Let's Play Pokemon Legends Z-A, Part 25: Neo-Flare

So after the brief battle with Emma, I go to Mable again in the Pokemon Research Lab, to find Mable screaming at the mayor for the still constant increase in Wild Zones in Lumiose City. Of course, now we know it's not actually the mayor or the city being an asshole, but rather something unavoidable from the Mega Power radiation from Prism Tower, but honestly, there really isn't any reason to keep Mable out of the loop from the Mega Evolution thing? She is operation-paperclip'd into working for Lumiose, sure, but from what we could see, she's being helpful or at least trapped enough by the conditions slammed onto her that she can't do much harm even if she wanted to. 

We ask Mable about Grisham, and while she feigns ignorance for a bit, she sighs and starts giving me a bit of a recap of her past. I, the player, again, already know all of this, but Mable is an ex-Team-Flare scientist, basically, who took a bargain plea to work for the Lumiose/Kalos government in exchange for not going to jail. Again, very cool that this is an actual plot point in a Pokemon game. Mable's deal essentially makes her stuck in the laboratory, but her job in Team Flare and the Pokemon Lab both have her look at what she's passionate about, which is pokemon energy, so she's not particularly bothered. 

Mable tells me that she isn't ashamed of telling people about her past. It is something that genuinely happened, but there are so many people who react badly to the name 'Team Flare' at all. I don't know, Mable, maybe it had something to do with you trying to blow the entirety of France off the face of the earth because you thought it wasn't pretty enough. 

Mable then reveals Grisham's backstory to me. Grisham is a part of a younger generation of Team Flare, having the codename 'Gris' for gray in French. Grisham was a child prodigy, but Mable doesn't really know why exactly Grisham would be joining the Z-A Royale now. Mable directs me to the Nouveau Cafe at Centrico Plaza...

Which, by the way, it was already pretty obvious ever since they appeared early in the game that the staff of Nouveau Cafe had unique models, and I did notice the Team Flare signs, but they have been in the background for so much that I kind of just... forgot about them. It's actually a nice feeling, to have the 'hidden in plain sight' narrative twist actually work as intended. 

So I arrive on the coffee truck at night. Yeah, that Charizard that just hangs out next to the coffee truck is a lot more ominous now. As I arrive on Nouveau Cafe, the barista asks me if I am here for 'another nasty drink', acknowledging that their coffee sucks and the only thing they have going for them is their position right next to Poke-Eiffel-Tower. Ignoring her, I go up to the dude that makes the coffee and immediately ask him about Grisham and a promotion match. So yes, the coffee maker dude is Grisham. Grisham tells me that the quiet Nouveau Cafe truck is just a front... and that he is the leader of Team Flare Nouveau. Nouveau means 'new' in French!

So yeah, these are like, a very, very, PG-rated Neo-Nazi nod, or a Neo-anything of a charismatic organization that have broken down. 

Grisham tells me that he has goals that he needs the Z-A Royale to achieve, and wants to explain everything. His waitress, Griselle, is quite angry about this particularly thanks to my affiliation with AZ, but Grisham is a lot calmer. He asks me to meet them in a specific location...

...and that location is a boarded up cafe. Specifically, Cafe Lysandre. 

...I forgot about this location. Has this been here all along? It has to be. But it was one of the landmarks in Pokemon XY's version of Lumiose City. Of course it has to be here.

The exterior is a shell of the obnoxiously bright-red club-like vibe it had in the past, and Grisham explains that Lysandre Cafe used to be a very important place for Team Flare, but it's just an empty storefront that no one wants to buy. So since no one cares about it enough, Grisham and the rest of Team Flare Nouveau has been using it as a secret base. Cool!

Griselle gets super angry at this point, particularly because I really don't know the full history of Team Flare, and starts ranting about how she wants to get rid of me for Team Flare Noveau. Grisham apologizes for his more hot-headed comrade, noting that the world hasn't been the kindest to people associated with Team Flare. Which... you... you guys could just not walk around parading in Team Flare regalia? Not dye your hair orange? Just get a new start? You were children when the TERRORIST GROUP tried to KILL EVERY LIVING PERSON IN KALOS, I'm sure you could get away with new identities. I get where they're going for here, but Team Flare is kind of a very unsympathetic group. 

Grisham says that Griselle's mind can't be changed once she decides to do something, and requests I battle her. No problem. And you know what? As much as Team Flare is kind of a terrible evil team, their music? The grunt/admin battle theme? An absolute banger, and one that I have always, unambiguously, loved. It's one of the music pieces from Pokemon that I downloaded into my iPod at the time, and hearing it remixed for this is absolutely killer. 

Griselle then shows off her Mega Ring, and we start off our battle. She starts off with a Talonflame, which gets drowned by my Slowbro's surf. A Camerupt... is also not really a threat. But then she pulls out an Aerodactyl! Oh, oops, Ice Beam. 

...and then the Metagross comes out, and I thought this was going to be her ace. The pseudo-legendary. I pull out my Chandelure, Mega Evolve it, and Shadow Ball the Metagross... wait, it didn't mega-evolve? 

No, turns out that Griselle's ace is... a Pyroar. Which I suppose makes sense, considering its association with Lysandre. But what the hell? A Pyroar is your ace over... over a party that also has a Metagross? Huh? Anyway, after posing with her ring, Griselle mega evolves her Pyroar to Mega Pyroar... which... looks... a bit... a lot... dumb. Yes, I read kanji, and I know 火 just became 炎. I get that. I get that 'fire' has became 'blaze'. It also looks stupid, I'm sorry, and that's without getting to the fact that the top of the Mega Pyroar's mane trails behind. I know some of the megas from Legends Z-A got an unfairly bad rap for being 'less serious', but some of them are kind of bad. Mega Starmie gets a pass for being charming, but this one is just terrible. 

My Mega Chandelure takes it out with Flamethrowers, somehow, sending Griselle into a bit of a depression. Grisham praises me, and in an anime smash-cut, the camera cuts to Grisham and Griselle holding up coffee pots and a Starbucks takeaway cup for a coffee break. That's cute. 

After my Pokemon are healed, I can now enter Lysandre Cafe. Absolutely love the environmental work they did here. It really does show that despite the less than stellar work of some of the external environment, a lot of work did go into this game. Lysandre Cafe still has a lot of its red furniture, it's just darkly-lit, all the plates and tables are covered and moved around, and the music is nicely nostalgic. 

Grisham talks about the history of Team Flare, and this is, again, something that was 'told, not shown' in XY. Team Flare provided a place for people to come together and help one another, to achieve a more beautiful world... and it was Lysandre's growing madness that caused the team to devolve into terrorism and trying his Thanos-before-Thanos-was-cool goal of reducing overpopulation. We've seen this before with Corbeau's backstory, how he was also a beneficiary of the original mission of Team Flare's beautification plans. 

Grisham and Griselle then tell us that the Ultimate Weapon used by Lysandre was AZ's creation, and that I've only seen AZ's side as a kindly old mentor. They blame the terror of the Ultimate Weapon as something that drove Lysandre to madness, which in turn led to Team Flare becoming outcasts. It's, uh... a fair bit of flawed logic there, and also Grisham refusing to believe that AZ can change and try to atone for his sins -- exactly what Flare Nouveau was trying to do. 

Griosham then invites me to witness the truth for myself, and yells 'open sesame' to open the hidden dresser at the back of Lysandre Cafe, giving me access to the old Lysandre Labs, the old secret base of Team Flare. Yes! Another subterranean dungeon! We've only got two of these, but both the sewers and the Labs were really cool and well-done. Being on a smaller map also allowed the Nintendo Switch's systems to render both a lot better as well. 

I'm not going to describe all of the walk through the Lysandre Labs, since it's honestly quite straightforward. It is very moody, though, and I love the walk through an abandoned, swallowed-by-time-and-nature scientific facility. A bunch of wild Pokemon have of course made the place its home, with some absolutely badass sequences of Noiverns perched upside-down like a bat swooping down and attacking. This is how you integrate wildlife into your video game, Pokemon, instead of just having them wandering around casually in any random rooftop. 

A bunch of scavenging hounds like Electrike, Manectric, Houndour and Houndoom have also made it in, as well as a bunch of Ekans and Arbok. The tiny little Ekans slithering around is actually quite surprising! A bunch of the overworld items are nicely recreated and scaled-up from their equivalents in the 3DS XY game, which I thought was very cool. Of course, all of them are dusty, overturned and abandoned, but it's nice to see that they took enough care to copy things like how the servers or the table and chairs looked in the original source material. 

Mable calls me a bit to give me slight directions on where to go, but basically I just have to go around activating generators and finding key cards. Thanks to all the ruins looking quite similar, the minimap is helpfully colour-coded to show the 'zones' of the base. It's also interesting that the typical 'evil team teleport pads' are the exact same technology as the holovators, implying that Lumiose City took these holovator technology and repurposed it for the city's construction. That's not brought up or highlighted by Mable, but I thought that was cool.

Anyway, this has gone for a bit long enough, and I'll talk about the second half of the Team Flare stuff -- the end of the Lysandre Labs and the fight with Grisham -- in the next one. There's a fair bit of exposition anyway in both for this it to stand on its own as a singular blog post. 

Random Notes:

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  I do find it funny that Emma wasn't willing to really give up confidential secrets, but is okay to give up partial confidential secrets if I could beat her in a Pokemon battle. 
  
• I still love Mable's Rotom iPad! I wish in future games we get to really have iPhone and iPad Rotoms as actual forms that our Rotoms can take. 
• Honestly, I find Griselle's design (or hairstyle, really) to be a lot more impressive and feel more like the 'boss' of the two than Grisham. With Griselle having more screentime serving Team MZ or Emma throughout the story, I thought she would be the actual Grisham. 
• Male and female Pyroar both mega evolve into the exact same form, which is the kind of boring laziness that also gave us Gigantamax Appletun/Flapple being the exact same form. 
• The contrast with Corbeau really does highlight what lunatics Grisham and Griselle are being. You can just... get another job. Mable, one of the criminals that were actually part of the core Team Flare leadership, even got a job. But these guys are so preoccupied with reclaiming the 'good name' of a team irrevocably stained that they really should've made a brand-new organization and just did whatever beautification goals they wanted. That's the point, I guess, that they wanted to do it as a 'Team Flare'. Some people really put a lot of meaning into names. 
• I really do hope that the next generation of mainline games would follow this formula with the 'open world' thing. I respect Scarlet/Violet actually getting it going, but I do really wish that the actual caves and whatnot were actual 'dungeons' instead.