One lunatic's love-hate relationship with the Pokémon franchise, and his addled musings on its rights, wrongs, ins and outs. Come one, come all, and indulge my delusions of grandeur as I inflict my opinions on anyone within shouting distance.
Last time, I had just drawn the Ten of Pentacles, which lets one of my readers make up a new rule and get rid of some existing ones. The lucky first person on the scene was jeffthelinguist, who offered the following:
(Also, for the record, here is my Facebook chat log with Jim the Editor from just after I drafted the previous episode)
Big rules here, little rules down there, let’s go.
We’ve successfully dealt with Team Galactic and saved the region (world? universe?), but there’s still a much more important challenge ahead: earning an eighth badge and defeating the Elite Four, as well as that goth lunatic with the Psyduck medicine. Because of the plot, the east road to Sunyshore City (yes, one n, it feels wrong every time I type it) is now open.
But first, I have an important promise to fulfill.
All right, so, last time I had just drawn the Tower as I began to climb Mount Coronet for the final showdown with Cyrus, and the Tower says this:
The Tower: Box your entire party. You cannot use any of them until this rule is overwritten. However, all other current rules are revoked. Only Pokémon in the Vessel remain unusable. If you have no other Pokémon, you may catch one of your choice in this area (or in the last area with wild Pokémon, if there are none here) before boxing your party.
So, everything is wiped, all the existing rules are gone: no nature restrictions, no gender restrictions, no evolution restrictions, no restrictions on switching in battle, no fµ¢£ing Justice card hanging around for half the game telling me it’s super important that I keep using an Unown. But my entire team – my six highest-level Pokémon, including my starter, King Louie – are off-limits until further notice. In consultation with the comments section on my last post, I have chosen the following team to replace them, a mixture of old and new faces:
Big rules here, little rules down there, let’s go.
So – last time I’d just finished training a moderately competent team on Iron Island out of the Pokémon assigned to me by the Devil (look, this is just the kind of phrase you wind up using in this run; deal with it), only to draw the Five of Pentacles when I entered the gym and learn that I won’t be allowed to use any female Pokémon.
Well, first things first: Judy, Sunfire and Gran Nite have to get back in the kitchen, along with all my other female Pokémon.
More importantly, Justice is still in play, and some slots just opened up in my party, so guess who’s coming back?
Big rules here, little rules down there, let’s go.
Look, I know everyone was eager to see me take on Canalave City with only a drastically underlevelled Blissey and Girafarig, an Unown and a Blizzard/Slam Quagsire, but I felt like I had to do just a teensy bit of off-screen grinding, maybe not quite enough to get Du Fromage and Anna up to the levels of the old team, but enough for them to be… well, competent.
Big rules here, little rules down there, let’s go.
We now have access to Surf, which lets us go to not just Canalave City but several other side paths and hidden areas throughout Sinnoh, including one or two that are big enough to be worth drawing cards for. So let’s have a little exploration episode with no dumb plot $#!t.
Big rules here, little rules down there, let’s go.
So there’s a Team Galactic goon here being a goon and doing goon things. Maybe Cynthia knew all about this and realised someone had to go and deal with it, but didn’t want to have to speak to her grandmother, so she engineered a bull$#!t pretext for the player to go to Celestic Town instead.