Let's Play Pokemon Sword: Isle of Armor, Part 2: Walking With Pokemon?!

So after completing the first two trials, I spent a long while just... wandering around the Isle of Armor again, catching Pokemon and shaking trees to get items and looking for all these funky new Armorite Ores and Galarica Twigs. Oh, and Diglett-hunting. And frankly, I'm just having fun just exploring and training up my Pokemon the traditional way instead of just shoving experience candies down their throat.

And there's a bunch of interesting stuff. There's the Digging Pa outside of a cave, who will take some armorite ore for me to... dig for watts? No thanks, Digging Pa, I get enough watts from both the Isle of Armor and the old Wild Area. What do you take me for, some chump who hasn't beaten Eternatus? Digging Ma also shows up, but she basically allows me to gamble, pay one Armorite Ore for the chance to get more. She broke her dumb shovel basically immediately, though, so I'm down one Armorite Ore. There are also a bunch of random people showing up wanting to trade Galarian forms for non-Galarian forms, as well as people who will sell me 'seen' Pokedex entries for 100 watts. Sure.

I also traveled through the waters surrounding the primary island and found a bunch of interesting stuff while dodging those dang Sharpedos. The Mow Rotom island is one I've visited before, but there are a bunch of interesting stuff all over the place. There is this weird six-pointed island on the top left that has five raid dens, and a Liligant of all things guarding each raid den? And the center of the island is a weirdly-cut grass shaped like a beehive comb with Combees? Do Combees and Liligants hang out together now? On a different island, there is a lady who will wipe your pokemon's slate clean for ten Armorite Ores, which I assume is an EV-reset thing. Nice! I don't really care for competitive Pokemon right now, but I dabbled with competitive builds a lot in Generation VI and I absolutely know that these sort of things are extremely useful to build that perfect fighting machine.

Also, as the soup lad in the dojo tells me, Max Mushrooms will spawn faster (or is it will only spawn?) when I clear Max Raid dens in the Isle of Armor. God damn it, okay, fine, game, I will play your stupid max raids. Honestly, my biggest problem is that these max raids are absolutely miserable if you're doing five-star raids with Pokemon that have AoE moves in their repertoire, and the AI is just absolutely idiotic sometimes. And I can't even run away with a full AI team to reset the AI or the Pokemon I bring, which, again, is annoying. At least I have a lot of Watts and Wishing Pieces stockpiled, so I can just run around spamming for three-star raids and below to trigger the appearance of these Max Mushrooms. The Isle of Armor's max raids also drop Armorite Ore, which is going to be useful for move tutor stuff

The internet tells me it's approximated to be one mushroom spawning in the Isle of Armor after you complete three raids, which, with the animations off and me just button-mashing the game when I watch Youtube, doesn't really take that long, but honestly, between the terrible AI and the annoyingly repetitive shield mechanic, that's probably the best thing I can say about the max raids -- at least for the most part it's easy to mash and ignore in the background when I do something else. Which isn't really something you want to be said for a game, but here we are.

And all of that effort is basically to make Gigantamax Inteleon, one of the new Gigantamax forms that are added in this expansion. Honestly, at this point I can take it or leave it with Inteleon, but he's still my starter and I feel like it's almost an obligation to allow him to be this one-man sniper. The animation for Giga Inteleon is pretty cool, admittedly, with how he initially spawns as a regular lizard with a super-long tail before coiling it up into his sniper's tower. And his sniper rifle is just a rod of water, which is pretty awesome -- it gets this past the censors by not being a real gun, while also feeling like it's a sensible, organic usage of a Pokemon's water-manipulating powers.

Speaking of new Gigantamax forms, got to use them since they're new, right? I got my new Bulbasaur up into a Venusaur, and Giga Venusaur... umm... he's sure a chonky lad! I actually think I significantly prefer this to Mega Venusaur, even if they both work on the same principle of 'the plant gets bigger'. The fact that the gigantic flower itself is the focus of this mega form, and it's become some sort of bizarre giant mushroom that also gives the impression of emo hair is pretty funny. I also like how the leaves look kind of overgrown, like this is a more feral Venusaur than the original or the mega form.

Going on with the story, Mustard calls Klara and I that the third, final, ultimate trial is just a Dynamax battle. Okay, I suppose this DLC really didn't have too many battles (are there literally no trainers to fight other than Klara and Mustard?), and apparently the mysterious locked door in the dojo leads to a giant dirt-patch stadium with a dynamax power spot. Klara buggers off to 'prepare her heart in the battlefield', which I actually didn't find suspicious at all since I thought it's just a regular video game thing where the NPC shows you where to go by offering to stand in the place you're meant to go.

Mustard also talks about how Klara has great talent but only really tries the bare minimum, and only by meeting me that she is starting to push herself to her limits. Okay, though, but she's like, running around with a single level 50 Venipede before she met me, so unless her talent is pressing B to prevent her Venipede from evolving, I'm going to have to call bullshit on that. Also, turns out that Klara's whole going to the battlefield early is to... put toxic spikes all over the battlefield.

Which... which would actually do something if I hadn't had half my team be poison types myself (Toxapex, Toxtricity and Venusaur). It's an asshole thing to do, but I do admit that this gives the fight some extra oomph. Of course, switching out from my Hatterene (why did I have her lead the party?) to Toxtricity ends up with the Toxic Spikes being absorbed into my poison-type gecko, and it's basically a beat-up of Klara's Skorupi and Weezing. I absolutely forgot that Dhelmise is not Steel-type and lost it to the Weezing first, though. And then it's Gigantamax Venusaur against Whirlipede, and this is the first time I actually ever used the Giga-Venusaur. Apparently his move, G-Max Vine Lash, leaves behind damage over time? The Whirlipede goes down easy and Klara summons her own Dynamax, a Galarian Slowbro. No Gigantamax for her, I assume she won't get Gigantamax Slowbro (if such a form exists) until later in the story. See, should've saved those mushrooms.

And Galarian Slowbro is... interesting! the pink-and-purple colour scheme does fit with Klara's bubblegum princess aesthetic, and apparently in this form the Shellder chomped down on Slowbro's arm and it's now a Samus Aran style arm cannon. And it's also Psychic/Poison... which, of course, the Psychic part of the equation one-shots my poor Venusaur. It's almost fifteen levels below Klara's team, and I really didn't expect Venusaur to do anything. I just wanted to see the Gigantamax form. I tossed out Hatterene completely forgetting that she's part-Fairy, and a Max Ooze ends up taking the poor creature out. I have more Pokemon, though, and a Dragon Darts attack later, Slowbro is down.

Klara is all depressed and stuff, but she's at least a good sport about the cheating and tells me that I can tell the master. What she did was kind of scummy, but she kind of needed the advantage against me, so I won't snitch... but apparently Mustard knows about the cheating all along and tells me that kindness is my strength and cheating is okay because... Klara just didn't want to lose to her rival? Yeah, no, Mustard, that's not a good life lesson to be telling the kids at home.

Klara gets let off with a slap on the wrist and the punishment of taking care of the dojo's Pokemon (which is, what, just the Poliwrath and the Scraggy?) and Mustard takes out the secret armour... surprise, surprise, the secret armour is a Pokemon, and it's Kubfu the kung fu bear, and we get a cute cutscene of it jumping around, doing kung fu kicks and atatatatata-ing against Mustard's palm. And then it's shy and hides behind Mustard's leg. Yeah, this is the star of the expansion pack and... y'know what? Humanoid-style Pokemon isn't my thing, and I really didn't think I was going to like Kubfu a lot thanks to its weird pillar-legs and weird stick-fingers and those giant eyebrows... but he's actually cute in motion. I don't actually mind him at all, he's a cute bear.

Mustard then talks about how I need to be friendly with my new wushu bear and look around the island and find the dojo students that are good at standing in spots (the little !!! reaction that said dojo students make are hilarious) and talks about how I need to be friendly with Kubfu and like camp out and have battles and walk with it.

Hold the fucking phone. WALKING WITH POKEMON IS BACK! WHAT THE FUCK! This was completely unspoiled for me, and it is a huge feature that they had in Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee and I was fully expecting to show up in Sword/Shield (before the whole, y'know, rushed-to-the-deadline game thing) and yaaaaay I can walk with Pokemon now. Sure, it's just on the Isle of Armor, but I think I spent an unreasonable amount of time just running around and testing out the new walking/running animations for my Pokemon. And I really shouldn't be surprised since I've seen them run around in the overworld before, but I dunno. I just really ended up getting super duper excited about this. This is awesome.

I could go around and continue the main story, but as usual, I became distracted. Honey talks about how she needs a lot of watts and wants to upgrade the dojo. Okay, I get it, it's the typical resource sink base-building feature in a game. I burn through a couple thousand Watts to try out, and she ends up calling in a hair stylist (who hides in the room because of the secrets of the hair styling is not for me to know), and a Rotomi terminal... that doesn't boot up! Honey goes into this rant about how Macro Cosmos is a scumbag company because how dare they sell hardware and software separately and this brand-new PC doesn't come with Windows 10, damn monetization, it's like releasing a video game that's only 75% complete and they will release the remaining bits in little increments of downloadable content a couple of months down the line!

Ahem.

Anyway, after the Rotomi's software gets installed (did they just buy a Rotom to haunt the PC or some shit?) the next thing Honey orders is a vending machine. Okay. I tried out the faceless haircut person and there are a couple of new hairstyles, including Chairman Rose's hairdo and the punk mohawk. Plus the dojo topknot. Google tells me that female characters get Marnie's hairdo... which is a lot more preferable than Chairman Rose's "I want to stand out on my first Twitch stream" hair.

Hyde shows me the Cram-o-Matic, which will recycle four crap items and maybe give me one good item. I tried it with the Apricorns as he suggested, but instead of giving me one of Kurt's Johto balls, it just gives me a regular Poke Ball. Oh well, RNG be like that sometimes.

Anyway... I end up going around and cooking, because a bunch of new item vendors show up in the farm plots outside of the dojo, and I figured out... hey, why not cook? I played the cooking minigame maybe three times in my entire original Sword playthrough? And you know what I appreciate? The Curry Dex. I had completely ignored it in my first playthrough and now having a lot of random cooking ingredients means that I can dick around and try to see what they all make. I'm pretty sure that the multiple variants just depends on the berry taste thing from previous generations, but I mostly just had fun seeing what sort of nonsense we can get up to with burgers, whipped cream, instant ramen, bananas, Farfetch'd's leeks, Slowpoke's tail (god damn it, Team Rocket apparently managed to get the Slowpoke tails exported to Galar)...

Some of the Curry Dex entries are bland and non-descriptive, but some are hilarious. Cook your curry with bread? "Even if you don’t like the idea of eating two kinds of carbs, they’re quite filling. It’s an extremely amateurish meal." Toss in sweet berries with whipped cream? "It’s practically a dessert now." Instant noodle curry? "When the instant noodles and the curry were combined, they became exactly what you’d expect: junk food." The snark in these entries! I'm sorry. I got completely distracted, I've never actually seen any of these curry dex entries before.

And then it's more exploration and Pokemon catching. Seadra! Blissey! Scyther! Shinx! Pinsir! Kangaskhan! Stoutland! Skarmory! Clauncher! Mustard wants me to go around and have Kubfu see the sights all over the Isle of Armor, which I think is a neat way to instantly boost up Kubfu's happiness rating. Thanks to the curry minigame I got Kubfu at full happiness after two viewing spots, but I went to all of them anyway. The Potbottom Desert doesn't really give me a particularly good view, and I don't think I've actually fully explored the Brawler's Cave before. There is a Druddigon randomly wandering around! It's absolutely pretty and the art team does a fantastic job at showing water inside a cave. Challenge Tower also has a properly pretty view of the whole Isle of Armor, which is nice.

And then there is this Loop Lagoon area, which I don't think I've been in before, because it requires surfing around the island to reach. And it's an adorable little island full of Sandygast! Yay Sandygast, I love Sandygast! Probably a lot of people fucking died on this sand beach but yay Sandygast! Sandygast's dex entry in Sword is hilarious! "Grudges of the dead have possessed a mound of sand and become a Pokémon. Sandygast is fond of the shovel on its head." Yep, it's a literal ghostly being formed by the grudges of the restless dead but hey it loves its cute red shovel!

Also, at this point, I took a brief detour back to the Galar mainland to purchase some Pokeballs, farm some gold and wishing pieces, and to check out this 'Style Card'. Apparently all it does is to allow me to purchase some hideously expensive... business suits? Okay, that's actually kind of cool. Between this and the Chairman Rose hairstyle, though, I think that this basically allows players to cosplay as either Rose or Marnie if you want to. God damn it, though, there are a lot of other cooler male characters in the game than freaking Chairman Rose!

I also talked to the Diglett dude, and I got a bunch of Alolan Pokemon, which... makes sense, actually. My memory on the order is a bit foggy, but I do know that I get an original-flavour Slowpoke, and Alolan versions of Meowth, Vulpix, Sandshrew and Raichu. S'neat!

After getting Kubfu's friendship up, Mustard brings me to the swamp and tells me that I now have to choose between two choices. The Tower of Waters and the Tower of Darkness, because the training Kubfu will undergo in the towers will be different, and I can only pick one. And also, Kubfu needs to be around level 70 to easily breeze through the towers. Okay, grinding time, then.

Thanks to some advice from a friend, I'm also told that I need at least another batch of Max Mushrooms for the Kubfu quest, so I began doing a bunch of max raid battles to also stock up on experience candies. And... for some reason, at this point I start meeting a lot of Gigantamax Pokemon in the raids? Is the rate increased in the Isle of Armor? I know that I've only ever caught a Giga Butterfree in the regular wild area (plus the Giga Meowth and Eevee from the event) and all the other Gigantamax Pokemon I encountered all broke out of their balls, but it's particularly easy here. Within around five or six raids, I got myself a Gigantamax Kingler and a Gigantamax Appletun (which is supposed to be Shield exclusive, isn't it?) and met (but failed to catch) a Gigantamax Toxtricity and Gengar. Okay, then. Party-wise, I benched my Venusaur in favour of Appletun. Yay fat chubby stubby dragon.

And then it's Tower of Darkness time! No real reason why, I didn't even look up at what the difference between the two Urshifu forms are. I just thought that Fighting/Dark is a cooler typing than Water/Fighting. Sorry, Poliwrath. I entered with a level 67 Kubfu, and it's five floors of trainers, and I have to clear them out in one go. Old-school Elite Four rules, got it. There's some neat kung fu dialogue here talking about having to learn to use both light and dark and synergy and stuff, which is cool. My Kubfu easily beats up the level 65-70 adversaries in the tower, going from a Zorua to a Scraggy to an Inkay to a Krokorok. It's simple, but Kubfu isn't like the most durable creature around, so I don't mind it.

Of course, waiting at the top of the pagoda is our master Mustard, who figured out in advance which tower is going to be my choice. "A stream that is too clear is avoided by fish, sometimes you need a bit of darkness." And with that bit of zen advice, Mustard... throws off his jacket and his hat, and apparently he's in full martial arts master underneath, holy shit, that's fucking awesome. It's an almost-expected trope at this point, but seeing Mustard suddenly assume a badass kung fu pose, jump around, punch the air and have his eyebrows rise up super saiyan style... it's actually pretty awesome.

And then his Kubfu outspeeds my Kubfu and his Kubfu one-shot my Kubfu with an Aerial Ace god damn it Kubfu Kubfu Kubfu. Also, despite Kubfu being a legendary Pokemon, I guess there's just a bunch of them running around in Mustard's dojo, then? The idea of legendary Pokemon being unique has basically decayed to nothing huh.

I returned back up, though, and this is the Tower of Darkness. I need to embrace my inner darkness. So... that means to cheat, by slapping a Quick Claw on Kubfu, saving in front of Mustard, and then save scumming until the Quick Claw activates and my Kubfu ends up aerial ace-ing first. What? It's the Tower of Darkness.

And with the ability to fight pragmatically displayed before my shifu, Mustard congratulates me for training Kubfu well, and Kubfu for not being a shy bear baby. Apparently, Leon did this trial before but failed because he got lost and was unable to enter either tower. Silly Leon. Does that mean that Leon has a Kubfu stashed somewhere? Also, I guess that's what happened to the Charmander -- Leon was the one who took it. With all that done, Kubfu gets to read the Scroll of Darkness on the top of the tower and with a 'babear', he evolves into Urshifu: Single Strike Form. Fighting/Dark with the move Wicked Blow, which will always result in a critical hit. One Punch!

The story is honestly pretty shallow, but I am enjoying it a whole ton. Maybe it's just because I really do like the martial arts trope and that's just my jam, but I did enter this DLC expecting nothing but the wild area, but it's just so much fun to explore and play through the story and discover all the random quality of life changes like the bicycle and the Pokemon walking next to me thing. Good stuff all around, I am certainly enjoying myself!

Random Notes:

• As of the time of writing, there is this huge Zeraora raid event where everyone in the world needs to clear 1 million Zeraora raid dens and we'll all get a free shiny Zeraora... if we have Pokemon Home. That service is a paid subscription, though, which is irritating. Also irritating is the fact that the most ideal way to do raid battles is with three other players means that I also have to subscribe for the online Nintendo service thing. Bah. 
• For all my bitching about the Max Raid AI trainers, we do get a new option in one of the dojo students who uses an offensive Poliwhirl, so that's at least one more trainer in the pool of AI trainers that I can trust to not fuck things up. 
• I found my baby Venipede in the Forest of Focus. I briefly thought about using a Scolipede in my team, but I did that already in Black/White, and I want to try and use new Pokemon in this playthrough. The dex entry noting that Venipedes are actually rival species with Sizzlipede is fun and, I think, actually true for most real-life centipedes!
• I taught Inteleon Scale Shot, one of the Armorite Ore tutor moves, and it's an interesting one? The animation's just a shower of scales being shot at the enemy, but it's a multi-hit move that boosts speed while lowering defense. The idea of becoming faster but more fragile as you shed your scales as ammunition is a very awesome one, and potentially two to five ticks of a speed boost by using a single move is a pretty cool one even if Inteleon's not the ideal Pokemon to slap this effect on.
• I do find it interesting that there are absolutely no trainers in the Isle of Armor. For a franchise whose post-game areas are almost always intended to just be mostly trainer battles, this is certainly a refreshing change of pace. 
• So since Avery is a psychic-type trainer, what tomfoolery did he do to cheat in the battle?
• Klara keeps saying 'kla-razy' in her fights. Between her and Mustard saying 'well mustered' all the time, everyone in this DLC likes to make puns on their names a bit too much. 
• I got Klara's league card after beating her up, and apparently her backstory is that she's a failed underground pop idol and she wants to become a gym leader to extend her popularity. Sure. 
• I'm going to assume that the addition of the hair stylist is a late decision when they were finalizing the game so they didn't have time to fit in the usual hair styling overworld items (which would look out of place in the dojo anyway) and just cooked up this hilarious bit of handwaving about how the hair stylist will want to hide out and protect the secret art of styling punk rock hair. Also, does the hair stylist watch me change? Creep!