#Of course I’m still disappointed we’re not getting new Unova games but still

[princeofheartsarts]

late 2024/2025 is gonna be sooo hype guys im telling you

[radramblog]

The Legend of Perfect Jazz

Last year I participated in Season 2 of the Ultimate Communitylocke League on the Nuzlocke Forums, a challenge in which you choose a specific Nuzlocke ruleset and do a run of one game from every region in the mainline Pokémon games with that ruleset. In my case, I was doing an Alphabetlocke- a variant in which the nicknames for every Pokemon are randomly generated, and your team has to consist of the first 6 alphabetically of the Pokemon you have available. I wouldn’t recommend this ruleset in retrospect, as having to stop everything grind up a new member half the time you catch something isn’t the most pleasant experience. But it was from this ruleset that the legend of Perfect Jazz began.

April 8th, 2020. Lockdown is in effect, even in Perth, and I’m on the last run of my journey. Ultra Sun. I’ve been using a particular website called Behind the Name for my nicknames, and being exposed to a lot of obscure names from a variety of different cultures as a result. After the disappointing catch that was Waheeda the Alolan Meowth, who would have been both of limited use even if its name wasn’t buried in the last stretch of the alphabet, I was moving on to my encounter in Hau’oli City.

Out pops a Magnemite. This is an exciting moment- Magnemite and its evolutions are excellent in Nuzlocke runs on account of their great typing, solid movepool (at least in later gens), and good stats. A boon like this so early in the game can be quite the benefit, if the cards fall right- especially seeing as in US/UM, its has early access to moves for both its types as well as both paralysis and confusion statuses. These status moves made it a bit of a pain to catch, but eventually it stayed in the ball, and I randomly generate a name for it. This, of course, is the origin of Perfect Jazz. I don’t know how a website like this could spit that out as a name, nor do I know why. I have never been able to replicate this result, nor does it appear in the websites databases when I go back and check. My only assumption is that some random person submitted Perfect Jazz as a name as a joke, later having it removed but not before it was generated for my Magnemite.

I don’t know why, but it’s a weirdly fitting name. A lot of jazz instruments are metal, so its possible a Magnemite could attach one to itself and…somehow, electromagnetically, play some tunes? I haven’t figured it out yet. I am, however, thinking of getting that commissioned.

Unfortunately, P is on the lower end as far as initials go, and so Perfect Jazz would not last long on the team. While they were fantastic for the time they were present, such a time didn’t last. Perfect Jazz would escape the run unharmed, despite how bloody it ended up being in the end, but underutilised.

Cut to 2 months later. The Ultra Sun run, and by extension, my UCL season 2 challenge, is over, but hungry for more community Nuzlocke content I sign up for the Nuzlocke World Cup. NWC was a competition rather than a challenge, with teams of runners matched up against their opponents seeing who could get the lowest death counts for certain games for certain rulesets. It’s round 2, and my team, the Unova Units, is on the chopping block- if we lose this round, we’re out for good. My assigned game is Crystal, and I’ve been running it fairly well- I believe I was only at 2 deaths at that point and would only finish with 3. At this point, I had an Onix on my team, and while Megasnek was pretty good, Onix peaks eventually and is terrified of a fair few coverage moves. So I wanted to evolve it. Typically, in GSC, the only way to get a Metal Coat to evolve Onix into Steelix is as part of the S.S. Aqua event, which takes place after the credits roll for the first time, and therefore outside the scope of the run I was doing. There is, however, a 5% chance that a wild Magnemite encountered will be holding a Metal Coat, and I still had the TM for Thief, so I burned that on my Haunter and went hunting. Somehow, before I actually got that 5%, I got the much lower chance of a shiny Magnemite.

Shiny Magnemite is not especially distinct in Gen 2- the only real difference is the lack of a blue tinge to the grey body. But somehow, through the ridiculously fast turbo enabled by the emulator, I managed to catch the trademark sparkle, and later, the mon itself. Considering the recency and, frankly, how funny I found the name in the first place, I chose to name this too Perfect Jazz. Or, well, Perf Jazz, due to the character limit.

Perf Jazz is not my first Nuzlocke shiny. In fact, in the first season of the UCL, I encountered 1 each in back-to-back games- Tamiyo the Pelipper in Sapphire, and Empyrrean the Steelix in Diamond. However, both of those came too late in the run for me to consider adding them to the team. Not Perf Jazz, however, and I proceeded to grind them the hell up, to the point of evolving into Magneton.

I was then informed that the NWC did not actually have a shiny clause in the rules, and that it was fine that I’d caught it but that I couldn’t actually use it in any battles. So once again, I was forced to abandon Perfect Jazz.

For now, this is where the legend of Perfect Jazz ends, but so help me I am going to make it continue. Whether that means finally using one in a Nuzlocke or breeding a shiny one for competitive, Perfect Jazz will one day properly take the stage, magnetized saxophone in hand. Or, uh, magnet.

(If you’re interested, you can find signups for the third season of the UCL here.)

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

baratrongirl replied to your post “Really do not understand why GameFreak took out the Hall of Fame...”

I'd be interested to hear what you don't like about Sword/Shield. For me, it's quite the opposite. I played the hell out of the 3rd and 4th Gens, then struggled to finish White and didn't buy White 2. Didn't finish SoulSilver, or whichever of X or Y I got, and became completely bored about 10 hours into Alpha Sapphire despite being all motivated to play the game with my original Sapphire team only now I know what I'm doing. Didn't even BUY Sun/Moon.

Then I hung out with my Pokemon friends over Sword/Shield launch weekend, watched them playing on the TV, and had to immediately borrow a spare Switch so I could play too. By the end of the weekend I'd bought the Switch and paid to download my own copy of Shield. I have a few issues with it, mostly relating to the lack of clothing options for male characters, but otherwise I'm finding it the blast of fresh air that I needed to get back into the Pokemon games.

I’ve heard a lot of people say something similar, that SwSh was a nice upgrade from the past couple gens. I started slipping around XY - didn’t wanna buy a 3DS and didn’t until Omega Ruby came out, since Ruby was the first one I’d played - and after I finished the Team Flare plot of X I just gave up for three years and only last year finished the 8th gym and the league. I honestly don’t remember much of playing OR. I think it was a weird kind of frantic nostalgia-fueled haze but I genuinely cannot comment on what I liked about that game. It’s a blank in my memory. Really enjoyed Sun and Moon, like Sword but get bummed the longer I think about it. But I did buy it because I did see a ton of people saying it was a change they were enjoying, quality-of-life upgrades, fun new features, etc. Different strokes and all.

My biggest gripe on Sword is that the world feels pretty empty. Besides the Wild Area, and its few secluded corners, though it’s really a straightforward place, there’s nothing to explore. The plot grabs you by the hand and pulls you to every location. There’s nothing off-the-way that you don’t go to for the main plot. There’s nothing like Kanto’s Power Plant, or Alola’s Power Plant - which I didn’t even realize was there on my first pass through, and then I was like “hey what’s this little place, OH MY GOD WHAT THERE’S MORE STUFF HERE.” The region is a linear loop. There’s no weird little caves that aren’t plot relevant that you get scrambled up in. There’s nowhere that’s locked until you beat the League, like the other half of Poni Island or those last upper bits in Unova or the Battle Frontier in Sinnoh. I had canvassed the Wild Area for everything by the time I went to the final tournament. There’s nowhere else to go. Sure I went back through the Wild Area to catch more stuff to fill out my Pokedex, but new places? Nothing. There’s nowhere to go back to once you can cross water except the little lake by the professor’s house. Not like in Sun/Moon where there’s bits on prior islands to go back to with Lapras. That cave underneath the starting island to go check out I’m thinking of. Galar is a pretty bare-bones region and the Wild Area doesn’t fully compensate.

Which ties to my other biggest gripe, which is, there are three legendary Pokemon in the game and one of them is the opposite version’s exclusive that you can’t get. Two legendary Pokemon! Two legendary Pokemon you can catch! And you catch them both in the course of the plot! There’s nothing like the Regi trio hidden by batshit puzzles, or Cobalion/Terrakion/Virizion tucked in out-of-the-way corners. No wandering Lati@s or beast trio. No Tapus or anything. You can catch two legendary Pokemon.

I think we really peaked back in Gen 3 with its visual Braille puzzles and Gen 4 with whatever the everloving fuck the Turnback Cave was on about. The weird locations that hurt your brain. I miss those. I miss the tricky caves you get lost in and spend time figuring it out. Galar didn’t have caves. The mines were basically a straight shot, yknow? When I’d like to go deeper and have more to explore instead of feeling like I’m taking a walking tour of the whole region.

And the DLC looks like it’ll deal at least with that point with more legendaries, which really grinds my gears. In all the discourse about whether or not the DLC is good or bad or neutral, whether the price of video games has needed to go up or the DLC is cheaper than a third version but some people wait for the third version, which I didn’t seek out said discourse but saw pass me by on Twitter, I saw no one mention that we’re paying to get more than two legendary Pokémon and I felt like I was losing my mind for a little while there. I feel like I’m paying extra for something that’s been in every game since the beginning of time, that being more than two legendary Pokémon that I can catch.

And my lesser little gripes: level balance of the game felt a little wonky with the wild Pokemon toward the end higher leveled than all the trainers except Leon, and the always-on exp share made it worse because when I dragged out the plot by catching everything in the Wild Area, my team got way overleveled for the back half of the game and I could curbstomp everyone that passed me. Team Yell were an egregious roadblock and while Pokemon has always had those, the prominence of Team Yell was exasperating. I prefer environmental roadblocks, like water and back when we used to have other HMs, those feel a little better than two dudes standing in the middle of a wide road.

And why, oh WHY, did GameFreak downgrade after XY and only have fitting rooms in boutiques instead of also in Pokemon Centers? I don’t want to fly to another town to change my clothes! Not every town has a clothes shop but everywhere has a Pokemon Center! I was crusading on this point through Sun/Moon and I will not be stopped until GameFreak puts changing rooms back in Pokemon Centers! (They will probably never do that but I refuse to stop. Forget Dexit; this is the real issue of our time.)

I didn’t mind the limited Pokémon at release because I never transfer my teams thru the games anyway - I’m a sentimental anxious idiot afraid of decisions and commitment and I can’t commit to the one-way transfers to move my teams up to new games. And that plus the Wild Area having trade-evolution Pokemon walking around made me feel like completing my pokedex was actually attainable. So I did!

I don’t hate the game, but I am disappointed by it. I’ve never been a Battle Tower or shiny-hunting person, but I’ve ended up doing those because I don’t know what else to do.

So that’s my opinion on why SwSh has bummed me out more as time goes on, since you were curious.

(Joker from Mass Effect 2 when you ask him for gossip about your teammates voice: “But that’s just my opinion, no need to go spreading it around.” ;) I’ll gladly chat with friends but the poke-discourse got too intense on twitter and I am not inviting that kind of bad energy into our lives. None of us deserve that.)

I’ve still got a lot of endgame stuff for Sun and Moon, UB hunting and I haven’t made it to the Battle Tree yet because my Moon team is getting its ass kicked by everything because I turned the exp share off and overcompensated in the wrong direction and am chronically underleveled. There’s a certain charm for me in being underleveled because I used to have endless patience to overlevel my team to extremes because my childhood anxiety was something like “if I die in the game I die in real life???” and I was terrified of losing and now I’m like “blacks out twice in a row in Moon as I go toward the postgame stuff yolo”. So when I feel like playing Pokemon I’ll probably spend more time in Alola, when I’m not trying to hatch that damn shiny Rookidee because I accidentally committed to that.

[returnerofthesky]

I was playing some more Ultra Sun over dinner and I think I finally figured out the easiest way to put my big problem with the game(s) - how they’re just too small, I mean

I griped about this back when the original Sun and Moon came out, at how cramped and overly condensed Alola felt compared to Hawaii in reality, but I chalked it up to me living here and knowing how much is here... but now that I’ve finished Acerola’s trial and I’ve been thinking both about Alola in-game, as well as Alola in terms of what I’ve been outlining story-wise, the more I realize that’s not really the case

the best way I can describe it is that the regions in Pokemon games have always been very small chunks of larger areas: four entire games take place in what is essentially Poke-Japan (Gen 1-4, of course), while the others are “a huge well-known city and the surrounding area” (Gen 5 and 6)

on the flipside, Gen 7 takes the entirety of Hawaii and turns it into a region of the same size - Alola’s four islands have a total of ten towns (this includes Royal Avenue, which may not be a town in name but is a town in function), which is exactly the same amount as Kanto, and also the exact same amount as Unova lets you explore before its postgame content

so in layman’s terms, the entirety of Hawaii is equivalent to New York City and the surrounding area, or Paris and the surrounding area, or a single small chunk of Japan, which... feels really incongruous, to put it lightly

(granted if we really dig into the nitty-gritty of distances and square miles I’m sure the point could be made that it’s not as incongruous as it feels, but it doesn’t change the fact that Alola doesn’t feel nearly as big or fleshed out as other regions despite having the same amount of general ground-space)

I realize that the reason Alola ended up this way is because the games are still on the 3DS and they’re basically pushing the poor handheld to its absolute limit with the switch to full 3D movement and environs, but I still can’t help but feel disappointed that we’re probably never going to get an Alola that isn’t so... missing-so-many-cool-things-y, if that makes sense (given Gen 7 will probably last this year or so, and then Pokemon Switch will come out and it’ll move on to something new)

thankfully, all that really does is give me more motivation to continue outlining and refining (and eventually get out of writer’s block and start writing) this Sun story, so I can try and pick up where Gamefreak sorta stumbled :v