You can fight her eventually. Her team of 'mons ends up being oops all eeveelutions.
Her final 'mon is trans icon Sylveon, and her battle quote when super-crystalizing her is “Shine bright like the starry sky and become who you really want to be!”
Also, her battle theme is this hardstyle edm thing (I feel like this is relevant, though I’m not an expert):
Upgrading my opinion from “hmm… what an easy headcanon to make” to “that has to be what they were going for (even if they’re too cowardly to say it out loud).”
This is convincing… I am also now choosing to interpret penny as a trans hacker. Her story also has a lot of stuff in it about long-time internet friends meeting “the real Penny” for the first time, after she spent over a year at home… transitioning???.. the read is solid
Okay I need to know whether someone I’m friends with on Facebook was bullshitting is there really An Ed Sheeran Song in the end credits or post-main-quest credits or whatever.
This is not what the song looks like in the game but here’s the music. In the game it plays over the credits after you defeat the fourth major plot quest, A Way Home
(can’t believe i actually finished a pokemon game, let alone before my superpokefan wife)
the final chapter was something else — made me feel, however briefly, like i had the wonderment of a 10-year-old again (except as a well-adjusted human being instead of the actual 10-year-old dork-me who hated on pokemon solely on a performative-reactionary basis).
(i blame the neuron activation from the extremely jrpg-final-dungeon-esque music (spoilers, obvs))
So glad someone else here finished it… that final chapter is indeed wild, and the final fight is so surprising!! I also loved it.
I went to the office today for the first time in months and ran into someone else who had rolled credits, and we could not stop talking about all the shit they do in the final sequence and in that final fight. This game feels like a Pokemon dev team has finally been allowed to go hog wild, explore the things they love from other games, and show us what they care about. It is delightful to see a Pokémon game bringing in narrative design tricks from other kinds of RPGs!
I have way too many psychic types lol. It’s fascinating people are complaining about this one when I still remember Sword and Shield being the worst Pokemon games I’ve ever played.
Feels so much more like the journey of going around a region properly realised. It’d be excellent if Legends and this get hybridised so they have the best of both worlds (and obviously some polish wouldn’t hurt).
This is the first game where I’ve felt compelled to fill out the dex. I love the bookshelf even though it’s just a difference of presentation.
A little bit more incremental progress, a Garganacl is currently in my main party and I hate how this Minecraft reject motherfucker looks but it’s hard to argue with its results. Trying to put together a team to go take on the Ghost gym now that the Normal one is beaten. Guess I should load up on Ghost type moves for non-Ghost Pokémon. I also have a Tinkaton that looks like a cross between a Digimon and an enemy from a Kirby game.
Ghost type gym is beaten and so is the Quaking Earth titan. On the doorstep of the psychic gym with:
Annihilape
Houndoom (Ghost teratype)
Sneasel
Beartic
Ursaring
Golduck
This is, frankly, a completely random smattering of dudes I’ve picked up along the way but I have a feeling Sneasel is going to carry the team for a little while – it absolutely wrecked house against the Ghost gym and was no slouch against the titan (although Golduck batted cleanup on the latter with a well-timed critical hit with Hydro Pump during that fight).
still have the compulsion to play this off and on, despite not being a big “postgame” guy
I finished all the classes in the school. Each class you attend unlocks the opportunity to have a conversation with the teacher elsewhere in the school, which increases your s-link with the teacher. This culminates with them giving you a some rare items items, which idk doesn’t seem super worth it. At least they have decently interesting personalities.
(if nothing else, the abstracted school experience is still authentic enough to literally put me to sleep. quite the big day for people who want to have a challenging experience just pressing the A button)
Been actually having a good amount of fun just combing through the map, poking at all the areas and nooks and crannies I missed the first time around, vaccuuming up sparkly objects from the ground, and fighting trainers who ended up way, way off the beaten path. If nothing else, this has given me an appreciation of how the map isn’t filled with hundreds of bokoblin encampments everywhere.
(anyhow, speaking of sparkling things of the ground, I can’t stop thinking about how the game trains your eyes to spot those little sparkles everywhere and pick them up, and then the final area just has a bajillion sparkles floating through the air and across the ground purely as decoration. not entirely sure if the intent was there, per se, but it reads as an incredible joke (i love it))
Brassius (grass-type artist dude) was a lot more fun as a gym rematch, though I think that’s mostly on account of the fact that the game fleshed out his personality just enough to be interesting (previously he was easily the most boring gym leader). I think I’m actually interested in the gym rematches now.
IMO the most interesting gym rematch dialogue is for Grusha, I recommend that one!
Missing only one Pokémon now, koraidon. Gotta touch trade it with someone next week and then I get the shiny charm. Currently running raids to get enough herbs mystica to make some of those shiny sandwiches and grind out some of my favorite new shinies… I started a shiny living dex when I was almost done with the regular one and now I gotta finish that one too!!
I was very excited to catch a shiny which then just turned out to be some other variant of Toxtricity, oh well. Also I think I had a shiny once and then accidentally KO’d it lol. I think maybe Shiny Hunting is not going to be for me.
Finished off all the gyms! Rando Houndoom got me out of the Ice gym when the leader’s final 'mon crystalized. (BTW I feel like I have barely engaged with that mechanic, half the time it doesn’t even seem worth sitting through the animation).
Have to grind up a team to go fight the Fairy-type Team Star base. Luckily I think several members of my team are already pretty decent types for this. Dreading dealing with the bullshit overpowered Revarooms but maybe I finally have some guys that are fast/beefy enough that I won’t have to burn through a dozen potions to prevail.
I have all these TM crafting materials and none of the ones I need for the moves I’d actually want lol. And sandwich ingredients. I have barely paid attention to that stuff. There’s A Lot in modern Pokémon games and I’d almost be happier with a much more slimmed-down set of mechanics, I think.
Have realised my type is big spherical Pokemon tanks with huge DEF.
Am still in a nice sweetspot where level bracketing is pretty appropriate for my team but I tend to level up an A-team and a B-team alongside each other which is probably slowing me down but I’m 250 into the Pokedex and still enjoying myself so it’s all good.
The route up to Alfornada is great, felt like a proper old-school cave for a bit.
The best gym leader by far is this guy, I wanna cosplay.
I made a charizard raid fighter Azumarill named Bazookarill. I highly recommend making one if you plan to do more of the charizard raids next time they’re up. The move set is belly drum → play rough, and you can run with light screen or a water move too if you want. Atk/HP stats. It didn’t take me too long to make one and it made doing raids pretty simple. It was so simple in fact that I sometimes ran iron valiant just to make it a bit more fun at least I got a ton of resources to build PVP and other raid Pokémon though!!
at least I got a ton of resources to build PVP and other raid Pokémon though!!