Let's Play Legends Arceus, Part 23: Weatherman

Yep yep, it's not been too long since I've been doing Legends: Arceus stuff, but despite my long hiatus around the time that I'm supposed to go to either the Coronet or Alabaster lands, I haven't been able to put this game down. It's just so... relaxing to just go around and battle and catch stuff and trying to tick off all the boxes in the Pokedex while I watch a TV show, y'know? 

And one by one, the boxes get ticked off. Flareon, Vaporeon, Rhyperior, Blissey, Scizor, Sylveon, Manaphy, Clefable, Regigigas, Chimecho, the Porygon line, Yanmega, Cranidos, Shieldon... one by one, I hunt down the elusive baby Pokemon (I can't breed in this game!) and look out for more elusive Pokemon like Pikachu or that goddamned Cherubi. 

I've only ever found Cherubi and Cherrim both exactly once in this game!

Also, completely by accident, as I was investigating the Ramanas Island under the behest of Mai (there's a swarm of Zorua!) I get assaulted by Landorus, who shoots these cool gray-and-orange tornadoes at me! And... and like an incidental boss fight, Landorus attacks me with two of the Zoruas that appeared thanks to the Mai quest. I didn't even have anything beyond level 60, and it was by sheer luck that I captured the Landorus in under six tries, since he'd easily one-shot everything in my party. 

The game also gives Landorus a brand-new signature move, Sandsear Storm, which is the gray-and-orange tornadoes he's been shooting at me in the overworld! It burns the target, which... okay, not an effect I'd associate with a god of fertility, but sure! 

Mai's quest leads into a bit of a comedy moment as one of the Zoruas impersonates her Munchlax, and her assuredness in picking out which one is her Pokemon ends up in complete failure (much to the displeasure of her Munchlax). But she tells me to report this to Cyllene, and the three of us basically decided to name this as "massive mass outbreaks", which are different than the regular mass outbreaks. These outbreaks only happen in certain weather. Which I guess is meant to be a tie-in with the three weather kami. 

A bunch of question marks appear all over the Fieldlands, and I have the chance to investigate them as part of a sidequest. After taking out a bunch of Stantlers, Wurmples and Zubats, I finish that quest, but I guess I've unlocked these massive mass outbreaks or whatever. Mai, Calaba and Arezu have a bit of a chitchat on what exactly causes the outbreaks, but it just leads to a chain of quests where I investigate massive mass outbreaks in other locations. Melli shows up to make a fool of himself in the Mirelands. The Arc Phone gets upgraded to telling me what species shows up in the mass mass massive outbreaks, which means... yay, I don't have to figure out where Bonsly spawns! And somehow this is all tied in to Mai's Munchlax and Aguav berries. Okay?

We'll save that until later, though, because I proceeded to go on a bit of a Unown and Spiritomb wisp hunt. The Unowns are a bit easier since they have clues on them, some of which are a bit more obvious. The dead tree next to the hot springs! Climb the Grand Tree! The top of a waterfall in the Fieldlands! Some are a bit harder to find. Also, while doing this, I also finished some of the final side-quests that I've neglected, including finding the five Alolan Vulpixes in the snowlands,, and doing the pretty short Swinub quest. Again, I do plan to finish all the sidequests except for that accursed balloon one. 

A surprisingly chilling one is a quest in the Icelands where I find a torn journal of some poor traveler who got basically lured to his death at the hands of a woman in a kimono... or, well, a Froslass. Brr! It's one thing to read about Froslass preying on humans by pretending to be a lady with a kimono in the dex, it's another to find the remnants of one of their victims...

...and then after looking for the Froslass, instead I find a journal and I think the Froslass enchanted the human into thinking that he lived in an illusory village? There's the whole journal disappearing when I was about to give it to the descendant in Jubilife, too. Spooky!

One particularly annoying sidequest was the Clefairy one on Mt. Coronet, where I have to keep resetting the day to get to a full moon. Man, and I thought that I had enough of this when I had to evolve Ursaluna! It's really annoying to try and keep resetting the moon cycle when sometimes the moon just gets covered by clouds and shit, y'know? The Clefairy dance is at least cute, with one of them kind of being a bit too small and off-sync with its buddies. 

Going around catching Unown and Spiritomb wisps while trying to rack up Pokedex entries is probably also my impetus to properly hunt down Thundurus and Tornadus, as well as camp out and wait for certain space-time rifts to cause Magnemites to show up (I caught Porygon, Shieldon and Cranidos a while back, which I think are the only other rift-exclusive Pokemon). 

I didn't realize that there are Unown in Jubilife City either, which... made some of the Unown hunting kind of stupid until I realized that one of the clues is literally 'village gateway'. Doy. Some great hiding spots for the Unown, too. That village gateway Unown that's hiding among the glyphs on top of the gateway, or Unown V that's hanging off a dead tree branch like a coat-hanger, Unown ? literally hanging off my coat hanger...

The hardest Unown that I had to catch has to be Unown W, the left eye that overlooks the village. I can figure out it's on the back side of one of the Magikarp statues. What I didn't realize that there was a doorway to reach that Unown from Kamado's office! I wasted so many feather balls!

...and it's at this point that I realize I didn't have to complete all research tasks for Arceus, just capture everything. 

Okay. Shit.

Okay, that makes my job a lot easier because a lot of the babies and lesser-evolved Pokemon don't have a lot of tasks to choose from! Like Cherubi (Absorb's pretty much the only thing I can do with it), Shieldon and Cranidos (Ancient Power for both and not much else)... and, as I later find out, Pichu, where every single task relating to Pichu involves capturing it. And the little rat is a bastard to even encounter, let alone capture!

Anyway, I go on and buy a bunch of items with the accumulated merit points, to get the things to evolve some of the Pokemon who I simply couldn't find the items for. Onix to Steelix and Magmar to Magmortar, basically. Also, some Pokemon that I simply had access to but never evolved are Rampardos, Honchkrow and Mamoswine. 

Basically, the only Pokemon at this point that I haven't captured are Munchlax, Pichu and the entire Magnemite line. Jeez! 

I had to reset and go back and forth from Jubilife to the locations to reset the weather. I need the heavy rain for the mass massive outbreaks to occur in the Fieldlands, as well as specific weather patterns to summon Thundurus and Tornadus. Eventually I had to just stay in the Coastlands for a while to properly get a couple of Magnemites to fill in that particular evolution line. I caught two Magnemites and a Magneton, and quickly proceeded to evolve the Magneton on the Coronet Highlands. 

I did have the fortune to get Porygon, regular Sneasel and the two fossils on some of my previous space-time distortions, but considering that completing the Pokedex is basically needed to meet Arceus, it kind of is a shame that we don't, like, have a sidequest where we get one of those as a reward, a la the Alolan Vulpix sidequest.  

So I just kind of go back and forth, playing a lot through mass outbreaks and doing a bunch of dex entry quests, while I keep resetting the weather to get a blizzard in the icelands or a thunderstorm in the coastlands; while also trying to reset the damn Fieldlands and find a Pichu or a Munchlax. Eventually, I did get a Pichu near the rivers in the Fieldlands, although not before shaking off a whole army of Paras. It's the damn Munchlax that proved the most troublesome. 

The first of the two lesser genies I manage to trigger is the one in the Alabaster Icelands, which is Tornadus during a snowstorm. I fly around on Braviary and find him just spinning around near the Bonechill Wastes like the Tasmanian Devil, and... it's a fair bit harder than Landorus for the simple fact that Tornadus spawns where there's a whole bunch of Glalie, including an infuriating alpha one.. I had to go back and revamp my party a bit to help me clear the Glalies instead of bringing a bunch of pokedex-entry members of the party.

Anyway, after a bit of a tag-and-chase with Tornadus... he actually managed to kill me once, which reset the weather! Thank goodness for save scumming. The idea of the battle is that basically I just have to keep lobbing Jet Balls or balls of mud at him, and then challenge him to battle in the split second that he's stunned. That's annoying, though I eventually used a combo of the smoke bombs and jet balls to get near enough.

Tornadus, like Landorus, has his own signature move this time around, Bleakwind Storm, which has a chance of freezing the target. Or, well, 'frostbiting' the target, as it were. 

Hunting Thundurus is a bit easier, mostly because I was on a wisp run throughout the Coastlands when the weather changed into a thunderstorm, and at this point I realized that the genies spawn in places where it's a wide area. Which means, for the Coastlands, it's the damn water. Which means a Basculegion open-world boss fight or whatever. 

...which, surprisingly, wasn't that bad? Mostly because I was already dreading fighting Thundurus on fish-back, and prepared a bunch of smoke bombs, which allowed me to approach Thundurus without him realizing. I laid like a layer of 8 smoke bombs from the beach all the way to where he was spinning around like a jackass. Then a sticky glob to his face (probably the first time I realized that this is an upgraded ball of mud), and then I fight him with his brothers before catching him easy-peasy with less than five ultra balls. 

Thundurus's new move is Wildbolt Storm, and... again, I don't really care about the genies, not really, but it's nice that they get something new.

Anyway, I bring the three genies as requested to Cogita. It is interesting that Cogita kind of acknowledges how these legendaries probably go from one 'chosen one' protagonist trainer to the next, noting that if not for the extraordinary times, she would've asked us to let these three fly free, as is their nature... except that Hisui is being assaulted by the aftereffects of the space-time rift, and it's best to keep these three Forces of Nature contained. If you say so, lady. 

Cogita reveals that there is one more of their 'cohort', and brings in their sister, Enamorus... who's just... obedient to Cogita? The game did actually foreshadow Enamorus's existence, with Cogita mentioning that she was carried to the Celestica Ruins by a Pokemon she's coy about, plus the whole Pixie Plate thing. It's still kind of random and I kinda wished that we got a bit more story with these legendaries. That's been my running theme throughout this playthrough, I feel. Enamorus is the herald of spring, who isn't normally bad behaved... but instead of giving us Enamorus from the get-go, Cogita tells me to hunt down Enamorus in the Mirelands. 

Dang it. Okay, at least the Mirelands wouldn't have the water that I have to chase around Thundurus in. It's kind of neat that all three of the major maps have a genie associated to them, and as I covered in my "Review 'Em All" segment, the now-four Forces of Nature are based on the four guardian beasts of cardinal directions in Chinese and Japanese myths, so it's neat that the four of them are guarding the four directions with Mt. Coronet in the middle. Enamorus's tornadoes give the same effect as Cresselia's stunning thing, but... eventually I catch her? 

Yeah, Enamorus is kinda ugly. I've spoken about her at length in those Review 'Em All articles, and I'm not likely to change my opinion after seeing her here. Her signature move is Springtime Storm, which buffs her like Ancient Power. Neato. 

After catching her and completing her dex entry, I return to Cogita to show all four of the Forces of Nature, and she gives me the Reveal Glass after some brief talk about the Forces of Nature's true, well, nature. There's another bit from Cogita where she re-emphasizes that... yeah, my character is mortal but these legendary Pokemon aren't. They'll live for a much, much longer time than my character will be, isekai or not. She talks a bit about how she's interested to see how the future will go with people who 'stir the pot' like me and Enamorus. Okay, sure, Cynthia's grandma. 

And finally, finally I manage to catch the final Pokemon in the Hisui dex (not counting event Pokemon), Munchlax. To keep things in perspective, I basically did everything from the top of this page to the bottom while trying to do Munchlax... which included capturing all four Forces of Nature, trying to reset for the Magnemite space-time rift, hunting for Pichu and Bonsly, doing the entire Unown quest... and... yeah. Okay. Fuck you, Munchlax, is all I can say.

And, because Munchlax is a spiteful little shit, like... three or four trips to Jubilife City while I was going around looking for wisps, and a Munchlax outbreak happens in the Icelands. Of-fuckin'-course. 

Anyway, after all that, I decide to tackle the Spiritomb side-quest. 108 spirits, and all I have at the beginning of this is... 67? That's not actually bad, considering I'm just opportunistically trying to get whatever I can. Neat!