It is said that through meditation, Medicham heightens energy inside its body and sharpens its sixth sense. This Pokemon hides its presence by merging itself with fields and mountains.
Well, you didn’t do so great given hidden pokemon are actually more noticeable than regular ones. Hm. Hidden really is a bad term in general, isn’t it? It’s more like “distracted pokemon”.
Onwards!
This seemingly infinite and harsh road lives up to its name of Victory.
I’m still in the first room! It takes like thirty seconds to get here, less if you’re running straight through.
The ace trainer is named Hope, so who knows, maybe she likes dramatizing things so she can make a point of how fine she is about it. Also, she’s got a L47 froslass. Also an interesting choice given her name. Its level seemed intimidating, but then it wasted its turns on setup moves rather than straight up murdering, so Flare took it out easily.
Lairon!
Lairon tempers its steel body by drinking highly nutritious mineral springwater until it is bloated. This Pokémon makes its nest close to springs of delicious water.
Yet another pokemon that’s weak to water yet has a pokedex entry saying it drinks the stuff. I wonder what exactly it is about the attacks that make them different.
Anyway, there’s also a plot point to be found in that humans love spring water to the point they’ll completely drain the aquifers below them.
I go on to fight a thug who says that I look good enough for a kid (?!) and then this ace trainer pair…
Not all teammates are necessarily equals. I’m a loyal underling of this fair lady. It was certainly my mistake that caused us to lose the previous battle. In other words, a punishment of long, hard training awaits me.
Listen I respect your lifestyle choices but I don’t want to know about the details, and Lucki is like fourteen why are you saying this to her.
It’s made more annoying by the fact the female half of the pair says, It…can’t end like this. Let’s meet again someday. which is some perfectly good determined trainer dialogue!
I continue along and fight some caped weirdo.
Then…I’m out? I’m up top in the very scenic land of bridges and waterfalls. Where’s Wally?
Ah, there’s Wally.
I bet you must be surprised to see me in a place like this!
Sort of, I remembered you showing up inside the cave.
Incidentally, I liked this gen’s cave. There were these spots where you’d find yourself outside again, which was a nice visual touch, helped make the map feel like it was really connected together, AND ALSO had the practical purpose of letting you fly back to the pokecenter instead of needing to backtrack or invest in dig/teleport.
That promise that we made back then… Thank you for keeping your end of it.
I don’t even remember that but I do feel kind of guilty over it, so, definite win for Wally as a good NPC there.
It was really all thanks to you that I could make it this far, Lucki.
What I do remember is his family was trying to kill him, so yeah, I did indirectly save his life! All his accomplishments are partly to my own credit.
It was only because I lost to you back then that I could become even stronger. I’m sure that you and your Pokemon must have had to overcome a lot, too.
Mostly my pokemon had to overcome me.
To make it all the way here. Right, Lucki? Everyone’s grown so much… And now we’ll finally get to see just what we all can do. Standing here facing you again gives me chills… …But I won’t give up! I won’t lose anymore.
And here’s where Wally fails as a rival. Why oh why did anyone think having your rival be going on a journey of self-realization was a good idea?
My Pokemon have given me the courage and strength to fight. I have to win for their sake!
While I have, you know, that apocalyptic god monster.
There are many, many problems with the way the game resolves the real plot prior to the pokemon league, but here it’s particularly glaring.
So get ready… Here I come!
Worst part? He’s pretty good at being a rival. Doesn’t heal my pokemon beforehand, just waits right outside the long slog of cave for me to stagger out. (Though this tactic doesn’t actually make any sense with the personality we’re given…) Plus, he even does this cute nod to his pokemon inside the pokeball before throwing it, because he’s a good trainer who really did get this far through a bond with his pokemon. And none of it’s going to matter.
Two of my pokemon have fainted – Silver, who’s L48 somehow, and my sceptile, L40.
He has a gallade now, rather than gardevoir, and it actually has a pretty okay strategy – it mega evolves, and it’s fast, uses swords dance, then close combat to knock out my pokemon in a single blow. Luckily, Irin’s max affection means she can survive the hit anyway, and then night slash tears his gallade apart.
… says Wally. I’ve lost…
Yeah.
Back in the cutscene, Wally continues with another … because, you know, crushing his dreams and belief he was worth anything. … Arghhh!!! … … …Hah.
And before my eyes he strangles his moment of honesty and then looks back at me with a calm, friendly face. Lucki, you… And your Pokemon, too… Thank you for not holding back when you battled against us… For not holding back when you beat us… And… Gallade… Everyone… Thank you so much… His face twists into a horrifyingly happy grin. I feel like I’ve been able to take another step forward thanks to you! Oh! I know! I’ll give you this to keep! I hope it will always remind you of your battle with me…and with Gallade and the rest of my team.
It’s a dawn stone.
If you have a male Kirlia as one of your partners, Lucki, I hope that you might use that Dawn Stone on it for me.
Because god, do they ever regret letting boy pokemon get feminine cooties on them. They didn’t think of the great “gendered evolution” fix until after Gardevior was established as an option for either one, so they can’t actually take it away (…yet. Given how much changes each generation, it’s possible that’ll go at some point) but they can make it clear what you’re supposed to do here – all of my pokemon are L40 or better despite actually trying to stay underleveled by this point, so I’d have to have been preventing mine from evolving, and on top of that, he’s pushing me to do it rather than just giving it as an option.
God, gallade annoys me.
I couldn’t beat you this time, Lucki. But I’ll stay here and continue training. And one day… Look out! I swear I’ll catch up to you one day! When I do, promise we’ll battle again! That’s a promise I intend to live up to!
So yeah. That’s that. I head to the pokemon league, where there’s a mewtwonite y hanging out right outside for some reason. Wally will stew in his own inadequency forever, regardless of if he ever could beat the elite four.
I do like one thing about Wally’s plotline – having him be the secret real rival had promise, where he just shows up all of a sudden right before the end with a full team to kick ass. But it’s the same problem as Silver only worse because at least Silver started off as an asshole and that made you feel slightly better, and you could even pretend that the problem was that while he did care about pokemon he still had a ways to go but he’d get there someday. Wally clearly cared about his pokemon from the moment they met, and he was talented enough to raise a ralts up as sole pokemon. He’s not a satisfying rival to spring on you at the end, even if he is a good battle.
Well, can’t rivals be respectful of each other, instead of bullying jerks?
The problem with that is that with these games, you are always going to be winning. A lot of people mentioned becoming uncomfortable with repeatedly beating the rival in XY, because they were a decent kid who was perfectly polite to you. And you beat them down again and again and again and again, and it gets to them every time. They put a brave face on it, but you’re always superior to them. You are repeatedly crushing a decent kid who can never figure out why you’re better than they are and is hurt and confused by it. It is so far from fun. Or like here, with Wally. What’s enjoyable about being the person who ensures a kindly and determined sick kid will never succeed at his goals?
They also have the low stakes rivals who just want to friendly battle, but they don’t mind if they lose, so why should you care if you win? It’s not depressing like the above type of rival, but it’s pretty meh.
The only recent rival who isn’t in one of these two categories was Hugh, who was pleased when you beat him because he wanted to use you as a weapon against Team Plasma. You could probably do something really interesting with a sidekick who was delighted at the chosen one’s chosedness because they could use their established friendship to get the chosen one to further their own agenda, but obviously Pokemon wasn’t going to go there. Hugh was just a mess of a character.
The smug jerk whose ego never seems to take a hit was a preferable dynamic in every way I can think of.
What’s enjoyable about being the person who ensures a kindly and determined sick kid will never succeed at his goals?
Isn’t that kind of condescending, though? You’re giving more weight to your opponent’s likeability than their choice of being Pokémon trainers.
Well, that’s the thing. They aren’t making a choice to be pokemon trainers. If Wally was a real person I imagine beating him all the time would still get depressing after a while, but he’s not a real person making a choice. He’s designed for you to feel like a good trainer and I don’t get personal satisfaction out of crushing some nice kid. I don’t see how that’s condescending because I’m not really talking about Wally as a person, which I guess I should have made more clear.
I’m talking about the game designers going “Hey, you know what would be a great idea for a rival? A perfectly nice person who you have no grudge against showing up near endgame to lose to you and spend the rest of their existence hanging out at the end of Victory Road trying to beat you even though they can’t ever.”
Compared to the first game, where you get a sneering condescending asshole to finally acknowledge your superiority, it just doesn’t seem like good writing to me.
I felt that’s what the “I’m glad you didn’t hold anything back” line was for? Like to show that he hasn’t become depressed or given up on anything from the defeat. I can see where that’d be subjective, though, as taking game dialogue at face value leads to glaring contradictions in other areas.
That said, I feel like a jerk rival every time would get stale (much like a friendly one every time since has become stale now). I see no inherent flaw with the idea of a rival with a character arc or a friendly one, just that a sickly kid may not have been the best route to take.
Silver had a dramatic character arc and Blue had a lesser one; rivalry is probably the best way of doing a character arc available in Pokemon.
Also, I am pretty damn sure Gamefreak wants their game to be stale with a thin veneer of freshness through mechanics. I know people complain about it a lot, but the winning Pokemon formula is “the same, but more” so far as the developers are concerned. If they have to have the same sort of rival, game after game, I would vote for the obnoxious jerks. There are a lot of different ways to be a jerk, so how stale it got would depend on the writing, but yeah. It’s been five games in a row of rival/best pal and not only am I sick of it, I don’t think they’ve ever done it particularly well.
Idk I feel like that logic is sort of… off in that separating him from being a real character as the reason for feeling bad about defeating a nice trainer would also separate out the niceness he also doesn’t have a choice in enough to not feel bad about beating a lump of game data with a team of higher level monsters: Wally doesn’t have a choice but neither does he have aspirations to be crushed.
Is it that a fictional jerk is better for taking out frustration on? Otherwise I don’t see the divide between he’s fake enough to not be able to condescend to him but real enough to feel bad for beating.
(I don’t intend to be argumentative here or anything, just trying to understand where the difference is, since at present I really don’t get it)
I think the problem is that I’m talking about emotional responses I don’t actually have any more. I played all these games when I was a kid. I hated Blue, probably hated Silver even more than you were supposed to (I never forgave him for kicking me) and I really liked beating Blue into acknowledging I was the better trainer, and beating Silver into being a better trainer. Then it got to Wally, and when I beat him my reaction was “Oh, okay. That’s good, I guess…. ” I didn’t want to lose to him, but like I’ve said, it wasn’t satisfying.
And at that point I wasn’t thinking about what the writers intended at all, but now I can, and based on what I felt when I was actually the intended audience for these games, beating Wally isn’t much fun. I didn’t feel triumphant or heroic or powerful or any of the emotions a power fantasy like Pokemon should be providing around endgame.
Nowadays I don’t have any feelings about Pokemon characters that aren’t directly linked to the writer’s choices, so I was probably conflating the two things confusingly.
I’m talking about the game designers going “Hey, you know what would be a great idea for a rival? A perfectly nice person who you have no grudge against showing up near endgame to lose to you and spend the rest of their existence hanging out at the end of Victory Road trying to beat you even though they can’t ever. [I]t just doesn’t seem like good writing to me.”
I get what you’re saying, but this sort of dynamic (a friendly rivalry where one of the fighters always loses to the other) is very common in shounen series. For instance, there’s Krillin and Goku, Tien and Goku, Vegeta and Goku… Or (to switch to a different series) Chu and Jin – Yusuke outstrips them so fast it never really develops into a rivalry, but both of them have scenes where they acknowledge they’re no longer on his level, even though they’d like to fight him again.
Wow, Krillin and Tien were considered Goku’s rivals at some point? I take it that was in Dragonball? We only got Z in my country.
The friendly rivalry thing can totally work. I just don’t think it works with video games where the character is meant to be the player’s avatar. It could probably be done, but the vast majority of video games are total power fantasies played absolutely straight. So in Pokemon, I am literally never going to lose, whereas if it’s a fictional series the protagonist can lose to their rivals and have character development over it and stuff.
From what I’ve seen, don’t protagonists with friendly rivals tend to start off in the loser position? If I had a friendly rival in Pokemon who actually beat me for the first few battles, that could work, because then I’d have a goal to work towards. But that would interfere with the way Pokemon games take place in a universe where you are inherently better than everyone around you just because, so it can’t happen.
Ash is always losing to his rivals in the anime, and it works fine, (if you ignore that by now he has more years of experience as trainer than years in his official age and should be much better than he is) but I think friendly rivalry is always going to seem neutered if one of the parties is always guaranteed to win.
From what I’ve seen, don’t protagonists with friendly rivals tend to start off in the loser position?
Not necessarily, I think. For instance: Tien only beat Goku the first time on a technicality, they were pretty evenly matched. On their second fight, Goku won handily, and after that he and Tien were never again on the same power scale. As for poor Krillin… He gave a good effort, but Goku was always stronger than him.
Same thing with Yusuke, really. I’m not well-versed in current shounen series, so I don’t know if it’s the norm for the protagonist to start out losing against his rival, but I don’t think that has to be an ironclad rule.
If I had a friendly rival in Pokemon who actually beat me for the first few battles, that could work,[…]
Sure, but only if the player genuinely lost, I think, instead of being forced to lose by a cutscene or a cheating AI; that’s just cheap.
Also worth noting that Wally (in the remakes anyway) surpasses you in badges, so he’s “winning” in the sense of getting through the gym leaders before the protagonist does rather than facing the player after trailing badgewise the whole time. The rival in Sinnoh also gets every badge but the last before the player does. It was only in Unova that the trailing behind for the entire game rivals became a thing.
I guess a lot if it stems from the fact that the Pokemon games don’t really have a different outcome mechanic for losing battles and the rematches if the player loses just continue on as though the player never fought the battle in the first place (bar Yellow but even then the only thing that changed was Gary’s eeveelution choice later on, and it was done more to decide which evolution he’d get than because they were attempting to have a point where the player could lose and continue with a different outcome from if they won). As long as this mechanic remains, there’s not much that can be done to have the rival win at first other than showing them getting badges before the player does, and a forced loss in a battle would indeed seem cheep.
I think the dawn stone tipoff is to let you know in-game how to get Wally’s gallade for yourself, because a lot of those rarer stone evolutions aren’t the kind of thing you’re likely to fall into by accident (rare stone + specific gender is a lot more complex than buy elemental stone, shove at pokemon of same type and hope), and it’d be frustrating for young players to keep raising kirlias in the hope that eventually one of the boys will turn into a gallade. Sure they could just look it up online, but as much as I hate the tendency towards hand-holding in newer gens I think it’s important for non-standard evolution types to be hinted at or explained within the game. As a pokemon Gallade got to debut an unusual type combination and is I think the first physical attacking psychic type, which was a cool new thing at the time. Plus single-sex pokemon had already been established before ralts existed, so if they really wanted to prevent anyone from every getting a male gardevoir they had plenty of precedent and I have a hard time seeing gallade as some kind of conservative fix.
Wally totally should have kept his Gardevoir though. He’s sickly, quiet, slightly effeminate, AND powerful, and that’s interesting.
Gallade is the freaking worst. There are literally 700 pokemon, but the idea that one might imply that men can be effeminate was just waaaay too much. Fuck gallade.
…I’ve had a long morning.
I knew literally nothing about this, because I haven’t played pokemon games in like forever, but now the Emiya Shirou character sheet makes a little more sense with having a ‘female gallade’. Pretty funny.
Gardevoir can still be male, though. I thought the most irritating implication of gallade was the idea that women can’t be fighters. That they purposefully shoehorned a more masculine escape route into that line in the first place is certainly suspect, though.
To me, those two together are what makes it pretty shocking. It’s like, okay, there’s an effeminate pokemon that can be male. Instead of just giving it an optional alternate evolution path for both, they give it one just for the male. So you have this really blatant expression of their priorities re: insulting men vs. insulting women.