Lupina Howls asks:

Wait, you’re using this again? Neat. Well thoughts on Tarastalization? (The Crystal hat thingy in Scarvio)

No-one sent any questions in for, like, six months! There were, like, one or two comments, but nothing that seemed worth posting a response to. This question-and-answer routine is a terrible system for two complementary reasons: one is that if no one asks any questions for a while, people forget it’s an option or think I’m not doing it anymore, and continue not asking any questions (to be honest, until last week I was beginning to suspect that perhaps it had finally died a natural death); the other is that if I get a lot of questions in a short time and manage to answer them, people get excited about it and send in more than I have time to write proper answers to, and then sometimes if I’m busy in real life it starts to feel overwhelming and I actually do give up on it for a while. It’s an extremely bad system that I only have in the first place because it was there by default on Tumblr, but hey, it means sometimes I talk about topics I wouldn’t have thought to talk about, without making it a whole thing that I have to have a researched and sober opinion on.

sorry, what were you saying?

oh yeah, sparklification

Well, I’ve never been one to get super enthusiastic about the big flashy mechanics like Mega Evolution or Z-Moves, but I have to admit, the strategic possibilities of being able to set up a Pokémon to change its type are interesting. The way it’s described, it sounds like sparklified Pokémon get a sort of double-STAB, so they’ll certainly have raw power on tap, but it seems like something that will take a bit more finesse and forethought than Dynamax or Mega Evolution. To be honest, I think the sparkly hats look pretty goofy, but I suppose they’re a reasonable compromise in this dilemma Game Freak seems to keep facing, where they want the flagship mechanic to be something all Pokémon can participate in (rather than a small minority, as with Mega Evolution), but also want it to be something visually striking that isn’t practical to tailor to every Pokémon in the game. I actually quite liked how Dynamax was part of the regional battle culture of Galar; I don’t think we’ve seen yet how/whether Scarlet and Violet plan to work sparklification into Paldean culture, but it seems clear that the phenomenon is tied to the land and perhaps the geology of Paldea itself, and I don’t believe any of the trailers or promos have claimed it’s a recent discovery, so I have to imagine there’ll be some kind of local tradition around it.