Pokemon Ultra Moon LP #6: Champion Once More

Final stretch of the game! I walk up to Mt. Lanakila's first lift, to be greeted by... Gladion! Oh, yeah, there's this fight that happens. His party's more or less the same with what it was in Sun/Moon, except the Zorua/Zoroark that showed up in all my prior battles with him replaced a... was it a Weavile or some shit? Anyway, Gladion's cool. He falls, and then I enter Alola's Victory Road, which was a shitty barren cavern full of nothingness but an Icinium Z....

Nope, wrong! It's chock-filled with trainers, just as a Victory Road is supposed to be! Yes, yes, yes. It's not as elaborately long as the Hoenn or Sinnoh or Unovan Victory Roads, but it's still a cave filled with trainers and powerful Glalies and Golbats that requires an ungodly amount of Hyper Potions to go through, so it's pretty dang cool. And most surprisingly, about one-thirds through the Victory Road, I see a crater... and in it is Necrozma, just chilling in the crater. I touch it, and apparently I 'share my light' with the Z-Ring.

Wait, what? So I guess we do get the mascot legendary before the final battle. I'm definitely not using Necrozma in the Elite Four battle, but I do accept his help in Photon Bursting fools through the Victory Road. Catching Necrozma is... very disappointingly easy. I threw a single Pokeball and captured him on the first turn.

Colress then shows up and gives a speech about how Necrozma was reinvigorated by the light from the Z-crystals, and gives me a bunch of tools to fuse Necrozma with Solgaleo and Lunala, and notes how he's very experienced in Pokemon Fusion... and I completely and utterly forgot that, yes, Colress was involved in the White/Black Kyurem subplot in Generation V. Of course his expanded role in the Ultra games is going to involve him dealing with fusion Pokemon. It's so blindingly (heh!) obvious that that's going to be his role, but it just never really crossed my mind. He also notes that Lunala is hanging out in the Altar of the Moone or somewhere, but I'm a bit too antsy to murder the League and be champion, so I'll leave that for later.

Anyway, Necrozma never ceases to surprise me! I walk up to the top of Mt. Lanakila, listen to Kukui's speech about how the League is awesome and yadda yadda yadda, and I get an amazing scene where Decidueye pops out of the Pokeball and I have a bit of an interaction with him. It's really not often that the bond with your starter is acknowledged, and this small scene is definitely well-appreciated by me.

So yeah, I could bring Necrozma with me... but that won't be fair. So my party, sitting in the early 60's, is comprised of:

• Decidueye (with the moves Spirit Shackle, Sucker Punch, Leaf Blade and Brave Bird)
• Hat!Pikachu (with the moves Thunderbolt, Thunder, Quick Attack and Iron Tail)
• Malamar (with the moves Foul Play, Psycho Cut, Topsy-turvy and Superpower)
• Muk (with the moves Poison Jab, Crunch, Flamethrower and Rock Slide)
• Kabutops (with the moves Aqua Jet, Rock Slide, X-Scissor and Ice beam)
• Bewear (with the moves Hammer Arm, Double Edge, Dragon Claw and Rock Tomb)

Is it ideal? Not really. I have two dark types and an over-abundance of rock-type attacks. And that Pikachu is a glaring, glaring weakness because, shit, any sane person would've brought a Pikachu that actually can be evolved into a Raichu (and I won't lie, a Thunderbolting, Psychic-ing Alolan Raichu would be sweet) but eh. A fragile Pikachu that can still hit hard as balls will make all this pretty challenging.

So yeah, I go into my first Elite Four room. It's supposed to be Hala but... nope! Apparently, the whole 'four Kahunas' thing is just thrown out of the window. I mean, it already was in Sun/Moon with Hapu being completely absent from the Elite Four and Acerola replacing Nanu, but still. Anyway, Molayne! That was unexpected, but it makes sense. Steel-type Elite Four member. Well, it's a good thing half my team can Rock Slide and Muk has an emergency Flamethrower.

Molayne's party is actually different from his party back when he's a possible champion in Sun/Moon, although I have enough Fight-type attacks and Rock-type attacks to deal with his minions. He does start off with the mighty Klefki who Thunder Waves everything in its path, which is mildly annoying, and resists all my Fighting and Rock moves. Good thing I have Muk, who just spams Flamethrower (which isn't particularly good with Muk's crappy Sp. Attack, but at least it's something) until Klefki dies. And then Dugtrio and Bisharp just die to Bewear's Hammer Arm, I am so scared by Metagross that I hit Malamar's Dark-type Z-move to one-shot it, and his last Pokemon isn't a fragile Sandslash... but a Magnezone! Which is a lot tougher to murder. But Bewear keeps spamming Hammer Arms and Magnezone eventually falls. Woo!

The rest of the Elite Four is identical to Sun/Moon, although their parties have changed a bit. All but two of Olivia's Pokemons have changed -- which is just as well since both Carbink and Relicanth were pretty crappy. She now has the Hoenn fossils, Gigalith and her two signatures of Probopass and Lycanroc. Decidueye makes very short work of Lycanroc and Gigalith, while Probopass still has that 4x weakness to Fighting (and that fucking annoying Sturdy), but as Steven Stone has proven, Hoenn fossils are scum to murder. My Kabutops and Armaldo have a little fossil-type showdown where I just spam Rock Slide and he spams Liquidation (why can't Kabutops get Liquidation?) while Cradily... god, I'm just glad this one doesn't have Ingrain. Suffice to say that with unexpected blasts of Earth Powers and Sludge Waves, it managed to knock out more members of my party than unexpected.


Acerola should, in theory, be the easiest. I mean, she's a Ghost-type user. I have two Dark-types, Muk and Malamar, and Decidueye is a Ghost-type. It should be a cakewalk, right? Well, not really. Decidueye kills the Banette pretty quickly, but the Froslass manages to tank a Spirit Shackle and get a Blizzard in that scores a critical hit and knocks my Decidueye out. No problem, I still have two more Dark-type hitter. Let's just have Kabutops Aqua Jet this red-healthed Froslass... and then apparently by luck or by design, Acerola sent Palossand out to tank my Aqua Jet. Which activates Water Compaction, increasing the defenses of an already tanky monster. And then Palossand Giga Drains my Kabutops for 4x damage. What? Giga Drain? Are you not a Ground/Ghost creature?

Pikachu and Bewear can't really do much against Palossand, and Muk's going to take a powerful hit from Earth Power, so I sent out Malamar. Malamar did get a couple of Foul Plays off, but not before a pair of Earth Powers KO Malamar. Eventually it was my Muk that knocks Palossand out with a Crunch. Which is fortunate, because the Palossand never managed to get an Earth Power out... oh, look, a Dhelmise! I bet he's going to be easy how the fuck does he know Earthquake? So yeah, Alolan Muk has only one weakness, and that is Ground. And Dhelmise, a Ghost/WaterGrass with Steel as a tertiary pseudo-type, knows Earthquake. Poor Muk.

So it all comes down to Pikachu... who outspeeds Dhelmise and kills it with a single Thunderbolt. Then the weakened Froslass comes out and Pikachu outspeeds it and kills it with an Iron Tail. Then the final creature, Drifblim comes out, and Pikachu knocks it out with a 10,000,000,000 Thunderbolt or whatever the Z-move is called. I didn't expect Pikachu to do anything against any of these until Kahili and the champion, and to see him actually sweep half of Acerola's team (granted, they were kind of damaged) when I had so much trouble... yeah.

Kahili's almost a breather boss at this point. Sure, she got rid of her Skarmory and Crobat for a far scarier pair of Braviary and Hawlucha. But Kabutops and Pikachu almost single-handedly sweeps the team with Rock Slides and Thunderbolts. It's... pretty easy when Kahili, unlike Acerola, doesn't hide any weird unexpected attacks behind her birds, although that Braviary's Crush Claw is pretty damn punishing.

Can I just say how much Kahili doesn't make sense? The Alolan games are unique in that they, alongside the Unovan games, are the only games where you actually have the Elite Four members be comprised of characters you've met across your journey as opposed to 'hey, check out these four really strong bosses!' like they were in literally every other game. But whereas Acerola, Molayne, Olivia and Hala are all very much relevant to your journey through Alola, Kahili's like a cameo appearance. She's really jarring that way.

And the final battle is against Kukui... who actually straight-up trolls me, by going "just kidding!" after going through most of the same scene that he goes through in the champion fight in Sun/Moon.

But no, the actual final boss in Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon is... Hau! Which is wholly unexpected. He's pretty decent, too, having replaced that embarrassing non-threat that is his Komala from Sun/Moon with a Tauros and a Noivern, both pretty solid choices, and he got that clusterfuck of a design that is Crabominable back. And, well... to be honest, he's nowhere as challenging as Molayne or Acerola was, and the biggest threat is simply because he has six Pokemon at high levels. But it's an easy bit of matching because my party takes his out pretty handily. Malamar kills Raichu with a single shot. Decidueye kills Primarina with two shots. Bewear one-shots Tauros (although nearly dies in the process). Kabutops one-shots Noivern. Pikachu almost two-shots Flaroen before being taken out, but Flareon dies due to recoil damage. And Muk murders Crabominable with a Poison Jab just so each of my party member pops up in the final battle.

So yeah, I win, and am once more crowned the champion of Alola! (I almost expect that I have to battle Kukui again) And the credits roll... and oh boy, it's a lot shorter. Some scenes are retained, like the party and the huge Z-move dance (with Mina being the one doing it in the bushes instead of Nanu), but we don't get like fifteen scenes of mid-credit scenes with dialogue or a random battle with Tapu Koko. It's just a short version of the party with nearly all the dialogue exorcised. And with the Lillie/Nebby stuff not really being as prominent in Ultra Sun, all Lillie gets in the credits is just a forlorn look at the bridge after a brief speech in front of Tapu Koko's altar.

There are a bunch of other wordless scenes too, with Gladion getting on the boat and being sent off by Wicke (instead of Lillie in this continuity), and Lusamine shows up at the end to wave goodbye, showing that she's... redeemed? Somewhat? Guzma attempts to disband Team Skull, but all they do is take off their bandanas, and, well, they're still following their leader and all that. Pretty heartwarming stuff. Team Skull's fate was one of the things that weren't exactly left clear back in Sun/Moon, with only Guzma and Plumeria showing up really giving you any indication, but yeah, this is a neater bow for them.

The Ultra Recon Squad, Aether Foundation and Colress make this alliance of morally-ambiguous smart science men dressed in white, and I guess it totally makes sense for them to work together now that they're all good. Faba's pissed, I think? Oh, and Dexio and Sina crowd around a Zygarde crystal (I completely forgot about Zygarde) while in a cave where I think we fought Guzzlord back in Sun/Moon... snake-dragon Zygarde is crawling around like a worm and screams. So yeah, definitely stuff for me to do in the post game. People tell me Zygarde is a lot easier in US/UM, which is nice because I never actually bothered to complete the Zygarde sidequest in Pokemon Sun.

Next-up... Tapu Hunting, Ultra Beast hunting, Lunala hunting, Zygarde hunting and I hear there's something about Team Rocket?