Anyway, I project it'll take some time before that happens, so I'm probably going to go on ahead and start doing the Generation IX Pokemon reviews in the meantime, since all the official Nintendo artwork has finally came out. It took a while! I think it took until mid-January until we got clean artwork of all the new Pokemon. I was thinking of doing all the reviews with the slanted Pokedex images, but I decided to hold off for consistency's sake.
So out of my party, I evolved Toedscool and Greavard into Toedscruel and Houndstone and... I really do love the pre-evolved states, but man, are they fragile! Particularly Greavard, who doesn't have any really good moves to use, unlike Toedscool who can at least help to Sleep Powder or Stun Spore enemies. The accuracy is shit because of Toedscool/Toedscruel's ability, but still!
Anyway, since then I went to beat up both Kofu and Great Tusk. Not much to say about Kofu beyond the long dialogue strings, with two Grass-types in my party, there really isn't much to say about the fight. My Frigibax evolved into Arctibax in the aftermath.
The Great Tusk fight is... a bit more... interesting to talk about, since this is the first Paradox Pokemon that deviates from Violet. At this point I've unfortunately seen all the designs, though there is always something very primal and cool-looking at seeing this dinosaurian, almost draconic-looking Donphan with giant tusks and scales running down its spine. Very cool, and actually much more impressive looking than Iron Treads, as much as I do appreciate what they were going for there.
Great Tusk is Ground/Fighting and I'm not sure how. This is a Pokemon that I wouldn't mind them slapping the Dragon typing on! He's also a bit stronger than Iron Treads, though it might just be the order of gyms that I do compared to Violet. There is a bit of a strange thing where I'm not sure if it's just my memory being faulty, but I did remember in Violet that Iron Treads rolled up into its ball form to zip off to the Herba Mystica boss fight zone, whereas Great Tusk just... disappears in a sandstorm. It's very lazy, and with how the A.I. clone stuff would fit Professor Turo better than Sada.
The fight against Great Tusk also caused my Floragato to evolve into Meowscarada, which... I think I liked the Sprigatito line the least compared to the other two, but I think both Sprigatito and Meowscarada (not Floragato) have supplanted the ducks very squarely. Meowscarada has 'Flower Trick' as its signature move, which is like an always accurate move comparable to Seed Bomb. Very cool, and, again, I think I appreciate Meowscarada's design and masked-gentleman-magician aesthetic a lot more once I realized what's going on.
I then just kinda went around unlocking fly spots and then fighting Attius and Larry. Not too much to mention here, though my lack of exploration did cause me to struggle a bit against both Great Tusk and Atticus. Not too much, but it's a nice change of air to have a bit of a challenge. I do like that grinding against the level 40-ish Water-type Pokemon around the lake is a quick way to basically level grind.
I then went up against Dodonzo and Tatsugiri, and... they are a lot easier now that I have a Grass-type starter, yeah? Not just that, but I also brought a second Grass-type, and a Fairy type for Tatsugiri. I really don't have much to say here, it's all basically the same cutscenes I experienced before.
Oh yeah, my Tinkatuff evolved into a Tinkaton! Gigaton Hammer looks super-duper awesome, and I think the stat boost really does make Tinkaton viable a lot more.
ALSO I FOUND A SHINY FLITTLE WHEN I WAS CHASING GREAT TUSK.
Flittle is a Pokemon that I haven't really cared about and Espathra is a Pokemon I really didn't care all that much about, but the change of colours of one of Flittle's frills from pink to green really does make her look very distinctive. I would've changed the yellow to like, pink or orange or something, but I don't care. It's the fact that I found a shiny at all while just running around the desert, and... well, I didn't think it completely registered until the Shiny sparkles appeared in battle.
So yeah. I was using a Mareanie as a sixth member -- the rest of my team are Meowscarada, Toedscruel, Houndstone, Frigibax and Tinkatuff -- but I think getting a shiny this early on kind of... it kind of forces me to use the Shiny Flittle as a party member, right? Shiny Espathra is weird and chocolate and a bit less exciting than Shiny Flittle, but it at least looks distinctive enough! Espathra also has a special signature move called Lumina Crash. Haven't really experimented too much with Espathra in combat, though.
Random Notes:
- Meowscarada has been renamed 'Morgana', to fit with the cat phantom thief from Persona 5. Much more creative than 'Masquerade', which was the name I had on him.
- Yeah, obviously my Scarlet playthrough got super-interrupted by me playing Persona 5...
- Toedscruel has this most delightful animation of hopping around like a goddamn pogo stick when it follows me around. Bless this martian octopus fungus.
- There are some rematches for Team Star that I should get to in Pokemon Violet. I do plan to exhaust everything these games have!
- Despite knowing the answers for Larry's gym's quiz, the choice to cheat the answer is there, and I can just bypass the whole quest by just remembering the answer before.
- I play Scarlet on a Switch Lite, and the frame-rate drops for the Dodonzo lake is extremely much worse than when I went through the area in my regular Switch. Odd, I thought the older Switch would be the one having lagging issues.
- Man, the lack of level scaling really makes the challenges really.... boring. I'm sorry, I know there's a reason for it, but what's the point of giving us 'you can challenge the gyms at any time' but the levels are fixed? I still don't like it, but it doesn't bother me since I never really cared about the whole 'choose your adventure' aspect of open-world games.
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