Let's Play New Pokemon Snap, Part 7: Beyond the Wall

So yeah, last where we left off, we unlocked the fifth major island, Durice, and the first area of it is the Shiver Snowfields! 

And it sure is an icy area! We've seen some very nice ice-themed areas particularly in Sword/Shield's Crown Tundra, the icy parts of Legends Arceus, and some parts of Paldea and the Terarium in Scarlet/Violet, but since we don't really have to do the open-world exploration in this game, there is a lot more attention paid to making the snowy snowfields a lot more majestic and gorgeous.

The Snowfields open up with a nice forest of evergreen trees with a lot of Furret running around. I like Furret! I've always found them very underwhelming in the actual games, but the anime and the 3D games has always done a great job making them look adorable as all hell, especially when they weave in and out of the trees like this.

There are also Beartrics lumbering in the trees, and while the size and the presentation do make them feel a bit more formidable and like actual dangerous polar bears, I still can't take that face seriously any time I remember that the spiky ice-beard is actually frozen saliva, sorry. 

After the forest we go into a very cool sequence where a herd of Mamoswine and Swinub lumbers over an ice-covered crevice. Skarmories fly overhead, and I didn't really think of Skarmory as a particularly ice-dwelling Pokemon, but I suppose it makes sense since they wouldn't be comfortable in like a volcano or something?

We then enter an ice cave, and there is a tiny Snom near the entrance that I wasn't able to take a photograph of because the damn NEO-ONE moves so fast. The cave is populated by adorable little Snorunts that just pitter-patter around, some tripping, some hiding halfway in the snow, and a very sleepy Glalie that refuses to respond to anything I throw at him other than shaking his head. Come on, you damn floating ice-skull-head-demon-oni thing! Smile for the camera!

The final part of the Snowfields is a very calming location, a little icy lake with tiny ice-islands in it. We've got a pair of Piplup running around and just playing, and an adorable Spheal that just rolls around from ice floe to the icy river before he just bobs along happily as the water takes him. Man, Spheals are adorable. 

More or less immediately, I unlock the night time version of the Durice snow fields, and as usual the Pokemon population gets changed around a bit. We've got a bunch of Mightyenas running and chasing some poor Furrets. Braviary fly around, replacing the Skarmory. Little Piplups and Snorunts also wander around in the forested section. A mass of icy spikes reveal themselves to be Alolan Sandslash, which I thought was pretty neat. 

The place where the Mamoswine were... grazing? Not exactly grazing, but they were hanging around there on top of a crevice, anyway. It's now barren, with only the odd Mightyena and Furret... and some Vivillon perching and sleeping within the icy crevices. Some Delibirds run around, and a couple of Abomasnows are hidden, surprisingly well-disguised next to the snowy trees. Honestly, New Pokemon Snap is really doing a great job at making me believe that a lot of these clunkier Pokemon could properly exist and camouflage in real life. 

The Snorunt cave is a bit more lively at night. There is a trio of Jynx hanging around a Vanniluxe that's just hovering back and forth between them. And this time, I'm just kind of confused -- is this like a Mareanie/Corsola or Sharpedo/Squirtle situation, where the Jynx are trying to prey of Vanniluxe and it's just trying to escape? Or are they genuinely playing? I mean, as an ice cream Pokemon, Vanniluxe's natural predator would be a human-shaped one... 

In the icy lake, an Alolan Vulpix hangs out in the center of the island, and we've got an Abonasnow lumbering around while a Mamoswine is having a nice, relaxing hot-water bath. How does that work, why is there a hot water spring in a snowy tundra? I guess it comes from something within the mountain? I'm not a good geographist or geologist or whatever branch of science this falls into. There is an adorable trio of Spheals just bobbing around the sea, and blocking the pathway of a small group of frustrated Piplups.

I did repeat the night Snowfields, and there are a lot that I missed. A Froslass now spawns in the cave where Glalie is in the day, and there are a bunch of fast-moving Weaviles now running around. Some behaviour I haven't seen before include Sandslash literally 'swimming' through snow, and I finally get to see Frosmoth, who I guess are just super well camouflaged in my first run! They look majestic. Man, I really like Frosmoth. I'm not sure if it's my favourite Pokemon from the Galar region -- but probably top five for sure. 

I finally get the Crystalbloom in the depths of that icy crevice where the butterflies hang out. That thing took me all the way to level 2 of the night snowfields to actually get a good shot. I just kept failing to get a shot of that for some reason. With that Illumina Orb unlocked, I think I now have access to a fair bit more things. Professor Mirror and Rita tell me that they discovered another new area, an underground cave in the Durice island. Also rather randomly, Rita tells me that I've unlocked the nighttime beach. Oookay? I was wondering why the beach areas never had the nighttime levels unlocked, but sure. 

But... we'll save the cave for next time! That's it for the Durice region for now. It was nice and calming! I liked it. 

So I did some of the night beach, and... again, it's always nice to see a now very-familiar location get transformed by the different behaviour of the Pokemon there. The Crabrawlers and Exeggutors are there, but now Drifblims are floating slowly in the sky. There are some Zangooses just... sitting and staring longingly into the ocean. What are you looking at, mongoose friends? What lies beyond the ocean for you?

The Crystalbloom that normally summons Bellossom in the day now summons a Seviper that coils out of the jungle, and... and I just know there's some way to get a Zangoose to come to this Crystalbloom and have them fight each other. 

There are Inkay bobbing in the ocean now, and one of the Octillery interactions has it shoot ink gloriously into the sky -- a bit more sensible than the Lumineon example earlier. Surprisingly after being shown to live in the deepest parts of the ocean, now we have some Clamperls having a little choir on one of the rocks! That's adorable, actually.

And finally, finally, the Sandygast shovels are active and I can chuck apples to wake the now-distinctly-demarcated clumps of sand and wake them up. I absolutely love the shocked .0. expression they make when they turn around and see the massive tide swooping in, and scramble to glorp away from the tide. Poor Sandygasts!

And... I've been doing a lot of spamming for some of the other levels. The higher level of Elsewhere Woods has an Espeon wandering around the mists of the foggy, ghostly sections of the forest, and I finally reached the summer part of the location which is covered almost entirely in bamboo trees. I guess that's why there's so many Panchams in Elsewhere Forest!

The Volcano also has a couple more Pokemon. Talonflames fly in closer to me, and there are a bunch of Flareons that have spawned and are hanging out with the Charmanders and the Torkoals. The Tyrantrum goes around chasing a couple of poor Archeops-es, who as the game reminds me, can't really fly worth a damn. Oh, and there's also everyone's favourite big boy Charizard flying and swooping around... Charizard felt like a Pokemon I had to unlock, and to see him just fly around like this... did I accidentally unlock him without realizing? 

Also, registering Espeon and Flaeron to the Photodex basically back to back makes me realize that we probably have all the Eevelutions, huh? And probably each area is going to be associated with one. The Volcano has a bunch of Flareons, the flower fields of Florio Nature Park has Sylveon, there are a couple of Leafeons in Founja Jungle, I just discovered Espeon in the mists of Elsewhere Forest, regular Eevee hangs out in the base camp... and while I haven't met them just yet, I'm positive that Vaporeon and Glaceon will show up in Maricopia and Durice respectively. Which leaves I think Umbreon and Jolteon as the odd ones out, so they'll probably show up in the desert area, and maybe one in the beach? That's cool, and that's assuming we don't get any more bonus areas before the end.

Anyway, that's a cool little area and I'm slowly getting more and more secrets and new Pokemon interactions in other areas. That's pretty neat!

Random Notes:

• I've surprisingly completed a bunch of Photodex pages, with all four behaviours for some Pokemon. I thought it wouldn't be something that I would be able to do without effort, and that I'd have to go through a bunch of crap just to get them, but I guess it's the sidequests and requests that are meant to be hard. 
  
• Some of the sidequests and poses in general are... rather interesting. I guess the idea of using apples or the music box is quite intuitive in what kinds of behaviour I can expect from the Pokemon, but the Illumina orbs are just so unintuitive to me in that sometimes I have to chuck it at flowers, some times I have to chuck it at the Pokemon, and sometimes I have to do both? Eh. 
• One thing that does annoy me is the sheer amount of button presses for the professor's evaluation. I don't really care to be honest about the scoring system when I'm just farming for experience points to level up my areas, and not having a fast-forward or skip button for these -- especially when there's nothing new in the poses or Pokemon I'm photographing -- is a bit annoying. 
• There are lots of impressive large Mamoswines, and a lot of tiny Swinub babies clustered around, but interestingly no Piloswine? Hmm. 
• I can't for the life of me aim the apples to get it into the Furret dens at the beginning of the Snowfields. 
• Furret really doesn't strike me as the type of animal that would be hanging around in snowy locations, but, as always, New Snap does a great job at making it feel naturally integrated into the setting. 
• I love that over the past couple of games I've played that Piplup has really been highlighted as a penguin that favours the cold regions. Most of its depictions in the anime, manga and the original Gen-IV games have just treated him like any generic Water-type, but I do love that the games have really taken Piplup and associated it with 'tundra-dwelling'. 
• With the large amount of Alolan regional variants, I guess the Lental region might be quite close to Alola? Apparently not enough for their Exeggutors to grow super tall, though. And... well, I guess this was created concurrently with Sword/Shield so they probably didn't have full access to the Galar-region Pokemon yet, and neither Hisui or Paldea existed at the time of the creation of this game... I keep forgetting that this is a 3-year-old game at this point in time!