Autumn Zephyr

The game is still being worked- pretty actively at that- but there hasn't been a new Version yet. V13 was planned to be a bigger update than V12 was from the beginning, and adding in Gen. 8's new goodies is making the already kinda long development cycle even longer. Patience is very much requested at the moment.

Might as well throw some of my experiences into the pile, since they might be helpful for someone. Alolan Muk- Okay, before you yell at me about how everyone and their mother already uses the living recycling center, here me out: I specifically run Alchemy on mine. That's right, the Doubles-only Ability that requires an ally to die to even function. Turns out that those hoops are surprisingly easy to jump through in this game. I needed something with decent power to sweep the Electric Gym with? Let the Alolan Raichu die to pass Surge Surfer to muk for speedy Poison action*! Random mook giving me a hard time with their bulky, Psychic and Fighting resistant 'mons? Pass medicham's Pure Power over and whack over the head with super-powered Crunches! The Puppet Master's Trick Room and Aelita's blaziken both about to die in the same round**? Hey, a free Speed Boost to keep the TR from coming back out! Heck, there was one fight I only won off of a lucky proc. from my banette's accidentally-transferred Cursed Body. Couple with the right set of Abilities among the rest of the team, Alchemy!muk can really make a splash in the many Double battles the game has. *This was back when Erick ran Electric Terrain, so I didn't even get the Field bonus at the time... **Given that the AI was even worse with using Trick Room at the time than it is now, I'm admittedly unsure if it ever clicked the move again to begin with. But hey, insurance is insurance, right? Salazzle- You know how Jan says that you can fight Fire with Fire against Amber? Uh, yeah, I kinda took that one to heart. Salazzle's blistering Speed, alongside access to Nasty Plot and Magma Drift, made this Gym in particular a lot less troublesome than I thought it'd be. Her most important role was as a suicide lead against Souta, however. The fact that his skarmory can easily one-shot her regardless of what I did meant that the Defense drop from the Telluric Seed didn't matter for her at all, allowing her to easily get away with negating the old man's biggest advantage over me and push the annoying bird down to Sturdy simultaneously- thereby giving my team its only opening to victory. Aside from that, just having a hard-hitting speedster that can shrug off Taunts with ease (a detail the AI refused to catch onto in one fight, R.I.P.) is pretty handy against the many normal enemies in the game- just be careful with Double Battles when packing Magma Drift! (She also helped out a lot against Crawli, but since that was entirely do to the fact that one of the Shadow Pokémon in the Sheridan scenario was a salandit that learned Water Pulse when Purified back in V9, and was pretty much replaced immediately) Oricorio- An admittedly recent addition to my team (blame the Crest; it's simple but effective), but the dancebirb has nonetheless pulled its weight handily. Much like salazzle, it's fast and hard-hitting (especially with the Crest), but it also bears a bit more flexibility to go with that power. The Ghost Typing's handy to have for the exploration part of the game thanks to its vast neutral coverage and ability to escape any unwanted Wild Battle, while the Nectars give you the (some limited) ability to adapt for any given battle. Pom-Pom was helpful against the Wailord boss and the lady meditating underwater, Baile finished off the sister at Ground Zero's steelix and used the boost from that to incinerate the rest of her team (especially that ledian; seriously, the Dancer Ability is nuts on the Big Top Field), and Pau let her savage a substantial chunk of Aya's team to boot! Be careful about using it against Ryland, though- Revelation Dance's Type matches that of oricorio's first one at all times, so effects that change that Type will also change the Dance. This means that his Desert's Mark technique will turn into a Ground Type attack (which his gliscor and claydol are both immune to), on top of making you lose Sensu's ability to swap out despite the Sand Tomb effect- leaving you stuck in a suboptimal position. Yay... And a bonus, for all you lovely people out there! From the Ability that brought you Serperior and Lurantis (but not Spinda- we refuse to take responsibility for that blatant knock-off!), we bring you the most outstanding non-Water sea life yet: Malamar! Just like your other favorite Contrary-brand products, Malamar can turn your foes' pathetic attempts at weakening you into power, and transform the downside of powerful attacks into a means of snowballing out of control! But this one can do so much more than the others thanks to a revolutionary new addition to the tried and true formula: Topsy-Turvy! Flip your foes' pathetic attempts at sweeping you into overwhelming weakness! Confound your enemies with a complete reversal of the Type Chart they're familiar with! Deny them of any and all bonuses they received from the battlefield itself! All this power, packed into a single, easy-to-use attack! Unleash the might of the Suspicious Squid Spectacular today!* *Due to unforeseen scheduling issues, shipment has regrettably been delayed until after the Kristilline Incident. Thank you for your understanding.

This post is made a bit more accurate when you into account that the PMD games call Flinching 'Cringing'. Though, uh, PMD references are decidedly more in Rejuvenation's ballpark that Reborn's…

The regular Grunts do, but since Eli and Sharon don't seem to be 'regular' Grunts, it's possible that they'd be exempt. ...Except we've seen it used on a Deathwing already, who are a step above these two, and Ren, who's likely a step above other Deathwings due to his status as Nastasia's personal unit, has been threatened with it, IIRC. Though since Ren's isn't visible on him (assuming it's even needed, given his predicament), it could be possible that Eli and Sharon's Xs are simply hidden under their vests? As for the other character's, Indriad's looking far more sinister than he ever did in the overworld sprites (R.I.P.), Geara looks pretty punchable (don't be so smug, ya dumb illusionist!), Marianette definitely has every right to look as worried as she does, and... I still have no idea how the heck Narcissa's sash-thing works? I know she's not the only character to have one (Champion!Iris sported a pink one in BW2), but doesn't ease up my confusion. I dunno, maybe I just don't understand fashion.

Telepathy, it turns out, lets the wielder evade all offensive attacks from its "allies", not just AoEs. As a result, you legitimately can't attack her until Melia and Aelita finally kill the beheeyem without wasting your turn, unless you happen to be using a pokemon with Mold Breaker. This effectively forces you to either play support for her or attack your friends when you don't really want to do either. Yeah...

To be honest, the above statement undersells the Red Haired Girl's involvement with that terrible night quite a bit. Of course, this one terribly tragic evening would only prove to be the catalyst for her following crimes against Kenneth, including: To be completely honest, it's because of WLL that the end sequence of V12 hit me as hard as it did. It's hard to oversell just how much I panicked the moment I saw that accursed beheeyem on my side of the battlefield- I straight-up had to leave the game for nearly an hour before I regained my composure enough to continue! ...Only find out that said fight has the singularly most vindictive use of the Telepathy Ability I have ever seen. Seriously, Karma'd better catch up to this lady real soonlike…

Actually, this gave me a curious thought: what if we're thinking about this completely wrong? We know from Nymeria's Story of the Ancients that many of the first humans- and Indriad especially- put a lot of stock in the difference between humanity and pokemon. With this in mind, it's entirely possible that the four Lights are actually pokemon, with Delpha being the first one we've come across (that we're aware of, anyway). It would certainly fit the divide between sides in that ancient war, at least. As for where that puts Ren and Reina, there are two trains of thought: 1) the fortune teller didn't specify that they were associated with the prophecy, just that one of them would eventually act in an 'evil' manner (though how that'll work out is a bit of an odd point, considering that both of them have managed to not be blatantly influenced by Goldenleaf Town's... unsavory culture during their childhoods); or 2) the Light one of the pair will wind becoming a pokemon somehow. Keep in mind that this sort of thing does happen in Pokémon's established lore a few times. The most common cases are many Ghost Types being essentially reincarnate spirits of the deceased (and boy would that make for a return that'll catch a lot of folks by surprise; Ren's precarious position also makes it very easy for such a thing to happen in the first place), but it's also worth noting the two cases where someone became a kadabra and the nine "great wizards" that combined to create the first ninetales (sounds like a drawback for botching a Garufan spell within the context of Rejuvenation's lore to me; Gen. 3's Dex Entries were weird sometimes). Naturally, there's an especially high chance that I'm terribly incorrect with this one, but if I'm actually correct... we're certainly gonna see some seriously surprised spoiler threads on that Version's release~

Building a bit on the Dual Prophecies, there's a relevant detail about them that's been on my mind since V11. They state that the 4 Lights are "not born of man", which highly suggests that they have to be created somehow. Ren's case is a bit of a curious one here- his mind is human, no doubt about that, but his body is mechanical- enough so to confuse even sensitive people like Nim. Considering that we don't know how strict the requirements for becoming a Light actually are, there's a very real possibility that he's 'artificial' enough to count now (which would be kinda ironic, considering that Team Xen recruited him because they thought he was the Darkness of Betrayal). Of course, there's now the possibility that all four of the Light slots are taken up by the fragments of the Archetype, but how lame would that be? Of course, if Ren's a Light, then that inversely means that Reina's a Darkness (which by definition do have to be 'born of man', or fully human)- and there is some incidental evidence for that. 'Reina' is the Spanish word for 'queen', and those of us who delved into the sidequests not attached to the Help Centers should be pretty familiar with a black-haired queen notorious for her evil deeds in her time. I wouldn't be too surprised to see Giselda attempt to possess the girl or something- surely one the most vicious of the Garufa would be willing to pull off a trick like that, right? Her sisters are still around, after all.

Dragapult would easily be a best-case scenario, but one mustn't discount the possibility of becoming a Galarian Yamask instead. Don't you just hate it when you're stuck spending your afterlife attached to a stone that's slowly draining you of all you're worth as it bides its time to completely hijack your very being? And Laborradora does appear to be rather close to the Mirage Tower... Thankfully, there are more winner Ghost Types than losers, so perhaps it's still worth the gamble? Shoutouts to golurk, which trades 'relentlessly haunting Fern for all eternity' out for 'slamming Fern with a No Guard Dynamic Punch to the face for a satisfying crunching sound'. Seems like a decent alternative for the more aggressive among us, eh? Have we taken this too far yet???

We know for a fact that that's what she pulled- Nim herself practically admits it herself (albeit through her twisted perspective as the victim of the scheme) to Venam and Aelita (the latter of which was part of the Blacksteeple crew, so Nim definitely knows her) when they tried to explain the truth to her. And this ignoring the scene after our failure on Mt. Valor that shows us the part of the conversation where Crescent renames her. (That's another thing to add to Crescent's list of sins, by the way: stripping away another's identity while they're feeling at their lowest. That's just a dirty play right there) Let's not forget that Crescent's tried to pull a similar bit of manipulation even closer to home. Remember how she tried to convince us that she saved our lives the first time our Interceptor powers kicked in? Sure, we might know that to be utter hogwash nowadays, between triggering it again in the ruined timeline in V10 and perusing the sunken archives in V12, but there was still a substantial amount of time where her claims appeared to be true. Of course, the biggest reason this bit of propaganda failed is that nobody in what was left of our group trusted her worth a hill of beans to begin with...

...Y'alls paranoia is probably stressing the 'poor' beheeyem out. That ridiculous degree of manipulation over the course of such a prolonged amount of time has got to be insanely tiring!