Let's Play Pokemon Legends Z-A, Part 40: Dedenne Worker Rights!!!

Before anything... I got another shiny! Running around in the Hyperspace missions, the shiny sound effect rang as I was mindlessly chucking ultra balls at Pokemon to fill my missions. And it's... a shiny Meditite!

I'm not going to lie, I kind of don't like Meditite and Medicham, but I do appreciate the shinies for the two of them. Meditite is a bright red, but Medicham is a very pleasant light blue. They kind of switch colours, don't they? Medicham, unlike my other shiny Roserade, can Mega Evolve... but I do like Roserade a fair bit more than Medicham. I'll still train Medicham up a bit, though, since I've got a shiny one to play with. 

More sidequests here! One of my favourite is Felina, a lady who's standing next to three Meowth: regular Kantonian Meowth, Alolan Meowth and Galarian Meowth. The Kantonian Meowth is just sleeping blissfully on the grass. Felina speaks in a lot of cat puns. We approve of cat puns here, pawsitively so.

Best of all? To initiate the battle we get a blast to the past in terms of memes. "I can has Pokemon battle?"

Felina hints that I can choose my favourite of the three clawsome Meowths after battling her. And after I do... I get to... purrsonally play with the Meowth. No free Meowth for me. I can trigger all of the animations with any of the three Meowths, including some of the harder-to-trigger ones like eating, sleeping and sitting. Normally the dex and battles only really showcase the three 'attack' animations for physical, special and status attacks. Plus fainting and taking damage, I suppose. But it does make sense for her not to give away her Meowths! Unlike the random NPCs who give away their partner Raichus, Stunfisks and Gimmighouls, Felina's whole deal is that she really, really likes her Meowths, so why would she so freely give them away? 

I enter another 'new mega evolution detected... and it's a rogue mega showdown between two Mega Crabominables. A random dude called Boris runs up and gives some exposition about how horrible it is, and tells me to stop them. Who are you, Boris, and how did you end up here in Hyperspace Lumiose? No explanation is given on that front. 

This is a 2-v-1 battle, but I also, like, ate a +17 donut after the Mega Chimecho failure. Which really irks me because, again, it's the donut that seems to matter, not my Pokemon build or type matchups or whatever. I do want to say that Crabominable is one of my least favourite Pokemon in terms of visual design... and Mega Crabominable actually fixes that a lot. Instead of a tuft of stupid-looking hair on top, Mega Crabominable's hair has elongated into a shaggy, properly yeti-like mane that ends in yellow. Its eyes are whited out and look frenzied, and its lower jaw fangs are a lot more threatening. Its ugly-as-sin crab-glove-things are now encrusted in ice. And it's now standing on two legs like a rearing horse, with a massive ice-spikes acting as boots for the rear legs. 

This... this improves on everything I dislike on Crabominable and actually makes it a pretty cool looking monster ice crab. I am quite pleasantly surprised that, yes, I like Mega Crabominable quite a bit. 

The fight was hard mostly because there are two of the damn things, but between Mega Chandelure and Diancie I was able to use area attacks to whittle both down, and when Chandelure gets knocked out, I bring out Mega Mewtwo to sweep the crabs one by one. Pretty neat, although again I still don't like how dependent on the donut extending the timers and giving my Pokemon buffs are. 

One of the funnier -- if longer -- sidequests is a Cubone randomly on the street. The quest has nothing to do with any of Cubone's dex entries or biology, it literally is just there as a mascot for a saleslady doing a promotion and comes in for a 'moment of my time' once I bend down to talk to Cubone. She's doing a customer survey about Protein, asking that kind of survey, and it's like 5 or 6 questions with her giving a polite, rehearsed answer regardless of how favourable or terrible my answers are in respect to that product. Man, real salespeople doing surveys are just talking like video game NPCs, don't they? I actually find this funny, since the questions about price expectations, awareness of benefit and competitor/complimentary product awareness are pretty legitimate questions. This one was cute, even if it isn't something heavily Pokemon-related it feels like a nice 'vibe' setting. 

Another nice vibe sequence is a lady called Couver, who stands next to a painted manhole with Gogoat in it. She tells me to go out to Rouge district and bring the Pokemon that their painted manhole has, and it's actually a very nice artwork of a Pyroar. It's a nice little spotlight to an aspect of the city that is so easily overlooked thanks to the generic-looking buildings, and someone put effort into drawing up these pieces of art. We've only got five, one for each district: 

But I appreciate them. 

There is a strange little sidequest where we've got three NPCs standing around deciding what to name a new street. They can't decide between 'Lumiose Grand Avenue' and 'Mega Evolution Road'. Both very generic-sounding names, but they at least fit Lumiose City. The third one suggests 'Borevard Boulevard', to not give any wrong impressions to visitors, but I feel like he's just being a dipshit to his coworkers. I picked the first option. It's... it's a bit of an odd side-quest, but I also randomly felt very strongly that the third guy is such an uncooperative asshole for no real reason.

We've got a couple more quests that shows of new-ish Pokemon from Galar and Paldea, which I actually like a fair bit. A lady has her Toxel throw a massive tantrum, because someone stole its Lumiose Galette. Tangent: Toxel's quite hideous, isn't it? I really like Toxtricity, too. Anyway, the thief turns out to be a naughty little Nickit, which is at a puny level 15 where the DLC wants us to be running around with a party full of level 100's. Yeah, after a runaround with it, that Nickit got absolutely crashed. That's nice, though. It's simple, but we actually do get a spotlight on the gimmicks of these two Pokemon. 

Another one has a Frigibax who was just given by the quest-giver Modesta's cousin to her from Paldea. She wants me to help talk to some trainers in a Wild Zone to find friends for Frigibax -- three trainers with a Bergmite, a Torchic and a Zangoose. All three trainers are happy about it, despite initial concerns about Bergmite (who they remember naturally fight with Frigibax in the wild!), the Fire-type Torchic and the punkish, aggressive Zangoose. 

As I return to Modesta, she ends up pussying out at the last minute, saying that it's a bit too dangerous and she thanks me for my help anyway. The game actually shows me the 'quest complete' screen, complete with rewards... until Frigibax yells and blows it away, forcing its new trainer to re-evaluate, and Frigibax's three new friends and their trainers show up and make the move to be nice to Modesta and Frigibax... while also respecting Modesta's introversion. I actually like the little bait-and-switch with the fake ending. 

Vinnie's secretary Solu shows up and tells me that there's apparently some trouble with Quasartico's security guards... apparently the fact that I beat the Dedenne led into a bit of a problem. There are some people who refused to understand that it's two champion-tier trainers that defeated the Dedenne, and are demanding for the Dedenne to be replaced... assholes! Dedenne Worker Rights now! How dare! The Dedenne work hard all the time!

The solution from some of these other employees is to employ Morpeko. I... I could almost understand it if they had wanted like, fierce-looking guards like Houndoom or something. But going from one poke-clone to another feels disingenuous. I face off against the Morpeko guards, and they fight me, turning into their hangry mode in the midst of battle. Solu exclaims afterwards that thanks to building up an appetite while battling, 'they've given in to their darker natures'. The two Morpeko are just angrily making D:< faces.  Solu immediately jumps on this to say that these darker natures won't do at all for representatives of Quasartico Inc, and thus makes this the evidence to around. Okay! Cute.  

More importantly, the Dedenne's employment are safe for now. 

Another returning minor NPC is Trevelle, the backpacker from the Alpha Bunnelby quest. He's grown up a bit, and he's gathered a team to fight me with. They're all alpha Pokemon, although all ones from the base game like Heliolisk and Garbodor. He's still got his regular Bunnelby as his ace. He ends up having grown enough from his encounter with me that he wants to explore more of the world, and see more majestic stuff like the Dedenne. All right. 

One of the major sidequests is located in Rust Syndicate headquarters, which is a Hoopa portal that teleports me into a Hyperspace arena that resembles that house filled with boxes that I cleared some Gengar out of. And inside are... Corbeau and Phillippe. Just casually standing there. Taunie follows me into the distortion, and this is a nice coda to the Corbeau/Taunie relationship. Taunie thanks Corbeau formally for clearing her debt, and Corbeau brushes it off as needing to be in equal footing. 

We then get into a battle, a double battle between Taunie and myself and the two Rust Syndicate mafia. I actually consumed a really good donut before this fight, so I was able to wipe the floor with Corbeau and Phillippe's Pokemon. This is silly, isn't it? Does anyone find it silly? That the donuts I eat beforehand just either boost my levels to over-level the enemy Pokemon, or if I don't eat a good enough one, I get curb-stomped because my Pokemon would be forty levels below Corbeau's? That the donut crafting is what matters, and that the game doesn't really tell me if the '3 star sidequest' is actually going to involve a major battle or not?

Anyway. I beat them. Philippe and Corbeau have a bit of a moment where Corbeau thanks Phillippe for always training with him, and wraps up the meeting since 'we meet each other plenty of times in real Lumiose anyway'. Corbeau gives me... the best gift ever, which is his outfit. Fuck yes. I can walk around dripped out in Corbeau's mafia suit, that's awesome. 

Phillippe warns me not to masquerade as the boss with those clothes (fair enough) while Corbeau gives off another comment about how Team MZ and the Syndicate have been too buddy-buddy lately, and that they are supposed to be a 'ruthless syndicate that would happily send a beached Magikarp down to the bottom of a river; or peel the skin clean off an Ekans trying to molt'. Both examples, of course, being helpful ones to those two Pokemon that he's doing horrible things to. Oh, Corbeau, you tsundere mafia, never change. 

Anyway, that's a pile of side-quests done. Next up, more main story! 

Random Notes

• I did more Infinite ZA grinding, all the while evolving the new Pokemon. So far I've ended up fighting Naveen and Yvon. I feel like this would be more exciting if each trainer had more Pokemon (like, 4-5) and gave more points instead of short bursts of 2 Pokemon each. Also, give more of them mega evolutions! It's kind of a shame that so many of them actually do have mega evolving Pokemon but we don't see them. Also, DLC, give them the DLC Pokemon. Man, people who grinded the Infinite Royale without the DLC to do on the side must have found it miserable.  
  
• Yvon's got the same party of Aromatisse, Slurpuff and her ace being Vivillon, and added Slowbro and Trevenant to her party. Kinda wished that some of the other megas that didn't get spotlighted in the story went to these guys. That Slowbro could've mega evolved!
• We've got some more short side-quests:
• A dude in a battle court gives a tutorial about build-up moves like Razor Wind and Solar Blade, and it's cool to tell me we've got some new moves in the game, but it's so obnoxious because the game makes us wait like 10-20 seconds every time he does a 'zoom in to his manic expression gag'. 
• A lady on top of a rooftop called Condinu shows off multi-strike moves... and her gag is at least easy to button-mash through, she just uses a lot of multiple descriptions as she explains how cool they are. 
• A very miserably long side-quest has a dude who wants to be a 'tip board', and constantly does a finger-snap and a pose as he asks me three questions. He keeps making a big show of checking the answers for each question, it's nonsensical padding. He, at least, becomes an actual 'holo' tip-board at the end. 
• "If you owe someone money, you owe 'em your very life" - Corbeau. 
• Razor Wind, at least, has a very cool new animation as it sends out five sickles in all directions like an anime attack. Time will tell if it still sucks!