Really? Shit. Oh well.

 

So there's a Spiritomb on Sea Mauville. It has Momento. Mother fucker.

Edit: So what's the over/under on your character having been conceived on the night of the previous meteor shower? Since it was 11 years ago and you're supposed to be 10.

 

God dammit, I had to deal with a sassy nature when it could have been avoided? 3 perfect IVs though (speed, HP and Spa).

If you're just giving them away, I'll have one?

 

Sure, offer me a trade while I'm online. Will is my in game name, code 1177-6990-4170 in the event that you don't have it already.

 

I beat the Elite Four. Took a while to get there because I was on a Legendary hunting spree. Thoughts:

-Uxie and Raikou can go fuck themselves with their shitty catching times. I’m not staying up late for you!

-Heatran also deserves a middle finger for being hard to catch. The only time I had to reset my game was with him.

-One day, Cresselia, one day.

-Soar is really awesome. I like how the music changes depending on the time. The beginning and ending animations are kinda annoying and Fly is faster, but Soar is a good experience that I like doing sometimes.

-I got a Secret Base in the Secret Caves, second one to the right. It has big space and just the right placing for my bed. I can also Soar to it, thank god.

-I had such a hard time building my team. I still don’t have a proper sixth Pokemon which pisses me off considering I’m already using a Legendary.

-New Mauville was awful. So damn small. Sea Mauville was perfect, thank you game. However, all those damn Big Nuggets… I make money well enough on my own! I don’t want handouts.

-Victory Road was… something. I had my music off so that might’ve lessened the experience. Wally was incredibly easy to beat, sorry kid.

-The style of the Pokemon League and Elite Four buildings reminded me more of Johto than anything else with that traditional Japanese look. I’m not sure if it’s suits Hoenn.

-The only Elite Four member I remembered was Glacia, so I was going into this blind. Sydney looks dumb in his overworld sprite, but that battle sprite makes up for it. Alright, Sydney, I’ll accept you. No trouble with him.

-Phoebe was a bit boring. How many ghost Elite Four members do we have? Three, four? No trouble with her either.

-Glacia was beautiful, but come on, two Glalie and Froslass? Laaaaame, she better have better Pokemon on the rematch.

-Drake, you’re like seventy, put on a damn shirt. I don’t have a proper ice-type but my Sharpedo’s Ice Fang wrecked him pretty good.

-I like how when I went into the Champion’s room, the game tried to do a slow reveal shot like in X/Y, but don’t think I didn’t see your shitty hair, Steven. Steven was a badass through. I was doing pretty good, but his Cradily destroyed half my team while they were only at half health. That Metagross was a big scary, but my Magmar did a huge chunk with Flamethrower before being Giga Impacted into the Stratosphere. Metagross got burned, like it deserved, and my Latias finished it off.

-The credits were credits, I guess. I wasn’t into that flashback stuff, it only reminded me how I didn’t enjoy the game. I one-shot each of Brenden’s Pokemon, and it’s a tad strange the game is pushing romantic undertones when the characters are ten-years-old.

-Post-credits scene was a thing. Norman, stop being an asshole and go to Mossdeep with your wife. You bought those tickets, so it’s expected you’d get that day off at the gym. I’ll admit though, that Delta music was pretty ominous.

Elite Four Team
Pyro the Magmar, level 58. Flamethrower / Feint Attack / Psychic / Confuse Ray.
Maryn the Sharpedo, level 52. Waterfall / Crunch / Ice Fang / Slash.
Pyrope the Latias, level 53. Psychic / Dragon Breath / Surf / Recover.
Samson the Raichu, level 52. Thunderbolt / Grass Knot / Nuzzle / Flash.
Argent the Aggron, level 50. Earthquake / Iron Tail / Double-Edge / Dragon Claw.

I won't finalize what I think of the game until I do Episode Delta because people seem to either love or hate it. I'm pretty curious on how it'll go.

 

If you had the music off for Wally's battle too you missed some of the most baller new music of the game, btw.

 

I like how anime is now canon with the games. Thanks Steven. Since if you have the Shiny Beldum evolutions with you at a certain point he mentions this.

 

Well, more than just that is made canon, in the delta episode every pokemon game ever is made canon in a nasuverse-esk twist...

 

I know his design seems contrary, but Sceptile is actually a Special Attacker. Look up his stats, his base Sp. Atk is 105 (145 Mega) and his Atk. is only 85 (110 mega). His movepool is shit so the best thing you can run on him is:

Timid Nature
- Giga Drain
- Dragon Pulse
- Focus Blast
- HP Fire

 

Lol, no shit. Doesn't contradict the fact that in campaign, leaf blade is perfectly adequate, and certainly better than mega drain.

 

Go Energy Ball. It got buffed to 90 BP, so it's on par with Flamethrower, Thunderbolt and stuff.

 

The only reason you would put Energy Ball of Sceptile, in competitive, is if you wanted to run Hyper Offensive Sceptile and that's a horrible decision unless you have huge amounts of team support.

 

Trust me, I know. I ran (or, well, a site ran) the math a while back - given equal IV/EV/opponent defence Mega Drain just doesn't beat Leaf Blade on power before taking crit into consideration, except in one case: Mega-Evolved Modest Sceptile. Pledge and Blade are closer matches (Pledge slightly wins with neutral nature pre Mega, hands-down wins post Mega) but if you didn't find Pledge (or if you have a -SpA Sceptile like yours truly), Blade works fine.

Isn't Energy Ball a postgame TM anyway? Either that or it's hidden somewhere I didn't explore.

 

Alright, finished Episode Delta.

-Mega Rayquaza looked boss until the cut scene after I caught it zoomed out and I saw it was literally in the shape of a Delta. Come on, game, why is Rayquaza’s ribbons attached to its tail?

-The cut scenes themselves had good animation, but weren’t that impressive.

-I don’t have much of an opinion of Omega/Alpha, X/Y, and presumably every generation coming up being in an alternate universe to the rest of the games. At least when the next games are remade, there’s an excuse on why things have changed.

-Okay, I’m a bit confused about Zinnia, more specifically, her and her Whismur, Aster. She calls Aster her daughter once, and Aster’s Pokemon speak comes out as “Mum” sometimes. Zinnia’s dialogue gave me the impression that maybe she had an actual daughter that died and her Whismur is a replacement. The only problem with that is Zinnia’s Overworld sprite is my size, implying that she’s ten, so I’m not sure what’s up with her. May just be a cute relationship with no subtext.

-Yesss, I’ve always wanted a Deoxys, so when it appeared I was happy. Then I looked at my leading Rayquaza and realized, “Oh no, I’m going to accidently murder this poor creature.” Took some careful switching and Revives until I could get it paralyzed, and I’d like the punch the guy who had the bright idea to give Deoxys Recover. I threw ball after ball, almost killed it a few times, then Cosmic Power started kicking in, and my hope dwindled with every turn. I ended up using my Master Ball. I think Deoxys would just appear somewhere else if I killed it, but fuck that.

-I named my Deoxys Cosmo. :3

-I haven’t seen Hyper Beam in-game for such a long time. Ah, beautiful gen one sound effects~

-Thanks for being useless the entire episode, Brendan.


Now that I got that out of the way, I feel okay with reviewing the game now.

Good things about Alpha Sapphire:

-The Dexnav feature was pretty cool, but I basically stopped using it after the third gym. With Game Freak’s policy of not keeping cool new features across games, AS has this going for it, at least.

-Soar is beautiful. I like how Game Freak was very generous with the Legendaries, and I enjoyed having a Latias with me the entire game.

-Sky Pillar was cool. I actually went to get the Mach Bike before I went there, only to find I wasted my trip. Oh well.

-Yeah, that’s it.


Bad things about Alpha Sapphire:

-You think Game Freak could be more subtle about those fade-to-black location changers. They were in my face and felt lazy. Sky Pillar had no scene changers as I went up each floor, which I expected. It's weird.

-It doesn’t feel like a lot of effort was put into updating the game. Episode Delta was cool and all, but basically everything from Emerald was scrapped when HG/SS included Crystal’s whole subplot. Hoenn seems to be the least-liked region of the games, and it’s almost if Game Freak agreed with that? I loved Emerald, and maybe it’s just the nostalgia filter that’s telling me that, but damn.

-Double-battles were severely lacking, and the major character trainers had awful Pokemon distribution. Elite Four gets rematches, so I’ll ignore them, but if I’m not mistaken, gym leaders can’t be battled again? If so, a lot of them were fucked over hard. Matt, while not a gym leader, had one Pokemon for an entire game, a Sharpedo with paper-thin defenses.

-On that note, the Pokemon in the routes before the eighth gym was also sorely lacking. Coming off of X/Y, it boggles my mind how few Pokemon were around. Hoenn has always appealed to me for its tropical and diverse environments and the Pokemon didn’t reflect that. I’d be fine with it if there was a New Game+ that gave you the National Dex right off the bat and didn’t change anything else, but there isn’t and that’s sad.


The best thing about Alpha Sapphire is that I can transfer all my Pokemon from X over so I can restart X again. I can’t see any reason to play through AS a second time. I didn’t enjoy it and I regret buying it.

5/10.

 

Yeah, but you're never going to be running Mega Drain. The only grass type offensive move you would put on Sceptile is Giga Drain, which is nearly twice as strong as Mega Drain. Although, if you want Sceptile to learn Giga Drain, you need to keep it as a Treecko till Lv. 21 or something.

But yea, if you got -SpA Sceptile, then the best thing to do would be to run Leaf Blade because of fast stab. And yeah, I'm pretty sure Energy Ball is a postgame TM.

 

Which isn't exactly a consideration you'd make in a main game runthrough, which is where I'm getting from.

 

Has anyone else had trouble getting Buzznav updates? =/

Supposedly you're supposed to be able to update every 8 hours, getting new mirrage islands and secret bases, but mine seems to be far less often than that. Once a day, if I'm lucky, a couple if I'm not.

 

Based on my understanding, mirage islands and secret bases are updated based on you being online, not time-frames. One island will change every 24 hours, your "local" island (where you can find an item with the item finder), but the others are based on passing people on the street, or interacting with the/passing them online. You do have to log on, and then do things with people (even if it's just giving O powers) though, I think.

I could be wrong though, it's just how mine tend to change.

 

Yeah, when I said Buzznav Updates I meant the street-passing with passerbys in the PSS.

 

So I finished this Mid-Jan, it was oddly the first Pokemon Game where I felt like I had to keep coming back to finish it. And while I loved it, Pokemon X and Y unfortunately blows it out of the water for me.

Normally I'll finish the game storyline within 3 days constantly playing for 8-10 hours, this time it just didn't happen. The Rayquaza storyline was interesting and kept me entertained, but hunting the legendaries is something I can't really be bothered to do. Which on a side-note, really makes me wish the Battle Frontier was here, that was almost a game within itself on Emerald.