Quickslip

I'm actually glad that he's not wanting to do a mono-grass run. A hardcore of that is what I want to start in a few days. Shelly, please be gentle. I'm actually really interested in seeing a hardcore Nuzlocke though. And seeing what rules he'd choose to keep/abandon. I thought about it and decided I didn't even want to try unless I modified the rules somewhat or overleveled alot for some battles. It actually seems kinda terrifying...

Don't worry Chikorita, I still love you. Good luck on the run.

I figure that you have to have some sort of plan for the ending, but how much of this plot was the same from the start? Did it end up taking any surprising directions from the viewpoint of what it started out as? Can you share some of the more interesting what-might-have-beens(assuming they exist) and/or why they weren't? Edit: Oh, that's quite a bit like HakuTaku's. Hmm. If this game had been a book, who would you have made the main character(s) whose thoughts and/or actions we would follow? Please ignore this if its too...anything. I feel like it may be inappropriate to ask, but can't decide. >_>

Fixed the two above mistakes, thanks you two. Seems reasonable enough, I mean, how many could there possi-holy crap." OK, I had no idea this was that popular of a lets play. xD I've added ~half of the ones I've found to the list, because that is alot of videos. I'll add the other half over the next day or two. Then, I think I'll section the items by what Reborn Version the starting video uses, as that list looks like it'll be a giant eye-sore otherwise.

I'm weird and like to look at what's been done/how it was done, so I threw this together. May it help any who want a list for some reason. These are sorted by type of playthrough then date of the thread's first post. The more recent the thread, the higher on the list it went. If the playthrough is still going, that's mentioned at the end of its listing. If it stalled at a certain point without further posts, the last major battle is listed instead. If the playthrough was completed, there is nothing where either of the above would have been mentioned. If a thread didn't make it to at least the Julia fight, I didn't list it. If it had fewer than 2 pages of posts, I likely missed it. In addition, I probably just plain missed others in general. I'll try to find those later when I update this, but feel free to point any out or any mistakes in the list itself. Reborn Playthroughs Reborn: Hardcore Reborn on Youtube

Eh. To be fair, I didn't put in Panpour or Loudred, but they were basically only in the party because there was nothing else that seemed cool at the time. Also, I forgot about Pyroar entirely. Must rectify. But all in all, yeah. Can't really take all that much credit at being good though; the mod seems pretty accommodating to whatever style anyone may prefer if they're willing to use items.

I'm not sure it's quite fair to call the difficulty of a memory testing game not real difficulty. Memory, quick recall, and keyboard coordination are skills you can train just as much as reflexes and tactics. That said, I would have say Super Hexagon was the hardest game I actually enjoyed. I think the Touhou game's I've played are harder, but I don't really want to put that much effort into memorizing allllll those levels and patterns. xD Not quite as enjoyable to me; I'm not that good and its just a game.

I'll go ahead and second the One Way Heroics thing. Awesome game. Also, LostMagic is a ridiculously good DS game if you're into its genre. Its basically a real time strategy game with a magic system that requires you to draw one to three glyphs and activates different spells depending on which glyphs you draw and what order you draw them in. The game doesn't stop while you do this though, and if you draw it a glyph incorrectly, the spell fails. Add to this that there are a pretty fair number of units all which interact with the spells in slightly different ways and you have a good idea of this game.

In hindsight, I probably should have just fought Ciel again. It was a pretty silly way to end the run the way it is now that I look at it again. The only things that would have changed would have been that Mega would set Reflect so Stone Edge wouldn't be able to one-shot Heliolisk and I would have just beat Gyarados with Pride without involving Heliolisk though. There was no chance Noivern could one-shot Aurorus with a neutrally effective attack it doesn't have STAB on or even a not-very-effective 210 power attack, so the misses didn't feel important at the time. First of all, thanks to Amethyst's group, Commander, and Solarance, for the awesome game. It certainly made my day for a couple months and hopefully more to come. I think I'll stop for a couple of weeks or so, then do another hardcore run of some sort. In this run I kept a good portion of my team because it seemed like I should so the next could be different maybe. Imma take a look at all these other runs and see what's been done. A monotype seems like it might be interesting too, but I don't want to do one that's already been done recently. Or maybe something else entirely? Is there an index of other people's runs somewhere? If there isn't, I'm probably just going to make and post one to make my life easier. In any case, suggestions on run types you'd like to see are welcome. Style-wise, I think I'm going to look at a more minimalist way of posting that still looks interesting. At some point, I realized that I didn't actually like the way I was posting these for a number of reasons, but I kept it this way since it started out that way. Maybe I'll adopt and modify one from another of these threads somewhere. Can't think of anything else to say at the moment, so on to the hall: Pyroar .

Oh. Well, this section turned out to be much shorter than I thought it would be. So, we go to challenge Ciel and see what we have to do to find a ticket...but Ciel just gives us one, since no one can retrieve Terra and they're short on acts at the moment. Well then. Buuuuut. After that Sadly, that's the end of the game so far(unless there's some random post-game stuff somewhere? have to look up things now). I'll post closing thoughts, pokemon hall of fame, and any other random thing that comes to mind tomorrow or the day after. If there's anything from the run you'd like to question me about or see that I didn't post now's your chance to say it; I have ~28 gigs of pics and the majority of my saves(2317 of them >_>), so I can probably dig up the picture or remember my thoughts if you like. Thanks for reading guys/gals/others!

Didn't actually -do- very much here, but there were enough battles to make it seem ok. Here we go With the power of waterfall in our hands, we explore the mountain caves a bit more till we get bored, then head down to save Titania. She seems weakened from the fall/thirst/starvation, but still game to beat her way out of this place. She also seems to favor Saphira's way of dealing with Meteor. Even with Titania crippled by injury and only having Aegislash with her, we proceed to steamroll our way through the puzzles. Taka seems to be helping under the guise of trying to slow us down, and it quickly gets on Titania's nerves. Taka seems unwilling to leave, and so just leaves us to conquer the puzzles with his help. Eventually, we find a room that Titania and I cannot both pass, so Titania stays behind and we stop the PULSE Swalot by ourselves. It was quite hard until I realized that Blizzard froze the evil water, and then it was easy. We then proceed to wander around the plant for 2 days, not realizing that we can just surf on the now purified water. I am stupid sometimes. Beyond the trap we free Titania from is Taka. He tosses us Amaria's bracelet and lets us go with the request that we defeat him in a battle to make the whole thing look reasonable to his boss. Titania, disgusted that Taka won't just leave, refuses. We, since we're doing a run-like thing, accept. Taka thanks us and runs off. We start to do likewise, but Shade appears and stops us along the way, telling us that only 2 of the 4 scenes we saw way back in his factory are actually true. Weird. Titania's dissappointed that we helped Taka, but doesn't do anything about it. We both head up the waterfall, she on Amaria's Lapras Deliverance, and head back to the house. On the way, we get stopped by Florina and Julia. They explain that they saw us climbing up the waterfall and got curius to what was going on. Also, Ame wants us to have the machine for Fly, so they hand us that too. (!!!) Now we just need to defeat Ciel to use the thing. We finish making our way to the house, but find Meteor on the roof. They want the Sapphire Braclet, and they want it enough to challenge us to 3 double battles in a row. Yikes. We fetch Arcanine and train her a bit on the re-fightable clown for this. We'll skip the first fight, as its just against a pair of Meteor Aces with Florina as our ally. Fern and Florina talk a bit. Fern's words are troubling to her, so Sirius has Serviper attack while she's distracted. Julia steps up to take her place in our next Double Battle. Titaniam getting bored sitting on standby incase ridiculous things happen, gets bored and joins up with the rest of us. Totally out-powered now, Meteor decides to try to burn the house down. Well. That wouldn't actually work since I'm standing right there with an Aurorus anyway, but Titania opens(breaks) the window leading the Water Gym and blasts them out. Amaria wakes up from all the racket and apparently has Amnesia. Titania quickly leaves before she breaks something at this developement, and Amaria goes back to bed talking about a headache. Florina heads up to Calcenon to see if she can do anything there, Titania takes the Bracelet and heads out somewhere, probably her Gym in the desert, where Meteor will have a hard time getting them, and Julia stays to watch over Amaria. She suggests we go beat Ciel so we can get Fly working and be infinitely more mobile. Given that alot of these were Double battles, I would have thought this part would be annoying. However, the fact that I was basically fighting two separate people who just happened to be fighting together, the fight wasn't nearly as grueling as it could have been. True, there were some comboes the enemies could pull, but it didn't seem as stacked as most Double battles. Also, I giggled a bit too much when Florina pulled out a Mega Steelix. Surprisingly fun overall. The only bad part was when I got lost, and that was really, really just my fault. >_> Next section in 4 days probably.

With our fancy new Dive badge, we head back into the mountains, because we're really just leaving Aya behind for now. Wouldn't have called that. We meet a scary PULSE Avalugg, and learn that the field effects page is wrong; Heat Wave actually terminates the field, it doesn't make it a Water Surface field. Still, Aurorus is ridiculously powerful on this field and after some feather dances, is really unconcerned about the PULSE's damage output. After the fight, the glacier melts quickly and Shelly approaches. She wonders about why the machine is here, but we set it aside, since we have no real idea what's going on. People are starving and stuff. She and I make it to the city... Aster gets depressed when we win again, but hands over the machine. He seems to be thinking over the lengths Meteor is using to achieve its goals, but doesn't seem to think he's strong enough to make a difference. Or maybe he'll just do something else on the sidelines who knows. Anyway, our Pokemon are healed and we head the rest of the way up the Mountain. There, Shelly has already fought and lost to Blake while we had our battle downstairs, so now its our turn. Even after we win, Blake still refuses to part with the ring. As his helicopter is here as well, he looks like he might get away, but Hether and Cal show up just in time to take the ring away. Thwarted, Blake continues his escape, but his parting words about the sleeping Agate city are troubling. So yeah, Terra be bad. Cal flies us off the mountain(we really, -really- need to get Fly at some point >_>) and we head back to the circus to confront Terra...except, when we do, she says "well duh" and jumps into the computer, Megaman style. We chase after her as Player 2 and find outselves in Pokemon Red/Blue-land on Victory Road. We traverse this place while making it through the Terra challenges... until we come across a random stranger... Next was a Mega Mewtwo Y, which could one-shot my entire team with Psystrike or Ice Beam. This was solved by giving Mega a super-effective-Ice redicing berry to allow him to set a Light Screen after Mewtwo Ice Beams it...which ultimately didn't matter, since Mewtwo decided to use Thunder or Thunderbolt on Heliolisk which wouldn't have KO'd it anyway. We get the Thunder Wave off and the fight is easy from there. And beyond that...there was Terra. Mega Terra, even. Gravity Badge is get! Its interesting. I don't trust my only thought on the doubles battle, which was that is was weird how unopposed Aurorus felt was outside of Vanilluxe's Metal Shot, but strategically I'm horrible at doubles xD. In the last two fights Aurorus was really, really good so even though I didn't have any trouble, I don't feel like that's saying much. Its not like the teams didn't have answers; Ninetails and Alakazam would beat Aurorus and Snorlax sometimes does, depending on when it uses Amnesia and how often Ancent Power crits due to the speed thing. Excadrill and Nidoking both beat Aurorus and Mega Garchomp would beat it if I didn't give Aurorus the ground-super-effective reducing berry. Eh. Next section in 4 days probably.

Crouching hidden Eevee. Sadness. Also, this update was totally not because I felt slightly guilty for taking so long on the other one. Not even a little bit. Still short though. Our battle done, the leaders and I decide that our next stop should be Calcenon City, which we had already decided earlier, but now we know there is also a PULSE machine up there to blow up. We head down to collect the Surf machine. Amaria's out for a walk, so Titania goes to collect it for us. While she's gone, for some unkown reason, we decide that the -best- thing we could do is to go read the diary that she was writing in.(I mean seriously...what. -.-) She gets understandably furious at us and tells us not to tell Amy what we read...who walks in at that moment and gets a look at what's inside. Amy runs away in tears and Titania runs after her. We leave to follow and meat our good friend Absol along the way. We explore the city a bit, trying to see who's where. We find Anne and the others with Cain in a house here. We explain the situation with the iceberg and Anne and Noel suggest getting Dive to go underneath it. Shelly really wants to go too, since Heather is apparently there as well. We have to beat Charlotte first to get the machine to work though. Good thing her gym is here. Going further, we find Hardy and Saphira trying to find some way to get through the Mr. Mime wall blocking off Meteor. Fern comes down to taunt everyone as is his way, but he's decided to side with Meteor besides. Not making any friends at all. We go to talk to Charlotte and find her trying to talk to Laura. Laura's been fired from the Elite 4 and is incredibly frusterated with herself. As we enter, she runs off and Charlotte goes after her. We search everywhere for them, even going back to the Circus(I need the machine for Dive anyway) and eventually just talk with Saphira again. While we do so, Sirius comes down and offers Aya's life for the Ruby Ring. Hardy gets angry at Saphira when she says we shouldn't do it, as its far too important. Charlotte approaches during all of this and takes the ring when we refuse to give it up.(Not sure what I would -actually- do if thrust in that situation, but really. Lets just give the bad guys the keys to God that also happen to be able to control time somehow. >_>) Sirius leaves with Aya and says he'll send someone down to trade with her. We go after Charlotte, and she hands the ring back to us. She commends the choice to not give it up, but wanted to give Meteor a show that will slow them down and confuse them. She heads back to her gym so that we can battle for the Dive enabling badge, and we make our way up to her through her gym trainers and challenge her. Charlotte is certainly different. Almost everything on her team is some sort of speedy powerhouse, assuming they only use their really, really strong attacks. Double Flash Fire was awesome here, though I suspect a decently powerful Rock type would have worked as well, since Solarbeam isn't that scary when the field is aflame. Seems fine mostly. That lead is scary strong and scary fast, but I'd assume people have ways of dealing with it at this point. Next section in 4 days probably. .

I actually hoped Pride would be able to make it all the way, but I wasn't too sure on Silk. Ok, this is a really short section. I blame doing all of the honey forest around Route 1 last time. After fiddling with the Crustle puzzle a bit, I just was not willing to do it for the longest time...it just seemed so tedious. It wasn't even hard. But I do hope that there isn't another lengthy puzzle immediately after these fights. >_> After leaving Luna's, we head out in search of Cain. We find him really quick and he gives the the final-portal-there's-no-coming-back-from speech. Sooooo, we go get our affairs in order... Everything I can think of done, we head into Agate and find the whole town asleep. We quickly find Aya and Hardy knocked out in the middle of the town. Cain starts falling asleep as well when a girl with a giant hammer arrives and almost smashes him. She introduces herself as Terra then knocks Aya and Hardy away...somewhere. With her giant hammer. So I guess they're dead. Terra takes us down to the Circus below and explains that the city is dangerous and puts people to sleep somehow. She says that Aya and Hardy should be around here somehere, then chacha's away. So we head around the circus, fight all the scary strong clown pokemon and give in to all the thiny child's demands, netting another department store sticker. Afterward, the circusmaster tells us that they found Aya and that Samson will take us to her. We enter the big tent and meat Ciel and Aya again. Aya is just waking up and is worried about Hardy, who was apparently thrown far further than her. And may like him, but w/e. We pick up a Powder Vial and head out...and why can we only take 1? We make it through the crustle puzzle and make it to Amy and Titania's house. Titania seems somewhat apathetic towards the whole Metoer situation, but perhaps its just concern for Amy, who has some broken ribs right now. We confirm that Hardy's fine and get him to go to the circus. Titania gives us a pass to fight one of the circus gym leaders and offers us the Surf machine if we can win. We get back to the circus, have an interesting series of conversations with Terra involved, and challenge Samson. Hawlucha actually outspeeds my entire team, so I was actually banking on having to use the super-effective-reducing berries just to set Reflect and let Heliolisk Thunderbolt it, but Pride turned out to be tankier than I thought and Samson decided to hard switch it in, so that was nice. Fight feels fine regardless. Not sure if I hate or love Terra yet. >_> pleasenolongpuzzlesinthenextsection...

Backstory: So, after 4999 screenshots, the game actually stops saving them and I didn't notice until waaaay late. So, for this section, I don't actually have all that many of them. Sorry about that. We will return to your regularly scheduled picture overload on the next post, unless you all just like this format better. As the fight ends, the lights go out for nor apparent reason. We all decide to leave, when Elias decides to finish double-crossing us. He tries to capture with us while our pokemon are still mostly KO'd from Radomus, but Cain delays him long enough for us to escape. He charges us to find and rescue Luna, who was apparently captured as well. Radomus meets us outside and tells us that they probably took Luna to 7th street, and that for undisclosed reasons, he cannot come with us. Shady. Then...lots of stuff happened without any important battles coming in between. I picked up a Ponyta and Amaura and got another department store sticker, but other than that we mostly had alot of story: After that, we head after Luna with her key. We bump into Bennett multiple times around the valley, eventually culminating in a battle, since Bennett is unable to turn the stalker creepiness down. Quite possible something Elias did to him maybe? Bennett walks away muttering about how stupid everything is, vowing to make us all see one day and making Luna regret turning away from his love. We move on and lock the rocks behind us. Luna greets us and accepts our challenge. Not sure how I feel about how I'm winning some of these battles. On the one hand, it's partially just using the ability that Silk has. On the other, spamming items is starting to feel like cheating, even if I have tons and really aught to use them. >_> Hmm. In any case, Luna felt fine. Not controller-breaking hard, but not easy either. Did not know about that trainer in the Grand Hall, but that will certainly make leveling Rapidash and Amaura the rest of the way easier. Next section in 4 days probably.

We don't have snow yet and no one around has put up many lights. The hype is not yet meant to be. How many cats is too many cats to have?

So alot of tiny little problems happened irl. They are still around, but I think I have a handle on it all now. That said though, these probably won't be put up as fast as before. Sorry for not saying anything before now. :/ After the battle, Noel expresses concerns about Saphira, so we set out to look for her...and then the mountain blew up. Fun. So we head back into the Steelix den and find alot of items, but no Saphira. Searching the main cave system more thoroughly leads us down another path where we see Saphira breaking open bits of the mountain to escape. She hands us the ring and pendant Meteor is after, tells us to keep them safe, then goes to move the kids away from the house. We head out of the mountain into a big huge forest. There, we find Fern bragging again and challenging us to another battle. Afterward, we explore the forest. Actually, I kinda hate this place, since the Taruos only respawn when you enter certain places and everything looks the same to me unless I pay alot of attention. >_> We find a bunch of things like an Itemfinder, the creator of this region's PC Boxes, and some Oddishweed before finally making it to the gym. There we find the Luna person that Bennett was asking about, who has made herself at home at this gym now. Also, the gossip gardevoir is actually a gardevoir, so yeah. xD The leader greats us, but Cain is fast behind and challenges us to see who will challenge the leader first. After the fight, we look around and realize Gardevoir is gone. A ransom note demands Luna in exchange for Gardevoir. Radomus is entirely unwilling to do that, but sees no need to follow after the kidnapper either. Cain is not willing to let that stand, nad heads off without him, so Radomus and I follow. Falling down a few holes near the front of the Grand Stairway leads us down to a new area with lots of Unown floating about. We meet with a white-haired person and Gardevoir, who now says that she actually hates Radomus. It takes the Ameythst Pendant somehow, and heads off into the Aerie. Using the power of the Ruby Ring, we climb the Aerie after it and confront Gardevoir and El. As everyone seems confused about whose words they should be trusting, we just side with Radomus, since we already know El is quite likely not trustworthy at all. When put to the question, Radomus points out that the Gardevoir everyone's talking to isn't actually the real one. El lets the ditto that was impersonating Gardevoir reveal itself and then goes on a rant about Arceus being entombed down here. Its all very roll-eye-y until he has ditto transfrom and it actually turns into an Arceus. While we deal with the ditto, Radomus calls out to the real Gardevoir who immediately teleports next to him in grandiose fashion. They put El to sleep with Hypnosis, and then we all leave the underground. When we reach the surface, Adrienn(the white haired person) is confused, since everything looks different. Further, the Grand Gates have opened for the first time in forever. Adrienn heads to the broken down gym in Coral Ward and everyone decides that Xe must have been stuck in some sort of temporal stasis that was broken due to the power of the Ruby Ring and Amethyst Pendant. Adrienn vows to make the city a better place and heads off. We head back to the gym, and meet a new butler named Elias. Luna seems put off by his appearance and wanders off. We head through the puzzles and ultimately challenge Radomus. The greeter dude from the normal pokemon games tells us that there are actually two battles for him, so we go ahead and do both. Singles Infinitely harder Doubles I was so not prepared for the Radomus Doubles fight. xD I'm not entirely sure if my pokemon were at the normal level for that fight, or if I just missed an entire event somewhere. I feel like the level gap isn't as big a deal in singles as it is in double battles and that Radomus's pokemon shouldn't be as high as they are in the doubles battle to compensate, but I could be wrong about that. It does bear mentioning again that my team is just pretty bad at doubles in general, and that half the power of Silk is in Pickup-item-advantage anyway. I still have more Max Revives. >_> Next section probably in 4 days or so.

After the battle the Mart disappears again and Bennett runs off with El to see the Elite 4 or something after telling El what he actually knew about Luna's whereabouts. Serra is very sad about all this, but seems to accept it as normal. We catch up to the Mart finally and pick up some medicine. We give it to Anna, who promptly gives it to her doll Nostra...and feels better somehow. Mmmk. After this, Anna suggests we go ahead and battle Noel now, saying its really important to get it done soon. Uh. Wait, what? The next badge raises the cap to 60. There's no chance I'm actually going to get this battle right? >_> Uhhh....oh wait! An attack by Meteor and the Doctor! There we go. We meat Saphira, who is related to Charlotte and Laura somehow. Laura and I to split up to defend everyone and wait for anyone who arrives while Saphira goes out to stop the Meteor grunts from overwhelming us from the lake. The Doctor and a pair of orderlies gets here first. The orderlies team up to stop me from confronting the Doctor, who goes upstairs, which is fine since Laura's there. We beat them, but then Sirius enters and tries to force his way through...wait, are my pokemon still hurt? >_> Not long after the battle, we hear a scream from upstairs. To stay or go huh? ...well, I don't seriously think the Doctor can beat all of Laura, and Elite 4 person, Noel, a gym leader who is probably stronger than I am, and Anna who is....something by himself. Besides, they aren't calling for help. We keep them away until Saphira returns, but learn that the Doctor just ran in and assaulted Laura with electricity before she actually got to battle, then took the twins. Well crap. Saphira is only angry at Meteor thankfully, so she and I head off after them. We split up while in the base. Many, many Meteors later, we find the kids locked up again and then later the controls for the lock that the Doctor and his key are hiding behind. We learn that Saphira was quite brutal in her fight against the Meteors on the lake and that the earthquakes are considered weird even by the Meteors. We eventually find the center of the base...where there is another PULSE machine along with an Abra. The abra teleports us away after the Meteors explain that they just want Abra to teleport them somewhere in particular and that the Abra is having none of that. The situation in Spinel Town is apparently just a side-effect. Rather lost, we wander out eventually and come out into some tunnels. These are rather large tunnels however. We come across Saphira who is trapped deeper down...somehow. Doesn't she fly around on her Dragonite? Anyway, we eventually make it to the source of the tunnels... Saphira and I catch a ride on the ginormous Steelix and dig our way out. Saphira stays on the Steelix to break out the kids and generally wreak havok on the Meteor base while I go in to distract them and take out the PULSE if I can. This turns out to be exceedingly easy, since the Meteors can't get Abra to do what they want and really would rather shut the project down, but can't as Abra teleports them away when they get close. The Abra fight is straightforward: Mega survives a Dark Pulse and sets up Light Screen, then survives a 2nd with the help of the screen and hits with Petal Dance. He's then KO'd. Abra is fast, so we send in Heliolisk and Thunderwave it. Light Screen cuts the damage from Psychic tremendously, so we get in 2 Thunderbolts before Abra KOs Heliolisk, which is actually enough. Big scary Lin arrives, and we hide amoung the Meteors. Lin seems to suspect that Sirius's story about what happened with the Abra is fake, but doesn't elaborate as to why. Before she can do anything, Saphira and the Steelix start wreaking things and she goes out to deal with it. Sirius tells us to get away before she comes back to save face. However When we make it back to Charlotte's, no one knows what happened to Saphira. Sensitive subjects are spoken of, so Charlotte leaves. Laura runs after her and Anna suggests we finish that battle from earlier. Didn't have much trouble in this section, but that's largely just due to how ridiculously fast Heliolisk is while also being an Electric type, which most of the fast-ish sweepers here are weak against. Super Effectiveness ftw. Also, because Reflect and Light Screen are just extremely good. I also don't know just how much the Rain mattered. The game said the ground beneath Mega caught fire, but I assume that actually got cancelled by the Rain. If the field had actually caught fire and changed that could have caused some issues. The passive healing may have actually saved Heliolisk against the Porygon. Then again, if it weren't raining Arcanine would have been much stronger. Eh. Maybe somewhat on the weak side, but the fight felt fine though. Next section within 3 days probably.

I'm definitely a casual gamer as far as how I play games goes, but I tend to like games to be on the harder side if possible. Dark Souls was awesome. Also, options. Not quite sure how to put that. I like that games where I can look at alot of the options, make assumptions about how I expect choices to work out in the game mechanically, and then see how correct I am. This tends to cause me to have huge amounts of play times on games like Skyrim or Dragon's Dogma, even though I tend to only play a little into the game to see if what I think is actually right. I can't even guess how many characters I had saved just after the 2nd bell in Dark Souls that I just didn't play anymore because it was boring after the mystery was solved. I really, -really- like playing co-op in the games that I like, but I don't like most shooters and typically can't convince others to play the other games that I actually like with me due to time constraints and such, so can't say much about that.

Because I'm dumb and probably didn't. So sometimes I actually write what's happening in the battle as I'm doing the battle, but I don't usually do that if a battle takes me more than 3 or so attempts. Then what I usually do is just look at the bazillion pictures I took of the battle, use them to reinforce what I remember of the battle, then choose a few that I actually put in the post. If something is unimportant or obvious to me at the time I'm doing the battle(or if I'm just too surprised by something >_>) I don't take a screenshot. In this case, when I recreated the battle I saw this and remembered that the entire reason I left Silk out was to eat Froslass's evasion boosts, and that it looked like I missed and hit a mirror. So, I just assumed that I had used Double Edge, since I didn't care about Silk taking a little damage and it has the highest accuracy, forgetting that Froslass was a ghost. What probably actually happened was I used Play Rough and didn't bother to take a screenshot of it since the result of the hit was likely irrelevant and Play Rough would be the only logical choice to use in that situation anyway.

Gaaah I want to use Misdreavus, but Destiny Bond feels like cheating, I don't have a TM for Will O Wisp yet, and I can't get a decent one with Nasty Plot. :0 qq xD Aya tells us how she -really- doesn't want to be the gym leader; the job was supposed to be Cain's. He left all his pokemon behind and just left without saying goodbye to anyone. And for some reason, Aya is convinced she's a failure or something. Hardy stays behind to try to cheer her up and we head out again. We head out, defeat Mr. Bigglesworth and pick up Misdreavus, then head back to the bridge. We meet up with Cain there and we get something like an explanation for his running away. Accepting that for now, we make it out tof the underground and end up in the old abandoned Yureyu building. Its infested with Meteor grunts so we team up with Cain for a bunch of double battles. What's with all the factory/short circuit fields. xD We learn that Meteor is actually behind all the "earthquakes" and just spread the lie that it was all due to natural disasters. Arcanine and Nidoking solo this whole place, but the exp share gives that helioptile I mentioned a few episodes ago enough experience to learn Thunderbolt, so we go ahead and use a Sun Stone. We eventually find and release all the kids besides Anna and Heather, who are way high up in the tower. Sigmund turns out to be guarding them and refuses to release them. Then, lots of stuff happens. Since we can't actually get to the PokeMart, we decide to go ahead and challenge the gym leader here, whose house/gym the mart currently rests on top of. Bennet(the leader's son) asks if we've come across someone named Luna. He's disappointing that we haven't, but a traveling visitor named El affiliated with the church of Arceus or something comes by, also interested in her. Bennett unconvincingly says he doesn't know where she might be, but Serra(the leader) invites El to spectate our match. Bennett takes him to the waiting area and we work towards Serra's area. Partway there, we are waylaid by Bennett who asks for a battle. With no reason not to, we oblige. With that, El speaks of how impressive the battle was, and offers assistance to Bennett as he believes that he shows much promise. That aside, we head back to the center, heal our pokemon, and challenge Serra. Wait really? That's it? No hoops to jump through? That's actually kinda surprsing. xD Time to farm the trainers more efficiently. Sigmund was strong on his field, but Cain having so many pokemon made up for that pretty well. Bennett was easy, but since he has 3 bug/fliers on a team that is already largely weak to fire, I suspect he isn't supposed to be a challenge right now. Serra could be obnoxious sometimes purely due to the field's evasion mechanics but it sometimes works against her just as badly. It felt like I was battling the field more than her Pokemon at times, but the field can be changed so not sure how I feel about it. Eh. Next section within 3 days probably.

Before I forget, I'm just going to say...I LOVE the Apophyll area background music. We head back down to Volcano land and notice the inner rooms for the first time. >_> There, we move a TV and get a sticker before heading to the Volcano about to kill us all. Victoria meats us there and tag teams with us all the way up the mountain. After beating all the Meteor people, we make it to the top. Cain and Cal have been defeated already, so Victoria and I step up and face Taka and Solaris individually and end this. Regardless of this battle, Garchomp still stands in our way. Kiki comes along from behind and attempts to destroy the PULSE while everything is going on with her Medicham, but Cal stops it, since he's actually working with Meteor. While Kiki is defenseless Solaris does what Solaris does, but this angers Cal enough that he blows up the PULSE himself. After shoving more derision down our throats, Solaris and Taka retreat. Victoria is incredibly angry at Cal for his treachery and Cal leaves in face of her rage. We head back to the gym where Victoria gives us the Strength machine. She has to stay behind now though, as the academy has passed to her. We head back to the door to the wasteland, where Cain challenges us once more before allowing us passage. With that, Cain opens the door to one of the stranger areas I've seen in this game. Random fences, vines, broken builds, graves and signposts litter the area and make it difficult to progress. There doesn't seem to be any pokemon in the area that aren't Poison type other than the one level 50 Unown that was in a headbutt-able tree for some reason.In any case, we eventually make it to Aya's house, which may very well be the only actual residence in the place. Aya is just finishing her battle with Fern, who is being his typical self. We also meet a new gym leader named Hardy who is here to try and ease Aya into the whole gym leader thing. She goes off to heal her pokemon, and Fern challenges us again while she's gone. Of course we oblige. Hehehe. Anyway, Aya makes her way back, Fern goes up into the stands to watch the battle, and we heal our pokemon and come back to fight Aya. Who seems rather vocally reluctant about the whole thing. And maybe about living too. Solaris seems fair as a kind of puzzle boss. I don't trust myself to talk about double battles, especially since I forgot about what Spikes does on the Wasteland field for the entirety of that fight. :/ Still, it felt fine at the time since it seemed like I could have just done the fight better. Fern just seems mostly countered by fire types at this point, but his team is explained as being based around fighting Aya at this point, so eh. Now to go and show all those rocks whose boss... Next section within 3 days.

Battles, battles, battles. Lots of battles here. We head back down the volcano and make out way back to the hym. There, we discover that Kiki is actually sick and Victoria doesn't feel comfortable letting us battle her. We decide to discuss this the usual way. Victoria doesn't like it, but is willing to let the battle stand. Thankfully, the Center is right down the hall, so we heal up and get ready for the gym battle. But...after that she collapses. Depressed and angry, she tells everyone to leave. Victoria waits outside of her room anyway, and wonders where Cain is, since he said he was coming and all. There an island between here and the City, so we stop there to see if we can find anything. Mostly, it turns out to just be full of wild pokemon, but after exploring the place, we come across a house in the wilderness. We meet the Meteor duo again who claim to have captured Cain and now would be more than happy to capture me as well. There's a handy dandy healing station deeper in the hideout, so we use that before heading on. Turns out, there's not much heading on to do as the hallway leads to a deadend with Cain in a cage along with Taka, some grunts, and a Camelrupt. We get some of the details of the plan to PULSE up the Camelrupt to cause that volcano we were just at to explode before taking trying our hand against Taka again. With that, Taka retreats, but he takes Camelrupt with him. Quickly opening the cage Cain was in, we head after him. Mostly, this section just reminds me that I absolutely hate confusion >.> That Machamp was sooooo annoying with its confusion, bulk, good damage, and healing backup. Still, if I had anything that could two-shot it(and I know there are more than a few things in my box I could have just trained up to do that) or just used a ghost I don't think there'd have been any problem, so its probably fine and I'm just overreacting. I do kinda feel like there's alot of experience in this section and the last one if I'm not getting a badge to increase the level caps any time soon, but I'm not sure whether you could do anything about that with so many story battles in this part while still keeping the difficulty up. Next section within 3 days probably.