Last we left off in Pokemon Uranium, Ura and his trusty team of bizarre beasts burned down local douchebag Sheldon's gym, before being conscripted by his dad and the Pokemon Rangers to deal with a second nuclear explosion and a swarm of nuclear Pokemon attacking the citizens of Legen Town. Also, Theo cries a lot. With nothing to do about the mysterious nuclear explosions and plant meltdowns, everyone tells Ura to continue on with his gym journey, so it's off to the Baykal Rainforest and Amatree village.This update covers the first part of Ura's journey through the bug-infested rainforest.
But first, before we progress through the game, let's take care of a bunch of... side-quests, I guess? I'm actually surprised I have 50, honestly -- I know I've been lobbing balls at anything that crosses my path, but still.
PP Up is neat but probably not the most useful. Substitute's only really useful in competitive battles, but the real prize is an egg of a rare Pokemon.
??? I don't actually know what this is. I know I reviewed all the Fakemon in Uranium, but some are just sorta there. It's pink and cute, though.
Charlie, actually, has the ability Flame Body, which is great for hatching eggs since it cuts down the amount of steps it will take to hatch eggs by half.
...The fuck you say? I have a ticket, right here, from the stupid Pokemon Rangers. Wait, what, where's my ticket?
So apparently, to my utter confusion, it's not a game-breaking bug or anything, but every time you ride this fast-travel train you have to buy a ticket and spend it. Which is realistic, sure, because in real life that's what you do, but there is honestly a reason why video games aren't realistic.
Because it's kind of freaking annoying. It's the same sort of rant I have towards the defenders of item durability or the stamina bar from Breath of the Wild. Just because it's more realistic to do something doesn't make it a good gameplay feature. We're in fantasyland anyway, what's the real point of doing this other than to just make things a little more convoluted?
Whatever. It's not like anyone would do anything other than buy these in bulk so they never have to deal with the stupid TURP Tickets.
Back to this route I didn't go through before. We found the TM for Skill Swap, which is kind of never useful unless you have a really shitty ability like Truant.
Montage of trainer battles! I think this is the first time we see Palij, Pahar's evolution, as well as the regular, non-nuclear version of Trawpint.
That's the official Pokemon Whimsicott, the evolution of Cottonee. I think this game gives it a fanmade mega-evolution. Also, random trainers have Tractons, which gives me the mental image of these trainers (and Sheldon) gambling really, really hard in Beachball City.
Speaking of Uranium Pokemon I forget about, I also catch me one of these weird headphone ducks, which are... Normal/Psychic? Yeah, I'm genuinely not sure how these guys are psychic. Is it like a weird parrot-duck thing, then? I name mine Hide, after the Tokyo Ghoul character.
Oh hey, there's also a huge day care center, the place for your Pokemon to make eggs. And to level them up, but let's be honest, not a lot of people use day care for that second purpose.
Also, a TM for Steel Wing, which would be neat for coverage, but I don't think I have anyone who can learn it?
Holy shit, random Lucky Egg, just handed to me like that! Y'know, I would do a Giga Drain TM style rant, but leveling up is actually legitimately annoyingly hard in this leg of the game, so I will happily take all your lucky eggs, please.
I leave Sleepy Shit the Feleng and Baaphomet the Baashaun here, because I have no real interest in raising them so they can level up and maybe if I ever remember to return I'll level them up a couple of times to fill in the dex entries of their evolutions.
Oh hell yes. Rock Slide is another one of those pretty damn useful moves due to the sheer coverage of rock -- but the actual rock-type Pokemon tend to not be very good. Gyro Ball has been pretty shit since Coconut the Cocancer is a lot faster than I give him credit for, so I replace Gyro Ball with the far, far more useful Rock Slide.
...umm okay.
We need to get this poor man to an asylum. I feel this is a reference to something, but I certainly have no idea what it is. Probably why only fangames put in blatant shout-outs and references, while official material tend not to.
Gentleman Sir Goldkorn calls me up, demanding a rematch... and holy shit he really got his team buff what the fuck. Or maybe I'm the underleveled one? Regardless, though, poor, poor Cerebella here is staring down a giant angry snake with a 6 level difference
After seeing the damage a single Psybeam does to Arbok, I decide to cheese the fight with Yawn, putting Arbok to sleep. Fortunately, Sir Goldkorn tries to do a Stockpile/Spit Up gambit, which means my brain-fish cleanly sweeps Arbok down.
Gentleman Sir Goldkorn's next Pokemon is a level 34 Tanscure, and the only real thing I have for it, short of banking on Charlie's Flamethrowers, is Taxonomaly's Fairy-type attacks.
Draining Kiss does... a decent damage but Tanscure just keeps doing Roar, which swaps my Pokemon with a random one from my party. This is neat, becuase, well, my Pokemon are mostly faster than the Tanscure, and even when it's little baby E. coli that's dragged out, he can still get an attack out or two.
The Tanscure keeps doing Roar, and getting punched in the face by Taxonomaly and eventually with a mighty coconut-capped Crabhammer courtesy of Coconut.
I also capture one of these awkward-looking dog-frogs. Or, well, as the dex calls Folerog, "Long Toads". I'll call you Michigan J. Frog. Man, what an awkward looking creature. From its design to its name, it's just awkward all around.
Another side-quest I do is looking for the bike wheel, which I apparently missed. Also, I found the TM for Bulk Up. A decent set-up move, but I don't really plan on doing set-up moves.
Oh yeah, it's this My Little Pony baby unicorn! I genuinely 100% forgot it existed in the Uranium pokedex.
It's a Fairy/Normal, and has a popular toyline based on it. Just like My Little Pony, get it? I name her "Sparkle" after Twilight Sparkle, which a google search tells me is the main character in the My Little Pony cartoon. I know absolutely nothing about the franchise other than it's apparently a great show, but has some really obsessive fans that are really toxic in the internet or something?
Alternate names for Minicorn: Hasbro, Merchandise, Shadowfax, Glitter and Brownie.
A lot more disappointing compared to E. coli, I must say.
And I get the Bicycle, which allows me to zoom around Tandor pretty quickly. Neat.
Good Boy the Lunapup joins our party temporarily as a strength HM slave. I forgot I had the boxing gloves or whatever, and ended up teaching Good Boy rock smash as well. Oops!
I bring Good Boy along mostly because he's a good boy and a lot cuter than Ahoge the Barewl, and frankly I could honestly never see a Barewl in the rest of this playthrough and be fine with it. Wigglefoot the Ludicolo take a well-deserved vacation in the box.
Yes move that rock who is a good boy yes you are yes you are
No, it was my dog. My superhero dog. Are you blind, lady? You're standing right next to us.
Huh, so apparently that's the gimmick of the Amatree village. They are backwater people living in the forest who refuse to accept the advancements of technology, so they don't have electricity for PC's. Interesting. Do they have a healing bay like Pokemon Centers, though?
Unwilling to take the chance, I do a quick trip back and splurge my money on Super Potions and Revives.
Also apparently Gentleman Sir Goldkorn isn't the only one with a high-level Arbok. I guess the levels have just ratcheted up. And, sure, Charlie is on par with these level 30's, but I do want to get at least some members of my team to level up.
Facade is... Facade is funny for the one or two times you get to pull it off, and sometimes you get some really ridiculous nonsense in combination with Toxic Orb and the Guts ability, but without that specific combination Return is always better, I feel.
I enter the real Baykal Rainforest, Route 10. It's always raining and the forest is daaaark.
BUG WARS! With Aerial Ace coming off of a now pretty decent physical attack stat, Sponaree is no longer a problem for my team.
Also, some camper lady thinks she's like in Ocarina of Time or something like that.
Ah, a Tiki mask Pokemon. I am so glad that the actual, official Nintendo Tiki Pokemon aren't just slapping a Tiki mask on a monkey's body and calling it a day, and actually did something somewhat creative and not too obviously appropriating someone else's culture. Majora seems like an okay name for this.
You know, this line of dialogue probably encapsulates the entire Pokemon world.
Lots of Firokes being used in this forest by trainers, and Cerebella has a love/hate relationship with them. On one hand, Cerebella's weak to the Bug-type moves, but on the other hand, she is able to unleash water moves with impunity thanks to the rainy weather boosting her water attacks.
Also for some reason she tries to learn Rest and Snore... I know that brains need sleep to be healthy, but Cerebella doesn't really have any use for those. Make other people sleepy with your droopy, goofy yawns, little fishie!
AAAA IT'S SO GOOFY LOOKING I LOVE IT
It's no Sponee, but Unymph is pretty cute! Mostly it's the almost bulldog-like underbite and those dumb stubby feet. She looks more like an earwig than a dragonfly nymph, too, but I guess this is a critter just happily sploshing around in the mucky bogs and swamps of a rainforest.
I already have a Bug-type, but Meganeura here (named after prehistoric giant dragonflies that Yanma is based on) is on the short-list of joining the team. Unlike the elemental ants, Unymph's evolution's stats are actually respesctable.
There's also these cute little... bird-cat things? Chicoatl will evolve into a big dragon bird serpent thing, but now he's just an adorable little bird-headed cat with undeveloped wings. He's a cute baby birb. I call her Jan'alai, because she'll grow to be a dragon-bird.
Oh yeah, good rod. I forgot about fishing almost entirely. Whoops! Tubjaws seem to like the equivalent to Carvanha or Goldeen as the slightly-stronger critter that starts showing up with the good rod. They have just weird looking bodies but such a great shit-eating grin. Not quite a moray eel, but I'll call him Flotsam nonetheless.
There's a cave, and there's some bizarre scratched-up sign. B WAR HE EIKA ATER? Ura doesn't speak martian language, sorry.
Anthell? Oh, ant hell. I get it. Also, you're a human too, weirdo.
Huh, he's got impressive fully-evolved bugs. I mean, I have a fire dinosaur, so they're still no problem, but still, considering that the ones I've seen before are just the Firokes and Sponarees, it's slightly more troublesome. I'm not sure what the AI is doing, because he keeps switching out between Nimflora and Harptera (that's the evolved form of Unymph, by the way), allowing Charlie to slowly mow them down with Flamethrower.
Harptera's neat. I'm not sure if it's quite "replace Taxonomaly" neat, but neat. He's Bug/Flying, and that's notoriously fragile, but we'll see.
...right. Okay. I'll leave you to loving your bugs in Anthell.
Don't let them crawl up your pants.
Anthell is filled with S'mores, Sponees and Tricwes, but occasionally I find a Firoke. Firokes are probably the most ant-looking of the three evolved elemental bugs. I name this after Inferno, the pyromaniac fire ant transformer from Beast Wars.
More strength puzzles, and a random hex maniac for some reason. Lady, you're in the wrong themed area.
One way is blocked by a bunch of bug Pokemon, which I am unable to interact with, and neither can I use Charlie to burn them down. Ah, arbitrary roadblocks!
The only exit I can see leads into another part of Baykal Rainforest, where I'm accosted with the dragon tamer
Unfortunately for his stupid Barand, I've got a Fairy in my party, who kisses the dragon to death.
Quetzoral here is the evolved form of Chicoatl, and she's this pretty neat-looking bird-headed serpent with two arms. Sort of reminds me of those serpent-people from Warcraft. Despite her trainer, though, Quetzoral is not a dragon type, and murders poor Taxonomaly with Acrobatics.
I throw in Charlie, who, despite the rain cutting down the power of his fire-type moves, the super-effective damage he deals still kills Quetzoral.
At this point I took a break to sort the screenshots and decide that Baykal Rainforest just looks incomprehensible at night when screenshotted and shrunken down to the size I use on this blog, so I waited until daytime to play this game.
Also, you can't hear it, but the soundtrack for this rainforest has a bunch of ambient monkey/bird/insect sounds overlaid over Ruby and Sapphire's Mt. Pyre theme.
Also makes collecting items much easier. I find a random crown sitting on a stump, and the TM for Energy Ball!
Energy Ball is basically a far more powerful version of Giga Drain, without the draining effect. E. coli has pretty powerful special attack stats, too, so I get rid of synthesis for energy ball.
Also apparently these trees aren't decorative, and I can pluck the berries. Huh. Weird. The game features regular Generation III/IV style berry trees, so I am genuinely not sure why.
And then we enter Anthell again for a second time. That seems to be the theme of this area -- rainforest, ant hell, rainforest, ant hell. Also, yeah, it's a pretty neat bug catcher's dream, and if not for type diversification I'd also fill my team with bugs bugs bugs and more bugs.
Also you can't hear it, but there's a whole lot of insect buzzing noises overlaid into the soundtrack for Anthell.
This random bug catcher has a full team of five, and not of five shitty Pokemon either, and it's genuinely impressive for a random dude to have a nearly-full team. I've been so used to official Pokemon games giving most trainers 2-3 Pokemon until like the last couple of areas.
Charlie burns his Nimflora and magnitudes his Firoke, but has to bail out when he throws in Sponaree. E. coli one-shots the thing with Shock Wave, which is a good thing since I totally forgot that E. coli is part-grass and would've died to a bug bite or some shit.
Then my grumpy giant beach crab just murders everything else. Is this the first time I encounter a Harylect, Tricew's evolution? It's the first time I noticed his butt is a lightbulb, anyway.
I cannot for the life of me spell Harylect properly. In my head I read it as "Har-ly-ect" or "Hai-ry-lect" but never "Ha-ry-lect".
Gotta catch 'em all Pokey-mon!
Also, deciding that Sand Tomb has outlived its usefulness, I replace it on Coconut with Dig.
Hey, that other guy also said that, you... you bug catcher wannabe, you! >:(
You don't even have bugs, you shit! His Pokemon are a Paraudio and a Cometeor. Stupid super scientist.
Infestation! That's a generation VI move, and basically bug-type fire-spin. Not very useful at this stage in the game, but I always love the name of the move.
After that bit, Ura gets thrown into yet another part of the Baykal rainforest.
Oh putain de merde c'est une dame kaloaise!
XY, I think, is the newest game to come out at the time Uranium was released. I'm sorry if that French sentence was garbled, I used google translate. I am not sure why the Kalos-reference NPC is randomly in a forest, though.
More trainers to fight. I'm not sure why I thought this fight between Taxonomaly and Quetzoral to be important to screenshot. But okay.
You will be food for the worms, you fool! That's what you get for challenging Ura!
I fight a bunch more trainers, then I reach Amatree town at last. Trust me, it took... quite a while.
Instead of lights, they have torches.
It's honestly not that dangerous. Just long and tedious, but the bugs are honestly pretty weak and the forest itself didn't have too much challenging Pokemon other than the odd Primeape that tries to fling its doo-doo at Ura's head.
Wow. Good job. I chuckled at the very unimpressed sign.
They do go all in on this "remote village in the middle of the rainforest" vibe, huh? I really wished they actually tried to do more other than just not having a PC. It's pretty atmospheric, if nothing else.
I guess it'd be frustrating if there wasn't a healing area, so a rest house is still here. Some random noob fool apparently left his strongest Pokemon in the PC for... some reason, but still managed to get all the way through the rainforest.
There's this gimmick, at least, where apparently instead of poke mart, I have to barter things like traders of old. That's what all the berries in the Baykal Rainforest is for.
None of your civilized currency system, you damn invader! Amatree is backwards and refuses to deal in anything but berries!
...but they have chemical medicine in bottles just like everything else. And a fucking Scope Lens. Y'know, if you wanted to go all in on the remote jungle village thing, have them sell Sitrus berries instead of potions, Pecha berries instead of antidotes, things like that.
That Expert Belt is actually kinda tempting, though.
Oh shit, they actually sell Pokemon! Is it even legal? Wait, more accurately, who's buying any of those bugs? You can't walk through Anthell without tripping over them. I'm... I'm not sure what the bottom two are, though.
Oh, it's the named-after-a-chimera-but-not-a-chimera Fire/Poison critter, and the fire baby cheetah. I have a far more superior fire raptor, but I'll keep this shop in mind, because I've not encountered either Chimical or Flager yet, and unless they're exclusive to this shop, I won't spend money on them.
More sights in Amatree! It's a pretty huge town with more interesting NPC's than Beachball, if nothing else.
Oooh, backstory time about the Anthell cave I've just been through! Yipee!
Uh-huh. I know that. It's apparently more of a giant ant-hill than a series of caves, but I can forgive the fan-game for not being able to properly depict this. Also, while I know of what they look like, I do find it pretty neat that the fire ant, the water spider and the electric ant-bee creatures are actually part of a single, massive hive. That's pretty cool!
Oh, the QUEEN ant. Is that what the EIKA ATER sign is all about? I thought it's like some sort of foreign watch brand.
I don't know why Tandorians don't believe that. Have you never learned about ant physiology? The queen ants lay eggs to expand the colony. Read a book, man. I believe that.
Oh, so the bugs eat the trees, then? Cutting it down or something? But sometimes their hunger is not satisfied... so I bet you damn primitives feed them virgin blood on an altar or something, you fucking monsters.
Ura is not a kid! Stop treating him like Theo!
"Every so often someone from our village gets abducted and torn apart by giant dog-size ants. It's totally natural." Umm... no, it's not. And you apparently just accept your fate at being subject to the mercies of this massive, giant, encroaching ant colony? Respecting nature is one thing, but if your people are being abducted I'd get Ripley here with a flamethrower and machinegun and hunt down the queen.
Man, Picnic Boy the Smore suddenly looks so much less innocent...
(Also, insert your own Circle of Life joke here)
I agree with the former statement, not necessarily with the latter. Definitely didn't feel overwhelmed by the swarms of elemental ants. "Irritated", "amused" and "mildly pissed off", perhaps. Never "overwhelmed."
Yeah, I'd take traffic sometimes keeping me up at night over flesh-eating bug swarms that sometimes kidnap people from your shitty village, thanks.
Maybe if you had installed electrical fences and nets, you wouldn't have had this problems, you primitives!
...no, Coatlith isn't that impressive. It's cool and all, but it doesn't look quite as majestic as some legendaries I know. Although it does look more impressive than some official legendaries.
Coatlith is Chicoatl's final evolution, by the way.
Okay, apparently the gym leader's missing, and we have to go on a side-quest! Which we'll do... next time! See you until then, and don't let the ants bite.
Current party:
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