Let's Play Pokemon Legends Z-A, Part 27: Art is an Explosion

This will comprise of the sidequests done throughout the 'Team Flare' arc, as well as when Prism Tower goes wild. I would like to say that a lot of the sidequests that appeared in the second half of the game are a lot more engaging -- and that's not counting highlights from the Jacinthe-arc era like the Litwick quest as well. Bit of a shame that the earlier, slower parts of the game couldn't have had some of these more engaging, longer sidequests. 

First up and the one I am most tickled by, is a crazy-eyed artist called Fina. An obvious love letter to Deidara of Naruto fame, Fina rants about her desire to be artistic in all things, and that the thing that makes battles shine is how ephemeral, how powerful, and how beautiful everything is. With some utterly crazy eyes and expressions, Fina laughs and fights me with a team... that spams Self-Destruct and Explosion. She's got Carbink, Onix, Haunter, Vanilluxe, Garbodor and Gourgeist; all instantly self-destructing at the first opportunity. Even against my Chandelure, where the explosions shouldn't even be effective! 

Fina closes the battle by saying that she was inspired by a trainer that says 'let's give it all we've got' before battle, which I think is a reference to Korrina. But then we zoom in to a psycho expression on her face as she laughs about how of how she realized what it really meant to give a battle 'our all'. Fina then handwaves this fucked-up tactic by saying that she brings her Pokemon to the Pokemon Center after every battle, and then runs off yelling about the ephemeral beauty found in a fleeting battle. 

A psycho! We've had selfdestruct trainers before, but none who actually had a personality that calls it out. I love this quest. 

Another one I did was a lady called Cate, who glares at me, and demands to know if I just beamed a message to her brain. I... I obviously didn't, but Cate insists that I should not have any pretense, and that I'm 'one of us'. Who is 'us', you ask? Why, trainers who live in the blessed company of Starmie. Yes. I love this. I love that there is probably just one guy in the development team of Legends Z-A who really, really, really, really likes Starmie and finds Starmie's "are they alien cryptids" lore super fascinating. 

Cate asks me to bring my own Starmie for their next gathering. And when I come, I'm surrounded by a group of five trainers all with Starmies, gathering like a glorious cult. "We shall invite the Starmie dwelling among the stars to descend and grace us with their presence! For, as we know, Starmie are none other than the very stars themselves!" Glorious. Absolutely glorious. I really need to watch Warning From Space now. 

The cult starts just chanting and calling down the Starmie from the heavens, and we can only achieve it if our hearts are one with our Starmie. And... it's just a lot of chanting of 'STAAAAR!!!' as our Starmies jump and whirl around. I have to join it, with all of my dialogue options being 'staaaar!!!' and at some point we get a night jogger who runs past and gets confused with this cult activity. 

The cult activity actually did something, summoning a shooting star that lands on Bleu Plaza. Cate yells about how we should rejoice for what we have achieved, that a new Starmie has decided to grace our planet. And apparently this is a yearly routine. 

Going to Bleu Plaza, grants me... a Moon Stone, which we do know comes from the stars. But it has nothing to do with Starmie, which evolves via Water Stone. 

But this quest is glorious. It's quite unhinged, it's so moody, and it doesn't answer anything. The perfect weird-cryptid quest, I find! It's really little stories like this that makes me appreciate super-weirdos like Starmie and Mega Starmie a lot more. 

A hex maniac (who has an updated model with a Chandelure necklace) talks about Pumpkaboo. I love this quest, since it's a bit of a meta joke. Pumpkaboos were Pokemon's first foray 10 years ago to experiment with the new 3D model format to show different sizes of Pokemon. After Pokemon Go and Legends Arceus, all Pokemon coming in different sizes is just commonly accepted, leaving Pumpkaboo to be a bit of an oddity. 

But they turned it into a cute in-universe change of terminology, showing the progression of Pokemon scientific research in-universe, which I thought was cute. Apparently Pumpkaboo used to be sorted based on their 'size', however, that terminology has been challenged due to the fact that the differences go beyond just size. Which is true; the four Pumpkaboo variants actually have differences in stats! Taille says that instead of being called 'sizes', the Pumpkaboo variants are now 'varieties'. Small variety, medium variety, large variety, jumbo variety, and she compares it to different breeds.

The quest is for a Jumbo Variety Pumpkaboo (please, no Alphas, she emphasizes) and it's simple enough even if my strategy was just chucking Quick Balls and Dusk Balls at every Pumpkaboo in the nearby Wild Zone. The quest ends with Taille happily making up her own creepy statement that the different sized Pumpkaboos are carrying different sized souls to the afterlife. Okay! 

On top of the roof of the Fists of Justice is a lady with a very fancy outfit called Male. She is just a generic NPC, sadly. She fights me with an entire team of Ghost-types and expects me to do the same, and notes that her special 'secret' is that her Ghost-types are super-fast, so in a battle where everyone is effective against each other, she'll win. She trash-talks Ivor a bit, but then feels a chill in the air as Gwynn's Chandelure is apparently not very happy at it and Male has to yell for forgiveness. A bit funny (if creepy), and I do find it cute that Gwynn is of the 'I am fucking done with my idiot brother, but I'm also the only one allowed to bully him' type of sibling. 

Male was begging for her soul to be spared, that's some fun dark comedy for Pokemon standards. 

A cute sidequest with some Aron chomping on some junk metal has a nearby NPC ask me to Sludge Bomb the metal junk so that the Aron would have some 'seasoning' on their food. The Sludge Bomb is completely okay, because Arons are immune to Poison-type moves, and so it's just like, chili to them or something. See, this is the type of side-quests that actually takes into account the specific Pokemon that the quest is spotlighting and everything. This is the type of side-quest I appreciate a lot more, as much as this is a simple 'find a move, and use it'. 

The Furfrou barber, meanwhile, who has had a series of quests asking me to demonstrate cutting moves to Scyther, introduces me to the 'Elite Four'. Unfortunately the spelling is the same, but this Elite Four (Elite 'Fur'? Elite 'Frou'?) are the top and fanciest Furfrou trainers in town. And I have to go cafe-hunting to take down the Elite Furfrou Four. I don't... I'm not a big fan of these kinds of sidequests, I kind of remembered that they first originated from Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee where there was one for every species, but it's kind of annoying. I fed some steroids and candies to my Furfrou, taught it Giga Impact, Rock Smash, Protect and Cotton Guard, and went off to hunt down the Elite Frou.

Oh, my Furfrou is in the Dandy Trim, which doesn't have a TCG card art representation at the time of writing. He is a wonderful gentleman\, thank you very much, with his silly hat and green highlights. As a lifelong dog person, I actually think I'd like Furfrou a lot more if it had non-neon highlights. I get where they were coming from with the poodle thing, but still. 

The Elite Four are hanging around in four different restaurants all over the city. The first one is Brill with his Star Trim Furfrou and Mia with her Kabuki Trim Furfrou, neither of whom have a personality. The second one is Marta who has the very delightful Matron Trim Furfrou, who talks about children respecting elders... despite being a young woman herself. The third is Diamant, waxing lyrical about the unbreakable Diamond Trim... before lampshading that, no, the different Furfrou trims do not affect stats. There were some differences in the movesets of the different Furfrou, which is neat but Furfrou inherently just doesn't have an interesting moveset in the first place. 

Of course, the quest does not end here. With every Elite Four there is a champion, and in Cafe Woof awaits madam Soignee, and she is the Furfrou Champion. She challenges me with a party of six Furfrou, which... I'm not about to train up six more Furfrou for that, so I just give more steroids to my dog, and proceed to spam hyper potions during the battle. Soignee uses the other five trims not represented yet: Heart, Dandy, Debutante, La Reine and Pharaoh... and for the last one, she sends out a shiny regular Furfrou. That's cool. 

Soignee and Mirte (the barber) shows up and congratulate me for being the person in all of Lumiose that loves Furfrou the most. I mean... okay? It's a good doggy? They do give some context to the Furfrou League, however. The XY disaster somehow caused the Friseur Furfrou salon to close up shop, and the Furfrou fan community panicked at this. However, when I come and did all those side-quests to teach Mirte and her Scyther how to trim Furfrou's fur, I basically revitalized this little fandom/community. Soignee flirts with the idea of me being able to create other new Pokemon-specific leagues, like a Binacle or a Spewpa League. (A Vivillon League would, actually, work quite well to show off the different forms). 

It's a cute enough quest, I suppose, I just wished that there was more oomph given to it. Mirte's quest should really highlight Furfrou and its various hairstyles a bit more; and to actually show off why Furfrou is so charming, like, have them prance around and be cute doggies in a dog show, you know? 

A sequel to the Carvanha movie director quest has the director ask for a Trevenant now. I love the display the 3D Trevenant model as it scuttles around. As with the Carvanha, albeit not as over-the-top, the Trevenant ends up making a cute expression. Or as cute as a cyclopean shadow-tree-ghost could make, anyway. It's a 'cute eyes closed' expression. The actors speculate it's because Trevenant take care of the little woodlands Pokemon in their forests, and this Trevenant sees the actors as something similar to that. I don't think it's quite as 'neat' of a hook as the Carvanha-being-timid-alone thing, but it's still a nice translation of one of Trevenant's pokedex entries. 

One of Jacinthe's minions is bemoaning that her house key, placed on her Klefki, has gone missing. The Klefki feels a bit guilty and upset. This quest is set up a bit like the 'find me a good house' Helilolisk trainer, and we can find the house key in a battle stadium near a barbershop. Turns out that Klefki lets go of this key because it lets go of keys it doesn't like, leading Jacinthe's minion to realize that she needs to share key-holding duties or something. I don't think this is the best mini-story to sell Klefki's 'story' and personality, but it's all right, I suppose, and a much more fitting hook for a puzzle/fetch quest than the Heliolisk one.

Random Notes:

• "Spirits of any size can now be carried to the afterlife. If you ever need them, please let me know!" Well, there is this annoying rich twit called Jacinthe...
• Other less interesting quests: 
  
• A dude's Whirlipede gets too excited and runs around town. The quest ends with some Fists of Iron people telling him to control his Pokemon properly and drag him off for training... and this really should've been placed much earlier in the story when the human/Pokemon co-living situation was still being discussed heavily. 
• Another Rust Syndicate grunt fights me with her Steel-types, and gives me some tidbits about paralleling Corbeau and Philippe's relationships to how Steel can't be poisoned. That Philippe is loyal to Corbeau, but also uses Steel-types as a reminder to be a level head and 'ground' the charismatic Corbeau. That's nice. 
• A trainer in the icy Wild Zone fights with Ice-type Pokemon, and she quotes Lorelei from the Generation I games. I got the reference, having played the Kanto games... well, a lot, but it does feel a bit random. 
• Another trainer challenges me to a fight with Bug-types. No Bug Catcher jokes was made, sadly, although I must appreciate this trainer for his appreciation of the best type in the game. He actually uses a Mega Pinsir, and I really wished the other 'type' trainers also did that. I don't think tossing in like a Mega Abomasnow or Mega Aggron in these type quests would've made them significantly more difficult. 
• Again, I do find that this is the exact kind of game that -- even if we don't want to get super-serious -- we could've really replaced so much of the weaker 'spotlight a battle gimmick' sidequest and have them highlight the questions and conspiracies around Quasartico, the co-living situation with Wild Zones, and all that. We kind of started with the Sableye thief in the graveyard, but then kind of... dropped off and only had more of them now when it's hardly relevant anymore since we know everyone's a good guy more or less. 
• Once I've triggered the Prism Tower/Ange lighting up thing, the load screen also has the 'A' in Z-A light up in an aura of pinkish-purple. That's cute. 
• One of the trainers mutters about some conspiracy theory that AZ was the creator of Mega Evolution after traveling to Hoenn and bringing back Mega Crystals. Which... Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire actually features mega evolution heavily, and it really wouldn't be surprising if AZ actually did travel to Hoenn to research mega evolution.