Brauvo

This is the coolest blog post of all time!

Unrelated to the discourse on who Madame X is, I must say: Chapters 14 and 15 do a great deal of dispelling the initial ideas we had in the game about Crescent essentially being all powerful. When you run into her early game, she seems unbelievably OP, like not within the confines of a pokemon game levels of OP. Hearing that she essentially used one of the Interceptor's full revives after losing to Clear, and seeing that she was motivated to kind of create us by her feelings for her classmates using the same type of Garufian magic we've grown accustomed to? That makes her feel kind of accessible. Especially now that some protagonist characters are magical, and we know who we are as the Interceptor. Crescent used to seem like this omnipotent, time traveling magician. I guess sane Karen and Melia's siblings are probably as powerful, though.

Nice catch, I forgot all about this. One of many reasons to replay the game from the beginning, for those who just played new content.

I am on many topics about boss fights spreading the gospel of pyukumuku. It literally helps with so many gyms and bosses, especially now that you can toxic shields! Purify + recover + toxic with loads of defense and an item to help with whatever the boss at hand does well. A lot of time, pyukumuku isn't dense enough to take hits from the overpowered bosses we fight, but it's so nice when it can.

He's certainly intimidating, but I don't think he's the worst solely because you can match his advantages with your own hyper offense team. Even if not using flyers, having an elemental seed (or w/e seed he's using if that's not the right one) gives you the tailwind boost, too. He doesn't set up another tailwind, so if you have a way to do it or a second seed, you can have the speed advantage all battle. Not taking hits from his glass cannons makes him doable even for a team that isn't specifically designed to beat him. The sick strategy you cooked up looks like it'd demolish him for anyone who copies, especially with a seed on boltund. I myself used magnezone there for about the same job and swoobat for the other half of the work.

Looks like I seriously underestimated the power of brining a wonder room user!

You'll need every type, yes, but saying it's dumb to pick a best/fav is silly. I voted with the majority: speed natures. There are so many instances where having maximum speed helps you avoid a lot of trouble. You can just obliterate a pokemon that covers the team you have on hand pretty well if you can make sure you're faster than it with a hard hitting pokemon. I love doing that with Cinderace or Staraptor.

This is the first gym that I didn't win "the right way" to me. I needed a bit of luck here and there, and I try to not do things that require luck or revives. I used pyukumuku with toxic on the two ??? type pokemon she used. That, hilariously, takes away their immunity to poison. Of course, Aggron hits like a meteor and pyukumuku can't toxic + take another hit to recover. Therefore, I needed to use ultra pots to stay alive there. The other ??? type pokemon, Brozong, couldn't beat Pyukumuku head to head, so that was fine. I used an adamant staraptor to break her *one* pokemon with low defense. I believe that was Duraludon? It spent most of the match switching out from staraptor, so I pretty much used staraptor to hit everything that'd switch in pretty hard. My pyukumuku got to recover against metagross for some reason, who wanted to use cosmic power? It chose to set up, letting pyuk get its health high enough to work it over with Innards Out. That left it low enough to pick off. Corviknight, as initmidating as it is, is still a flying type. So, I used my magnezone. Since Corviknight switched in to a couple of staraptor hits, magnezone could put it away with one hit when they were finally against each other. Bastiodon was ridiculous. I couldn't really beat Bastiodon without luck, because all of my resources were devoted to beating the Aggron, Metagross, Corviknight trio. Legit took nearly the whole team for that effort. I ended up reviving Pyukumuku and re-using Innards Out to get it low enough. It made me reset so many times because there was no way to harm it hard enough with my remaining pokemon by the time I saw it. This pokemon does not need its crest on a glitch field with wonder room activated! So, maybe a pyukumuku for you? If you follow what I post on other topics, I'm pretty much telling everyone to get a pyukumuku!

It's available only after badge 12 now. A dramatic move, right?

Yikes, kinda feels like this quest has to be unaccomplishable if you do certain events before completing it. It reminds me of how you can (could?) access the secret area in Venam's gym and get greeted by Venam there even if she's not on the island (or, is stone).

It's amazing that this game has three game modes where the AI performs differently and every major battle has different teams entirely. That's so much more than a main story game gives us. I played 340 hours on a new playthrough of V13 (though probably 40-80 were just me sitting at the start menu as I looked something up on the pokedex lol), loving every minute. I get that rejuvenation's story is so interesting that some people who aren't into difficult pokemon games might want to play too. I think the dev team does plenty to accommodate, though. I guess levels could be lower, or bosses could all use 4 pokemon? I'm watching some people's casual playthrough to think more on this point and it appears that casual gets tough near the end of the game. I guess with several years between the initial conception of casual mode and the release of v13, maybe making a solid casual experience is tough. I feel that it's kinda lame to make a status about quitting the game over difficulty (as opposed to just deleting it and going on about life), but the conversations had about it could be valuable to the dev team, I suppose.

My way of dealing with Flora was to change the field. I use my trusty Pyukumuku with Purify for that. Of course, the field then changes to Forest if you do that, and that's still to her advantage, but it changes how seeds work and makes steel more useful. Cuts down on a lot of the nonsense she does. If you had a weather setter like A-Ninetales, you could stop the super speed Ludicolo. It's only a problem because of the rain. A steel type resists its moves normally, but not on this field. I preferred using my Magnezone, which required me to purify the field. Unfortunately if you don't have a way to purify the field or deal with the rain, I'm not sure you have a lot of options since you're trapped here. I can only recommend not using fire types, as the field and weather combo makes them extreme liabilities. Other than Cinderace and its ability to not be a fire type, of course. Flying types are useful here if you don't change the field. I think the best way to go if you don't have the aformentioned strategies available to you is to use the field to your advantage. The nearby pokemon almost all can do that. Offensive teams are better to use IMO. Defensive things just lets her get ready to abuse you.

You can get a Luck Incense, the equivalent of an amulet coin, in Grand Dream City from the same person who sells the Nightmare Medallion. There's no earlier one AFAIK.

It seems that between V12 and V13, her personality was taken back a bit so that her growth could be more dramatic. I appreciate it. It's only a little jarring if you don't replay the previous chapters.

I finally finished my replay, 340 total hours! V13 did some absolutely amazing stuff with changes to early chapters, and the story resolutions we got in the newest content were A1. I can now finally read some spoilery things here and push out some opinions about some characters and their fates. I want to ask what others think of Madame X. There are so many mysteries around her.