble, though.
If I win, give me your Pokemon!
…
Hmph! I take weak Pokemon and raise them with tender care until they’re good and strong! That’s my policy!
The game has issues.
I did read an interesting fanfic about this, aeons ago.
Anyway, on to the bridge! Hey, test idiot, gonna stop me?
The results of the test showed that 4,934 people can be on the Tubeline Bridge at one time.
“But even more interesting was how much of the rubble was still usable!”
On to the bridge, with its special camera angle.
Argh! screams the first person in the spiky hate box. Loud! It’s way too noisy! It’s all the trains!
Your own screaming can’t be helping.
They never stop! When the train runs below, it’s unbearably noisy! To be more specific… The noise level is about 70 decibels!
That’s…not that bad.
It’s as noisy as the main street in Castelia City when there are a lot of people.
So not really noisy at all.
Argh! So loud! If we just had a Pokemon with the Soundproof Ability, we could make all this noise go away!
Huh. I thought soundproof meant the pokemon itself wasn’t affected by noise.
Hm, if it’s like an aura of silence, all the serious badass hitmen with their sniper rifles must carry around whismur.
Talking again to see if they’ll request I trade them a pokemon with the ability, I learn that the number changes. This time it’s 120 decibels. It’s as noisy as an engine of a plane in top gear! See, that’s a lot more valid.
80: It’s as noisy as loud people! So…you.
100: It’s as noisy as the horn of a truck right next to my ear!
That seems to be it.
This Tubeline Bridge was No. 1 in bridge rankings in Unova.
“All the others crumpled at 4,933 people!”
That means it’s the sturdiest!
Well actually there’s more to a bridge than how much weight it can hold. For example, what about wind stress? Or earthquakes, how secure is its foundation? Plus, there’s the issue of vibrations, those trains are probably causing a lot of stress!
To be honest I’m not even sure why they checked how many people could stand on it when obviously it’s mostly used for trains.
Beyond, palpitoad!
It lives in the water and on land. It uses its long, sticky tongue to immobilize its opponents.
Stunfisk!
When its opponent can’t be paralyzed, it contorts itself with unexpected speed and flops away.
Does it have some sort of water protection ability? I just think something that’s part ground and lives in water should come with that.
The pokemon here are in the fifties, and the trainer pokemon the sixties. This is why the elite four really need to be the end of the game, there should not be random ordinary trainers with higher level pokemon than theirs.
Holy shit ninjas!
You… Congratulations. Ghetsis won’t do anything anymore…
So I’ve crushed a man’s soul. Does he go to jail like a regular person now?
No, to be more precise, he can’t do anything anymore…
I get it, my point is that you still go to jail for committing crimes.
That’s why we won’t forgive you. Battle us!
…I have the option of saying no? How does that even make sense?
If I say no they just vanish, but they reappear if I go back – see, there’s an itemball behind them which I guess is meant to be enticement, even though 95% of the stuff is useless let’s be honest here.
But hey, I want to fight them.
I’ll win! That is the only way to regain his lost heart!
How is knowing the person who kicked his ass is even weaker than someone else going to make him feel better?
L70 bisharp. What are you doing fighting me when you could be doing an assault on the League itself?!
L72 absol
L70 bisharp again.
He disappears, and another one ninjadisappears/reappears in front of me.
What do you want? Do you want to keep battling?
Well, if you don’t mind I’d like to go heal my volcarona…
I see… When the season changes, I’ll battle you.
Huh? Wait, now they actually left! I guess they’ll come back in winter, hopefully higher level but probably another L70 trio. The item is a PP up.
There’s four weirdos walking in a circle, which is more like a square.
Truth! Ideals! Two dragons!
Truth and ideals. Move forward hand in hand. (Music note)
Fused by splicers. Divided by splicers.
When one is divided, (music note) the world will broaden. (Music note)
I though the dragon splitting was a bad thing? I mean, the idea that truth and ideals are irreconcilably different sure seems like that.
Inside a house, someone says, Reshiram and Zekrom have lived for thousands of years. They have likely met many heroes and bestowed their knowledge on them…
Wait, so this happened lots of times before? I had the impression N and I were the first since the original heroes. Certainly everyone talked like this had only happened once before.
But the truth remains a mystery, and the world still isn’t ideal. Yet those two still believe in people. Even in heroes… How foolish.
The fact everything isn’t perfect doesn’t mean every individual is an equal failure for it. They don’t believe in “people”, if they did they wouldn’t select a single individual who fulfilled the criteria properly. Clearly they’re quite picky about who they believe worthy.
You can go inside the gym. The puzzles are easy.
Brycen: In the past, when I was hurt and depressed, Alder shared this with me… There is strength in being with other people and Pokemon. Receiving their support makes you stronger. I worked as a Gym Leader, and I came to understand what he meant by that. My desire became to strengthen this relationship that makes everyone stronger–the relationship between people and Pokemon.
You talk and talk and when is the battle?
By focusing on the path of an actor, I want to make everyone think that living together with Pokemon is exciting and wonderful. Teaching is being taught… Excuse me, it’s time for training.
AND THE FUCKER JUST WALKS AWAY FUCK YOU I’M GOING TO MAKE MY DRAGON EAT YOU
Back outside: Always, the tower looms, disdainful of the wind and snow. Perhaps its presence is telling us not to forget dreams and ideals…
The fact that apparently you can substitute “dreams” for “truth” in the phrase everyone’s using explains a lot about why they keep acting like it’s subjective.
Sawsbuck!
They migrate according to the seasons, so some people call Sawsbuck the harbingers of spring.
Other people call them harbingers of winter because they live where sawsbuck go in the winter. Seriously, pokedex writers, think.
Okay on to the tower at last.
FUCK IT’S NOT-JUNIPER. Let’s see if I can sneak by.
We still don’t know anything about it. Could the Dragonspiral Tower somehow symbolize ideals? Could it somehow represent truth?
He turns back to me and from the exclamation mark exploding from his head, he’s surprised, so I guess he was talking to himself.
Cedric Juniper: So you came here as well! He turns away. Lecture mode engaged!
It was two years ago… In this tower, a certain man and a certain Pokemon came face-to-face. This man pursued his ideals so he could change the world. That’s right. This building rising serenely into the sky is the Dragonspiral Tower.
I KNOW ALREADY
It has towered over this land since before Unova was founded. On the highest floor, the legendary Dragon-type Pokemon
arg
was waiting for the appearance of a person seeking his or her ideals… It was exactly how the legends said it would be…
Something startles him again.
Ah! The Dark Stone!
I can only assume my avatar gave him an unimpressed look and pulled it out of her bag in the hopes it’d make him stop pontificating.
If that’s the case, you must be headed to the top floor. Changing the world… That’s an outrageous idea, but it is possible to change yourself.
God, what’s with you people and your defeatist attitudes? I’m not getting godly power so I can find the power within to accept the world’s flaws. I’m getting it SO I CAN REWRITE THE WORLD TO MY SPECIFICATIONS.
…As long as you pursue your ideals.
I’m not going to “pursue” them like some sort of zen thing, I’m going to fucking accomplish things. Get out of the way or get eaten.
My! That conversation sure took a serious turn!
No, but seriously, move.
Maybe something light and sweet would help balance things out!
Your death will be painful.
He gives me an old gateau, better known as that stuff you find in a rotting haunted mansion. Yeah like I’m putting that in my mouth.
Be seeing you!
Not if you want to live.
Anyway, it’s kind of interesting climbing the place when there’s no one else here. Also, there’s a string of the three orbs for the fourth gen legendaries for some reason. Also, a comet shard? A shard which fell to the ground when a comet approached. So like starpiece/stardust, only more legitimately star-related.
The screen shakes.
The Dark Stone… It’s trembling inside the bag!
It asks if I want to take the stone out. Say no and I get shoved back a step to try again. I really wonder why the game bothers asking these things.’
It sucks in dark and blue energy. Looks pretty sinister, honestly.
The Dark Stone draws in the aura of the surroundings and converts it into a powerful force, which is…now…Being released!
God, narrator.
Now it’s releasing purple and white energy. Zekrom wakes.
So I gotta fight this guy then? First, there’s some item. Another comet shard. Okay, but now, fight?
Huh, if you try to talk to it from behind your sprite then walks through him to stand in front again.
Bazzazzazzash! it shouts in spiky hate box.
L70. It’d be more difficult if it didn’t keep using imprison for some reason.
…then it goes into the first ultraball I throw.
I can catch the legendary dragon of ideals, but not a fucking metang?
This legendary Pokemon can scorch the world with lightning. It assists those who want to build an ideal world.
And then N appears! Hi N!
N: Zekrom has recognized you as the new hero.
I guess we’ll say that’s why it was so easy to catch. I still wish I could have done it N’s way of just asking. It’s not like it was an epic battle or anything.
That’s right! As a Trainer with a will strong enough to change the world!
Which just makes it the more depressing that N hasn’t. Douchy got you good, didn’t he?
I have something to tell you. Go to the Giant Chasm! Kyurem has returned.
God, N, you are just the bestest NPC ever.
That’s what my friend has told me.
You mean your zoroark or one of the others?
Farla!
N!
The world that you desire for Pokemon and humans… I look forward to seeing how full of love that world is.
It’ll be great! First we’ll kill the bad people, then maybe some new laws… No more of this “people and Pokemon” nonsense division, no more of them being property…
N starts to walk away. Then he stops and shakes his head. Someday… Pokemon and humans will be bound together without Poke Balls. They will simply truth and help one another. Make that kind of world.
Okay! Humans should help pokemon as much as pokemon help humans, that seems a good idea.
Now, to get my ice dragon. Or possibly just ice pokemon, since there was that hint it might not be a dragon type. I’ll find out!
The cane’s still there, so shouldn’t it be impossible to catch Kyurem since pokeballs don’t work?
It’s the cane Ghetsis was holding. Was he controlling Kyurem with it?
No, he said it was for pokeball blocking. Pay attention!
Well. Let’s do this.
Haaahraan!
Well. Flamethrower does normal damage, so it seems it is part dragon after all. Also, for some reason it’s L70. So, L70+L70 combine into L50?
It’s easy to get down to a single HP, but it will not get in the ultraball. Okay. Fine. Masterball it is!
This legendary ice Pokemon waits for a hero to fill in the missing parts of its body with truth or ideals.
Hm, interesting. And yep, dragon/ice.
Now there’s a pokeball in front of me, I guess of Kyurem?
Cheren: Farla! That was Kyurem just now, right? So that’s the legendary Pokemon Team Plasma, or should I say Ghetsis, was using…
Bianca: Farla, you’re amaxing!
See, Cheren, this is why Bianca is a better NPC than you.
You’ve met so many Pokemon! Hey now! Your Pokedex should be pretty full, right? I’m sure Professor Juniper will be really happy if you show her!
Cheren: I’m sure she was!
Huh?
In Unova, actually in the whole world, there are still many Pokemon that are waiting to meet you, though!
Bianca: Still… How many Pokemon could there be in all? I think I’ll go back to Nuvema Town and ask Professor Juniper!
Thanks for reminding me where she is. You continue to be the better NPC.
They head off.
The pokeball turns out to be an itemball holding DNA Splicers. Presumably I can use this to create black or white Kyurem.
So. I’m now the legendary hero, with two of the three dragons to my name!
The game’s been pretty terrible up to this point, though.
Most of the game is following after Failry and listening to NPCs talk to each other. About the only halfway amusing thing is Team Plasma telling Failry to stop asking about the damn purrloin already. Colress would have made an okay recurring character but you only see him what, twice before the boss battle? He wasn’t really built up that well. And really, most of what I liked about Colress was just that he appeared alone and talked to me, instead of in conjunction with and to Failry. Failry is the core of the problem because as soon as he’s removed from the plot, everything gets a thousand times better.
I’m also increasingly baffled by what the moral here is supposed to be. So, some of what Team Plasma said was right, but still people should only do it because they feel like and not because anyone’s making them? And Team Plasma people who were acting to help pokemon were wrong, even though the fact the same organization is full of pokemon-abusers proves that there are some people who do need pokemon taken from them. Humans can live in harmony with pokemon, but only the harmony of pokemon obeying humans. People argue about if pokemon are tools or not, but no one disputes they’re property. But then, the narrative did seem somewhat unimpressed by Failry’s vendetta, or maybe that was just me. I really can’t tell what was meant to be behind most of this.
“Hm, if it’s like an aura of silence, all the serious badass hitmen with their sniper rifles must carry around whismur.”
DELIGHTFUL
“I really can’t tell what was meant to be behind most of this.”
I haven’t played it, but just based on what you’ve reported… It almost seems like it’s not supposed to have a moral or take away, so much as it’s presenting you with the “lots of different viewpoints!” it keeps talking about and leaving you to try to reconcile them yourself. Which would be quite sophisticated if it weren’t done so messily, and also it’s incredibly unsatisfying because you can’t actually *do* anything about it. I could be way off though.
Oh, that makes sense with it. I guess I can’t get over that saying everyone should make up their own mind is itself a viewpoint.
I suppose if you view the pokemon as set pieces in a morality play it works very well. How you interact with them shows your viewpoint and how valid it is. It’s important to your personal growth that you have the option of abusing pokemon.
It reminds me of the arguments I got into about how letting people do what they want isn’t actually free will and God could totally let people decide to shoot someone without actually letting someone get shot. Everyone just kept saying that if God stopped you from shooting someone how would he know you really meant to, and I kept saying that if you pulled the damn trigger you meant to. Apparently letting some people see the consequences of their actions is always more important than other people being those consequences.
I always thought the point was that they’re to impress onto you that ‘with great power comes great responsibility, but really, nobody’s sure what that responsibility is, so just do listen to what we have to say and make a (somewhat) informed decision you can do nothing about’. By which point you’re the strongest trainer and utilize your power by crushing everyone under your heel, but it still doesn’t make you the ruler, and so like any good hero, you ride your dragon off into the sunset, searching for a better world where you can actually have fun if you can’t rule the world, aka the previous and better pokemon games.
Yeah, but Spiderman doesn’t swing off to go hang out on a mountain or whatever. The responsibility is to USE your power. When you see something bad happen and have the power to stop it, your responsibility is to act, and correspondingly your responsibility is to try harder than other people to tell what the right action is.
I didn’t take away a single person’s pokemon here! Half of Team Plasma bragged they abuse pokemon, and they still have those pokemon! God knows how many other people mistreat pokemon and just aren’t bragging about it constantly! Ghetsis is still around and it’s supposedly okay because he’s not currently being evil? No! That’s like “why should I trip the burglar I’m sure he’s done burglarizing so let’s forget about it” and it gets your loved ones killed!
“Yeah, but Spiderman doesn’t swing off to go hang out on a mountain or whatever.”
I feel like there is a better story in there. Something to the tune of the protagonist from B/W the first believing that the only responsible thing to do after recieving their living nuke was to go into hiding to protect the rest of humanity from getting their hands on it and destroying themselves.
That would work way better with the legendaries from gen three or four, since the dragons are keyed to their respective heroes.
One and two work fine as well – you’ve already eliminated the big threat, and so you retreat to hone your skills.
But there’s so much that needs to be done! In the original games, Team Rocket was motivated by money, so by destroying the organization, you either stopped crimes from being committed or made it so they’d be individual criminals who could be taken down by the police. But there’s no rule about how you have to treat pokemon, so anyone abusing them is just going to keep on doing that. You haven’t done anything to help pokemon by removing the head of Team Plasma. Hell, the ninjas are still at large and unless we’re meant to view Liepard as angry at Failry because it liked its previous owners, it’s presumably meant to be one of those pokemon whose hearts were closed by abusive! And they’re still there and they still have all their other pokemon!
So N passes the mantle of legendary heroism on to you and charges you with abolishing pokemon slavery… and this is not the point of the game. And we’re probably never going to hear anything about it again.
WHY WAVE IT IN FRONT OF IT IF YOU’RE NOT GOING TO LET US HAVE IT?
Okay, yes, it would ruin the existing game mechanics, but still.
But they could so easily fix the game mechanics! There’s lots of other monster fighting games that avoid the problem. For example, all you have to do is say that pokemon only appear if they decide to challenge trainers and want to be caught by suitably impressive ones. And maybe do some Mystery Dungeon type thing where you stop keeping pokemon in box limbo and have them hang out elsewhere. Maybe you could call them up and transfer them through your cell phone to change your team, Japan should be all over cell phone gimmicks.
There’s a Japanese game called ‘Keitai Denjuu Terefangu’ where you collect monsters’ phone numbers and call them up when you need them in battle. :)
Omg that’s adorable why do we not get that?
I know, it’s a shame. I tried it and it’s pretty fun! (Pokemon Diamond and Jade are the bootleg versions of it, if you’re familiar with those.) Apparently the guy who ran the company who made it (Smilesoft) was arrested for child prostitution and the business went down sometime in the earlyish 2000s, I think.
Incidentally, Farla, did you ever see the fully animated trailer? It gives voices to Cheren, Bianca, and Failry, as well as the two PCs. I would be interested to hear your (eventual) take on it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkTsd0iU97s
I watched that! I was really dismayed by all of the Cheren, Hugh, and Nate running around being heroes, because if you were going to have Cheren and Hugh there, and then N doing more hero-looking stuff later, would it really have hurt to use Rosa instead?
Agreed, I figured she’d show up again so that it would be somewhat, I don’t know, balanced, but no. Maybe they were trying to imply that Nate and Rosa have simultaneous quests going on, so while they’re on the boat, her serperior is laying waste to Clay’s pokemon.
The way it’s laid out, it makes it look like she’s just a rival character he has to beat. We see his journey beginning and we see him fighting bad guys, and she’s there just being a strong trainer in a gym battle – we’re not even given a shot of her at different times to show she’s growing stronger like he is. (And we even see him at a gym so that’s not even something she gets to herself.) Even the pokemon choice! Her having a grass type to his fire type should position him as the rival, but no, under the new three-person setup the first BW introduced she’s actually the secondary Bianca-style rival, the one who doesn’t even get a type advantage.
It’s also a reminder that everyone important is male. The games did a better job disguising this, with Juniper and Bianca showing up a lot, but as the trailer proves, at all the big important parts of the game, when it actually matters it’s some combination of male characters doing things.