So I check to see what tropiuses’ ability options are, and find out their hidden ability is harvest, where they keep regenerating berries. Several hours later, I manage to catch one of those. Did not expect it to take nearly that long. Next time, definitely just hacking it in.
But anyway, I now have a Saurius with harvest and leech seed and it only took forever.
Also, did you know that all tropius are insanely slow? They are. My numel regularly outspeeds them.Speaking of, guess who evolved!
Camerupt has a volcano inside its body. Magma of 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit courses through its body. Occasionally, the humps on this Pokémon’s back erupt, spewing the superheated magma.
I attempt for a while to make my way through the route, but Saurius keeps fainting, so I think I’ll go through the desert with him first.
Baltoy moves while spinning around on its one foot. Primitive wall paintings depicting this Pokemon living among people were discovered in some ancient ruins.
Sometimes the very banality of these entries wraps around to weird again. Isn’t it kind of expected that pokemon would be drawn on walls? What’s the noteworthy fact here? Is it that this was one of the first pokemon depicted among humans? Is it that pokemon species actually change very rapidly, so finding a pokemon that still resembles how it looked a couple thousand years ago is really weird? (…hey, I’ve just explained the pokemon games’ changes! Their appearances and types and moves have been changing as time passes.)
But Saurius has fainted yet again, so back to heal.
Also apparently I need to keep trying with the good rod so let’s fish.
Barboach’s sensitive whiskers serve as a superb radar system. This Pokemon hides in mud, leaving only its two whiskers exposed while it waits for prey to come along.
Goldeen is a very beautiful Pokemon with fins that billow elegantly in water. However, don’t let your guard down around this Pokemon–it could ram you powerfully with its horn.
Okay, so back up to the desert.
OH GOD THERE’S A GHOST IN THE DESERT WHAT IS SHE STARING AT WHY IS SHE HERE
How did you manage to climb your way up here? Did you use a strange power like me, I wonder? …You rode a Mach Bike up here? It wasn’t some strange power? Do you think I could ride one, too?
YES HAVE MY BIKE JUST SPARE ME
Okay, a little beyond is another defensible-style secret base. So, a sandstorm, a sand slope requiring a bike to traverse, and a spooky ghost girl now stand between creeper and Lucki. Barely acceptable.
I find the fossils and pick claw fossil, because in my first game I went with the root fossil.
If they can find Fossils in the desert, it must have been a sea once! But that doesn’t make my eyes any less itchy…
That’s really not how it works. If they find the fossils of sea life then yeah, clearly sea. But it’s not like the sea is the only place that forms fossils. It’s also not the only place that turns into desert.
A better line would be along the lines of just how surprising it is to think that this very very dry place was once very very wet.
Still haven’t seen a single trapinch. I checked Bulbapedia to find out if I was supposed to be walking miaround the sand pits, and no, supposedly there’s a 20% chance of trapinch, same as cacnea and baltoy. Also supposedly there’s a 40% sandshrew chance despite baltoy showing up way more than anything else.
Run around and around and my Japanese paras is now evolving into a zombie. Time to head back to the pokecenter.
…ah, and there you are!
Trapinch’s nest is a sloped, bowl-like pit dug in sand. This Pokemon patiently waits for prey to tumble down the pit. Its giant jaws have enough strength to crush even boulders.
You can see why I’d think it was something you had to get in the deeper pits.
Okay, now to back to the route of rain.
Aw, there’s Team Magma devotedly staring across the bridge to guard against anyone coming from the opposite direction!
You know, actually this is only kind of dumb, not totally stupid like it seems. If you’re coming from Mauville, you need a pokemon with surf, and the number of people with both a water pokemon and the badge and the HM must be pretty low. The bigger concern is anyone coming down from Fortree, which is also much closer and the more likely place for anyone to call for help.
Oh hey, cutscene! It’s Casual Friday Magma!
Just…what…is this… D-d-did Leader Maxie know that it would happen like this?!
Mr. Hunchback Scientist replies: Curse you! The precious results of my research! GIVE THEM BACK!!!
Oh, shut it.
Steady on! says the gentleman sprite. Are you all right?!
Just what is going on around here?! Casual Friday Magma says. Ahyahya! Even I, Tabitha, am feeling all discombobulated. Leader Maxie! What are you trying to do?! …To the world. …To us. …To Team Magma. This can never, ever be forgiven!
Well, no idea what was going on with any of that. I don’t remember the conversations being this disjointed in the original, but maybe I just wasn’t paying attention.
Since Lucki only had a tropius for this route, I’ll face him with just that.
Ahya. Are you one of my fans? You’re that same kid who’s always popping up! I can’t believe you’re even following me around in my private life. Ahyahya! Well, that’s all right! Maybe I’ll just clear up this intensely unpleasant feeling I have welling up inside of me… By beating you into a pulp!
L32 camerupt. Sadly, Saurius isn’t quite up for it, so my swablu finishes it off.
Hah… Hah… Ahya… Ahya… Good grief… Today has been absolutely nothing but stress! I can’t take it… It’s so unpleasant! You better listen, you stress-inducing child. When Leader Maxie’s plan has been executed, twilight will fall upon the world.
Uh…pretty sure it’s not going to be particularly twilighty, no.
The Primordial Sea will be changed to Desolate Land. In other words, all life…
Ah! This fits well with my theory that Kyogre is the heart of the earth and Groudon is something alien. I wonder how this goes down in Alpha Sapphire? Kind of hard to get worked up about losing desolate land.
Child! What do you think you can do in the face of that which is to come? I’m looking forward to seeing you rush into action! Ahya! Ahyahyahyahya!
And he leaves, but the cutscene does not end.
The Leader should be headed for Mt. Pyre… Which means I… and then he does leave.
You OK there, mate? says Third Guy. Because yeah, save for Lucki this cutscene is a sausagefest.
Hah… Hah… That truly was a slap in the face… says Hunchback Scientist.
Those thieves… What could they hope to gain by investigating the extreme weather patterns of thousands of years ago? says Gentleman. Oh, but I am forgetting myself! First I must thank you properly for your help. It might seem an odd way of rewarding you, but please take this Pokemon as my thanks. Hmm? You cannot carry any more Pokemon with you currently. Why don’t you come to call again after you’ve made space on your team?
I was about to make fun of this, but almost no trainers have a full set, so it really is me who’s the weird one here.
But then again, this is how many games into the series? The designers know players fill up their teams immediately, so the game should be designed with that in mind.
But as for the data those ruffians were seeking… They wanted to know about the extreme weather conditions that ruled thousands of years ago because of those two super-ancient Pokemon.
Ah, dates! Perhaps the pokeworld is much younger than ours. The fact many pokemon take such an active role in creating biomes would speed things up.
One of the pair was the Legendary Pokemon we know as mighty Groudon… By absorbing the energy that abounds in the natural world, Groudon transformed itself–or so it is said.
Yeah, forgive me if I don’t consider people from thousands of years ago to be good zoologists. People a few hundred years ago thought snakes traveled by biting their tails and toads ate dirt.
Even if the basic sequence of events of Groudon starting off as regular then getting superpowered is true, which, again, people thought toads ate dirt, there’s absolutely no way any of them would know the mechanism.
Also, Groudon seems horribly opposed to “nature”. Admittedly, ocean basically is another type of desert but it’s a lot easier to have too much sun and heat for life than to have too much water. The fact that Groudon seems to create an effect where water vanishes rather than going into the air is a pretty good sign of something being very wrong here.
Anyway, I continue with my theory: Groudon is alien. Weakened by the loss of its original planet, it needed a bit to get used to the new environment.
The transformed Groudon caused so much disturbance to the weather patterns that the world grew barren. The heat it created dried up the oceans, and the parched land covered more and more of the planet. We refer to this transformation as Primal Reversion… The result of it is the terror we call Primal Groudon. Primal Reversion is a possible form of evolution, like and yet not like Mega Evolution… Or so it has been theorized. But it has never been achieved by any Pokemon other than the super-ancient Legendary Pokemon, and so it has been largely forgotten as a method of Evolution.
Who on earth “theorized” this? How would you know it was any different?
You know what, I’m going to go with psychics. Psychics having past visions. There. The actual events are now semi-verifiable.
If you’ll excuse us then… says Hunchback Scientist. We’ll be heading downstairs now, but talk to us when you have a moment. We want to thank you as well.
Okay, so my current team is:
L29 Saurius
L39 lombre
L23 cacnea
L39 loudred
L34 swablu
Egg that still isn’t close to hatching
So – I guess I’ll kick lombre off. Maybe actually raise a castform this time?
Back up:
I would still like to thank you somehow for your help. I hope you’ll take this Pokemon for your team.
I name her Judgement.
Castform is a Pokemon than changes its form according to the current weather conditions. We have many Castform living here in the Institute with us. They help us with our research of weather phenomena.
It’d be nice to see those around in that case.
I’ve been researching rain for many years, but it’s ridiculous to think that humans can freely change the weather.
Well, how localized is stuff like sunny day? If you had enough pokemon, it shouldn’t be that difficult to keep that going.
Anyway, looks like that’s it for this place.
Still no form for sandstorm.
Pokedex data:
Castform’s appearance changes with the weather. This Pokémon gained the ability to use the vast power of nature to protect its tiny body.
That’s…pretty much what the guy just told me. Bad Lucki, don’t copy from other people! The pokedex is supposed to be YOUR half-remembered rumors and suppositions complied as absolute fact.
Hey, it’s Brendan.
Lucki! You’ve been looking for Pokemon here? Huh? That bracelet you’ve got on… It’s like, I don’t know, really cool… … Whoa. So that’s a Mega Bracelet? And you can use it for Mega Evolution…
Because some of us are out saving the world while you’re wandering around not even getting gym badges.
So you’ll just keep getting closer to your Pokemon and getting even stronger… All right, then. I guess I’ve just gotta help you test how strong you’ve become, huh?
FINALLY!
Show me in battle how much better you’ve gotten! Come on! A battle! I’m challenging you to a battle!
WHY ARE YOU ACTING LIKE I’M SAYING NO, SHUT UP AND START THE BATTLE!
He leads with his L31 wailmer. Leech seed, Saurius!
I get it most of the way down, then decide to switch in Judgement to finish it off. Of course, it uses rest. Judgement uses sunny day, then I swap Saurius back in.
He sends out his combusken next, of course, so I swap to Judgement. Rainy weatherball to the face knocks it out. Next is his shroomish, so Saurius again. We can’t really hurt each other, but Saurius’ leaf tornado is only half power compared to the 1/4th power of giga drain, so the match quickly turns in my favor.
Saurius levels and has the option of learning natural gift. That seems to have good synergy with his harvest ability.
Brendan says something about my getting decent. That didn’t sound like cowering, inconsequential mortal.
Ah, and my loudred’s finally evolving.
I’d say you’re good enough to search for Pokemon anywhere by now, says the inconsequential mortal. Here, I’ll give you this, so try it out. You should be able to use it fine.
It’s FLY. Your tribute is acceptable. You may live.
With Fly, your Pokemon can carry you back to just about anyplace you’ve visited before. of course, you’ll need the Fortree Gym badge first, though… Well, I’m going on ahead. But I’m definitely winning next time!
Free advice: get more pokemon on your team.
Exploud triggers earthquakes with the tremors it creates by bellowing. If this Pokémon violently inhales from the ports on its body, it’s a sign that it is preparing to let loose a huge bellow.
But really, how often is exploud not about to start bellowing? Do you really need specific tells when the answer’s going to be “yes” at any given time?
Okay, so I dump my exploud off and go get the barboach. Also, I remove both Saurius and Judgement in favor of Tryke, who’s several levels lower.
I fight one more ninja kid. And by ninja kid, I mean ninja boy as always. As obnoxious as the outfits were in the recent games, at least it allowed for girls to exist. Why can’t girls hide and jump at people?
“Why can’t girls hide and jump at people?” Because there are no known survivors of a ninja girl’s assault! I choose to believe that until they actually make ninja girl trainers.
As for the filling the teams thing, I thought it was more intuitive to have all 6 slots as soon as possible too, but a in lot of Let’s Plays I’ve seen the player goes through and only catches whatever catches their attention and it isn’t uncommon to only have three or four things on a team when much more are available in earlier parts of the game, so maybe it’s not as common to fill the team as I’d thought? Black and White even had a line in one of the early cities suggesting that it was more common for trainers to have a team of just three that they trained regularly. I’ve always filled all 6 slots as soon as I can to try to get things exp for evolving my way through the Dex, but maybe the way I do it isn’t what’s expected?
Imm, when playing as a kid I always had a full team of mons that I carefully kept all the same level. I was bewildered to find when checking my cousin’s game that he just had an over-leveled starter and some random weaklings. He’d only caught eleven pokemon all up by the time he’d beaten the elite four, and trained none but his starter.
Still, based on glorious anecdata I’d say that the ratio is about seventy-five percent players play with a full team and twenty-five percent play with various combinations of less. It happens, but it isn’t common enough for it to make sense to design the game on the basis that everyone plays like that.
Though if that’s what they’re doing it would explain why they’ve decided that full teams are solely the right of the champion.
full teams are solely the right of the champion.
Don’t you dare forget about Mr 6 Magikarp!
I didn’t forget about him. I averaged the experience points he provides and concluded he actually had less than one pokemon on his team.
Magikarp are nothing. You think you see an orange fish gasping helplessly, but actually you behold the void.
Now that I’m thinking on it more, the characters that tell you what was on your team when you got badge x also comments on a team of 6 with “you had a full team, you were ready for everything” at the end in a way that sort of suggests they expect the full team to be a later into the game thing than with every badge from the start, too.
That said, they certainly don’t do anything to discourage filling the team and overwhelming the rest of the game with sheer numbers when the exp. share bolsters even tagalong monsters so easily even if it is the intent to just make a team consisting of a few.
NPCs having 6 mons are a very different aspect of the gameplay than the player having 6 mons. There are just so many random trainers and fewer pokémon mean more trainers to fight before absolute tedium.
It might might make more sense if the player could only battle with the same number of pokémon as the opponent in some casual trainers battle and official gym battles. Even fanfic authors understand that using all the pokémon in every battle is silly.
My point was not that every trainer should have six mons. It was that only the champion having them is ridiculous. The elite four should have full teams whenever you fight them. You should get to watch your rival’s team develop through the game, and it should definitely be full the last two times you battle them, at the very least. Ace trainers in Victory Road should also have their numbers getting up there. But nowadays they don’t seem to give even endgame trainers more than two pokemon on average.
And if you find fighting trainers to be tedium you probably shouldn’t be playing Pokemon, unless you absolutely love filling in the pokedex or something. Most people who play Pokemon enjoy battling.
Battle limits would be a good idea, but Gamefreak’s current approach to game design seems to be “Would a little child find this frustrating maybe? Let’s not do that then.”
And if you find fighting trainers to be tedium you probably shouldn’t be playing Pokemon, unless you absolutely love filling in the pokedex or something. Most people who play Pokemon enjoy battling.
Yeah, I’m actually feeling a bit annoyed to have a battle start and then my opponent has only one or two pokemon. A part of what makes trainer battles different is supposed to be that now you’re locked into having to fight multiple pokemon in a row, while you can take a breather between each fight when dealing with wild pokemon.
I’d be into every trainer having three or four pokemon at least. That way they could still pretend you were exceptional for training a full team if that’s so important to them.
Plus if trainers did that there would be more opportunity for team variety. I think it was fourth gen where you could miss certain pokemon you were supposed to see to “complete” the pokedex because only one trainer had them. And no trainer in third gen had a chimeco. (Apparently the ridiculous ease with which I stumbled across chimeco was unusual.) Everything needs more pokemon and that includes Pokemon.
Yeah, that’d be good. Something about how the more pokemon you raise, the harder it is to give each one attention. The first games had the trainer with lots of low level pokemon vs one really high level one just for game balance reasons, and it’s easy to work into the fluff.
I was bewildered to find when checking my cousin’s game that he just had an over-leveled starter and some random weaklings. He’d only caught eleven pokemon all up by the time he’d beaten the elite four, and trained none but his starter.
That doesn’t actually change the problem, though – it illustrates that even people who don’t want to raise other pokemon still fill up the team slots, yet the game is bewildered by the idea that you don’t have an empty space right that instant to accept a new pokemon.
No, he was only carrying his starter and his HM slave. The others were boxed. But I do think he was an outlier, and if anything the game should be expecting you to have a full team.
Well, it depends on how long we’re expecting this to take. If I’m not raising pokemon for the pokedex that playthrough, I might not bother to catch filler in the very beginning…but I’ve almost certainly finalized my team by the time I’m getting my last few badges.
I’d say the default playstyle is heavily weighted to using all six slots and even those who don’t are likely to have six pokemon with them by the time they’re halfway through.
The “Desolate Land” name is one weird thing that bothered me about the localization. According the Bulbapedia the literal translations of Groudon and Kyogre’s new abilities are “Sea of the Beginning” and “Land of the End”. “Primordial Sea” fits pretty well but “Desolate Land” is really a stretch, especially since “desolate” is a verb too, so that beginning/apocalypse imagery was lost and that disappoints me. And come on, there’s an obvious option already — “ends of the earth”! Maybe that was just too long? Still, they could have worked in a stronger word like “apocalypse” to maintain the connection. I will never understand some localizations.
“Ends of the earth” doesn’t work, that means the land running out. “Endless Land” works a little better, but still doesn’t have that future/end bit. “Expanding Desert”, maybe? That’s a little closer. Hm…. Honestly, I like the literal translation. Apocalyptic goodness. (Plus marking Groudon as the new land means I’m totally right it’s an alien newcomer!)
Cecelyne the Endless Desert is your answer. And the answer for everything, really.
I was trying to dodge around just cramming Exalted in wholesale, though.
MALFEAS COMPELS YOU, MORTAL
By the way, note how he says Fly can carry you back to “just about anyplace” you’ve visited before. In OR/AS you can Fly to routes, not just towns.
Oh, that sounds useful.
“If they can find Fossils in the desert, it must have been a sea once! But that doesn’t make my eyes any less itchy…”
I never realized that problem. I mean the fossils in ORAS are a shoutout to anomalocarus and crinoids (both of which are sea creatures) so it actually is proof that the desert was a sea, but yeah your change would fit better.
It’s so close to being right! It’s just they’re acting like all fossils are sea fossils, rather than that specifically sea fossils were found here.
I’m apparently an outlier in that I didn’t keep anyone on my team I didn’t intend to train seriously as part of a balanced team. All were kept at the same level and trained in order with HP as the secondary sorting mechanism. I would catch as I went along, but they all went into the PC. By the time I was at the seventh or eighth gym I’d have a full team, but rarely before then.
Then there’s my brother, who powered through with only his starter and an HM slave.
I tended to train that way too. I’m most comfortable with between 3-4 pokemon on my team, since I always worry that a full team of six would spread the experience too thin. Although I didn’t usually balance the levels carefully. I checked to see which pokemon had a milestone coming up (strong move, evolution) and level until they either hit that point or a big pocket of easy experience for a different guy showed up.
By the time I was at the seventh or eighth gym I’d have a full team
But that’s where I am, and the game still thinks it’s weird I’m not walking around with an open slot!
Alpha Sapphire’s version of the events here doesn’t even mention the opposite ability by name at all. Just that everything will return to the beginning before the first births or something along those lines. To answer how they tried to make “Desolate Land” sound good, they simply avoided mentioning it altogether.
Kyogre’s world being the world as it was before life can fit pretty neatly into the world heart thing, though.
Ah.
And that’s interesting that it’s before the beginning of life, makes it easier to see how Aqua could be making a mistake. Primordial Sea makes me think of primordial ooze and a generally life-filled if primitive setup, one that modern day life could easily handle as well. “Before the first births” means it’s going to be a sterile waterworld, and that’s a lot more terrifying.
Might fit with the idea we’re Groudon’s children, too.