Last time,

Well, into the woods I go.

And here’s a scientist hanging out, and here’s Team Magma in their adorable horned hoodies, and here’s the scientist cowering behind me because I’m a trainer. Does he not have any pokemon? How’d he get this far?

Haha, Magma guy’s posing. And now there’s SUPER DRAMATIC FIRE BACKGROUND.

Ooh, L9 poochyena. That’s halfway decent. Shame my surskit is such a murderous thing, and shame he doesn’t have any more than that.

I now have exp share. I guess I’ll use it until I’m sickeningly overleveled or the ralts have evolved.

Slakoth lolls around for over 20 hours a day. Because it moves so little, it does not need much food. This Pokemon’s sole daily meal consists of just three leaves.

Actual sloths are even weirder than this. Not only is the algae that grows in their own fur a major source of food, but they actually cultivate it by raising hundreds of moths of various species in their fur to fertilize it with their droppings. Imagine a plant/bug sloth.

Also, I fight one kid who says that bug pokemon are a great way to get popular at school.

I remember a fanfic referencing the idea that there are levels of pokemon trainer licences, and that while you have to be ten for the full license, younger kids could still keep bugs. This makes sense until you remember that scyther is a bug, and then that the only moderately dangerous weedle half of the kids have evolves into a giant bee-wasp with three stingers.

Perhaps the best explanation is that it’s possible but hard to catch pokemon when you don’t have one yet, and bugs are the best target for this. Much like how in real life, your parents may refuse to buy you a puppy but they can’t stop you from bringing home as many beetles as you can grab, bug catchers are cool because they’re kids who’ve managed to get a pokemon all on their own.

If you have a big Bug Pokemon, people respect you for it, the kid adds, presumably because at his age it means you personally wrestled it into submission.

As I leave the forest, the camera shifts away from me. Team Magma!

…This is the Petalburg recon team checking in. I’m afraid I have to begin with an apology, Ms. Courtney… It’s not good news… The mission is a no-go… A little something cropped up and got in the way… …Roger that. …Got it. Will do. I’ll continue investigating that energy we detected.

We change angles.

… …Phew! But that kid sure had some promise as a Trainer, I’d say. …

I’m actually liking the increased plot!

I wasn’t expecting to say that. But this is really how to do it, especially if we stick to the mute narrator. Instead of people talking around me like I’m not even there, cutscenes where I’m literally not there, and the fact they’re using that time to actually talk about me just makes it better.

Well, back to Lucki, who’s oblivious to all this. There’s more berries. It’s annoying that the trees clearly have three on them but I only get two when harvesting.

Hello! This is the Pretty Petal flower shop. Spreading flowers throughout the world! Lucki, would you like to learn about Berries?

Do I get something if I say yes?

Berries grow on trees that thrive only in soft soil. If you take some Berries, be sure to plant one in soft soil. A planted Berry will soon sprout, grow into a plant, flower beautifully, and then grow Berries again. I want to see the whole wide world filled with beautiful flowers.

SO DO I. But if I plant them and don’t pick them in time, eventually they die and stop coming back, okay? And it’s not based on playtime but actual time passing. You see my problem!

Honestly, I really wish there was a code to just make them stop aging at the ripe stage. I love seeing them growing, but I don’t love not being able to play the actual game.

Continuing on, battles! The actual game. I don’t know why the farming minigame needs to be more punishing than actual farming games. Also Lucki looks toward the sign as she runs past. A lot of very nice animation details in this.

If you’re faced with a decision and you let someone else choose for you, you will regret it–however things turn out.


Um. That sounds important.

My team is getting kind of battered so I’ll head back.

Shroomish live in damp soil in the dark depths of forests. They are often found keeping still under fallen leaves. This Pokemon feeds on compost that is made up of fallen, rotted leaves.

I actually raised one of these guys all the way up to the L50s to get a breloom with spore. Then I used that trick to duplicate GTS pokemon to copy it and trade it. Then later I found people having fits about the fact when people did that, they were getting “fake” pokemon. Which one was fake? Maybe I had the fake and they got the real one, they’re identical so it’s pretty hard to keep track of that.

Anyway later I got an action replay, hacked up a shiny umbreon, mass cloned them, and traded away hundreds on the GTS. Good times!

But I’m not doing that here. Yet.

I do swap pokemon and catch another wurmple to evolve. As luck would have it, both evolve into different pokemon…

And for some reason they still don’t have pokedex info come up automatically but make you go look for it.

Silcoon tethers itself to a tree branch using silk to keep from falling. There, this Pokemon hangs quietly while it awaits evolution. It peers out of the silk cocoon through a small hole.


And yet, I ran into these in the woods. This seems like something you should have to get by headbutting trees or something like that.

Beautifly’s favorite food is the sweet pollen of flowers. If you want to see this Pokemon, just leave a potted flower by an open window. Beautifly is sure to come looking for pollen.


…But, pollen isn’t sweet. Also, its proboscis clearly indicates it’s designed to gather nectar.

Hm. Unless…see, pollen is full of protein. That’s why bees harvest it, the grubs need protein to build their bodies. Now, an interesting thing has been observed. There are some moths that have learned to wedge their thin proboscis into our clearly pathetic flesh to drink our delicious protein-filled blood. And certainly other pokedex entries mention that beautifly is vicious and drains prey.

I wonder if Wally’s family ever advised him to put a plant in his window to attract a protein-hungry beautifly?

There’s some asshole fisherman who sends out a bunch of magikarp to flop helplessly on the ground. I’ve got something written for that in Amnesia already. Can’t wait. But right now I’m Lucki, and in the game there’s nothing for it anyway, so I just order my sweet, gentle ralts to tear their minds apart.

Also, there’s another berry patch, this one with more berries on each tree and an old lady who I guess was watering them. Will she water them again if I don’t?

I head further on, where I find Brendan coming out of the pokemart.

I should really explore this place but I want to get more pokemon first.

Onward!

Skitty has the habit of becoming fascinated by moving objects and chasing them around. This Pokemon is known to chase after its own tail and become dizzy.

Normally, Whismur’s voice is very quiet–it is barely audible even if one is paying close attention. However, if this Pokemon senses danger, it starts crying at an earsplitting volume.

Nincada lives underground for many years in complete darkness. This Pokemon absorbs nutrients from the roots of trees. It stays motionless as it waits for evolution.


As with silcoon earlier, this seems like it should be redone as a pokemon you only encounter when you go poking for it.

And speaking of that line, now my cascoon is evolving. So let’s get the data there.

Cascoon makes its protective cocoon by wrapping its body entirely with a fine silk from its mouth. Once the silk goes around its body, it hardens. This Pokemon prepares for its evolution inside the cocoon.


That is a super disappointing pokedex entry. It’s just three lines of “this is a cocoon pokemon”.

Dustox is instinctively drawn to light. Swarms of this Pokemon are attracted by the bright lights of cities, where they wreak havoc by stripping the leaves off roadside trees for food.


You know, animals getting screwed up by cities is an actual problem(here, have some depression), and it sounds like that’s what’s happening here. If leaf-stripping was a good idea for dustox, they’d do it everywhere, so it’s probably the result of a lot of them ending up in a place with very little food. Starving, they devour whatever they can. It may not even be something they can digest.

The pokedex informs me that dustox’s habitat is “unknown”. The adult form of this pokemon can no longer be encountered in the wild! We can’t tell if it’s basically extinct or simply rare – we saw some beautifly earlier and those are also of unknown habitat. On the other hand, Brendan reacted to seeing them fly by with an almost religious awe – perhaps that sight is getting steadily rarer.

Wurmple can breed, which is odd for a larval form. Perhaps they’re evolving away from evolution and one day, like the axolotl, the “adult” form will be nonexistent in the wild. (More depressing news, axolotl themselves appear to be nonexistent in the wild.) Perhaps it already is and the pokemon we saw were released by trainers.

I try contacting the professor but all he says is I should run around in the grass more. Sir, I think we have bigger problems.

You know, this is actually fitting nicely to the ecoterrorism plot. I had the impression things were pretty good in Hoenn last time, so magmaing/tsunaming everything seemed like a weird response – much like Kalos looks way too pretty for anyone to be shouting about genocide. But all this is suggesting that although the human side of things is looking up, it’s more dire for pokemon. Some, like wurmple, may adapt. Others…well, we’re from Johto, how would we know what’s already been lost?

I don’t know where you guys all live, but where I live the weather’s been broken for a while and it gets a little worse every year. We’re like two months off now from what it used to be. (I’m going to try to plant Fourth of July tomatoes this year just to see when we actually harvest them. It was almost a month to the day the last time we did it, which was years ago.) I spent most of this winter so far not wearing a jacket! And maybe the worst thing is – we have a lot of immigrants. They have no idea what the weather here is supposed to be. And yet they accept global warming, and the people who grew up here are still making excuses.

At least we have cloning now. Maybe in a thousand years, if we’re not all dead, we can start putting the rest of the world back together.

Sorry, I wasn’t expecting to see that about axoletls and between that and the weather… Here’s a lion playing in the snow. Lions are doing pretty well, all things considered!