All right, all right; I get it already.

(This counts as my answer to ALL readers, past and future, asking about Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby)

So, I’m not that excited, I guess because Ruby and Sapphire just don’t have the same nostalgia value for me as they do for younger players, but I am very interested to see how they handle the story.  A somewhat expanded treatment is surely to be expected, and they’ll probably draw on material and dialogue from Emerald, but they can’t lean too heavily on Emerald either because the paired game structure dictates that Team Aqua have to take the lead in Alpha Sapphire and Team Magma in Omega Ruby.  Hopefully we can expect to see a slightly more nuanced portrayal of both teams’ motivations and plans (as well as of some other characters, like Steven – speaking of which, who will be the Champion, I wonder?).  

I’m also curious whether contests will return, and in what form – will they give contest statistics to all the 5th- and 6th-generation moves that never had any, or create something completely new that has more in common with, say, Black and White’s musicals?  Ruby and Sapphire were the generation that introduced the idea of interacting with Pokémon in that kind of way, so it seems only fitting that a return to those games will result in something fairly spectacular in that department.

In any case, seeing Hoenn on the 3DS is going to be a pretty huge deal – I can’t help but wonder whether some of the cities will look a little bland next to the varied and often eccentric settlements of Kalos, like Laverre with its fairytale aesthetic or Anistar with its… big-ass sundial whatsit… In fact, X and Y have just been such a huge step-up from their predecessors in such a wide variety of little ways that bringing Ruby and Sapphire up to speed with them seems to me like quite a daunting prospect!

Oh, and secret bases?  Hell yes.

Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby strike me as odd titles to go with.  I think probably the reference is to the logos of Team Aqua and Team Magma – Team Aqua’s would pass for a capital alpha as easily as a capital A (which looks exactly the same), while I guess Team Magma’s kinda looks like a capital Ω?  If you squint a bit?  Alpha and Omega placed in opposition like that tend to represent “the beginning and the end,” particularly in Christian iconography (come to think of it, Alpha and Omega would have made way better titles than X and Y for two games themed around life and death, but what’s done is done).  Maybe the titles hint that the games will play up the importance of Mount Pyre and the Cave of Origin?

Probably I won’t do a playthrough journal in the style of what I did for White 2 or X, because honestly that $#!t’s getting kinda old for me and it’d be a little weird with a game where I already knew at least the outline of the story.  I’ll probably think of something fun though.  We’ll see.

Eh.  Nothing really comes to mind.  Not a huge fan of crossovers as a rule.

Hey, anything that involves Percy Jackson in the discussion is fine by me.  Piper’s charmspeak is an interesting comparison to make; I think we can all agree that Attract obviously doesn’t compel sexual acts, even where the target’s species would allow it, but at the same time the imagery associated with the technique is clearly meant to make us think that romance or sexuality is involved somehow (same way as charmspeak, really, since it comes from the goddess of romantic love and sexual desire – although the way that series portrays Aphrodite, and that portrayal’s relationship to the original myths, is actually kind of complicated).  It has similar versatility too; same way as Attract can work between Pokémon who would never breed, charmspeak can apparently work on anything that even approaches sentience, up to and including a robot dragon head.  I think the important difference is that Piper can’t easily command someone not to attack her because charmspeak works best if she can phrase it in terms of something the target actually wants to do, or at least could potentially be neutral to.  Attract seems like it’s maybe a bit more forceful in that way, which is weird.  I think it may have a greater capacity to create desires rather than just manipulate existing ones.

What, you mean, like, in the real world?

Um… hmm… well, I suppose my immediate reaction would be to wonder where the hell it came from and whether there were any more.  Those things could wreck havoc on just about any real-world ecosystem if they were able to establish a breeding population.  There’s sort of a worrying tension between reporting it to the authorities so they can take action (which would probably involve quarantining the poor thing and possibly killing it) and keeping it secret (which would be hugely irresponsible and risk catastrophic ecological damage if there are any more that I don’t know about).  In any case, I certainly can’t let it wander about unsupervised.

Anyway…

Probably the first thing to do is figure out what it can and can’t eat (assuming it needs to eat, which for some Pokémon is not necessarily a given).  Most Pokémon probably have fairly high energy requirements, so I’d have to buy a lot more fruit or meat, depending on what kind of diet it naturally has.  Best to set aside a few days to experiment with that and figure out what’s palatable.  Also gotta figure out what it would do during the day while I’m busy; there’s a big park near my apartment that I walk past every day, and it could hang out there, under strict instructions to go nowhere else in the city, at least not at first.  Probably want to stay with it the first couple of days and make sure it knows to treat humans in this world with extreme caution.  Beyond that… hard to say.  It’s difficult to know what to do with someone who’s been dumped in a totally foreign world.  Whatever personal goals a Pokémon might have had are probably not going to be relevant or achievable here, which is unfortunate, to say the least.  Depending on the species it might be okay with just having food and a place to sleep, but some might need to find a way to contribute to the lives of others to be happy.