Let's Play Legends Arceus, Part 15: Ghost Fox Hunting

So a little birdie told me that if I report the Avalugg questline to Kamado, it's going to essentially lock me into the endgame. So I've been spending the past couple of days just... just casually trying to complete the Pokedex and complete as many of the older sidequests as possible. Mostly, I really, really wanted a Hisuian Zorua. I genuinely thought that a Zoroark was going to be one of the Noble Pokemon, since Hisuian Zoroark has been so prominently featured in so much of Legends Arceus' promotional material!

But nope, Zorua is just... a really, really rare encounter in several spots in the Alabaster Icelands. So as I just jump around the five big maps, I also try to complete research tasks for some more Pokemon. Throughout everything written here, I worked on getting Infernape and Espeon's entry full; and getting research tasks for the Turtwig and Piplup lines and evolving them into Torterra and Empoleon. I also raised a Togetic all the way into being a Togekiss, taking care only to evolve these rare Pokemon only after I got research tasks out of them. 

Ultimately, I found a Zorua after murdering a whole ton of Bergmites and Misdreavuses in one of the ice tunnels in the Icelands, and I captured him immediately. I call him Enma, after the god of the underworld and that one sword from One Piece. 

And as I trained up Zorua, I finally found Brice (is he a reference to Pryce?) and finally set up the second camp in the Alabaster Icelands... after I basically finished everything the main plot wants me to do there. I give Brice a random level 5 Ponyta, too, since he's a bit too cold in this tundra. 

And after that, I kinda... just jumped from map to map, looking for Cherrim for that one damn early-game quest. I finally broke down and looked up a guide, and apparently Cherrim will only spawn from blue trees that shake, so I just alternated between every single area to look for a Cherrim. In doing so, I found out that the 'Fabled Grove' is actually a meeting place for Clefairies and Clefables at night, and it's actually genuinely surprising to me because it really should have been obvious with the 'fable' name, but also I didn't expect the Clefairy line to show up in Hisui since I don't think they showed up in the Sinnoh games. It is pretty nicely eerie and magical to see the Clefairy just hop around and sometimes I think create illusions? Or maybe I'm just really bad at throwing pokeballs when a Smoke Bomb is active. 

Also, in one of the time-rifts, I find not a futuristic Pokemon like Porygon or the modern Johtonian Sneasel, but Shieldon and Cranidos! ...of course this is how they're going to introduce the prehistoric Pokemon. That's genuinely so cool! I think I'm in a comfortable enough level to survive running around in a space-time rift until I have exhausted the time limit, though I also have to pick my battles properly.

Another interesting thing is that one of the Gingko Guild members sells me a strange mechanical wardrobe... and it's a Rotom-style refrigerator! Where the fuck did you find a refrigerator in medieval-era Japan, Volo's boss? I guess it fell out of the space-time rift, and somehow Rotom is able to possess it? It's still kind of odd that Rotoms exist before televisions are (presumably) invented, but I guess anything that doesn't gel perfectly we can really just blame the space-time rifts. This finally does add a piece of furniture to my otherwise barren house, though, which I thought was cute. 

There's a bunch of outbreaks that I had fun in. It's interesting how there are Pokemon that are just kinda passive, like the Sudowoodo, which makes the outbreak a bit easier to handle. Then there's the Eevee outbreak where all the little foxes will just scatter to the winds. And then there are outbreaks like Heracross, where the damn beetles will gang up on me, sometimes four at once, to try and murder me. 

My exploration also yields me a bunch of Old Verses and Unown, although I haven't really even started to properly looking for them. None of the Old Verses, I think, connect to each other and are just a collection of old weird myths? There's also some carvings in the Snowpoint Temple and I looked a bit more closely on it -- there are symbols of at least Cresselia and Heatran there, which... I don't know if all the Sinnoh legendaries are going to make an appearance here? 

All the wandering around in the Icelands ended up with me stumbling into an Unown in a hidden rock smash tunnel in that one cave in Mt. Coronet. There's another one just on one of the outcroppings near the Eternal Ice, and another one on top of a strange rock in the Icelands' waterfall. Pretty neat, and I absolutely love that, just like the Koroks, any slightly-weird place will for sure have Unowns or Spiritomb wisps around. 

I also finally turned in a bunch of side-quests. There's a Pearl Settlement lady who is Bergmite's number one fan, and she wants to see the dex entry for Bergmite (which I already completed). She's like, pretending badly to know all the information or some shit, and I don't find her particularly funny. 

Another quest that I hadn't completed is the Nosepass request. This one, unlike the Bergmite one, actually makes use of Nosepass's uniqueness and has the lady that request it actually use Nosepass as a compass to navigate the dark cave. It's not much, but this is the kind of flavour that makes some of the non-spotlighted Pokemon much more memorable. If only there's something like that for poor Bergmite, who himself is already kind of boring...

There's also another balloon minigame, except this time it's like a triathlon nonsense. Remember how I said Braviary's controls are not so good, but it's okay since it's just used for exploration? This is one of the most miserable minigames I've played in a Pokemon game. Fuck this one. I just got my 30 balloons popped since the switching between ride Pokemon is a bit clunky, and dipped out. 

Oh, and I also found Wanda in a random Coronet Mountain cliff, just... just by accident. Wasn't even looking for the lady! She's so happy because a Crobat blew her away and she couldn't get up. There's a cute moment where she's all like 'oh, I am relying on you, why couldn't you be in my corps' or whatever. She's going to probably get lost in the Icelands one more time, isn't she? ...except she gets lost in the Fieldlands again? Okay? That's weird. I haven't actually completed this side of the quest.

Eventually, I did find a Cherrim and thankfully it's guaranteed that startled Pokemon from berry trees will fight. I just chuck an ultra ball at it the first chance I got, because shit, I ain't going through this hell of looking for Cherrim in the trees. I spent a lot of the time doing all of these other quests just spamming Cherrim's research mission, which is to do things in agile moves since I can't bloody well defeat or catch more Cherrims if I can't find more than one. The quest itself ends anticlimactically when the random farmer guy just goes 'oh, okay, so Cherrim has two forms neat'.

...if nothing else, Cherrim, you have utterly and successfully made yourself memorable in my brain, though not perhaps for the best reason. 

Another sidequest I completed is the Tao Hua/Choy storyline. Which... turns out that the 'treasure' that was stolen from him was his granddaughter. So all of this nonsense is just a family spat over an overprotective dad who doesn't like his son-in-law. Okay. The Tao Hua stuff really have a bit too much dialogue baked into it, but I did like that we do have a running storyline in the background. 

With the power of Exp Candies, I manage to raise up a Pachirisu to level 35 and use it to beat up the Ursaring in that one quest in the first area that I've kind of ignored because Pachirisu really isn't that good for battling. Although now that I type this sentence, I think I realize that I probably should've made use of the move tutor to teach it Thunderbolt or something. Oh well. 

The missing Eevee quest also gets solved when I realized that I'm not supposed to be looking for Eevee, but one of its evolutions. The only real hint is that the old man who owned the Eevee talked about the Galaxy Corps base, and I didn't really think that the Umbreon that Sanqua had was anything but an easter egg to Gold & Silver's Karen! Turns out that the Eevee just evolved on its own -- probably out of happiness from the muffins the old man keeps giving it, and the old man ends up parting with the evolution stone he set aside for Eevee. That's cute. 

While all of this is going on and I'm just trying to fill up the 'capture' and 'defeat' quotas for a lot of the more common species, I also start to evolve a lot of my Pokemon, especially those with unique new forms. Bergmite and Rufflet are easy; they are already at relatively high level so it's easy to turn them into Hisuian Avalugg and Hisuian Braviary. Avalugg... just isn't that good thanks to getting so much x4 damage from everything, but he's cool and that's all that matters. I don't care enough about Braviary to use him, but Avalugg is probably going to get raised a bit more. 

Some of the Hisuian forms are a bit tricky. Hisuian Voltorb evolves into Hisuian Electrode... not by the Thunder Stone, but by the Leaf Stone. That's cute! And Hisuian Sneasel evolves into Sneasler by Razor Claw... but in the day, instead of in the night like Weavile! That's... okay, that's interesting. I really still don't like the look of Sneasler and his fursuit-looking design, but Electrode will fall into the same category as Avalugg and Arcanine where "I'll raise them to be substitutes when I want something different". 

Basculin evolving into Basculegion takes a bit more work, though, because the way that you do that is to accumulate almost 500 HP in terms of recoil damage. Poor, poor Basculin, you literally have to hurt the poor fish to turn him into a ghost. Hisuian Basculin's new signature move, Wave Crash, is basically Water-type Take Down and that helps, but it's still kind of annoying that I have to keep healing up poor Basculin. With how often I've been using the red-accented ride Basculin, it was a bit jarring to see mine evolve into the variation with white accents.

And finally, my Hisuian Zorua evolves into Hisuian Zoroark. I love everything about this design. It just looks so wild with the in-game 3D model. It's blood-soaked hair, its edgy, exposed-dying muscles look... and the fact that I already like Zoroark in the first place! Instead of Night Daze, Hisuian Zoroark's signature move is Bitter Malice, which might freeze the enemy Pokemon and deals more damage if the enemy has a status condition. That's kind of fucking metal, it's inflicting the same ice-cold conditions that murdered it and its young on the enemy! 

Honestly, while the dex entries are certainly morbid, I really do feel like it's such a great combination of tropes between the mysterious icy-mountain demons, travelers who die and succumb to the cold, and Zoroark's original already very aggressive protectiveness of its young, now twisted into something that's surprisingly a lot more brutal than its Dark-type counterparts in Unova. 

Looking at my pokedex, I think I've encountered most of the non-legendary Pokemon? I'm still missing actually capturing some of them. Haven't met a Pikachu yet, I'm missing a couple of the Eeveelutions, obviously Spiritomb, some of the baby forms, and... and unless there is another overworld area (I highly doubt it!) my Pokedex ends at Lucario. That sounds about right, I feel, before we move into the endgame. I am an ninth-star with Cyellene, I believe? I haven't turned in my pokedex research for a while.

Current Party: Hootle (Hisuian Decidueye), Manterror (Kleavor), Enma (Hisuian Zoroark), Bartholomew (Ursaluna), Geth (Basculegion), Uzumaki (Hisuian Goodra)