Let's Play Pokemon Sword, Part 8: Giant Space Dragon Out of Nowhere

Last we left off, I completed the gym challenge, and have taken the train up to an icy mountain. And... and this is sort of like a tiny, short version of the Victory Road? It's even more underwhelming than the icy Victory Road we had in Alola. There is a particularly interesting encounter here, though, because the grass is filled with Galarian Mr. Mime, something that I've been spoiled about prior to this... but I didn't realize they moved so... oddly!

No, seriously, they're basically Charlie Chaplin-ing and tap-dancing as they chase after my character, and they have this little flourishing clap when you fight them. They're modeled after tap-dancers, I suppose? Not the biggest fan of them, but it's certainly an interesting take on Mr. Mime.

Anyway, I think I'm pretty happy with my team at this point -- Centiskorch, Inteleon, Corviknight, Sirfetch'd, Boltund and Frosmoth. Sure, the smart thing to do is to take out Boltund and Centiskorch for better type coverage (Toxtricity and Coalossal) but screw that, I'm all about the critters I like more in these playthroughs. I did consider taking out Inteleon, who's been genuinely underwhelming, but he's still my starter and I feel bad. I am still training my B-team, though, having them level up passively as I walk up the small gauntlet of trainers.

And I arrive not at the expected Elite-Four-and-the-Champion battle area, but Wyndon, a straight-up massive town that's supposed to be this region's equivalent to London! And hoo boy, it sure is an impressive cutscene they showed when you arrive at Wyndon! Giant towers, a ferris wheel, Corviknight taxis, monorails... but in another case of how so much of this game feels unpolished, there's surprisingly very little to do in the city.

Hop talks about how the city is split into multiple districts, but the 'shopping district', while having some pretty looking TV screens on the sides of buildings and whatnot, only has the same old hairdresser, clothes store and cafe that Motostoke and Hammerlocke have, and all of the fancy buildings are just window-dressing. The little housing district also had a grand total of a single person who has anything interesting to say -- the dude that fights you with Rotoms. Even the Corviknight taxis and monorails are utterly pointless considering how quick I can move around the city. The visuals are pretty neat, but unlike Hammerlocke and Motostoke (and Castelia, and Lumiose, from previous games), I genuinely feel like this city was padded out and not even with interesting filler. I'm sorry. At least the shop-filled street and the monorail station are nice-looking set pieces? After the genuinely empty-feeling Spikemuth City and routes, though, it's another one that feels like it definitely could've been done a lot better.

Anyway, without much to do in Wyndon, I basically head off to the huge stadium to participate in the Champion Cup. And it's pretty cool, because instead of an Elite Four, this time we're actually fighting in a tournament like the anime and manga. Which is something that fan-made game Pokemon Uranium actually ended up doing (Uranium also has a Bug/Ice moth. Just saying.) and I'm somewhat tickled by it. Kind of disappointed that we don't get the return of the Elite Four, but on the other hand we do still have a gauntlet of trainers we have to fight through. Neat-o beans.

And apparently they're just weeding out the remaining competitors, and first up is a fight with Marnie! And it'd be a far more epic fight if her Pokemon were actually matched in level. I didn't even do that much grinding, and I'm nearly ten levels above her! Her team's mostly the same and my Sirfetch'd beats the shit out of her squadron of mostly-Dark types... and then she pulls out a Grimmsnarl who can gigantamax. And what the hell, that giga Grimmsnarl looks positively menacing, like something out of Attack on Titan with lanky, curled muscular arms, a straight-up demonic face and a towering visage. It's truly badass seeing that thing particularly from the low-angle cam he shows up with as he gigantamaxes...

And looking at his design I'm pretty sure all those black muscles are meant to be Grimmsnarl's hair, which makes it kind of hilarious as well. I didn't get to see what Giga Grimmsnarl can do because my sword dance'd duck knight one-shotted the Grimmsnarl with a single brick break without even gigantamaxing. Which is mighty anti-climactic, but also pretty hilarious.

Next up is Hop, who... has basically the same team as before that I bulldoze through. Hop gets significantly more dialogue and also can dynamax his Cinderace, but once more, my Inteleon one-shots the Cinderace with a single Snipe Shot. Y'know, these battles would be significantly more threatening if the levels are a bit higher, y'know? I am so genuinely underwhelmed by this particular Hop fight. And apparently this qualifies my character into the actual tournament or something? Okay.

Anyway, after that there's a buildup for the eventual champion fight with Leon... which will take place the next day. We do get the obligatory scenes of Leon congratulating us, and Hop talking about worthy rivals and whatnot and being a graceful loser... and there's a news reporter interviewing me and stuff. I kind of find a bit of an amusement from this scene, actually, where the reporter was clearly being an absolutely rude piece of shit to Hop, asking me questions about "how did you feel about defeating your so-called rival, who the champion also endorsed at the same time" without even taking notice of said rival next to me? That's kinda funny.

But before I get to fight in the final tournament to reach Leon, though, I get stuck in plot at last! Or, well, some semblance of a plot. And said plot? Leon's late for dinner. Oh noes! The subversion that it's something so trivial that kick-starts the final part of the story (which, make no mistake, they just hastily crammed into this leg of the game) is Leon being late for dinner is... it's neat, but on the other hand it just feels so out-of-character considering the fact that Leon has like three character traits and one of said traits is that he's got Roronoa Zoro levels of direction-sense, so him being late for dinner really shouldn't be much of an issue. Really, the writing for this game really is a massive step-back from Alola.

Hop panics and he ends up enlisting the aid of Piers to hunt down Leon because if Leon is late for dinner... tomorrow's tournament might be delayed? Or something? That's a bit of a logic leap going on, but any chance for the game to have Piers make hilarious slasher-smile faces is a-okay by me. Piers ropes Marnie and Team Yell into helping out and to cause a ruckus, which... okay?

And then Oleanna shows up. Turns out that this background character that's been following Chairman Rose aroud but has a unique character model actually is relevant to the main storyline, and she basically taunts us about how Rose and Leon can't be disturbed right now, and that we can't access the monorail to Rose Tower... but apparently because Chairman Rose "likes his games", he's told Oleanna to give the card key to one of the random league officials who wears sunglasses. Y'know what? I'm not going to complain about this part of the game. It's actually the sort of over-the-top mustache-twirling self-sabotaging silliness that Pokemon villains are allowed to do.

And this dude, "Macro Cosmos Eric", is sort of hiding in the plaza in very obvious places, and I sort of have to hunt him down and challenge him. Okay then. That's really my only response to this. I find him looking at a wall, beat his Meowth up, then he runs away, then he tries to pretend to be talking to a bunch of people, and then he hides in a phone booth. That last one is actually kinda clever, but ultimately Macro Cosmos Eric is kind of a pushover. I do like that he uses steel-type pokemon, but ultimately he's still just kind of there.

Also in the Macro Cosmos Eric fights Marnie keeps cheering us on and we can choose between the responses to get a stat boost? And I really kinda wish that Macro Cosmos Eric was genuinely a bit tougher for this to really mean anything because my Sirfetch'd is already outclassing his Ferroseeds and Mawiles even without the cheer-boost.

(I was ranting a bit about what the fuck Macro Cosmos is and why they never mentioned it before, but apparently they did -- way back in like, route 4 or something when Sonia talks about the name of President Rose's company. But Macro Cosmos has had such a non-existent presence on Galar -- compare it to Aether Foudation in Alola, y'know? Where their outposts are sort of everywhere even when they're not integral to the plot yet. Or, hell, any given evil team in any given Pokemon game. Macro Cosmos being the true villains is less of a surprise than if the Miror B. from Colosseum suddenly showed up, because there's so little buildup to Macro Cosmos even being a thing.)

And then we get a cutscene where Macro Cosmos Eric runs into the monorail station and, uh... disguises himself with four doppelgangers? And this causes Hop and Marnie to... despair or something? The cutscene leading up to this is kinda weird, actually, but Piers just shows up, belts out a rock-metal solo in the middle of the station, causing a crowd of people (and Zigzagoons) to run down the stairs and, uh, trample the Macro Cosmos clones or something? And as she sort of rotates in place, Marnie "gets the key"? As I said before, any chance for Piers to do silly faces is a-okay by me but this cutscene doesn't really communicate what's going on particularly well. Is that what we've came to? I really don't want to be that dick that complains about every facet about the game, but we either have unfinished areas and abrupt off-screen battles, or confusing cutscenes. Damn it, Nintendo, let your game designers have another couple of months to polish their games!

And then we bugger off to Rose Tower, which... I guess is what passes for as the bad guy base in this game? Piers and Marnie stay back, while Hop and I ascend a huge elevator and fight like, three battles. Which is, holy shit, pretty disappointing, that's less battles than the fucking Nugget Bridge. Even if they didn't have the resources to render a full dungeon-base, at least make it something of a challenge, y'know? An actual gauntlet of grunts or something? Shit, Hop even heals my pokemon after every fight, as if this needed to be any easier. Like, Hop talks about how the tower has 100 floors and while I wouldn't want 100 non-stop battles, I really expected something more, y'know?

At least we get a boss fight with Oleana, who's all "I will do anything for my boss' visions!" and stuff. She strikes some hilariously angry faces.

Anyway, Chairman Rose... isn't actually "keeping Leon locked up". They are quite literally just having a civil conversation, and it's presumably one that took place for a couple of hours or whatever. Oleana's Pokemon is pretty neat, being themed after 'pretty' Pokemon, and I always do like trainers who have pokemon teams that are themed around something other than types.

Oleana starts off with a Froslass and Tsareena that get taken out by my Centiskorch, a Salazzle that gets snipe-shotted by Inteleon and a Milotic that gets zapped by my Boltund. Boltund, apparently, learns Play Rough, which is going to be great for elemental coverage! Oleana's final Pokemon, instead of being something traditionally elegant... is a Garbodor! Who she proceeds to Gigantamax! Into GIGAGARBODOR HOLY SHIT THAT THING IS AN ABSOLUTE UNIT.

And Gigantamax Garbodor fixes everything I disliked about Garbodor while also making him a gigantic trash-themed kaiju. Like, I never had any problem with the concept of a monster that's literally a walking junkpile, but Garbodor is just a formless blob with non-descript pieces of garbage stuck onto him. Gigantamax Garbodor has recognizable things like planes and boats and buildings and random substitute and poke dolls stuck onto him, and he really looks like he could be a tokusatsu monster that could fight Ultraman as a monster of the week. Anyway, my Frosmoth takes out the Garbodor (Mothra v.s. Hedorah!), and Oleana reluctantly lets me pass.

Turns out that Rose and Leon... are just having a civil, but long, conversation. And in an interesting change of style, this cutscene is rendered with drawings instead of the 3D models talking? It... uh... it sure is dramatic I guess? Basically the crux of the problem is that chairman Rose wants to do something for the betterment of the future, and screw the people now, what's important is the future thousands of years later because Galar, too, will fade, and Rose has some huge plan brewing that's going to be vaguely harmful but also vaguely beneficial to humanity in the long run. Mostly, he's being vague. Leon, on the other hand... is actually willing to compromise, but he tells Rose to wait a day because you can't sacrifice the happiness of people in the present for some vague far-reaching dream of fucking common sense, just wait another day Rose, what the fuck.

It's not that much of a complaint, I guess? I mean, we've had a villain in the past literally wanting to plunge the entire universe into nothingness because "heart makes emotions and emotions leads to evil so I'm making a space-themed supervillain squad to capture space-time-dimension warping dragon gods". But Generation IV never pretended that Cyrus and his goons were anything other than lunatics, whereas Rose and Leon are framed in such a way that it sounds like they're having a hugely philosophical debate. Maybe if there was a set time that Rose's ambiguous plan has to happen and it coincides with the tournament, maybe if we had any sort of actual idea what's going on and what the stakes are... all I'm saying, there are ways to make Rose not sound like a complete nitwit who watched an episode of Captain Planet and now needs to fix the world for the good of the future of humanity or whatever.

And Leon sort of rounds up everyone and brings them to the hotel. Let it be known that this whole assault, rounding up Team Yell grunts, causing a ruckus at a train station, assaulting a tower and having a giant ice moth do battle against a walking junkheap... is all because these two gentlemen were just having a conversation and neglected to say anything. Okay.

Anyway... it's the next day and it's the Elite Four champion's cup! The gym leaders and my character go off to fight in the championship. But we get interrupted by... Bede! Who's now dressed up in the Fairy gym outfit just like Opal, talking about how he's trained and how he's calling me out to battle him, staking his career as a pokemon trainer on the fight and wanting to retire if he loses. I really do like just how much Bede seems to be hamming things up based on the animations he's doing, like, he might hate his current job, but by jove he's going to commit to it. I can respect that.

Okay? Apparently he's now a fairy-type trainer, and is also classified as a gym leader. Three of his pokemon are Psychic/Fairy, though, so it's not that huge of a change. He did swap out his Reuniclus and Gothitelle for Gardevoir and Mawile. My Centiskorch and Corviknight make very quick work of his first three pokemon... and then his Hatterene... gigantamaxes!

Hold the fuck up. Isn't Gigantamax only possible if you catch a special gigantamax pokemon in a max raid battle? And didn't Bede evolve this Hatterene from a Hatenna? Although I suppose he could replace his Hatterena with a different one. He seems like the sort of heartless bastard to do that. Gigantamax Hatterena looks... it looks neat. It's got two tentacles instead of one and stuff. It takes two hits from my dynamax'd Corviknight, so at least it's an actual challenge?

Anyway turns out that Bede didn't want to quit and was just trying to use it as an excuse to escape Opal, but the crowd starts cheering him on and telling him to not give up, and he's all tsundere about it. That's kind of a neat resolution to his story. It's messy and oddly paced, for sure, and there's kind of a Stockholm Syndrome aspect to it I'm not comfortable with, but I'll take my story if I can get them.

With the Bede side-story out of the way, it's time for a tournament! Seven gym leaders, one protagonist... of course, it's a tournament so I only get to fight three out of the seven, and I wonder if it's actually scripted, or if the fights could truly be random? And is it one of those things that Sword and Shield might have different leaders? My first opponent is Nessa, who, as we remember, was one of the gym leaders that didn't get to gigantamax, and I know for certain Drednaw has a gigantamax form.

The rest of her team is... not that much of a threat, really. Her first pokemon is surprisingly the fantastic Golisopod, but I had the fortune to lead with Corviknight who one-shots the giant isopod samurai with drill peck. The rest of her team up to Drednaw are pushovers (Pelipper, Seaking and Barraskewda? Pfft) and Boltund zaps them all out, and it's Gigantamax Drednaw versus Dynamax Boltund. My Boltund one-shots the Drednaw with a single G-max thunderbolt or whatever.

My second match is against Bea! Who's swapped out her team a bit, but I kept Corviknight in front and it just swept her team. It's, uh, Hawlucha, Grapploct, Falinks, Sirfetch'd and Giga-Machamp. I couldn't resist the opportunity to have a Sirfetch'd-vs-Sirfetch'd fight, though. Mine is stronger. It's an exchange of brick break against brick break. My duck's giant leek sword is more powerful than hers.

There's a little bit of cutscene where Piers and Marnie walk up to me, and apparently Piers lost to Raihan... talking about how he explicitly refuses to dynamax even when he could, just to show off the fighting style of Spikemuth. That's... that's respectable, man. That's such a stupid thing to do but also one of those romantic, stupid-manly things. Y'know what, Piers? Because every single fight thus far has been a pushover, I'll carry your torch for you.

Raihan's swapped his team around, although he still has four out of five members of his team be dragon-types, and all of them sort of still has a weather theme. First up is a drought Torkoal against my Inteleon. Oh ha ha Torkoal you non-evolving Generation III pure-Fire type reject, I'm surprised you even made it into this generation and you think you can stand up against my starter pokemon HOLY SHIT IT KNOWS SOLAR BEAM

...it instantly charges thanks to the drought, it's level 60 unlike Marnie and Hop's pansy team, the Torkoal tanks the snipe shot and hung on with like a sliver of health, critical hits on the solar beam and takes out my Inteleon.

Respect to you, you silly ol' steam tortoise.

Yyyeeeeep. Okay, that's actually kinda awesome. I toss out Sirfetch'd out there to brick break Torkoal. That's neat, actually. It's an actual challenge! Next up is Goodra against my Boltund, and Goodra... uses rain dance? Okay, so Raihan's using all the weather conditions. Kind of weird that he doesn't get Pokemon that has drizzle or sand stream show up, because the Goodra wastes a turn to rain dance, allowing Boltund a free Play Rough in... but Goodra is kinda defensive. It took two Play Roughs to bring Goodra down, but it manages to bring Boltund to the red with sludge bombs.

Raihan is missing a hail user, and instead his third Pokemon is a Turtonator, which also uses Sunny Day. Wasting a turn to sunny day means that my Sirfetch'd is able to swords dance and then one-shot it with a powered-up brick break. Flygon's up next, and then Flygon is fly gone when Frosmoth unleashes a blast of 4x effective icy wind.

And then come the meat of the fight, Raihan's Duraludon, the dumb-looking asthma inhaler Mecha-Godzilla, who Raihan of course gigantamaxes into the giant skyscraper. And I still patently refuse to dynamax. This one's for Piers, y'know? I will take out that Duraludon while it's still gigantamaxed with a normal Pokemon. My Frosmoth's icy wind barely does any damage before the Duraludon unleashes the gigantamax rock move, dealing 4x damage and taking out my moth. Then I toss out Sirfetch'd. Leek-knight duck versus a 30-storey dinosaur building.

And, uh, a critical brick break one-shots the gigantamax Duraludon.

Fear the power of a Sirfetch'd leek.

And... and holy shit, that's the end of the fight! I actually beat the big scary gigantamax pokemon without dynamaxing. I defended Piers' honour, and my duck is also a pretty badass duck.

Anyway, it's the finals. Leon and I sort of circle each other and do a badass walk in the stadium... until Chairman Rose suddenly interrupts the fight, talking on the monitor about some crisis or whatever, that he literally couldn't wait a single day to enact his plan, and apparently his machines overloaded as he's trying to bring about the Darkest Day and now gigantic dynamax pillars just like the wild zone is appearing all over Galar, including the Wyndon stadium!

Okay, main plot time! Dynamax pillars are exploding all over Galar, so it's, like, all hands on deck time, right? Except... nope. Leon tells me to, again, explicitly avoid the huge crisis battles, none of the Dynamax pillars are anything I can visit, and instead Hop just sort of teleports me back to Postwick Town because we have to investigate the mysterious wolf we saw in the mist in the prologue of the game. Which, of course, is the mascot legendary and something that's definitely going to fix whatever's going on, but it just feels like such a lack of tension and buildup, y'know? Even in games like Emerald or Sun/Moon where our main character's going away from the main threat to get a plot device legendary or whatever, there's a sense of tension, a sense of "we need to do this ASAP" or whatever.

Anyway, this time around, after a brief chin-wag (see, I'm picking up on that Galarian slang) with Sonia and my character's mom, Hop and I charge into the Slumbering Weald, and apparently slightly beyond the level 2 Rookidees and Skwovets is an area filled with higher-level Corviknights, Orbeetles and Weezings, which I actually appreciate!

Eventually this leads to a bit of a cutscene as Hop, Sonia and I meet not just Zacian, but Zamazenta as well, and... the two wolves just sort of disappear into the mists again because, uh, we're not worthy or something, I guess. Instead, Hop and I walk up to a neat Legend of Zelda shrine where we take the Master Sword a random rusted sword and shield. Okay, sure, why not. It's neat.

And then it's sort of back to Hammerlocke with a bunch of rusted weapons, and both Raihan and Oleana sort of implore me to actually participate in the main plot for once instead of staying off-screen. What madness! Oleana talks about how even her own Pokemon are dynamaxing and running out of control in the stadium and gee whiz it'd be such a treat to actually see this, huh? Oleana also gives the genuinely random bombshell about how Chairman Rose has a mighty Pokemon called Eternatus in his secret basement lab, and that it's the source of the Dynamax energy in all of Galar, and Rose is trying to drain energy from Eternatus to, uh, give us go-green energy or some shit, I dunno.

My point is, they really could've had this Eternatus being really be foreshadowed at some point, any point, earlier in the game. Instead, we get Eternatus quite literally dropped on us within like two lines of Oleana's dialogue and it's now suddenly our final boss. I don't care enough to look up how each game specifically handled their legendaries, but basically after we left the GBC era, any plotline that sufficiently involves a villain trying to manipulate a legendary Pokemon always has some sort of buildup, even the rather spottily-written Hoenn games.


We take the elevator in Hammerlocke Stadium that used to be out-of-bounds and enter... the Energy Plant! It's just a single large room that leads immediately to the pretty set-piece of bizarre empty canisters and a platform with a smashed-open sphere or whatever. Rose has some prissy dialogue about how we are short-sighted and can't understand his master plan for the betterment of the world and whatnot, and how "from your perspective I must've done something terrible" or whatever... but he's clearly just an idiot who literally only had to wait a single day. Rose's a Steel-type trainer like his mooks, but I have a fire centipede. He's got two Pokemon (Escavalier and Ferrothorn) that is 4x weak to fire and three pokemon that's 2x weak to fire (Copperajah, Perrserker and Klinklang). Oh, sure, his Copperajah gigantamaxes into, uh, Nosepass Mark II or whatever. It's ridiculous, the nose takes up the entire screen, but my Centiskorch takes it out without even needing to Dynamax.

Because, y'know, I guess Piers was right all along and that Dynamax is actually secretly evil. Piers is likely refusing to dynamax becuase he's a contrarian, but turns out that dynamaxing is maybe evil?

Anyway, after beating Rose, apparently Rose's backup plan in case of Eternatus running amuck is "hope Leon catches it", and he's so confident that Leon can do so. So Hop and I take an elevator up to the top of the Hammerlocke stadium tower or whatever... and we see Leon facing off against Eternatus, which is... it does look like a crazy demonic elder being that you would find buried deep beneath the earth, I suppose. I like it.

And for all my complaints about poorly-executed cutscenes in this game, the scene where Leon faces off against Eternatus is pretty cool. He lobs a Pokeball at Eternatus, and as it wiggles a bit, he immediately realizes that something's wrong, and orders Charizard to shield me and Hop, and the way the movements were animated were pretty dang fluid.

Anyway, Leon's down, Charizard's down, and so is his title of "undefeated champion". It's up to me to fight a giant skeleon dragon made out of glowing crystals. Apparently Eternatus can use Cross Poison, and it's to my delight later on to realize that this giant thing is a legendary Poison/Dragon creature. If you don't count the Ultra Beasts as legendaries (which I do, but I understand the argument against it), this means that we have our very first Poison-type legendary and not only is it the big bad world-ending threat, it's also a pretty badass looking one.

It also got its ass thoroughly kicked by my snow moth, but hey, it's the thought that counts.

We get another cool cutscene of Eternatus falling down after I beat it in battle, and then it coils up and the rubble around the area rises up to the sky as Eternatus itself morphs and (presumably) gigantamaxes into a really bizarre form where it's... uh... how can I describe it? It's a spinning spiral of worm-like body coiled up in the sky, and it's tail-claw (head?) snakes down like a giant claw and roars at us. Is it a Necrozma ituation where the creature's body parts can be arranged in different forms? Either way, it sure is a final boss!

And... and the final boss finally sort of plays out like a max raid battle. Sort of! Neither my Frosmoth or Hop's Dubwool are able to use our moves while Eternatus "stores energy", and it's like oh no what a hopeless moment what do we do now until Hop remembers the plot devices we recovered ten minutes ago. Taking out the rusty sword and the rusty shield apparently is enough to transform two rocks in the Slumbering Weald into Zacian and Zamazenta (what we've been seeing are illusions or something?) and then they teleport in, fuse with the rusted weapons and assume the forms of how they look like on the game covers. Player 3 and Player 4 have joined!

And basically it's an interesting quasi-scripted battle where Hop and my Pokemon are barely doing any damage, and it's Zacian and Zamazenta that's beating the fuck out of Gigantamax Eternatus until its HP reaches zero and I lob a Pokeball on him and I catch this eldritch abomination in a Pokeball. Not the most exciting battle, but a neat way to incorporate the cover legendaries in the climactic fight. I don't mind this, it's actually kinda neat.

Which... that sure is a main plot? Leon and Hop congratulate me, Zacian and Zamazenta zip off into the sky, and I have Eternatus in a ball. Next up is the fight with Leon, I suppose, but I'll be saving that for another segment in my let's play.

Overall... the basic story behind Rose, Eternatus, the doggos and Leon is a solid one. It's nothing to be ashamed of or to mock, really, as much as I did rib it a bit earlier -- it's no more sillier than some of the plotlines you find in Pokemon games. If, and I reiterate, if it's paced properly. You don't even have to have deep lore revelations or an intricate backstory, but I really would appreciate it if the main plot actually progresses alongside my character's adventure, that I actually learn about the plot of Macro Cosmos trying to siphon dynamax energy (which turns out to be a legendary pokemon) or actually give context to Zacian and Zamazenta beyond just "hey these legendaries with these two-kings-and-also-weapons" vague backstory to the region that feels like it's a completely different story compared to the Macro Cosmos/Rose/Eternatus storyline. I dunno. This all feels haphazard and unpolished, which is honestly a criticism that applies to a huge chunk of the game. I dunno. I really don't want to sound negative because despite everything, I still enjoyed the time that I poured into the game. I really do! It's just that it's so obvious at so many parts of the game just how rushed the development of this game is.

Anyway, next up is finally the Leon match and we're going to kick him and his Gigantamax Charizard's ass... because I don't think we're getting much plot after said fight? And if we do, this segment's ran on for long enough as it is. Next LP session, I'll probably cover the Leon boss fight and a bit of the post-game, if there's any?

Random Notes:

• We don't know much about Oleana, but just seeing her pretty team but also seeing her use Garbodor as her ace Pokemon and even having a loving tap before she lobs the gigantamax ball? That actually tells me a fair bit about Oleana if that's intentional, y'know? 
• Chairman Rose's battle theme song is AMAZING. Like I'm weak for any soundtrack with choir chanting or whatever, but Rose's got easily one of my favourite themes ever, which is kind of a shame considering how underwhelming the battle actually ended up being. 
• The kid with the Mr. Mime in the town square in Wyndon explicitly notes that the Mr. Mime he has is called "Marcel", which, of course, is the nickname given to the only Mr. Mime you can get via an in-game trade in the original Pokemon Red/Blue. I understood that reference!
• Hop talks about the 'battle in the garden', which I don't remember? Unless he's talking about Magnolia's backyard?
• It's actually surprising that the Wyndon plaza square doesn't have a unique battle background and it's just the generic white meshwork.
• One of the best random lines of dialogue is one of the Macro Cosmos grunts who instead of trying to drive off the interloping kids or to praise Chairman Rose... just tries to sell a life insurance policy. That's hilarious. 
• So there's supposed to be eight gym leaders and a challenger battling in a tournament? The problem is that Bede, representing Opal, challenged me before any official matches and lost... so how's the tournament going to be structured normally, since 9 people won't really fit on a tournament tree?
• Raihan's animations are still just as awesome and lively as ever. 
• There is a neat bit of random flashes to other parts in Galar during the Giga Eternatus fight. It's neat.

Kamen Rider Zero-One E14 Review: If It's A Wolf It's Mine

Kamen Rider Zero-One, Episode 14: We Are The Astronaut Brothers

So the plotline of this episode starts off when Aruto is late for work, and decides to call in his transforming phone-bike, that gets ejected and launched towards Earth from Satellite Zea, and this absolutely irritates the two astronaut humagear that runs maintenance on Satellite Zea, the titular 'astronaut brothers', Raiden and Subaru. The hot-headed Raiden decide that they've had enough, and they decide to beam down to Earth to give their boss a piece of their mind, interrupting a meeting between Aruto and his flunkies. And it's kinda fun to see Raiden's hot-bloodedness. He might be a robot, but he ain't taking shit from no one, not even his human creators-slash-employees, and it's actually pretty fun to see him chewing the scenery and causing Aruto and even Fukuzoe to cower. 

AIMS, meanwhile, is finally analyzing the kanji of Metsubojinrai, and they realized that out of the four kanji, two of them correspond to the two core members of Metsubojinrai -- jin (speed) is Jin, and metsu (ruin) corresponds to Horobi, and Fuwa quickly realizes that this means that there might be 'bo' (death) and 'rai' (thunder) members of the group... but this conversation quickly gets tabled when AIMS realizes that the fact that Metsubojinrai.net can so quickly react to any Humagear achieving singularity is likely because there's a spy within Hiden Intelligence. 

AIMS goes off to interrogate Aruto, just as the space-bros are giving him a tour of Hiden's space facilities. There is some rather convenient dialogue as Fuwa quickly challenges and outright accuses the Humagear present if they're the spy since anyone working on the satellite would have access to the whole Hiden framework. The fact that Raiden is fond of using the phrase "bring down the thunder" causes the over-zealous cop in Fuwa to come out, and since Raiden's the one Humagear in the world who refuses to take shit from anyone, he gets into an argument with Fuwa immediately.

There's also a sense of this episode being a big more eventful than previous ones. With the Dodo arc over and everyone talking about the 'next move', Horobi even straight-up mentions that they're moving to the next phase and it's time to bring their comrade in. Jin shows up just as Fuwa and Raiden are arguing, shooting his not-a-toy-real-ass gun to steal the good guys' Progrise Keys, because they need it for the quarter-season plot. We get a pretty cool fight and another showcase of Shining Hopper as it zips around Jin's Kamen Rider form, but when Jin tries to hack the astronaut brothers, Raiden pushes his brother out of the way and takes the hit, and uses his hot-bloodedness to straight-up resist Jin's hacking. 

Jin flies away, but also leaves behind the little crumb of information that Raiden is a Daybreak survivor, and we get a brief bit of information dump as Raiden and Subaru gives us a little history lesson -- Raiden was supposed to man a satellite that was supposed to be launched during the Daybreak Incident, but said satellite blew up during Daybreak. Raiden ended up being brought back online to train his little brother to maintain the new model, Satellite Zea. 

Fuwa gets absolutely angry at the mention of Daybreak, though, and he's got a stick up his butt throughout the entire episode... pity, considering the character development he got in the past two episodes. I really felt like the episode could've given us a couple extra scenes showing just how disturbed Fuwa is about Daybreak or something. But he gets so flustered that he even ignores one of Aruto's bad jokes and talks about how he doesn't need laughter at the moment. Okay, emo. 

The Space Bros, to clear their names, end up enlisting Zea's help to help track down Mestubojinrai.net in the ruins of Daybreak. Fuwa, Aruto and Raiden go off to Daybreak, but Jin shows up to greet "Ikazuchi" (thunder). Fuwa's all like "I knew it you're a spy" and Aruto's all like "he's a good big bro he can't be a spy", but turns out that Raiden's been a deep-cover agent who doesn't even know that he's actually secretly a spy all along. There's a pretty twisted bit of his child-like attitude from Jin at this point, giggling about how he's totally getting a new big brother out of it before attaching a Force Riser into Raiden's body and transforming him with the Dodo Key into Kamen Rider Ikazuchi. 

What? No! I wanted my dodo kamen rider, but not like this, not with another character!

That said, though, Ikazuchi is a pretty dang cool suit, and Fuwa goes straight-in with Punching Kong to fight the now brainwashed-into-evil space-bro. Aruto has a neat brief moment of hesitation before jumping in to help in his shark form, but if the past couple of episodes have taught us anything is that the Dodo Key is fucking badass, and Ikazuchi easily overwhelms the two Kamen Riders, knocking off the Progrise Keys from their belts while Jin gleefully collects them. What a scamp! 

Apparently, the keys that Fuwa, Aruto and Jin currently have are enough (no mention of the keys in Yua or Gai's possession, or the Zetsumerize keys in Horobi's table) for Ikazuchi to unleash a beam to Satellite Zea that summons the huge CGI glowing animals, have them all zip around into the Ark, and blow open a hole in Horobi's base and, uh, cause a little chamber similar to what Aruto has in his basement to start 3D-printing Progrise Keys? Okay, that moved a bit fast, but essentially this ended up with the creation of a new variant of the Progrise Key. The Ark's revived through this, and Jin gives a brief little recap to explain things to us. Aruto goes into Shining Hopper mode, but gets overwhelmed from the feedback and Ikazuchi manages to knock him to the ground. Izu slides in and hands Aruto the weapon that Zea constructed in the background, the Authorize Buster, which Aruto uses to shoot Ikazuchi on his ass. Izu and Jin zip in and takes the keys that their factions originally had to keep the status quo the same. 

And then it's new toy time! Horobi tosses Jin the brand-new Progrise Key that the Ark created, but Jin drops it when Aruto shoots him. That's it for Aruto this episode, though, who falls down wounded. Fuwa picks up the brand-new toy, realizes that it's called "Assault Wolf", and with the logic of "if it's got a wolf in it, it's mine!" decides that he's going to transform with that key. And I do really like the fact that Horobi's so certain that Fuwa's not going to be able to utilize Mestubojinrai.net's key, but Fuwa's made a career out of forcing open keys that wouldn't authorize him, and the one-man Force-Riser rips apart the Assault Wolf Key with the hilarious-but-also-appropriate "I don't need laughs, I NEED RAGEEEEE" and transforms into the Assault Wolf form, which looks badass, and the transformation sequence gives us a couple of nice spinning shots. 

Assault Wolf Vulcan faces off against Ikazuchi, two new toys, but Assault Wolf and the power of Fuwa's unyielding anger absolutely overwhelms Ikazuchi, and uses the Authorize Buster to annihilate Kamen Rider Ikazuchi and blow him up. Fuwa falls down wounded from the strain of using his new form, and Aruto and Izu end up retreating, while Horobi and Jin pick up the Dodo Key and retreats as well. Jin ends up feeling absolutely sick at the sight of the death of his buddy Ikazuchi, and it's apparently a sign of him approaching singularity, something that Horobi is delighted about. The kind of fucked-up thing, though, is that I think it's implied that Horobi's selectively grooming Jin's development so that his singularity is directed in hate towards humans, because if you remember Jin's original debut as a Kamen Rider, it's arguable that he was about to reach singularity when he showed compassion and tried to help the voice actor Humagear until Horobi 'reset' him. 

Anyway, a pretty interesting episode. Things are going a bit fast and we do get the feeling like the show's zipping through multiple new toys in a single episode and that there's not a whole lot of breathing room between the debut of Ikazuchi, Assault Wolf and the weapon, not to mention the huge plot revelations. I really do kind of feel like I would've cared a lot more about Raiden being brainwashed and transformed into Ikazuchi if I actually cared about Raiden. The actor's competent enough to give him a generic brash-anime-dude personality, but ultimately the revelation that he's a traitor and his subsequent mercy-kill at the hands of Fuwa don't particularly land that well. It does seem like we're entering the stage in the show where we're getting a lot of revelations in one go, which I certainly welcome! It does happen a bit too fast, though, which is kind of my big complaint. And at the risk of sounding too much like a Dodo-chan fanboy, I really kinda wished that it was him under the Kamen Rider Ikazuchi mask instead of some dude we met 10 minutes ago. 

Random Notes:

• Anyone who knows anything about Kanji or general Japanese mythology in general will quickly realize that "Raiden" has the kanji for lightning that's also found on Metsubojinrai.net. Ikazuchi is an alternate reading of the rai kanji.
• I completely forgot about it, but Gai gets a brief scene talking about how as the Ark guides them, they're reaching the age of a new mythology; the mythology of the Kamen Riders. Ominous!
• The visual imagery of the two astronaut humagear just having to manually dock the giant transforming bike-phone onto Satellite Zea is just so ridiculously impractical, and in a series that have shown that Hiden's technology has teleportation and instant-transportation, is there literally no way for the ground-bound Hiden staff to teleport things back up to Zea? 
• That "oh yeah, the motorcycle" scene perhaps encapsulates the Kamen Rider filming staff's reaction towards the motorcycle in general for the past, oh, dozen shows or so. 
• The Gimmick Watch:
• "Assault Bullet! OVER RISE! Kamen-Rider-Kamen-Rider-Kamen-Rider Shot Rise! Ready, go! Assault Wolf! No chance of surviving."
• Ikazuchi's finisher is "Extinction Utopia!" We actually hear the 'extinction' (zetsumetsu) part of it back when Assassin-chan uses his own finishers prior to the Dodo Key's completion.
• The Authorize Buster's attack is "Progrise Dust!" when a key is actually inserted, it goes "Progrise key confirmed; ready for buster -- Buster Dust!"
• Raiden's actor, Yamaguchi Daichi, previously played Kimura, the alternate-timeline Kamen Rider Verde earlier this year in the Zi-O spin-off Rider Time: Kamen Rider Ryuki. 

Arrow S08E01 Review: Old Friends

Arrow, Season 8, Episode 1: Starling City

Well, that was... unexpected! Arrow's eighth season abandons any sort of down-to-earth gritty vigilante tone and goes straight for a superhero style sendoff. And for all of its ups and downs, I'm not going to knock too much on Arrow as a whole. Despite its problematic writing and pacing, Arrow has been an interesting ride with great heart and great actors who clearly care about what they're doing. And just like how I feel when Gotham ended, it's going to be such a strange beast when I finally watch the last episode of Arrow and realize that CW's longest-running superhero show has reached its conclusion. 

And for a show that was so anti-fun, so emo and gritty and outright embarrassed about its comic-book origins that it even mocked the name "Green Arrow" and "Star City" in its first season, CW and Arrow as a whole has managed to find an interesting balancing act between a more down-to-earth superhero show and all the drama that comes with it, while also being a superhero show that exists in the same world as the wackier hijinks of Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, Supergirl and all of Arrow's other sister shows. 

And yet there's an undeniable sense of rock-solid history. For all of the retoolings that Arrow's done, for all the secret siblings and secret past enemies that it's done, Arrow's never actually disrespected what came before it. For all its warts, season one of Arrow was a pretty solid season, and it's very much appropriate for the season premiere of Arrow's eighth season to begin with what's essentially an Elseworlds concept. Something that really could've felt like a retread ends up tugging on nostalgia scenes and a constant sense of "wait, what is going on?" Obviously, Oliver Queen is on a quest from the Monitor to do something to avert the incoming Crisis on Infinite Earths (which is actually airing at the time I'm writing this and I'm basically shut myself off from all internet searches relating to DC stuff to avoid being spoiled). But is it time-travel? A what-if scenario? A Flashpoint-style alternate timeline? Turns out that 'our' Oliver is going through Earth-2's Starling City, looking at a glimpse of just how much he has touched the lives of those around him and just how differently things might've gone if Oliver Queen hasn't returned from the island as the Green Arrow. Of course the specifics of this theme ends up being blurred a little as the actual revelation to the audience that this is Earth-2 ends up being made, but it's still neat nonetheless. 

Oliver is quickly joined by 'our' John Diggle (who arrives courtesy of STAR Labs help), and Earth-2 Laurel ("Not-Laurel" from the past couple of seasons), who are known quantities to longtime viewers, but it's nice to see the return of a lot of familiar actors for Arrow's swan song. There is the unfortunate absence of Willa Holland (Earth-2 Thea died in a car crash while mourning Oliver), Paul Blackthorne (Quentin died in Laurel-2's backstory) and Emily Bett Rickards (Earth-2 Felicity is running her own goddang tech company) but seeing old friends Colin Donnell, John Barrowman and Susanna Thompson reprise their roles as Tommy Merlyn, Malcolm Merlyn and Moira Queen is genuinely heartwarming. There's an instant chemistry between these members of the cast, an as much as part of me is going "wtf is going on", the scenes in the Queen mansion tugs at the heartstrings pretty well as the characters do feel like a dysfunctional family reunited.

Speaking of which, y'know what's great? The fact that John Diggle basically knew what Oliver signed up for, on what's essentially a suicide mission to maybe save multiple universes... and his first instinct is to just grab an interdimensional portal and help his best buddy out. That meeting as Diggle tells Oliver that, no, they're not splitting the duo up is pretty heartwarming, as is all the nostalgia-tinged reprise of their first meeting. 

Speaking of a family reunited, we've got Diggle and Oliver basically giving a huge shout-out to their original meeting as Diggle replays through their original season-1 meeting and tells Oliver that the same trick isn't going to work on him again. Honestly, there's a lot of shots, particularly early on, that's just obviously evocative of the show from eight years ago, and y'know what? As someone who joined in relatively early on (either late season two or early season one was when I binge-watched the series) it freaking works. And the bizarre context to justify the returning actors means that everything has this neat, odd sensation of being nostalgic while also not feeling too much like a retread.

Oliver's tasked by the Monitor to obtain some mysterious sci-fi plot device, the dwarf star particles (which the Monitor couldn't have gotten himself despite being a godlike entity? Eh.), while a "Dark Archer" is menacing Starling City. Turns out that the Dark Archer isn't Malcolm Merlyn but Tommy; Adrian Chase (!!!) is 'the Hood' in Earth-2; and we get the little bonus surprise of Earth-2 Rene and Dinah being random flunkies of Tommy. And while there's a degree of seriousness to things, this episode is clearly leaning heavy on fun, because the action scenes are pretty fun, there's a snarky sense of things of Oliver and Diggle clearly not really giving too much of a fuck as these senior vigilantes and superheroes, so how they interact with the far-less-experienced Adrian Chase or how Oliver quickly disposes of Rene and Dinah and then immediately snarks about how they had a better teacher in Earth-1. Or how Oliver keeps snarking to Adrian about the memetic "ten steps ahead of you" that Earth-1 Adrian kept repeating in season five... it's fun.

And, sure, there's a lot of inconsistencies about everything that goes on here if you think about it too much. Isn't Earth-2 Green Arrow supposed to be Robert Queen? What about the 2040 timeline, or whatever? But eh, at this point I think as long as the priority of the writers is more about giving Oliver a good send-off while wrapping up all the hanging plot threads from the past seven seasons. Which, okay, I can respect.

And, of course, the dramatic ending of Oliver managing to talk Tommy down from unleashing the Undertaking is well-delivered and emotional, and then, of course, we get the absolutely surprising twist that the destruction of the Earths is happening a lot earlier than we expected, because Earth-2 gets completely vaporized by an anti-matter wall, killing all these Earth-2 versions of characters we know and love... and, man, that Moira goodbye is one hell of a gut-punch, huh? Oliver, Diggle and Laurel-2 manage to escape back to Earth-1, but the stakes are real, and we're going full-in on the insanity of a comic book crossover plot presumably for the whole season. And that's without us going into the actual ramifications of Earth-2 being destroyed! I can't keep track of all the alternate-universe Flash characters on the top of my head, but there's like, a significant amount! Harry Wells and Jesse Quick for sure!

It's actually a massive gut-punch, since Earth-2 is actually a locale we've been through many times, perhaps the most out of the various alternate Earths in CW -- it does raise the stakes a fair bit, even if we know that the heroes are going to win in the end, the loss of Earth-2's a huge one!

The 2040 storyline is... it's honestly kinda there. It's competently acted and I suspect we're going to have some time-traveling payoff and shenanigans come Crisis time, otherwise why even keep the future cast around, still? Anyway, it seems like we're covering one of the bigger questions in season 7. If Connor Hawke is actually Bronze Tiger's kid adopted by John Diggle, whatever happened to JJ? Turns out that he's the Deathstroke of 2040. As much as I'm too tired right now to figure out how this stacks up to the information we know about the future timeline of the Arrowverse, at least it gives us time to flesh out the characters of the future? Mostly we learn that Mia's stubborn, and after a brief moment of allowing Connor to play things 'his way', Mia doubles down on her one-woman-show.

Anyway, I'm not the most impressed with the 2040 storyline, which feels like filler more than it did in the previous season, but I'm definitely a fan of the present-day storyline!

DC Easter Eggs Corner: 

• Obviously the big easter egg is the Batman mask on Lian Yu at the beginning, replacing the Deathstroke mask that was so prominent in the first two seasons. Which leads to some questions. Is this a parallel to the fate that Batman's taken in Earth-1? Is this just a little wink-and-nod acknowledgement to how so many Batman elements crept into Arrow? Or just a random cool easter egg? 
• Adrian Chase also name-drops Bruce Wayne, attributing a Sherlock Holmes quote to good ol' Batsy. 
• A huge chunk of the first act is basically a huge, huge homage to Arrow's pilot episode. I'm not going to point out every single detail.
• Walter Steele gets a bit of a shout-out when Oliver is confused where Walter is before realizing it's Malcolm that Moira remarried in this Earth.
• Earth-2 Thea died specifically of a Vertigo overdose causing a car crash on her 18th birthday, which is a reference to "Trust But Verify", where Thea also had her 18th birthday, a Vertigo overdose and a car crash. It just wasn't fatal on Earth-1. 
• The way that Oliver gets chained up by "Dark Archer" Tommy and the whole sequence that follows through is basically a (far looser) homage to the climax of season one where Oliver and Malcolm went through a similar confrontation. 
• Adrian's nickname for Laurel is "pretty bird", which is the nickname that comic-book Green Arrow uses for Black Canary.
• In the comic-book version of Crisis on Infinite Earths, it's Earth-3, the 'evil counterparts' Crime Syndicate Earth, that got destroyed first. Earth-2 isn't quite the one-on-one evil counterparts world as the Crime Syndicate's Earth, but it's close enough to that!

Let's Play Pokemon Sword, Part 7: Underground Goth Rock Scene

Last we left off, I got a water bike! And one thing that I absolutely love about the surfing bike is just how smoothly it transitions from zoom-zooming around on the land to zoom-zooming on the water. There's no delay in animation as all as the balloons inflate and you just ride around on a water-bike. It's glorious. Take your "this isn't the time to use that" and eat your heart out, Professor Oak.

This water route is... actually pleasantly maze-like, which sort of alleviates some of the complaints that I had about the previous routes basically being nothing much but basically pretty corridors. There are actual twists and turns and stuff, and the general route actually feels longer than like 30 steps. I do really like the vibe, too, this cold, frosty part of the ocean with icebergs blocking the way and like, Wailmers bobbing around and Mantines and Mantykes bursting out of the lake to ram you in the face... I kinda wished there was a bit more variation in the Pokemon in the water (bizarrely, there's a lot more critters in the grass, and you'd think they would put Octillery and Jellicent in the water) but it's still neat.

Oh, and I meet a new Pokemon called Grapploct, which is just hanging out on various parts of Circhester Bay and just free-style charges towards me as I cycle past and try to murder the shit out of me. It's a fighting octopus and... and it sure has a very weird mouth and very weird proportions. I caught its adorable smaller form, Clobbopus... and the entire line is pure-Fighting? ...but Grapploct lives in the ocean and is an octopus? It's weird. I get why it's Fighting type (the dex notes that an octopus body is like 80% muscle or something, and I do know that cephalopods are deceptively strong for their size) but I don't get why it's not also Water-type. You can't even give the same excuse as Crabrawler (which lives exclusively on land) since these Grapploct motherfuckers chase me around in the ocean. Ah, Pokemon.

Clobbopus is neat. I like Grapploct a bit better when it's moving around, but it' not one of my favourite designs from the region.

We get to the next city and Spikemuth... apparently has, like, a huge wall to keep people out? And Team Yell's taken over and has closed the massive blast door to shut out all gym challengers? Okay then. That's, like, literally the only moderately 'evil' thing Team Yell's done, isn't it? Honestly, as ineffective as they are, you at least get the impression that Team Skull are trying to be thugs and be disruptive, they're just comically incompetent. Team Yell is just... they're just literally a mild irritant that keeps showing up but never amounting to much. They barely qualify as a presence in the game, honestly, let alone an antagonistic force.


It's Marnie to the rescue, though, and since we sort of wrapped up Hop and Bede's stories, I guess its time for Marnie's? I really feel that we don't meet Marnie quite as often, though, that she really just ends up being kind of "oh yeah this nice somewhat-goth girl exists". Marnie's apparently from Spikemuth, and she knows a secret entrance. Which, by the way, isn't really all that secret, it's like six steps and a corner away from the main entrane and is as large as the main entrance itself. Marnie challenges me to a battle and her team's a mixture of evil, thuggy Pokemon like Toxicroak, Liepard and Scrafty, plus her Morpeko, and... it's neat, but I have a Sirfetch'd that basically steamrolls Marnie.


At this point I take a brief detour of exploring the Wild Area and doing some pokemon catching and finally discovering what's been going on about these Gigantamax Pokemon when I fought a G-Max Sandaconda in a raid. I have opinions about raid battles and G-Max and basically I think that the former's pooh-poo and the way we get the latter is also pooh-poo, but more on that below when I rant.

More importantly, I've evolved my Snom nom nom through happiness into... a Frosmoth! It's basically Frosthra from the fanmade Pokemon Uranium but in a completely different direction, with Frosmoth really emphasizing the mystical, ephemeral and beautiful qualities of some moths. Frosmoth's a pretty unconventional design for a moth creature and she looks so dang pretty. I like her. She's neat.

A fun little detail is that if you play the curry game with Snom, it'll eat like five times as much curry as you, but as a Frosmoth it'll barely eat a tablespoon. It's a neat nod to how real-life caterpillars quite literally only exist to consume as much nutrition as they can before they metamorphose into butterflies or moths.

And Spikemuth City is pretty cool looking... but sadly, it's all style and no substance. The only building I can go into is the Pokemon center, and all the buildings and houses in Spikemuth are all decorations that I can't interact with. Which sucks because there's a lot of effort put into the neon signs that really sell that this is a seedy punk town, like something out of Pokemon Colosseum but with better graphics or something, but the fact that it's essentially a literal corridor really leaves a bad aftertaste in my mouth.

And... and I dunno. I kinda feel like this area felt particularly unfinished, graphics aside. The concept is that the entire town of Spikemuth is the gym itself, and the Team Yell grunts are the gym trainers. But there are like, hints of Mr. Mime blocking the road, or the Team Yell grunts talking about "look at the neon signs", but there is absolutely no thought or puzzle in the gym at all, just brief one-on-one battles with Team Yell Grunts before they scamper. Even as a gym, Spikemuth's sort of a disappointment.

Y'know how you can tell just how minimal-effort the development of this segment of the game is? The dialogue and cutscenes always show two grunts charging your character and talking about how "they" are going to show you what's what, but up until the last set of gym trainers, it's only 1v1 battles. Wouldn't it be thematic for the Dark-type hooligan gym to have these punks bum-rush you? And instead we get this absolutely toothless excuse of a gym where you quite literally just walk straight in a line. I would've been disappointed even if the dialogue-and-battle stuff were integrated well, but it isn't.

What's not a disappointment, though, is Piers himself! The Spikemuth City Corridor ends in this huge ring where Gym Leader Piers is performing some death metal, rocking out some tunes and presumably screaming into his mike on this grungy underground concert stage as the Team Yell grunts cheer him on. He seems like a pretty chill guy despite being a pretty rockin' metalhead, and we get a brief history of Spikemuth as an unpopular town without its Power Spot and without the ability to Dynamax.

Which means that the gimmick of this gym is that it doesn't have a gimmick at all, which is surprisingly refreshing, and honestly keeping in theme with the deviant attitude of the Dark-type. And honestly, it's a nice breath of change, I guess? Piers also has a lot of great animations in the background, and he has like a line or two for each Pokemon he sends out, which I adore. His team isn't the most complex. His Scrafty, Obstagoon and Skuntank fall very easily to my Sirfetch'd, while Centiskorch eats his Malamar alive. Notably, Piers' last pokemon isn't his ace Obstagoon, but his Skuntank. That's another neat little deviation from normal gym leader formula, which I do like. Hey, I need to derive some entertainment from this otherwise disappointing town, all right?

Anyway, we get the at-this-point pretty obvious revelation that Piers is actually Marnie's big brother, and that he's been sending the Team Yell grunts to cheer his little sister on... and just like Opal, Piers sort of wants Marnie to succeed him, presumably so he can just focus on his rockin' music career. But they sort of end up making peace with each other, and Marnie continues to challenge Piers because she's going to be the gosh-darned champion, dang it!

What's with all these gym leaders trying to pawn off their jobs on successors?

Anyway, it's a neat, if, again, pretty underwhelming cap to Marnie's story. I genuinely feel like we barely got anything with Marnie beyond "hey Team Yell likes her" that I am just genuinely so neutral about this revelation. It's neat, but it feels like Marnie's just about to get interesting just as her story ends. I know the Alolan games get a bit of flak for really trying to shove the secondary characters' stories down our throats, but at least it made you care and be invested in them, y'know? Here characters like Marnie and Bede are just starting to get interesting just as their stories are swiftly wrapped up.

But never mind my rivals, because some random dude (no, really, it's a random NPC) calls my character because some shit is going down outside Spikemuth. Nope, don't call the local gym leader, call me instead, some random kid in a sports outfit. Leon meets me outside, and he talks about how random pokemon are dynamaxing in the wild... but then gives his "champion time" catchphrase and runs off and, of course, my character can't catch up with him because hey who cares about the main story of the region, right?

Instead, I am railroaded to talking to Hop, and then my character and Hop goes through the tunnel connecting Spikemuth and Hammerlocke, only to see random people cheering about oh how awesome Leon's off-screen fight against the off-screen Dynamax Pokemon is. Wow. How exciting that the huge, epic fight between the champion that's built up to be our final boss and the dynamax pokemon that's the gimmick of the region ends up being shown to me... through a series of news reports of Leon posing in front of a fallen Dynamax Perrserker.

No, really, this is the sort of 'things happen offscreen' nonsense that I would expect if your engine is the Game Boy Color. What's the point of rushing a Nintendo Switch game if you're not going to take advantage of it? If you can't program a cutscene in, at least have my character, like, have a boss fight. Have my character fight a Dynamax boss fight or something, y'know? Like, wouldn't it be great for me, Hop, Marnie and Piers or someone to have a four-man raid against the berserking Dynamax Pokemon? Way to undersell your already disappointing gimmick of the generation, game.


Anyway, Leon quite literally tells me to not care about the huge scary monsters springing up everywhere in Galar (would've been nice if I saw it, Leon) and continue doing the gym challenge. Which I might as well get over with. The final gym leader is Raihan, who brings me to the Hammerlocke Vault. Even moreso than Piers and Opal, Raihan's not mincing words. His gym battle is quite literally just three gym trainers. They're not even in a specialized location or anything, just quickly fight them and get to the boss.

Except this time around the actual puzzle is the battles! We've got a gym full of double battles, and each team uses a different weather effect! The first trainer uses a Sunny Day team, the second one a Rain Dance team and the third one a Hail team. The strategies are utterly rudimentary, and I'm not sure how that Abomasnow/Hakamo-o team was supposed to synergize, but the concept of a gym based on double battles and weather battles is pretty damn great, and it's honestly something I kinda wished Pokemon did more often instead of relying sorely on types.

The boss fight with Raihan is pretty great, mostly because Raihan does get a bit of decent build-up. I absolutely love the expressions and poses Raihan is making throughout the gym battle. He's such an anime character, the most anime of all these anime boys. From the screaming face he makes when he yells about "blowing everyone away", the hammy "stream once more, Sandstorm!" speeches, and, of course, taking a selfie before he chucks his dynamax pokeball... pretty well-done stuff by the animation team.

Raihan, of course, uses a Sandstorm team, opening up with Flygon and a Sand Stream Gigalith. Unfortunately for Raihan, both my Inteleon and my Frosmoth know Icy Wind, which easily take out Flygon, Gigalith and the Sandaconda that shows up next. Sandaconda is not the gigantamax here, but instead it's... Duraludon! Which is a Pokemon that I always felt looked more like a backwards metal asthma inhaler that someone drew a face on, and I can't take that thing seriously.

And then Duraludon gigantamaxes, and any chance that I see Duraludon as anything but a comical motherfucker evaporates. This thing just becomes a fucking building! A skyscraper with a goofy-ass face on top! You'd think that the huge blue bit around halfway through his body is his mouth, but nope, it's the little pez dispenser on top. Mecha-Godzilla this ain't. This thing looks so dumb in all the endearing ways.

As a little challenge to myself and maybe as a bit of a nod of respect to Piers, I tried to not Dynamax throughot this entire fight. Unfortunately, it's pretty damn hard since the Duraludon does hit for a pretty hard damage (and that G-max rock mode took out poor Frosula), but thankfully Dynamax/Gigantamax only lasts for a while, all I have to do is wait out the 3-turn time, and Duraludon peters out and renders itself vulnerable to being burned to death by a centipede.

Anyway, that was a pretty cool fight and gym concept. I just kinda wished that Raihan had either a more robust team or a gym challenge that comprised of more than three dudes. The whole Raihan sequence ends with me getting the eighth badge and Hop, revitalized and super-duper excited, decides to fight Raihan right then and now... while my character goes off to the Challenger's Cup, which seems to kind of be like a cool tournament similar to the anime? We also get a short scene of Magnolia (who I genuinely forgot existed) gave a whole speech about the history of Galar, gives some encouraging words to Sonia and gives Sonia her labcoat. Which is sure neat, I guess Sonia has been around long enough for me to somewhat care about her as a character. 

Anywy, next up: a snowy mountain!

Overall, by the way, I've been really enjoying the Wild Area and exploring through it. Not so much the raids since I still think it's silly, but the Wild segments are really nice and it's kind of a shame that they didn't even try to integrate it into the story beyond a generic "find your way to the next town" roadblock.

I've been a real big fan of Frosmoth. It's not quite as charming as its butt-faced Snom pre-evolved form, but I do like it a fair bit. I've also trained up Orbeetle a bit (she can do Psychic now!) and the Psychic typing is neat, but I don't think I'll really want to use her, especially not with Frosmoth and Centiskorch already core members of my team. I did evolve up Impidimp up to its final form, Grimmsnarl. Grimmsnarl's pretty cool, it basically goes from an imp to a goblin to a troll, and apparently its hair now wraps around his body to form strong muscles, which is probably like a reference to an anime or manga or something because it kinda sounds somewhat familiar, but I don't remember which anime/manga specifically. Grimmsnarl's got a neat typing and movepool. I'm a fan, although I don't like him enough to use him in my party.

Toxel's also evolved into Toxtricity, which is a smug-looking lizardman with attitude who has spiky glowy spines and strums the strings on its neck-chest while pantomining guitar noises. Why the fuck didn't Piers have one on his team? Apparently there's more than ont Toxtricity form, and my Toxel evolves into the "low-key" form, which is purple and neon blue. It's got a cool ability, "Punk Rock", which boosts sound moves. Okay, then!

Anyway, we're nearing the end of Galar's main storyline. Which is kind of a shame. Looking at the remaining map, I guess that we're going to have the conclusion of the Zacian/Zamazenta archaeology storyline as well as whatever Rose and Leon have been dealing with in the background around then? Okay.

Random Notes:

• So this LP episode's "Random Notes" is less about me noting random things, but more about me just ranting about how unbelievably stupid the Gigantamax system is. And maybe I'm blowing things out of proportion? Maybe I'm being entitled? Yeah, I could be. But as much as I keep trying to enjoy this game (and it certainly has a lot of parts that I did enjoy, otherwise I wouldn't keep making these let's play writings) boy is the Gigantamax system dumb. Do I hate it more than I do the lack of national dex? I'm not sure. It doesn't exactly ruin my single-player playthrough, but man, the way to get the Gigantamax forms is just so ass-backwards to everything that the Pokemon franchise is supposed to be about that it genuinely baffles me why they think this is the optimal move. 
• First up... Gigantamax and Dynamax are supposed to be the big gimmick of the region, yeah? But instead , the Dynamax forms are just straight-up locked behind either gym battles or Max Raid Battles. And Max Raid Battles are cool for... oh, for about the first four or five times you play it. But then turns out that when you turn all moves into just variations of "do huge damage", things get absolutely freakin' boring. Whoop-dee-doo, the enemy just put up a fucking annoying shield that I have to beat through. 
• And then... none of the Pokemon you catch can ever become Gigantamax except for very specific ones you get from the Max Raid Battles. That Butterfree you've been training since route 1? That Drednaw? That Sandaconda? The Corviknight or Centiskorch I've been training up? Fuck that, they'll never achieve this cool new final form, because they're simply inherently unable to. 
• In a sense, I kinda get this limitation for normally-evolving pokemon like Pikachu, Eevee and Meowth, things that they plan to distribute through events. It's sort of like that Z-move Snorlax or pre-ORAS Mega Blaziken. Sure. The item is exclusive. I get that. But that simply limites the exclusivity of the new form/gimmick to the player, not the species entirely, y'know?
• Instead, you have to randomly roll the dice on these Max Raid Battles, hoping to find a Gigantamax creature, defeat it, and then capture it. Which, by the way, as I discovered from the two Gigantamax raids I've been through (a Butterfree and a Sandaconda) you can absolutely fail to catch. 
• What makes it worse? Fucking online interaction is locked behind a paid service to access Nintendo online. So I'm stuck with the same dumb AI trainers who brings Magikarps and a Sorlock without a damaging move into the max raid battles. It's horribly dumb.
• And... and honestly, this is the feature that they cut out so many things from the franchise for? For a dumbed-down multiplayer raid trying and failing to mimic MMORPG and mobile game systems, which mostly amounts to spamming Dynamax moves over and over again? Because, shit, sure, the animation's cool, but after seeing Max Flare and Max Strike for like the twentieth time, it gets boring. At least regular Pokemon fights use more than like the same 8 animations or whatever, y'know?
• Considering just how convenient they've made raising an ideal Pokemon is nowadays with features that allow you to train EV, higher-IV pokemon in the wild, and even things like ability or nature-altering items, it's completely bizarre for me that the game designers just decided to take like a huge leap backwards with how they incorporated Gigantamax forms. 
• Anyway, yeah. I've been enjoying my playthrough through this game. The game is pretty, the wild area is a great proof-of-concept, the new Pokemon are cool... but man oh man are there a lot of decisions that this franchise is going towards that I am genuinely disappointed by. At least with around 50% of the previous Pokemon being cut I can kinda see the reason why (crunch time, deadlines, et cetera) but I'm genuinely baffled and completely bored out of my mind with the max raid battles and obtaining gigantamax forms. 
• And part of me is kind of angry that this system is likely to never be fixed, considering Nintendo and Gamefreak's policy of "fuck the previous generation's gimmick, onwards to even more gimmicky shit in the next generation". 
• ...that sure was a rant. I dunno. I'm trying to be as positive as possible about this game since Sw/Sh gets a lot of flak out there, but I'm putting my foot down on this one aspect of the game. 'Cause it sucks. 

Kamen Rider Zero-One E13 Review: When I Shine, Darkness Fades

Kamen Rider Zero-One, Episode 13: I Work As The President's Secretary

Well this was kind of late. Oops! I'm like, two weeks behind or something? It's admittedly better time than I'm making for the CW superhero shows, though! Last we left off, Aruto's assumed his first-quarter-season upgrade, Shining Hopper... which leads to an interestingly abrupt fight? We get some Ultra Instinct "I can see all the moves you can possibly make" CGI sequence between Shining Hopper and Dodo Mk. III, but Dodo quickly learns what Shining Hopper can do and absolutely demolishes Aruto, grabbing him mid-punch and tossing him aside. We get the hilarious snark from Aruto about how "isn't it too early for you to figure this out?" Yeah, yeah, Aruto, at two minutes into the episode, it certainly is. After Aruto takes a hit that was originally meant for Izu, it's Wazu to the rescue as he charges (well, speed-walks) in and activates the Breaking Mammoth key to summon the giant mammoth spaceship and beam the good guy squad away. 

So yeah, that's an interesting way to start off the episode, with the shiny new toy beaten up. The Hiden robots basically talk about how the Shining Hopper key is incomplete, while Fuwa just wants to murder the rogue Magia. Basically it's a bit of a mission statement between Aruto and Fuwa, both of whom want to stop the Dodo Assassin for their own reasons, and they head off to stop Dodo-chan from hunting down Number 5, his 'brother'. As the boys head off, Izu and Wazu discuss about the power of intuition, since last episode Wazu did warn them not to use the Shining Hopper key for some reason... and apparently that's Grandpa Korenosuke's influence making Wazu achieve singularity and having gut feelings and whatnot? Their discussion (and some 'call me your big bro' moment from Wazu) is interrupted by Yua, who they catch up with off-screen. 

Aruto and Fuwa, meanwhile, head off against a small army of lesser Dodo Magia, and I do like the little description from Fuwa about how transforming into a Kamen Rider will 'compensate' for Aruto's current injuries. We get a cool double-henshin and they fight the Dodo Grunts... and then Horobi and Jin show up and Horobi blows up some of the Dodo Grunts with his suitcase bow-and-arrow. Jin has an adorable sad face when he says that assassin-chan won't listen to them anymore, aww, poor baby. Horobi offers a truce. Work together to fight the third party villain, that's like a superhero tradition, right? But Aruto and Fuwa absolutely refuse to do so, which is... actually surprising. I guess the past couple of seasons of Kamen Rider I've watched features so much "your enemy is my enemy" stuff that actually seeing them not even entertain the thought of fighting alongside the big bads actually caught me off-guard! But it definitely makes sense. Fuwa is a rabid anti-robot racist and Aruto absolutely loathes Metsubojinrai.net for stomping all over what his Humagear dream. Yua even shows up in Valkyrie form to take the first shot against Horobi! These Kamen Riders don't negotiate with terrorists.

The Kamen Rider trio regroup in the van again, and... well, Fuwa and Aruto have sort of became buddies, as Yua surmises, and that's kinda funny. Wazu figures out where they should go to hunt down Number 5, while Izu collects Aruto's power-up keys to properly synchronize with Shining Hopper or something. And as the Kamen Riders deploy to fight the villain, Izu and Wazu get an interesting conversation about the 'central memory', and apparently, since Izu and Wazu are part of the Zero One Project, they are special humagears who can't upload their central memory anywhere as a security precaution... which means that there's the threat of them getting permanently killed since unlike Dodo-chan, they can't make backups. Obviously, this is going to lead to some Izu angst down the line, which is interesting. 

It's kind of a shame that Dodo-chan at this point has basically devolved into a generic toku monster talking about festivals of blood and shit. One of the more endearing qualities about the character that msdr me latch onto him so much was that he's slowly learning about everything around him, learning how to be a murderer, and now that he's just going "mwahaha, join my festival of blood, brother" really feels like they're simplifying him a lot.

The confrontation starts off with Fuwa shooting the bullet away from hitting #5. Fuwa, protecting a Humagear? It's a pretty well-done and surprisingly subtle bit of character development from our angry boy -- Kamen Rider shows aren't this subtle usually and I'm genuinely surprised we didn't get a comment from one of the other characters noting this. Anyway, we get a badass triple henshin (Power! Jump! Thunder!) as the trio heads off to beat up a bunch of dodos.

Izu and Wazu, meanwhile, are having a bit of a conversation and apparently Satellite Zea underestimated Aruto's growth over the past couple of episodes, and in a surprising reversal of the "power up item is too much for our hero" trope, it's the opposite this time around. I'm not quite sure how that works, though, although I guess it's Aruto's mind that is growing? Izu uploads combat data from the other keys into Shining Hopper, but because of drama reasons it's not quite enough and Izu resolves to upload her own records of Aruto's combat data into Shining Hopper. You watched the same fights that these keys have been in, Izu, what are you on about? Of course it's the guest star that ends up sacrificing himself, and Wazu ends up shoving Izu aside and uploading his own combat data instead. Apparently that one fight where Aruto got his ass kicked was enough to complete the data that Shining Hopper needs? Okay, sure. It's pretty dramatic. Wazu's actor does the little dramatic acting pretty well, even giving a neat motivational speech about how the best way that Izu can support their boss is by being by his side.

We even get what amounts to Wazu's life flashing before his eyes, quite literally qhen his hologram projector shows us a brief memory of Grandpa Korenosuke telling Wazu to be prepared to support his little sister Izu when she reaches singularity. And Izu finally calls Wazu "big brother" like he had been pestering her to do just as he passes. Pretty well done death scene for a guest star, actually!

In the battlefield, Dodo-chan uses his "sword bash a bunch of missiles" finisher to knock Aruto out of his transformation while the AIMS boys are distracted fighting the dodo goons, and we get a pretty neat exchange with Aruto yelling about how "if you can learn how to beat me, I can learn how to beat you!" Izu lobs the Shining Hopper key between Aruto and Dodo's next attack, and the shining new toy emits so much power it blows away Dodo's attack. Izu tells Aruto that Wazu dies making sure that key is completed, even acknowledging him as her brother again, and Aruto's expression of a combination of confusion, grief and gratefulness is amazing. Aruto isn't the best-written character in this show but his actor sure does have some pretty great moments.

We get a repeat of the fantastic Shining Hopper henshin sequence. 'When I shine, darkness fades' and all that. Shining Hopper moves way, way faster than before, appearing in multiple spots in that Sherlock-Holmes-predictive-move sequence, and apparently Shining Hopper moves and adapts so fast that it defies expectations at the last second. Aruto gets a badass one-liner: "the only person that can outdo me... is me!" With a speedy finisher, Aruto blows the fuck out of the Dodo Magia. Sleep well, sweet prince. It's not the best exit for Dodo, especially since he's certainly grown as an actual character over the couple of episodes that he's been in. I've watched the next episode and I know that this is goodbye for Ansatsu-chan for the time being, but with Number 5 still running around I'm holding out hope for my favourite supporting character making a return someday.

Horobi shows up and stops the AIMS duo from claiming the dodo key, Sting Dystopia-ing the two of them and then buggering off with the dodo key, delivering an ominous line about how Zero-One is now worth fearing. Amatsu Gai also watches and drops hints about how he would like to see Shining Hopper fight "Thouser". Foreshadowing! The episode ends with Dodo and Wazu dead, but they didn't quite get the key that will help fix Hiden Intelligence's reputation. I do really like that final scene where Aruto is battered and bruised but just picks himself back up to do press conferences and other stuff that bosses are supposed to do, with Izu being all smiles and supportive. It's pretty neat showing just how seriously Aruto's taking his day job even if we don't see him doing a boss a lot of the time.

This two-parter in general does kind of suffer from a bit of a choppy pacing and perhaps trying to do too much? I did like that eventually the focus in this episode ends up being on Wazu and Izu, otherwise that death scene wouldn't quite work as well as it did. On the flip side, though, both the Dodo Magia's exit and the whole police investigation plot sort of gets a slight shaft. It's still a neat two-parter, though, and sort of feels like we're entering a new phase of the show -- the Dodo arc is over, and it's definitely exciting to see what is up next!

Random Notes:

• Gimmick Watch: "Bit-rise byte-rise kilo-rise mega-rise. Shining Mega Impact!" So how high does the prefixes go? 
• For the power-level geeks out there (and this is Kamen Rider, power levels are quite literally bullshit and dependant on the requirement of the episode), Shining Hopper at the beginning of the episode is merely a 180% increase in power, whereas at the end of the episode it's 500%.
• I didn't get Izu and Wazu's punny names until like right now. "Was" is the past tense of "is", after all. 
• The robotic way that Izu and Wazu raises their hands when Yua barges into the AIMS van is perfect. 
• Thirteen episodes into the series, and Horobi finally uses that fucking katana for something more than just edgy-posing, using it to deflect Valkyrie's bullet. 
• Izu gets Wazu's pocketwatch. I'm not sure if it'll be important down the line?

Movie Review: Spider-Man 2

Spider-Man 2 [2004]

Sequels are an interesting thing. They're sometimes a godsend, a sign that a movie has blossomed into a franchise, and sometimes they end up showing that either the creative team or the franchise itself just doesn't quite have the oomph needed to be a long-running film series. But when 2002's Spider-Man ended up not just being a great adaptation of everyone's favourite neighborhood superhero but also an actual box office smash, a sequel was pretty much inevitable. 

And 2004's Spider-Man 2 (and the later released director's cut, Spider-Man 2.1, which is what I watched for this review) ended up being widely regarded as one of the contenders for the best Spider-Man movie ever. And, honestly, watching this movie more than a decade later... it's easy to see why. Sure, Spider-Man 2 suffers from a lot of the pre-MCU superhero movie tropes that made some of them feel a bit too cheesy and brings the movie down a bit. The villain's plot essentially takes place in the background separate from the hero until the inevitable Act 2 and Act 3 confrontations. The main leading lady is just there to be a damsel in distress and a romantic love interest. And some of the dialogue feel a bit too stiff and cheesy. Old Aunt May hanging on to a building with her umbrella, anyone? 

But with the exception of the final installment of the Raimi movies, what these old Spider-Man movies did right was adapt the source material relatively faithfully and they do so with heart. Sure, there are some shortcuts that are inevitably taken when taking hundreds and hundreds of comic book history and condensing them to two hours. But the storyline adapted for Spider-Man 2 is pretty solid and well-done. I wouldn't say tightly-paced, because there certainly are some parts of the movie that leaves me scratching my head, but otherwise, it's done relatively well. 

The movie itself is simultaneously funnier, more action-packed and arguably even darker than its predecessor, the 2002 Spider-Man. It does try to follow up on some of the plot threads set up there, particularly on the Harry Osborn path, but it's mostly a running B-plot while the main storyline is mostly about Peter Parker struggling with his dual life of Spider-Man being a huge, huge obstacle to his civilian life. He misses Mary Jane's huge play, driving a huge wedge between the two's relationship. His relationship with Harry is also strained (although that's more Harry's fault than Peter's). He misses his pizza deliveries, costing him his job. He misses classes and his grades suffer. He struggles to make ends meet, and he's owing money to both his landlord and even JJJ's secretary. Sure, he's saving lives, but being Spider-Man ends up being a horrible influence on Peter Parker as a person. Throw in the fact that due to Peter's other boss J. Jonah Jameson and the Daily Bugle painting Spider-Man as a goddamn menace, and Spider-Man leads a very, very thankless life. Tobey Maguire really ends up portraying Peter Parker as someone who tries his best, a plucky young man trying to do the best with what he's got, but who life always kicks down. 

During the course of the movie, a scientist that Peter looks up to, Dr. Otto Octavius, ends up being funded by Harry Osborn to create some sort of... science experiment or other. And while watching this in 2019 made me chuckle a bit at the sheer lack of realism with the huge science experiment mumbo-jumbo (not even a glass panel separating the press from the experiment in the warehouse?), at the core of things, the story is told relatively well. Giving Octavius a prior connection to Peter as a mentor talking about science and discovery is a neat, if easy, way to give Dr. Octopus a connection to Peter that some of the antagonists in lesser Spider-Man movies don't quite have. And then we get the obvious supervillain origin when Dr. Octavius's robotic tentacle arms and the (very unsafely exposed) inhibitor chip keeping the A.I. in check ends up being destroyed in the explosion, and driven insane by the death of his wife, Octavius is manipulated by the tentacles to... repeat the experiment? Or something? Yeah, making Dr. Octopus be essentially a puppet to his robot tentacles robs the villain of a lot of agency, and I honestly would prefer it to be him just being driven mad by the death of his wife. 

And as Peter Parker struggles with his own personal demons, things get even worse for our hero, and I really do like just how personal the stakes are. Eventually, in the midst of trying to get a bank loan to save poor Aunt May's house, Peter finds himself facing off against Dr. Octopus in a fight on the bank, and... hoo boy, despite some of the criticisms I may have towards this movie, the best thing about it is easily the special effects behind Dr. Octopus's mechanical arms. Which are completely practical effects, done with puppeteer teams. It's amazing and it holds up even now. 

Spider-Man manages to save Aunt May from certain doom, but fails to actually apprehend Dr. Octopus. This failure is spun off, once more, by the Daily Bugle, as Spider-Man assisting the supervillain. Throw in the added blow to Peter's life when Mary Jane reveals that she's became engaged to J. Jonah Jameson's son John, and Peter basically suffers a bit of an emotional breakdown, abandoning his Spider-Man identity and dumping his costume in the trash. 

And we actually see that Peter Parker's life is so much better without the stress of the double identity. He performs better in university, he has a better relationship with his Aunt (through a very, very emotional scene when Peter reveals his role in failing to prevent Uncle Ben's death), hell, he even flirts with Mary Jane moderately successfully, and that blissful "ah, the pressure's off" when he sees a bunch of police sirens whiz by is pretty nice. It's not very often that these superhero movies explore just how much devoting your life into superheroing takes a toll, and showcasing just how much Peter's life is actually better for him personally without Spider-Man is amazingly done. 

Of course... with great power, comes great responsibility, and all that jazz. Peter's good heart ends up winning out when he sees a building on fire, and while Peter Parker manages to rescue a little girl all on his own, the firemen tell him that there was another man who died on an upper floor -- with the unspoken implication (great restraint there, movie!) that Peter could have saved him if he had been Spider-Man. Another cheesy scene was when he helped Aunt May move. Aunt May had been critical of Spider-Man before, labeling him a menace thanks to the Daily Bugle, but after their team-up in the bank, the fact that both Aunt May and some random kid neighbour actually look up to Spider-Man as a hero ends up reinvigorating Peter to reclaim his mantle. 

The fact that the villains are doing their villainous stuff helps out too. I'm... I'm not quite sure who the hell is selling doomsday science equipment to Dr. Octopus after he robs his bank (no, really, who?) but Dr. Octopus ends up demanding the isotope tritium from Harry Osborn. Harry, still obsessed with killing Spider-Man after blaming Spider-Man for his dad's death, demands that Dr. Octopus bring Spider-Man to him alive. One thing leads to another, and Dr. Octopus kidnaps Mary Jane to threaten Peter Parker. 

The subsequent face-off between Spider-Man and Dr. Octopus on the train is perhaps remembered as the iconic superhero scene, and for good reason. It's paced well, it's tense, and the sheer awesomeness of Dr. Octopus's tentacles smashing around a speeding train while Spider-Man tries his damnadest to stop the train is pretty damn awesome. As cheesy as Spider-Man stopping the train is, you really do feel just how much the poor kid is hurting and giving his all to save these people. And... okay, the citizens of New York lifting him on his back and promising not to reveal his identity is cheesy as shit, but the subsequent scene of them standing between Dr. Octopus and the wounded Spider-Man is awesome as shit. 

And then... we get a series of events as Dr. Octopus delivers Spider-Man to Harry, gets the plot device isotope, Harry discovers Spider-Man's identity but we don't get much resolution because it's a sequel plot point, and then we get a showdown in the villain's lair. After a brief action scene and a lot of Mary Jane screaming, Spider-Man manages to appeal to Octavius's human heart and he ends up sacrificing himself to stop the reactor. Oh, and Peter reveals his secret identity to Mary Jane, and insists that this is the reason they can never be together.

The final scenes show Harry going crazy as he hallucinates Norman Osborn's ghost, and discovers that his father apparently has Green Goblin equipment hidden in a secret room, while Mary Jane abandons her wedding to be with Spider-Man, accepting Peter's double life as part of the deal. Aww!

And... and for the most part, the movie is well done. It's themes and the story it tries to tell -- Peter abandoning his superhero identity only to realize that it would be selfish for him to not be Spider-Man, and willingly sacrificing his happiness for the greater good -- is well done. The pacing is all right, particularly in the 2.1 Director's cut. But there are certainly a fair amount of criticism going into this one from me. Mary Jane and Peter Parker has a lot of great chemistry, but while I understand Mary Jane's confusion from her point of view, the fact that she actually ended up abandoning her fiancee (and John seems to be a nice dude) on their wedding and not calling it off before honestly ends up feeling a bit too selfish, and honestly, everything about Peter and MJ's relationship ends up feeling a wee bit too melodramatic for my liking. 

The villains of the movie are also... eh? Both Alfred Molina's Otto Octavius and James Franco's Harry Osborn are well-acted for sure, but I really am not a big fan of Dr. Octopus basically being mind-controlled by his robot tentacles and the movie really not doing anything with it until the end of the movie to give the character an excuse to go out in a heroic sacrifice. How much cooler would it be to have him just be driven by grief? Or how much cooler would it be to have him constantly argue with his tentacles, really setting up the tempting-devil influence? Or how much cooler it would be if the tentacles do even more evil things than Otto himself? Imagine that bank scene, with Otto Octavius only wanting to rob the bank, but the tentacles, out of their own accord, are doing evil things like kidnapping an old woman or trying to stab Spider-Man? And until the climax Otto is convinced that this is him? I dunno, it seems like they just wasted an interesting concept. 

Harry Osborn is also somewhat problematic, with his obsession not really being given enough time to develop. Every single time Harry shows up in this movie he's just being a little shitbag about how evil Spider-Man is and how terrible Peter is for not helping him hunt down Spider-Man, but the movie ends up really not going anywhere with it other than the obvious setup for Spider-Man 3. And while it's all right for a movie to set up for sequels (the MCU makes a living out of exactly this), I did feel like they really should've given Harry a more solid character arc throughout the movie itself. 

Overall... it still holds up pretty well. There are parts of the movie that are a bit iffy, for sure, and I'm not a big fan of the mishandling of some of the characters. But the good parts of the movie outshine the bad parts. Tobey Maguire's entire performance in particular, but also the awesomeness of the effects behind Dr. Octopus's arms, the train scene, the bank robbery scene, J. Jonah Jameson hamming things up, the horrifying scene as Octopus's tentacles start rampaging in the hospital... it's slightly dated for sure, but definitely a pretty vast improvement to its already well-done predecessor, and easily one of the better superhero movies of its time. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Stan Lee has a blink-and-you'll miss it cameo as a man pulling a mother and her child away from rubble when Dr. Octopus is holding Aunt May hostage. 
• When spitballing names for Dr. Octopus, one of Jameson's employees suggests "Doctor Strange", which JJJ likes... but then notes that it's taken. 
• The whole "Spider-Man... no more!" line, as well as Peter dumping his costume in the trash, is a homage to an iconic comic, Amazing Spider-Man #50-52.