Let’s finish up the last dangling threads.

To the desert and the guy asking for a “luna…” pokemon. God, I hate this desert. It’s not even a fun sort of maze, it’s just badly designed so you can’t make out where you are properly.

Riolu’s evolving, at least.

They can detect the species of a living being–and its emotions–from over half a mile away. They control auras and hunt their prey in packs.

Alright. And the guy who wants a lunatone?

Oh… Ohhhh… Yes… That lunatone you journey with… It’s been…30 years…but…

Then the narration kicks in: A mysterious power began to emanate from your Lunatone!

Naaaah…

And the screen goes white. Then the guy starts crying. Oh. Ohhhhhh. OH! And now he’s smiling. I’ve remembered… I’ve remembered everything! How to return home at last… And who I am! Thank you, Lunatone… And do not worry. Those star pulses that you bestowed upon me 30 years ago have all been made safe. I entrusted them to a group of wonderful men.

????????

Thank you, young lady… I think I can go home now… Thanks to the power of your Lunatone. Back to space! Here… This is my thanks. I hope you will take it, without holding back, together with my thoughts and wishes.

A moon stone. I wonder if the person in charge of sidequests wasn’t aware you’d be getting piles of evolution stones from the pokemon mine.

I will never forget…the people of this world.

Except for how you’ll lose your memory again going home.

And now…I think I’ll see myself out. Fare thee well!

…and he spins a bunch of time and ascends into the sky. Well, that sure was a thing.

Aw, and then Bonnibel’s idle animation kicks in and she fans herself to indicate she’s hot and wants to leave. Okay.

Let’s go gather up the last two gods. I’ll get tapu lele first.

Chinchou’s evolving into lanturn! Alright, I just got the last two I needed for the Akala island’s pokedex simultaneously.

This Pokemon flashes a bright light that blinds its prey. This creates an opening for it to deliver an electrical attack.

And my new tapu lele, who’s psychic/fairy:

As it flutters about, it scatters its strangely glowing scales. Touching them is said to restore good health on the spot.

Good luck ever doing that again, Alolans!

(Wouldn’t it have made more sense for this to be a feature of Bulu, given its ability creates a healing zone?)

Now let’s check out the Lake of the Sunne.

…nothing. Okay, Moone?

Rift!

Beyond the distortion you can see what looks to be another world… Will you go there?

Hell yes.

Okay, now the world is one where this is the Sunne altar instead, and also it’s dark. And I can go anywhere on the regular map.

I know marketing would never allow it, but you should be able to catch the Sun exclusives here. There’d still be the exclusive ultrabeasts, and with global trading it’s not like exclusives even force you to get your friends playing, so they’re not needed.

Also, I’m really disappointed that when I go to Bonnibel’s house, her mom knows her instead of chatting about have I met her son the champion???

I come to the center of the alt dimension’s platform.

Lunala suddenly cried toward the sky!

Mahina-peeeaaa!!!

Another Pokemon appeared from somewhere!

A solgaleo literally flickering into existence before Nebby, in fact.

…and then I guess they fuck? Because now there’s a cosmog.

Would you like to take Cosmog with you?

Well, that’s better than making me beat up a baby.

Saying no does nothing. It doesn’t react, the narration says nothing. Why even ask the question?

In ages past, it was called the child of the stars. It’s said to be a Pokemon from another world, but no specific details are known.

And it’s pure psychic type. And only knows splash, which does explain why that was all Lillie thought to shout when she was playing at being a trainer. It’s ability is “unaware”: When attacking, the Pokemon ignores the target Pokemon’s stat changes. So I guess as far as cosmog are concerned, if they don’t notice something, it doesn’t exist? That actually is the sort of reality-bending effect I’d expect from something meant to be a relative of the ultrabeasts.

Well, time to powerlevel up this L5 baby.

First, to the final tapu. Hope’s Ruins, how fitting.

Well, the addition of aqua ring makes it take a bit longer, but it’s ultimately futile. Tapu Fini is mine!

I’m a bit torn about the designs. On the one hand, I appreciate that exactly 50% of them are made to look feminine, rather than the more standard imbalance. On the other, I don’t like sticking gendered attributes on a species in the first place. I plan to resolve this by referring to them by the opposite gender.

The guardian deity of Poni, it can control water. People say it can create pure water that will wash away any uncleanness.

You reached out and touched the statue… There is no reaction from the statue…

Now and forever.

I decide to do a bit more training before heading to the battle tree, so I go to the battle buffet instead. I accidentally trigger the minigame where a janitor demands I pick up pokemon shit and feed it to his grimer. I’m not sure if it’s badly designed or intended to be surprisingly annoying, but one is really hard to find. When I do stuff the pile of radioactive sludge full of excrement, I’m rewarded with the TM for round, because Having a delightful song in your heart will help you get through even the hardest jobs. That is particularly unfortunate given I’m working on a song-related metaphor for the dittochild.

I spend a bit more time battling to finish turning my dragonair into a dragonite.

Incur the wrath of this normally calm Pokémon at your peril, because it will smash everything to smithereens before it’s satisfied.

So it seems like the recurring theme with dragon types is they’re chill until you anger them.

Then it’s time to fight Blue again.

Blue: You got me! We were called here to be the new bosses of this here Battle Tree!

God fucking dammit Kukui.

Blue: We’ll definitely battle again…if you can manage to make it through the Battle Tree, that is! And when we do, I’ll show you just what a top Kanto Trainer can do!

Red: … … …

And off they trot.

The battle tree itself is…well, it’s the same grind of random trainers, only three pokemon, and the idea that difficulty can be simulated by the computer cheating a bunch.

I go fight Mina instead, and my cosmog levels up to cosmoem.

There’s something accumulating around the black core within its hard shell. People think this Pokemon may come from another world.

It also learns cosmic power! So now it knows three moves, none of which are at all useful.

Teleport was learned at L23, so I guess that’s all Nebby was doing. Perhaps the fact it was so bad at it means it was lower level than that? But then, it failed at teleporting to safety when it was nearly cosmoem level, so…I guess it’s just really, really bad at teleporting.

Mina: Hrmmm! Well, this is frustrating. I failed to really use my full power… But it was a fun battle, so take this, big-time!

Ah, a bottle cap.

Mina: I’d like to draw a picture of the way you look when you’re battling, Bonnibel! Let’s have another full-power Pokemon battle again sometime, yeah?

No.

Also, I offered up that shiny L100 lunatone back to the internet and got a solgaleo in return.

This Pokemon is said to be a male evolution of Cosmog. At the activation of its third eye, it departs for another world.

At this point, my pokedex says I have 299/299 pokemon and there’s no empty slots. However, it’s still at 99%, there’s another one somewhere. And the internet informs me I should make for 10 Carat Hill and pop a repel.

Necrozma. Bizarre looking, but sadly still humanoid.

The battle also plays out quite oddly, with it having rather odd moves. Still, it’s caught in the end. Probably would’ve been harder had the internet not also said to avoid using the beastballs.

Rotom identifies it as a legendary despite its ultrabeast looks and the fact it’s coming after the other five.

GOAAALLL! You did it! You really did it, pal! You completed the Alola Pokedex! Zzz-zzzzzt!

The pokedex describes it as the prism pokemon and a pure psychic type – why not /rock, as in, crystals? Not a unique combo, but one shared with solrock and lunatone seems fitting for a game that has such a connection to time.

Light is apparently the source of its energy. It has an extraordinarily vicious disposition and its constantly firing off laser beams.

Returning to the overworld, the narration kicks in. You caught the mysterious life-form that appeared to be an Ultra Beast…

Sun’s pokedex turns out to be a bit more relevant:

Reminiscent of the Ultra Beasts, this life-form, apparently asleep underground, is thought to have come from another world in ancient times.

I think I know what the distinction is. Ultrabeasts are the ones still chasing the energy. Necrozma was woken up by all the tears in reality, and we know those were opening in the sky, which is where it was flying around when Looker saw it, but it made no effort to seek out those marked by the energy and has to be hunted down by me instead.

A pokemon is a creature that’s been in our world long enough that the energy of the portal has worn off and it either can’t sense the residual energy on others or it knows not to chase them. And maybe that’s the only thing the beastballs are looking at, that aura. After all, since it’s impossible to catch totem pokemon it’s impossible to know if beastballs would work on them, and perhaps the very fact Aether seems to have volunteered their anti-capture technology for use in those areas is because they didn’t want people to try out capturing totem pokemon and notice something along those lines.

Well. I think I’m done. Kukui, what do you have to say about my completed pokedex?

…still going on about z-powers. Bye then.

…

It’s hard to know what to think of the story of this game, in large part because it’s actually possible to think about the story this time. Normally, my reading is inevitably going to be heavy on alternative interpretations, but here, there’s a whole lot of stuff that’s not even obvious subtext but just flat-out text.

Lillie is very explicitly all about an abusive parent and Guzma is the same. We’ve got Hala driving his son off and scaring his grandson with his behavior – the Hala we spend the game with is the one who decided to act differently for Hau’s sake.

But it goes beyond that, and that’s where it gets murky.

It’s not just Guzma’s dad. Plumeria says no adult before Lusamine ever gave a shit about Guzma. I think you could even say that Lusamine and Wicke are the same as Guzma’s family situation – his mother sounds like she wasn’t directly abusing him she alternated between doing nothing to help and making excuses for the person who was, and then makes fresh excuses for the kid’s behavior rather than doing anything about the problem. Similarly, everyone keeps acting like Wicke is good for…what? Keeping everything Lusamine did going while leaving Lillie to handle her mother by herself. She talks about how hard Gladion worked to learn to sew his own clothes, while he’s still wearing the same shredded pants he outgrew at least a year back at the end of the game. She doesn’t help. (And she knows Lillie is chasing an impossible cure – because the jellyfish poison and the amnesia are unrelated, as Wicke knows full well but evidently said nothing about, and all curing Lusamine of the nihilego’s poison will do is make her less bombastic about what she’s always been. The most likely outcome is simply she gets better at manipulating and abusing people again.)

Hala’s positioned like he should be the good adult to counter the bad ones, except Guzma’s story makes it clear that he isn’t. He didn’t just ignore that a kid was getting abused. He’s someone who Guzma not only looked up to but actually had the whole master/apprentice setup…and yet, it’s still stated that no adult but Lusamine even pretended Guzma was worth anything. Look what he says to you at the elite four. “Old Hala will make you holler!”? Yeah, wonder where Guzma got the idea battling is about beating people down.

An adult tells us, “That Hala… He’s too soft on young Hau. When Hau was just a little thing, he once saw Hala in a real fury and Old Hala’s face was so terrible then that the boy burst into tears! Hala couldn’t do a thing to console him. I think he’s been holding something of himself back in front of Hau every since that day.” The game introduces the Hala and Hau thing like Hau’s just some delicate flower – but if you’re treating people so terribly that bystanders are scared, the problem isn’t them. Especially when the whole thing is wrapped in vagueness – was Hala’s expression just very angry? Was he screaming abuse? Was he hitting the other person? Not important. What’s important is that Hau needs a bit of tough love to shape up and stop being such a wuss. Only a pathetic baby would be bothered by Hala’s completely appropriate fits of rage.

And the resolution is that Hau moves beyond just wanting to have fun with his pokemon, because that’s failure loser talk. His grandfather is getting harsher, but that’s okay, he’s so happy about this, it means he’s become better, it means he’s proving himself able to take it, it means he’s becoming the person everyone else wants him to become (maybe even his dad will come back?), and really, if Hala wasn’t harsh, why, it’d mean he didn’t really love Hau, right? Hala orders some Skull kids to start dancing, and Hau nods and says he’ll oversee it. Hau will be the next kahuna, just like everyone said he should be. And he’ll start barking orders, because that’s what love looks like, and then he’ll start screaming them, and it’ll all be how it should be. Spare the rod and spoil the child.

And who is Hala? Why, he’s one of the kahunas. This is where the abuse narrative starts to expand from individual families into the social structure. Everyone agrees Hau is a wuss, just as everyone finds Guzma’s bahavior unremarkable to the point he’s got a following of younger kids who don’t find threats of/actual beatings a dealbreaker. There seems to be a class element to it as well. The two up and coming trainers that we’re told are super awesome are Ilima with his gold trophies who lives in a mansion and got to travel abroad and Kahili of an even more wealthy landowning family and who was similarly out traveling the world. Meanwhile, we find Skull kids in trailer homes. Kukui and Guzma were trainers at th same time who both knew Hala, but Guzma does not have a ring and or one of the three starters while Kukui got both even though it’s Guzma who behaves more slavishly toward the guy – and while we don’t know Kukui’s exact place, we know he got to travel abroad as a trainer and then get an education to be a professor.

Our villainous team for this game is a bunch of scared teenage dropouts devoted to a violent twenty-something who either threatens to or actually does harm them. Failing to complete the island challenge is a big deal – one of the only positive familial relationships in the entire game shows the kid believing his dad thinks he’s worthless for not completing the challenge and needing to be told that no, it isn’t like that. The eevee postgame and the tourist areas suggest there are just not many opportunities here, and look at Kukui – what sort of professor is he, really? He’s doing some nebulous research into “moves” that’s mostly pokemon tackling him while his wife has finished her research into mindreading pokemon dreams and is now looking into other dimensions. His research is so pointless he spends most of the game running around doing something else, and he moonlights as a masked battler on top of that. He seems to have become a pokemon professor because it was the only job avaliable that let him keep being a trainer at all, and what does he want to do with what little power he has? Turn it into a copy of the mainland he wasn’t good enough for and let him be for just one time the final battle at the top of the Pokemon League.

Then scale up again. What are the tapu?

They’re fickle. They’re powerful. They’re guardians, but every story about them is how destructive they are and people saying, Well, I’m sure there was a good reason… They wouldn’t have done it if we hadn’t done something wrong. And they must be behind the totem pokemon, right…? And those must have a purpose, they must want areas defended, they must want us to turn this into a system of challenges and to measure our worth by them! And perhaps battle would please them as well? We know whatever they are, one of their own kahunas ultimately rebelled and got crushed for it, and that the Skull kiddos are the remnants of that earlier rebellion. You disobey the tapu and they come for you, and everyone else averts their eyes and whispers you should’ve known better, you made them do it.

Scale way back down. Pokemon can call for help, but their help may turn on them, or you, the player, can choose to terrorize one to call victim after victim into the grinder.

And let’s consider our new mega evolution entries.

Alakazam(Mega): As a result of Mega Evolution, its power has been entirely converted into psychic energy, and it has lost all strength in its muscles.
Alakazam(Mega): Its hidden psychic power has been unleashed. A glance at someone gives it knowledge of the course of that person’s life, from birth to death.

Slowbro(Mega): All the energy from Mega Evolution poured into the Shellder on its tail, leaving Slowpoke to be swallowed whole.
Slowbro(Mega): When bathed in the energy of Mega Evolution, Shellder converts into impregnable armor. There is virtually no change in Slowpoke.

Gengar(Mega): Gengar’s relationships are warped. It has no interest in opponents unless it perceives them as prey.
Gengar(Mega): The energy of Mega Evolution awakened it. It sinks into another dimension, where it keeps a patient watch for its chance to attack.

Kangaskhan(Mega): Mega Kangaskhan’s strength derives from the mother’s happiness about her child’s growth. Watching it grow up keeps her spirits high.
Kangaskhan(Mega):Thanks to Mega Evolution, its child grows. But as the child is good only at fighting and nothing else, its mother feels uneasy about its future.

Pinsir(Mega): The influence of Mega Evolution leaves it in a state of constant excitement. It pierces enemies with its two large horns before shredding them.
Pinsir(Mega): Bathed in the energy of Mega Evolution, its wings become unusually developed. It flies at speeds of approximately 30 mph.

Gyarados(Mega): Mega Evolution also affects its brain, leaving no other function except its destructive instinct to burn everything to cinders.
Gyarados(Mega): It jets water from the orifices on its sides, streaking above the water surface at supersonic speed.

Aerodactyl(Mega): Part of its body has become stone. Some scholars claim that this is Aerodactyl’s true appearance.
Aerodactyl(Mega): When it Mega Evolves, it becomes more vicious than ever before. Some say that’s because its excess of power is causing it pain.

Scizor(Mega): The excess energy that bathes this Pokémon keeps it in constant danger of overflow. It can’t sustain a battle over long periods of time.
Scizor(Mega): Due to the effects of Mega Evolution, its pincers have taken on a more diabolical form, ripping anything they pinch to shreds.

Sableye(Mega): The jewel from its chest, which has grown gigantic due to the effects of Mega Evolution, can turn back any attack.
Sableye(Mega): Supporting a giant heavy jewel, it can’t change direction very nimbly and is vulnerable to attack from behind.

Sharpedo(Mega): The spines sprouting from its head are transformed fangs. If they’re injured or broken off, the spines will regenerate countless times.
Sharpedo(Mega): As a consequence of Mega Evolution, its combative instincts exploded. The yellow marks it bears are scars from a long history of battles

Absol(Mega): When this Pokémon whips the winglike fur on its back as though beating its wings, it sends an intimidating aura flying at its opponents.
Absol(Mega): As the energy of Mega Evolution fills it, its fur bristles. What you see on its back are not true wings, and this Pokémon isn’t able to fly.

Glalie(Mega): The excess energy from Mega Evolution spilled over from its mouth, breaking its jaw. It spews endless blizzards.
Glalie(Mega): It envelops prey in its mouth, freezing them instantly. But its jaw is dislocated, so it’s unable to eat them.

Salamence(Mega): Anyone standing in its path gets sliced right in two, while this Pokémon continues its flight without interruption.
Salamence(Mega): Mega Evolution fuels its brutality, and it may even turn on the Trainer who raised it. It’s been dubbed “the blood-soaked crescent.”

Metagross(Mega): This form results from one Metagross, one Metang, and two Beldum linking up.
Metagross(Mega): Mega Evolution stimulated its brain. It emerged as a ruthless Pokémon that will clutch at any means of ensuring its victories.

Garchomp(Mega): Excess energy melted its arms and wings, transforming them into giant scythes.
Garchomp(Mega): Its vaunted wings become scythes, sending it mad with rage. It swings its scythes wildly and slices the ground to pieces.

Lucario(Mega): Black streaks all over its body show where its auras and the energy of Mega Evolution intermingled and raced through it
Lucario(Mega): It readies itself to face its enemies by focusing its mental energies. Its fighting style can be summed up in a single word: heartless.

We were told before that mega evolution was caused by the bond between trainers and pokemon…but there never was any such mechanic, and the same game that introduced it had the villain pull it out while monologuing about his plan to kill all pokemon. Recurring themes from the Alolan pokedex’s mega entries involve pain, madness, physical injury, and existing only for the sake of inflicting harm on others. That’s what a trainer’s bond amounts to. (…and z-moves might use the wormhole energy? That same energy that messes people up? Yeah, that’s probably completely safe and not at all hurting your pokemon for personal gain.)

And so we return to Lillie. Lillie is the one where the abuse is at the forefront. And Lillie is the one who cares about all of the rest, who flinches when she sees battles, who tells people not to hurt themselves. And yet, what is her resolution? To caring about all those nonsense “feelings” and “caring”, because everyone who actually matters says she should be a trainer. And it’s not simply that she becomes a trainer. It’s at the same time she starts talking of that that she also starts talking about her mother in terms of what she wants. And so of course she drags the shell along with her when she’s becoming a trainer. Lillie can’t assert her own personhood against her mother without denying that same personhood from her mother. Of course her story ends with her both leaving to become a trainer and dragging the shell of her mother along.

Alola is an infinite fractal of abuse.

…So yeah, storywise this was all very, very depressing. I loved the characters, but that just makes the way things resolve all the worse. I loved the setting, but that just makes it upsetting to see how it’s already taken over by a miserable tourist economy and Kukui’s on a quest to crush the life out of what bits they still have for themselves.

And as to the game itself…well. It was small. It seems to have been made with all of Hoenn’s criticisms in mind, so we’re left, somehow, with a bunch of islands that never quite connect to the open sea. You’re railroaded from start to finish. The good ideas, like the trial thing, get kicked off to the side by the game. Affection continues to be broken as hell, even though even just having affection drop when one of the effects triggered would fix so much! And the one-pokemon trainer model is awful, ensuring that any battle is either a cakewalk or absurdly difficult – because if your team is weak enough to be struggling at all when it’s six on one, then there’s a good chance they’re low level enough that they’re getting knocked out without ever getting a chance to move at all. And the mini islands amount to the game playing itself for you.

I’m really not a fan of the new mechanics.

I obviously did play through without z moves, but even ignoring that, why have them function like mega evolution with the pokemon having to hold the crystal? It’d have made the whole thing more dynamic and interesting if it was entirely on the player’s side and you could use any crystal that matched up with one of your current pokemon’s moves. Similarly it’d have been nice if the type disks could be used on silvally so it could hold an item of its own (perhaps even letting you spend a turn changing it in battle if you wanted?) – they even have the hummingbird change forms with an outside battle item, and form-shifting items have been around for some time before this,so it’s not like it wasn’t an option.

The pokefinder…I really tried using that, and I ended at about 150,000…which is to say, very, very far short of the final upgrade. and it’s not like the final upgrade is exactly gamechanging enough to make me want to take all those pictures over again while using it. The minigame is tedious. Either the pokemon don’t move at all so you can only get the same shot or they sprint around so fast you have no real chance to aim the camera. I’d try to pick a location for the sprinters and wait for them to show up, which generally took forever because they’re also on extremely long loops even though only a few points are any good to actually take a picture of. Pokemon Snap wasn’t beloved because there was a single pokemon doing nothing particularly interesting for us to take pictures of. And there wasn’t even any particular thing we were taking pictures for – you didn’t have to collect all the different pokemon, you weren’t told you’d get triple points for catching the pokemon displaying some behavior, you don’t even get to build an instagram account preserving your pictures and comments.

And while I see why they decided to use the call for help for all the rare pokemon needs, it wasn’t balanced well. A pokemon only being catchable by chaining another pokemon that can only be found by repeatedly fishing a couple specific single-use bubbling areas? And doing so is also the only way to get hidden abilities, but you won’t know unless you can figure out what other pokemon has an ability to tell what hidden abilities their opponent has? And none of them get an option for cool moves? ORAS’ system of sneaking up on particular pokemon just worked so much better in every way.

I did find the pokemon themselves nice. There’s good lore, interesting concepts, and a host of really fun abilities in play…but I got to play with most of them in a single run already.

And I guess that’s the final thought – this game doesn’t feel like it’s replayable, which was always the thing I loved most about the early games. They did do a great job of crafting a storyline and characters this time around, but the resolution for those things is terrible so there’s not much desire to revisit, and it’s too much of a cutscene railroad for the gameplay to carry things like it should.

Definitely writing a fanfic with Bonnibel, though.