Onethousandrbirds asks:

if you could rewrite or redirect the plot of any of the games (main series or spin-off) which would you pick?

Hmm… until last year I would have said Emerald, but Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby did a pretty solid job of that with Delta Episode, I think.  Black and White are tempting because I think a more nuanced way of looking at their central conflict could have resulted in something absolutely amazing, but the fact is, their story is really good as it stands.  I’d probably go with Diamond, Pearl and Platinum, because their flippancy with the whole cosmology has never sat well with me – call me crazy, but I think if you’re going to give the player control of Pokémon that are capable of literally unmaking the universe, you need to be just a little bit more explicit than they were about why that is okay.  

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Anonymous asks:

It’s coming into winter time so I thought I’d ask, can you ice-skate? What is your favourite winter-time activity?

Something I’ve realised since moving to America is that, in the part of New Zealand I come from, we don’t really have winter.  We have more of a long, wet autumn that sort of shades back into spring at the other end (more tropical parts of the world have a rainy season and a dry season; Auckland has a rainy season and a rainier season).  The notion of specifically wintertime activities isn’t all that important to you when you’re from a place where it never snows, I think (and I definitely cannot ice-skate).  Although I suppose if I had to say, I’m very fond of winter desserts.  There’s no reason you can’t make apple pie or rice pudding at any time of the year, but those hot desserts are so much better when it’s cold outside.  I should really go and find my mother’s recipe for chocolate self-saucing pudding one of these days…

Anonymous asks:

What do you think of Allerglen, the fanmade game Pokemon Ethereal Gates take on Darmanitan’s zen form. I think it’s much more useful, since it has high speed so it can actually get attacks in (And a staff member has promised future updates will buff its special attack)

I’m not familiar with Ethereal Gates, but just looking it up quickly now…

Doing Zen Mode this way does make a lot more sense – part of the reason it just doesn’t work for Darmanitan is because Zen Darmanitan is trying to be a tank when it inherently starts with less than 50% HP, which is something of a recipe for failure.  Allerglen can take hits with its fairly solid initial defences and then strike back hard in Zen Mode.  The trouble is that you still have only one moveset that you have to use to fill two different roles.  Allerglen’s initial attack and special attack are sufficiently awful that it wants support moves like Stun Spore so it isn’t just wasting its time before Zen Mode activates, whereas once it’s in Zen Mode it wants Quiver Dance and as many special attacks as it can think of.  It’s definitely more flexible, and Zen Mode sucks a lot less for this Pokémon than it does for Darmanitan (who is so much better off without this unique and interesting ability that it’s just not funny anymore) but I suspect the problems with the ability are a little more systemic than that…

Anonymous asks:

Would you rather be a Pokemon trainer or a Pokemon ranger?

Well, to be perfectly honest I don’t think I have the constitution or physical stamina for the kind of $#!t Pokémon rangers get up to.  Trainer can be a hobby, while ranger is a job, and an extremely demanding one at that.  In terms of the relationship the two groups have with their Pokémon, though, there’s actually a lot about the rangers’ way of doing things that appeals to me – like the stress on the more temporary, favour-for-a-favour nature of their relationships with most Pokémon, and the resulting emphasis on the more personal ties they have with just one partner.  I think the rangers’ training style gets around a lot of the more ethically blurry stuff about living with Pokémon, which is probably a good thing.  It also helps that they have a formalised code of ethics about how to treat Pokémon, but that’s more to do with them being all members of a centralised organisation with a definite purpose.