Right, so, Mt. Pyre!
Well, now that I’m healed I can risk venturing past the people here aaaaaaaaaand neither wanted to battle and one is a rogue pokecenter employee operating on their own!!! so I really could’ve just stopped off here, huh. Also interestingly, she notices when your pokemon are fully healed rather than being willing to take them regardless. Maybe the people at the pokemon center always know that but due to how customer service works they’re told to just take the pokemon and put them on the machine anyway, and she’s glorying in her ability to not waste her time on that nonsense.
Also, looks like I can catch wailer here.
…and when they finally stop dying to weak moves, I do!
Wailer’s nostrils are located above its eyes. This playful Pokemon loves to startle people by forcefully snorting out seawater it stores inside its body out of its nostrils.
Game. Game, listen closely. IT ALREADY LIVES IN THE SEA IT DOESN’T NEED TO STORE SEAWATER.
This is obviously a reference to the whole water spray thing ocean mammals do, but that’s not them spraying water, it’s air that’s got water in the way.
Alright, in at last. And apparently I can’t use my glowing antenna headband to find items among the tombstones because it’s “not the time for that” and “hideously disrespectful” and such nonsense. Also, now that I’m talking about it, why on earth am I hearing my father’s voice? We’re obviously not close given I’m not even living in the same town as the guy.
Current team:
L34 Saurius 
L36 vibrava
L35 baltoy
L29 anorith
L27 tentacool
L28 shuppet
Okay, the ghostly effect of the hidden pokemon here is pretty cool. Also, the whole thing of chasing one down seems like a much better fit than getting ambushed by walking. Turns looking for pokemon into a challenge rather than a nusance – although I guess it’d mean losing out on the other cool idea of pokemon, that they’re omnipresent and even traveling between towns is dangerous for squishy humans.
Hey, duskull!
Duskull can pass through any wall no matter how thick it may be. Once this Pokemon chooses a target, it will doggedly pursue the intended victim until the break of dawn.
Ghost pokemon are great.
A ghost girl then informs me I’m not the one. Thank you for sparing me, ghost girl! I assure you I will not get in your way while you kill whoever displeased you.
Every time I think of the Pokemon I lost, I wish it had lived forever. But I also think it would be tragic to become immortal without wishing for it.
Nope punishing genocide king by making him immortal is still stupid, game.
I’m so old that all my tears have dried up completely. But my memories flood my mind all the time.
Well, that’s depressing.
I then face a couple. The boyfriend says he’ll impress his girlfriend by beating me. The girlfriend then says he’ll impress her by beating me, because the fact she’s apparently also a trainer doesn’t matter and besides, we should all remember boys hate it when girls are competent at anything but cooking.
When I told everyone that I can talk with Pokemon, they became concerned for me… says the tiny girl in a pink dress. She then expresses concern for her pokemon’s wellbeing upon defeat, so clearly yeah, what a total weirdo let’s all shun the freak.
Huh, apparently submission hits flying pokemon? Because…?
Anyway, apparently there’s a blackbelt guy here who says his teacher’s buried in the place, and it seems to only be for pokemon, unless it’s just that people aren’t visiting the human graves, so yeah.
By the way, harvest is really pulling its weight here. I mostly keep a sirus berry on Saurius, so he keeps recovering HP, and whenever he gets a status effect I have him hold the relevant berry, he heals on the first turn of battle, then harvests the berry before the end of the battle so I never actually lose it. It makes me think tropius would make a really good single pokemon for someone just traveling – as long as you have a couple of the relevant berries to start out with, your pokemon would keep producing its own medicine so you don’t need to worry about running out.
I’m generally enjoying using Saurius. He’s got a nice type combo, he’s pretty strong, and it’s fun to massacre kecleon. I’m pretty sure color change is designed around making the player feel superior for murdering them with it, but it doesn’t change the fact that’s exactly how I feel every time it happens. Also, my second slot pokemon knows earthquake so double battles always go great.
Hey, my baltoy’s evolving!
Claydol are said to be dolls of mud made by primitive humans and brought to life by exposure to a mysterious ray. This Pokémon moves about while levitating.
Well that’s clearly wrong because I just saw one evolve from a baltoy. Those might be mud dolls granted unnatural life through cosmic rays, but claydol is obviously the result of the mud doll cosmic ray thing feeding on the life energy of those it defeats until it has the power to reshape its body to its liking.
So, either the pokedex is not written by the player, OR we only see excerpts of longer entries and “said to be” is because there’s another line next to it explaining that everyone who thought said this was an idiot because it’s actually the evolved form of baltoy.
Okay, time to swap it out for that new duskull and then head back.
We sisters, having been brought together by the greatness of a Ghost curse, are the strongest…
Do you think you can win against we sisters who have been brought together by the greatness of Fairy magic?
I can only assume the older one then turns to the younger and starts yelling at her about how we agreed on ghost curse come on we’re in a cemetery mountain what do fairies have to do with anything and the little one’s like FAIRIES ARE THE GREATEST ALWAYS and that’s why I then crushed them. Afterwards the older one informs me the pink princess child is just a random neighborhood kid and they were only saying they were sisters because they’re both very weird people.
And then my 3DS runs out of juice because lol battery life, so we stop here.
Submission normally can’t hit something in the semi-invulnerable turn of fly, but I think you probably ran into a machop or one of its evolutions using it. That line gets the ability “no guard”, which gives 100% accuracy (even during fly, dig, etc.) to every move it and its opponent use.
Yup, a machoke.
Moves and abilities that affect the metagame really don’t make much sense, do they?
The other alternative to claydol is that in the ancient past the dolls could be brought to life evolved (either as claydol immediately or evolving into it so quickly they
weren’t in the baltoy state for long enough for anyone to see it) and whatever energy that once forcibly grew them in a more mature state upon coming to life only affected the original claydol, their offspring came into being as baltoy.
Huh, I thought there were normal random encounters in the tower too, not just the dexnav encounters.
There’s also the random encounters, but they didn’t seem to be too common.
I always found the theory that the protagonists wrote the dex entries dubious at best. People use it to explain the wild inaccuracies by saying “It’s exactly what a little kid trying to sound scientific would sound like” but it’s really not. They are clearly written by adults trying to sound scientific.
Of course, it’s frustrating if you aren’t writing them for different reasons, so I try not to think about it mostly.
And I hate it when dex entries act like evolved pokemon come from somewhere other than their previous form. It ruins those dex entries about banette all being possessed dolls.
Well, it does sound a little like what a kid who liked science and read stuff by adults might regurgitate if you asked them to write a fact about every animal you encountered.
Imm, I think the issue for me is that I could buy that from one precocious little kid, but not every kid who’s ever had a pokedex. Especially since they’ve gotten so lazily repetitive about dex entries nowadays.
Completely different kids in completely different countries shouldn’t be making up the exact same nonsense, or even repeating the same wild rumours, considering how isolated from one another the regions seem to be. And the tone is always too similar from dex to dex.
Plus I expect children to be a bit more babbly when they write. Like it would be very difficult for someone in the ten to twelve age range to resist the temptation to write “Not only can can charizard fly, but it’s sooo coool!!!!” no matter how precocious they were.
Maybe Claydol and Baltoy were two separate Dolls brought to life, but due to how inefficient Claydol are in comparison they fused the two so Baltoy could be made, than be made to grow bigger.
Maybe Baltoy is like a baby form of Claydol? So the Claydol come to life and spawn Baltoy because its more efficient than waiting for humans to make more clay things.
[ we should all remember boys hate it when girls are competent at anything but cooking.]
Hasn’t the franchise treated cooking as a man’s job? I seriously don’t remember many woman associated with cooking.
Female cooks:
1) Johto mom in G/S/C cooked to show off the time system.
Male cooks:
1) SS Anne kitchen
2) Brock was doing all the chores which Ash and Misty were incompetent at.
3) Cilan from Unova.
4) Cilmont from Kalos
This is just form memory.
*Being a chef* is a man’s job. *Cooking for other people* is a woman’s. To the point that female chefs in the real world have a very hard time.
Basically there’s no metric by which the patriarchy makes sense, and it doesn’t even give a shit.
Also the whole point with Brock was how shocking it was he was doing woman’s work. They even put him in a frilly pink apron.
It’s the same as how teaching went from an important position to one of the most under-appreciated jobs (especially at the elementary school level). When more women than men began teaching young kids it went from important to “women’s work” in the lower levels and remains considered prestigious only in the higher levels where men still make up more professors.
If it’s a thing a man does it’s something skilled, if it’s a thing a woman does it’s women’s work and just a natural offshoot of “her more caring nature” (see nursing as well).
:/
Well, we don’t really have a sex ratio of professoional chefs in Pokémon on hand. I do now remember one professional female chef in the anime who gave Jesse and James a job. The who cooking thing may be a prejudice projected onto Pokémon.
It’s not exactly a ratio thing.
Picture a waiter. Picture a waitress. Which of them is at a fancy restaurant and which is at some greasy-spoon diner? Imagine going into the kitchen at a fancy place – do you expect to see men or women?
Women cooking is what they’re supposed to do, not something they deserve payment for. A man who puts his mind to it is assumed to be better at it than any woman, even as he’s still looked down on for being less manly as a result. And because men are also assumed to have better things to do, they cost more, so it’s a bigger status symbol to be able to afford one. (Same for waiters – people going to expensive places prefer to have men wait on them.)
Women who can’t cook are seen as pathetic jokes, but being good at cooking isn’t supposed to be a marketable skill either. That’s part of why it’s okay for women to be good at it.
I was focusing on how Pokémon portrays this. Jesse and that one Kalos chef in the anime I remember, but that’s a small reference pool for exceptions.
Currently, Kalos anime seems to have made gender based competitions(with few men working as noncontestant) written in stone, but other professions are balanced as far as I can tell.
Thats so awesome about Saurious, I’m always looking for pokemon that would work traveling alone or nearly. Teaching odd pokemon the move dig(like half of all the pokemon ever it feels like can learn dig) or using teleport makes for awesome roleplay teams.
I think the claydol make the baltoy. The dex could be implying evolution isn’t the usual way to get those pokemon when the entries don’t match up. Frostlass and snorunt’s entries reference them being different mythological creatures, one is a woman lost in snow, the other is a sort of fae or child lost in snow. Though frostlass always seemed like it was supposed to be a stand alone pokemon.
Tropius, at least those with their hidden ability, really seem like great pokemon for the rangers and backpackers, or for any trainer who wants to do the Red thing of training in the remote wilderness. Endless supply of various healing items and can fly you home if you get into too much trouble!
It would make sense for some areas to be locked to trainers who don’t have proper support pokemon, rather than based on how many badges.
Hm. For really bad areas, you’d want a pokemon with run away or at least really speedy, a pokemon that can fly/teleport, and some form of replenishing healing. The only problem with tropius is that they’re ridiculously slow, so no hope of escaping a dangerous fight. If there was some sort of poketoy berry it’d be all set. (Hm, maybe substitute could work like a pokedoll?)