I wonder if Trubbish and Garbodor would have been better received amongst the fanbase if they had been based on cockroaches, accumulating trash around themselves as camouflage/armor.

*shrug* No idea.  I think I might have liked them more that way.  I have kind of a weird relationship with Trubbish and Garbodor, though, in that the thing I most disliked about them had nothing to do with the trash/garbage aesthetic. I was more upset because I felt they were just a rehash of Grimer and Muk, which is something that was kind of a recurring theme with me throughout Black and White – I was annoyed by how many of Unova’s Pokémon seemed like one-to-one replacements for the absent first-generation Pokémon.  So I can’t really speak for the fanbase there.

fireandsaltedearth said: It’s definitely not attached; there’s an early episode of the anime (the one with the school) that has Pikachu knocking a girl’s Cubone’s helmet around so it can’t see.

Oh, yeah, Giselle’s Cubone in The School of Hard Knocks; that’s right, well remembered.  Mmm; well, it’s not physically bonded to the head, then, but I still think it could be something that grows naturally and then sort of breaks off, like losing your baby teeth.  Then again, it would be strange for it to work that way, when the helmet seems to fuse with the skull once they evolve into Marowak…

How do you feel about the extra characterizations in the Delta Episode (in particular Steven’s, since I remember you lamenting his lacking characterization back in your Champions series)? And what would you have done differently with the Episode?

Steven is just better-written in general in Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby.  Well, everyone is, really; I actually think the villains benefit the most.  To be honest, I feel Steven still comes across as more of an exposition-whore than anything else a lot of the time, but he’s at least a lot more emotive and determined.  The scene in the epilogue between him and Wallace is nice too; it gives you a sense of the burden of being a Champion, and how the position isn’t all fun and games.  Mostly what I like about Delta Episode specifically is just that Zinnia is such a cool character.  She’s the one person in the game who knows exactly what’s going on from the start of the plot to the end, and that makes her choices and priorities very curious and interesting – her willingness to orchestrate the awakening of Kyogre/Groudon by Team Aqua/Magma in order to attract Rayquaza’s attention, and damn the risks; her absolute refusal to let Steven and Professor Cozmo try their own plan to stop the meteor; her lack of concern for her own life; whatever the deal is between her and that Whismur, Aster.  She very much carries that chapter, I think.

What would I have done differently?  Hmm.  Well, two things jump out at me.  One is that Zinnia is such a pushover in the final battle at the Dragonhark Altar, which is supposed to be the game’s last big challenge for you as a player – or, rather, not that Zinnia herself is a pushover, but that Mega Rayquaza is beyond ridiculous.  If she somehow manages to defeat Rayquaza, Zinnia actually becomes very difficult, particularly her Mega Salamence, but given that Rayquaza is entirely capable of outrunning and one-shotting all of her Pokémon, that’s just not terribly likely.  I would have maybe reduced its level to 60, or introduced some extra mechanic specific to this fight that would give Zinnia a chance to stop it – like, maybe because it’s Mega Evolved for the first time in a thousand years and needs time to get used to its power, Rayquaza is under some kind of Regigigas-style Slow Start effect during this one battle?

The other thing that kind of needs work is Deoxys, who just comes completely out of nowhere.  Or… well, not out of nowhere, out of a meteor, which is where Deoxys is supposed to come from; the point is that, just after the big climactic cutscene where Rayquaza blows up the meteor, we have one more battle with this powerful legendary Pokémon who has nothing to do with anything.  Could we have had… like… some foreshadowing of this?  The meteor shower is apparently a regular thing that threatens the earth once every thousand years; does Deoxys have something to do with that?  Why?  And what does it have to do with Mega Evolution, which is apparently connected with the meteorites?  Is Deoxys somehow the ultimate source of that power?  What does any of this have to do with anything and why should we even care?  I mean, I’m happy that Deoxys is no longer event-exclusive, but you have to admit that it was more than a little ham-fisted.

Explain cubone. You know… the egg mechanics.

Hmm.  What have I said about Cubone before?  Let’s see… well, someone brought up the whole “Cubone are orphaned Kangaskhan” thing, and my feeling there is that I think there would be clearer evidence for it if Game Freak actually intended us to see them that way, but it’s a cool idea and makes sense.  That doesn’t help us much when we actually hatch Cubone though, because we have no dead parent if that happens.  I think Cubone born to living Marowak parents must have to go and find skulls and clubs from ancestral ‘graveyard’ sites, which they maintain because reverence for the dead is so important to their species.  It’s a kind of rite of passage for them.

If you want to explain how a baby Cubone just immediately pops out of the egg with a skull already on his adorable little head, with no spiritual quest or anything like that necessary, well, obviously the real reason is that creating special breeding mechanics just for Cubone was clearly a waste of time, and we sort of have to accept it as a necessary gameplay abstraction.  Alternatively, though… I don’t know if anyone’s even considered this, but just to go all Occam’s Razor on you, maybe the whole thing is just a story?  Like, is it possible that the skull thing is honestly just what Cubone look like, and people came up with this strange mythology around them to explain their menacing appearance and haunting wails, which then gets reported as fact in the Pokédex because the Pokédex is approximately 48% complete bull$#!t?  We never see them remove the skull helmets, so who’s to say those aren’t really part of their heads?  That makes the whole thing remarkably easy, albeit a little less exciting.

(ask part 1/2) You mentioned before that you haven’t played GuardianSigns, and I assume the same w/ PokémonShuffle, but I noticed a connection between the two that I’d like to know if anyone (either you or your readers) noticed. Basically, in GuardianSigns you face off against a team that makes use of an ancient civilizations tech to capture Pokémon through suppression rather than friendship etc. This tech takes the form of “Steelhead” armor, which appears in the background of the Galerie Rouge

I, uh… I’m afraid part 2/2 seems to have become lost in the celestial aether.

Am frazzled

Writing MA thesis.  Much work.  Must decrease commitment to blog for the next month.  Will continue to post things, but not according to any schedule.  Will possibly post rambling nonsense tract about the ancient Roman glass industry at some point.

Why is Corsola in the Water1/Water3 egg group, and not Mineral? Water1 is composed of amphibians and aquatic mammals, and water 3 is shellfish and cephalopods. What in the distortion world IS coral?

Well, as I understand it, coral is a sort of communal organism not altogether unlike a jellyfish, but sedentary and hard-bodied, so Water 3 makes a lot of sense.  Water 1, to be honest, is composed of all kinds of insane nonsense and I’m not sure there’s any point looking for a consistent rationale there.  To me it seems like the primary idea of that group is ‘Water-types that are also comfortable on land,’ and Corsola does fit that, although it does put us in strange places when we start making comparisons to real-world evolutionary biology.  If anything I’m actually a lot more puzzled about Clamperl and Horsea being in that group.