Last time I mentioned that I was going to do another outfit change, and uh... I did. I could explain the thought process behind it, but I doubt anyone really cares, so you can just look at the trainer card to see what I went with. I will mention that I'm trying my best to change things up every time, hence why I decided to move away from the brown hair + glasses look, but I also don't really like any of the shorter hair options that much, so I'm sticking with the longer hair for now.
Anyway, I had previously encountered some Team Skull goons intimidating a bus stop with interpretive dance, so I figured it was about time to go see what their deal was. I get greeted with a baffling "You trying to steal our bus stop?", and go through a couple uninteresting battles before they wander off. Honestly I don't think they were even doing anything wrong, but they're Team Skull, so I had to get rid of them nonetheless. After they're gone, Kukui shows up and casually mentions "challenging the league", but doesn't really explain what he means by that. I mean, it wasn't exactly a hard thing to understand, but I guess Luna didn't know.
He also has a pretty great line of his own here: "Do me a favor and check out that bus stop to see when the next one is coming, would you?", which doesn't sound that funny until you realize that he's standing like three inches away from it. Is this... is this a test? Is he making sure that I know how to read? Is he glued to the floor and unable to rotate his body? Is he distracted by something offscreen and doesn't want to let me in on it? We may never know, because I check out the sign and summon the Exeggutor Express - a bus that is randomly Exeggutor-themed despite not really having any reason to be.
The bus takes us up to Mount Wannahockaloogie, and from this altitude Kukui is able to point out the other mountain on this island, Mount Lanakila. It's the highest point in the Alola region, and this is where he plans to build the Pokemon League. Apparently this is why there's no gyms in the region - there's never really been a request for it until recently. Now though, Kukui at least is interested in having an Alola Champion to rival the champions of the other regions. On a bit of a side note here, there's been a rumor going around of a "Pokemon Stars" on the Nintendo Switch, and if that happens, a popular theory is that the empty lots in many of the cities of the region might be turned into gyms in that game. Makes sense, but I guess only time will tell.
So here at the mountaintop, there's the oft-mentioned observatory, a Pokemon Center, and not much else. I do have the ability to actually go back down the road that the bus took though, so that's what I'll be doing. First though, I find some more Apricorn Balls in the area - one from Oak, and some just laying around. I've got five of the seven now, just missing the Love Ball and the Lure Ball. I also encountered a trainer that had a Clefairy use Wake-Up Slap on Dreemurr - one of the very few, situational weaknesses of its Comatose ability (since the move does double damage while asleep).
There's some grass along this road, and while it won't take you long to read this, it certainly took me a long time to get everything I needed out of it. Because not only does this grass contain Ditto and Beldum (the latter of which is notoriously hard to catch, especially with my regular Poke Balls only rule), but it also contains Minior. And there's a few things I have to say about this.
If you don't know, Minior has a few gimmicks surrounding it. Its ability, Shields Down, causes it to shed its outer shell after going below 50% HP, and this flips its attacking and defending stats, but also reveals its inner core. This core can have one of seven colors, and these are permanent per individual Minior, much like Unown or Shellos. Since I want to collect one of every color, that means I need to encounter a large number of them and get them to low health before confirming their color... but they also know Self-Destruct and have a tendency to use it fairly often. So yeah, this wasn't exactly fun.
After a couple hours though, I succeeded in getting every color (Red was my first, Green was my last), and I also got two Purples. Why? Well, because this is my eleventh team member! I went with the purple one mainly because it was the color least-represented on my current team (though arguably I don't have an orange one, Aleene's evolution is kinda yellowish orange, And Malone will lost most of his purple coloration after evolving). But the other reason was so I could name it "Lubba" after the fat purple Luma from Super Mario Galaxy 2. So yep, Lubba joins the team. It's Timid (actually a pretty good nature for it) and "Likes to run", which is pretty good because it doesn't have any legs. I taught it the Psychic and Charge Beam TMs, fed the usual rainbow bean, gave it the Rockium Z (to boost Ancient Power) and battled some of the trainers along the road to catch it up to the rest of the team.
The next area I'm supposed to check out is the observatory, so given a lack of anything else to do, I head there. There's a guy out front who I end up battling - this is Mr. Molayne, the person who runs the PC system in this region. He's friends with Sophocles, and he also used to be a trial captain, but no longer is... probably because you have to resign after turning 20 years old (as Mallow explained earlier but I forgot to point out). I'm not really sure why that rule exists, but eh, it's Pokemon. But anyway, this guy is actually fairly challenging. He's a Steel type specialist, and his Skarmory, Metang, and Dugtrio (the new fabulous one with surfer dude hair) managed to actually do some damage to my team.
With him out of the way, I head into the observatory itself, talk to a couple unimportant people, and then end up bumbling into the next trial without actually meaning to. Oops. I'm not going to be doing that until next time, so uh... reset.
That would pretty much be it for this entry, and it actually was if I was sticking with the one-day-per-post thing. But since that was so short, I'll share the uninteresting crap I did the following day while specifically avoiding progress (since I didn't have a chance to take notes at all while playing).
Since I'm a high enough level now to where I wouldn't be gaining a crazy amount of levels from fighting early wild Pokemon en masse, I decided this would be a good time to head back to Route 1 and seek some of the SOS exclusives. Fellana's the only team member I have that can learn False Swipe, so I teach it to her and start the process. I got a Pikachu and Happiny from Pichu and then a Sudowoodo from Bonsly. That just leaves Snorlax, and much like Munchlax before it, this turned out to be quite a pain.
To explain how annoying it was to get this thing, let me first establish that I actually found a Munchlax without taking ten years like last time. I used Laylee to pass a +6 Attack boost to Fellana (who's basically one fight away from reaching Level 30 at this point), then used False Swipe to get Munchlax down to 1 HP. Munchlax is guaranteed to have a Leftovers, so it's constantly gaining HP, meaning I have to keep using False Swipe to keep it low. I also used an Adrenaline Orb to increase its odds of calling for help.
Keeping that in mind, I spent a good two hours or so chaining Munchlax. I had to use a good number of Leppa Berries to restore my own PP, Cheri Berries to heal paralysis when it got lucky with Lick, and I went through about 50 Munchlax before it eventually killed itself with Struggle. This actually wasn't even the original one, I switched to one of the summoned ones about halfway through. The amount of experience from these low-level wild Pokemon was enough to get Fellana from not-quite-30 to 32. So yeah, I reset.
Another half hour later I finally got a Snorlax to show up, and caught it. That was uh, that was pretty bad. So that's where I'm stopping the wild Pokemon hunt for now. I did have a rather lengthy trading sequence with Joel though, trading some of the Moon exclusives for a Cranidos, Tirtouga, Passimian, and Turtonator. (Turtonator's Moon counterpart isn't available at the point in the game where I am now, but I saw no reason to not get it early anyway). He also wanted to trade-evolve a bunch of stuff, so that added a good 20 or so Pokedex entries for things that are not actually part of my collection. If I was going to be annoying, I could go through my PC and count up how many things I actually own, and display that number on my trainer card, but I'm too lazy to do that. I'm just pointing this out for all zero people that are going to see the large jump in that number and wonder why.
Speaking of the trainer card, that's all I had to talk about in this segment, so uh...
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