Let's Play Pokemon Sword, Part 7: Underground Goth Rock Scene

Last we left off, I got a water bike! And one thing that I absolutely love about the surfing bike is just how smoothly it transitions from zoom-zooming around on the land to zoom-zooming on the water. There's no delay in animation as all as the balloons inflate and you just ride around on a water-bike. It's glorious. Take your "this isn't the time to use that" and eat your heart out, Professor Oak.

This water route is... actually pleasantly maze-like, which sort of alleviates some of the complaints that I had about the previous routes basically being nothing much but basically pretty corridors. There are actual twists and turns and stuff, and the general route actually feels longer than like 30 steps. I do really like the vibe, too, this cold, frosty part of the ocean with icebergs blocking the way and like, Wailmers bobbing around and Mantines and Mantykes bursting out of the lake to ram you in the face... I kinda wished there was a bit more variation in the Pokemon in the water (bizarrely, there's a lot more critters in the grass, and you'd think they would put Octillery and Jellicent in the water) but it's still neat.

Oh, and I meet a new Pokemon called Grapploct, which is just hanging out on various parts of Circhester Bay and just free-style charges towards me as I cycle past and try to murder the shit out of me. It's a fighting octopus and... and it sure has a very weird mouth and very weird proportions. I caught its adorable smaller form, Clobbopus... and the entire line is pure-Fighting? ...but Grapploct lives in the ocean and is an octopus? It's weird. I get why it's Fighting type (the dex notes that an octopus body is like 80% muscle or something, and I do know that cephalopods are deceptively strong for their size) but I don't get why it's not also Water-type. You can't even give the same excuse as Crabrawler (which lives exclusively on land) since these Grapploct motherfuckers chase me around in the ocean. Ah, Pokemon.

Clobbopus is neat. I like Grapploct a bit better when it's moving around, but it' not one of my favourite designs from the region.

We get to the next city and Spikemuth... apparently has, like, a huge wall to keep people out? And Team Yell's taken over and has closed the massive blast door to shut out all gym challengers? Okay then. That's, like, literally the only moderately 'evil' thing Team Yell's done, isn't it? Honestly, as ineffective as they are, you at least get the impression that Team Skull are trying to be thugs and be disruptive, they're just comically incompetent. Team Yell is just... they're just literally a mild irritant that keeps showing up but never amounting to much. They barely qualify as a presence in the game, honestly, let alone an antagonistic force.


It's Marnie to the rescue, though, and since we sort of wrapped up Hop and Bede's stories, I guess its time for Marnie's? I really feel that we don't meet Marnie quite as often, though, that she really just ends up being kind of "oh yeah this nice somewhat-goth girl exists". Marnie's apparently from Spikemuth, and she knows a secret entrance. Which, by the way, isn't really all that secret, it's like six steps and a corner away from the main entrane and is as large as the main entrance itself. Marnie challenges me to a battle and her team's a mixture of evil, thuggy Pokemon like Toxicroak, Liepard and Scrafty, plus her Morpeko, and... it's neat, but I have a Sirfetch'd that basically steamrolls Marnie.


At this point I take a brief detour of exploring the Wild Area and doing some pokemon catching and finally discovering what's been going on about these Gigantamax Pokemon when I fought a G-Max Sandaconda in a raid. I have opinions about raid battles and G-Max and basically I think that the former's pooh-poo and the way we get the latter is also pooh-poo, but more on that below when I rant.

More importantly, I've evolved my Snom nom nom through happiness into... a Frosmoth! It's basically Frosthra from the fanmade Pokemon Uranium but in a completely different direction, with Frosmoth really emphasizing the mystical, ephemeral and beautiful qualities of some moths. Frosmoth's a pretty unconventional design for a moth creature and she looks so dang pretty. I like her. She's neat.

A fun little detail is that if you play the curry game with Snom, it'll eat like five times as much curry as you, but as a Frosmoth it'll barely eat a tablespoon. It's a neat nod to how real-life caterpillars quite literally only exist to consume as much nutrition as they can before they metamorphose into butterflies or moths.

And Spikemuth City is pretty cool looking... but sadly, it's all style and no substance. The only building I can go into is the Pokemon center, and all the buildings and houses in Spikemuth are all decorations that I can't interact with. Which sucks because there's a lot of effort put into the neon signs that really sell that this is a seedy punk town, like something out of Pokemon Colosseum but with better graphics or something, but the fact that it's essentially a literal corridor really leaves a bad aftertaste in my mouth.

And... and I dunno. I kinda feel like this area felt particularly unfinished, graphics aside. The concept is that the entire town of Spikemuth is the gym itself, and the Team Yell grunts are the gym trainers. But there are like, hints of Mr. Mime blocking the road, or the Team Yell grunts talking about "look at the neon signs", but there is absolutely no thought or puzzle in the gym at all, just brief one-on-one battles with Team Yell Grunts before they scamper. Even as a gym, Spikemuth's sort of a disappointment.

Y'know how you can tell just how minimal-effort the development of this segment of the game is? The dialogue and cutscenes always show two grunts charging your character and talking about how "they" are going to show you what's what, but up until the last set of gym trainers, it's only 1v1 battles. Wouldn't it be thematic for the Dark-type hooligan gym to have these punks bum-rush you? And instead we get this absolutely toothless excuse of a gym where you quite literally just walk straight in a line. I would've been disappointed even if the dialogue-and-battle stuff were integrated well, but it isn't.

What's not a disappointment, though, is Piers himself! The Spikemuth City Corridor ends in this huge ring where Gym Leader Piers is performing some death metal, rocking out some tunes and presumably screaming into his mike on this grungy underground concert stage as the Team Yell grunts cheer him on. He seems like a pretty chill guy despite being a pretty rockin' metalhead, and we get a brief history of Spikemuth as an unpopular town without its Power Spot and without the ability to Dynamax.

Which means that the gimmick of this gym is that it doesn't have a gimmick at all, which is surprisingly refreshing, and honestly keeping in theme with the deviant attitude of the Dark-type. And honestly, it's a nice breath of change, I guess? Piers also has a lot of great animations in the background, and he has like a line or two for each Pokemon he sends out, which I adore. His team isn't the most complex. His Scrafty, Obstagoon and Skuntank fall very easily to my Sirfetch'd, while Centiskorch eats his Malamar alive. Notably, Piers' last pokemon isn't his ace Obstagoon, but his Skuntank. That's another neat little deviation from normal gym leader formula, which I do like. Hey, I need to derive some entertainment from this otherwise disappointing town, all right?

Anyway, we get the at-this-point pretty obvious revelation that Piers is actually Marnie's big brother, and that he's been sending the Team Yell grunts to cheer his little sister on... and just like Opal, Piers sort of wants Marnie to succeed him, presumably so he can just focus on his rockin' music career. But they sort of end up making peace with each other, and Marnie continues to challenge Piers because she's going to be the gosh-darned champion, dang it!

What's with all these gym leaders trying to pawn off their jobs on successors?

Anyway, it's a neat, if, again, pretty underwhelming cap to Marnie's story. I genuinely feel like we barely got anything with Marnie beyond "hey Team Yell likes her" that I am just genuinely so neutral about this revelation. It's neat, but it feels like Marnie's just about to get interesting just as her story ends. I know the Alolan games get a bit of flak for really trying to shove the secondary characters' stories down our throats, but at least it made you care and be invested in them, y'know? Here characters like Marnie and Bede are just starting to get interesting just as their stories are swiftly wrapped up.

But never mind my rivals, because some random dude (no, really, it's a random NPC) calls my character because some shit is going down outside Spikemuth. Nope, don't call the local gym leader, call me instead, some random kid in a sports outfit. Leon meets me outside, and he talks about how random pokemon are dynamaxing in the wild... but then gives his "champion time" catchphrase and runs off and, of course, my character can't catch up with him because hey who cares about the main story of the region, right?

Instead, I am railroaded to talking to Hop, and then my character and Hop goes through the tunnel connecting Spikemuth and Hammerlocke, only to see random people cheering about oh how awesome Leon's off-screen fight against the off-screen Dynamax Pokemon is. Wow. How exciting that the huge, epic fight between the champion that's built up to be our final boss and the dynamax pokemon that's the gimmick of the region ends up being shown to me... through a series of news reports of Leon posing in front of a fallen Dynamax Perrserker.

No, really, this is the sort of 'things happen offscreen' nonsense that I would expect if your engine is the Game Boy Color. What's the point of rushing a Nintendo Switch game if you're not going to take advantage of it? If you can't program a cutscene in, at least have my character, like, have a boss fight. Have my character fight a Dynamax boss fight or something, y'know? Like, wouldn't it be great for me, Hop, Marnie and Piers or someone to have a four-man raid against the berserking Dynamax Pokemon? Way to undersell your already disappointing gimmick of the generation, game.


Anyway, Leon quite literally tells me to not care about the huge scary monsters springing up everywhere in Galar (would've been nice if I saw it, Leon) and continue doing the gym challenge. Which I might as well get over with. The final gym leader is Raihan, who brings me to the Hammerlocke Vault. Even moreso than Piers and Opal, Raihan's not mincing words. His gym battle is quite literally just three gym trainers. They're not even in a specialized location or anything, just quickly fight them and get to the boss.

Except this time around the actual puzzle is the battles! We've got a gym full of double battles, and each team uses a different weather effect! The first trainer uses a Sunny Day team, the second one a Rain Dance team and the third one a Hail team. The strategies are utterly rudimentary, and I'm not sure how that Abomasnow/Hakamo-o team was supposed to synergize, but the concept of a gym based on double battles and weather battles is pretty damn great, and it's honestly something I kinda wished Pokemon did more often instead of relying sorely on types.

The boss fight with Raihan is pretty great, mostly because Raihan does get a bit of decent build-up. I absolutely love the expressions and poses Raihan is making throughout the gym battle. He's such an anime character, the most anime of all these anime boys. From the screaming face he makes when he yells about "blowing everyone away", the hammy "stream once more, Sandstorm!" speeches, and, of course, taking a selfie before he chucks his dynamax pokeball... pretty well-done stuff by the animation team.

Raihan, of course, uses a Sandstorm team, opening up with Flygon and a Sand Stream Gigalith. Unfortunately for Raihan, both my Inteleon and my Frosmoth know Icy Wind, which easily take out Flygon, Gigalith and the Sandaconda that shows up next. Sandaconda is not the gigantamax here, but instead it's... Duraludon! Which is a Pokemon that I always felt looked more like a backwards metal asthma inhaler that someone drew a face on, and I can't take that thing seriously.

And then Duraludon gigantamaxes, and any chance that I see Duraludon as anything but a comical motherfucker evaporates. This thing just becomes a fucking building! A skyscraper with a goofy-ass face on top! You'd think that the huge blue bit around halfway through his body is his mouth, but nope, it's the little pez dispenser on top. Mecha-Godzilla this ain't. This thing looks so dumb in all the endearing ways.

As a little challenge to myself and maybe as a bit of a nod of respect to Piers, I tried to not Dynamax throughot this entire fight. Unfortunately, it's pretty damn hard since the Duraludon does hit for a pretty hard damage (and that G-max rock mode took out poor Frosula), but thankfully Dynamax/Gigantamax only lasts for a while, all I have to do is wait out the 3-turn time, and Duraludon peters out and renders itself vulnerable to being burned to death by a centipede.

Anyway, that was a pretty cool fight and gym concept. I just kinda wished that Raihan had either a more robust team or a gym challenge that comprised of more than three dudes. The whole Raihan sequence ends with me getting the eighth badge and Hop, revitalized and super-duper excited, decides to fight Raihan right then and now... while my character goes off to the Challenger's Cup, which seems to kind of be like a cool tournament similar to the anime? We also get a short scene of Magnolia (who I genuinely forgot existed) gave a whole speech about the history of Galar, gives some encouraging words to Sonia and gives Sonia her labcoat. Which is sure neat, I guess Sonia has been around long enough for me to somewhat care about her as a character. 

Anywy, next up: a snowy mountain!

Overall, by the way, I've been really enjoying the Wild Area and exploring through it. Not so much the raids since I still think it's silly, but the Wild segments are really nice and it's kind of a shame that they didn't even try to integrate it into the story beyond a generic "find your way to the next town" roadblock.

I've been a real big fan of Frosmoth. It's not quite as charming as its butt-faced Snom pre-evolved form, but I do like it a fair bit. I've also trained up Orbeetle a bit (she can do Psychic now!) and the Psychic typing is neat, but I don't think I'll really want to use her, especially not with Frosmoth and Centiskorch already core members of my team. I did evolve up Impidimp up to its final form, Grimmsnarl. Grimmsnarl's pretty cool, it basically goes from an imp to a goblin to a troll, and apparently its hair now wraps around his body to form strong muscles, which is probably like a reference to an anime or manga or something because it kinda sounds somewhat familiar, but I don't remember which anime/manga specifically. Grimmsnarl's got a neat typing and movepool. I'm a fan, although I don't like him enough to use him in my party.

Toxel's also evolved into Toxtricity, which is a smug-looking lizardman with attitude who has spiky glowy spines and strums the strings on its neck-chest while pantomining guitar noises. Why the fuck didn't Piers have one on his team? Apparently there's more than ont Toxtricity form, and my Toxel evolves into the "low-key" form, which is purple and neon blue. It's got a cool ability, "Punk Rock", which boosts sound moves. Okay, then!

Anyway, we're nearing the end of Galar's main storyline. Which is kind of a shame. Looking at the remaining map, I guess that we're going to have the conclusion of the Zacian/Zamazenta archaeology storyline as well as whatever Rose and Leon have been dealing with in the background around then? Okay.

Random Notes:

• So this LP episode's "Random Notes" is less about me noting random things, but more about me just ranting about how unbelievably stupid the Gigantamax system is. And maybe I'm blowing things out of proportion? Maybe I'm being entitled? Yeah, I could be. But as much as I keep trying to enjoy this game (and it certainly has a lot of parts that I did enjoy, otherwise I wouldn't keep making these let's play writings) boy is the Gigantamax system dumb. Do I hate it more than I do the lack of national dex? I'm not sure. It doesn't exactly ruin my single-player playthrough, but man, the way to get the Gigantamax forms is just so ass-backwards to everything that the Pokemon franchise is supposed to be about that it genuinely baffles me why they think this is the optimal move. 
• First up... Gigantamax and Dynamax are supposed to be the big gimmick of the region, yeah? But instead , the Dynamax forms are just straight-up locked behind either gym battles or Max Raid Battles. And Max Raid Battles are cool for... oh, for about the first four or five times you play it. But then turns out that when you turn all moves into just variations of "do huge damage", things get absolutely freakin' boring. Whoop-dee-doo, the enemy just put up a fucking annoying shield that I have to beat through. 
• And then... none of the Pokemon you catch can ever become Gigantamax except for very specific ones you get from the Max Raid Battles. That Butterfree you've been training since route 1? That Drednaw? That Sandaconda? The Corviknight or Centiskorch I've been training up? Fuck that, they'll never achieve this cool new final form, because they're simply inherently unable to. 
• In a sense, I kinda get this limitation for normally-evolving pokemon like Pikachu, Eevee and Meowth, things that they plan to distribute through events. It's sort of like that Z-move Snorlax or pre-ORAS Mega Blaziken. Sure. The item is exclusive. I get that. But that simply limites the exclusivity of the new form/gimmick to the player, not the species entirely, y'know?
• Instead, you have to randomly roll the dice on these Max Raid Battles, hoping to find a Gigantamax creature, defeat it, and then capture it. Which, by the way, as I discovered from the two Gigantamax raids I've been through (a Butterfree and a Sandaconda) you can absolutely fail to catch. 
• What makes it worse? Fucking online interaction is locked behind a paid service to access Nintendo online. So I'm stuck with the same dumb AI trainers who brings Magikarps and a Sorlock without a damaging move into the max raid battles. It's horribly dumb.
• And... and honestly, this is the feature that they cut out so many things from the franchise for? For a dumbed-down multiplayer raid trying and failing to mimic MMORPG and mobile game systems, which mostly amounts to spamming Dynamax moves over and over again? Because, shit, sure, the animation's cool, but after seeing Max Flare and Max Strike for like the twentieth time, it gets boring. At least regular Pokemon fights use more than like the same 8 animations or whatever, y'know?
• Considering just how convenient they've made raising an ideal Pokemon is nowadays with features that allow you to train EV, higher-IV pokemon in the wild, and even things like ability or nature-altering items, it's completely bizarre for me that the game designers just decided to take like a huge leap backwards with how they incorporated Gigantamax forms. 
• Anyway, yeah. I've been enjoying my playthrough through this game. The game is pretty, the wild area is a great proof-of-concept, the new Pokemon are cool... but man oh man are there a lot of decisions that this franchise is going towards that I am genuinely disappointed by. At least with around 50% of the previous Pokemon being cut I can kinda see the reason why (crunch time, deadlines, et cetera) but I'm genuinely baffled and completely bored out of my mind with the max raid battles and obtaining gigantamax forms. 
• And part of me is kind of angry that this system is likely to never be fixed, considering Nintendo and Gamefreak's policy of "fuck the previous generation's gimmick, onwards to even more gimmicky shit in the next generation". 
• ...that sure was a rant. I dunno. I'm trying to be as positive as possible about this game since Sw/Sh gets a lot of flak out there, but I'm putting my foot down on this one aspect of the game. 'Cause it sucks.