For this post-game stuff, I'm just gonna sort of summarize what I did in a faster fashion than usual, since I haven't noted down most of the details. As far as I'm concerned, the main purpose of doing these writeups is to point out my specific reactions to parts of the game in a humorous fashion whenever possible, or at the very least, provide some sort of commentary on it instead of simply saying "I go here, I do this". I don't want it to completely devolve into that, since it wouldn't be very interesting to read. And I also don't want to try and force every minor thing I did in the past two weeks into one huge segment either. So if it seems like I'm sorta skipping through big chunks or leaving stuff out, it's probably because I've either forgotten the details by now, or I decided it wasn't completely worth including it. Don't get me wrong though, it's still probably going to be stupidly long like usual.
To start out, here's my spoils from the most recent Vinesauce Wonder Trade session:
- A Rowlet with the OT "Jolyne"
- A Spanish Litten with the OT "kote". Yes, two starters in a row.
- An Eevee hatched in a Premier Ball with the OT "Dock".
- A Level 3 Lucario hatched in a Luxury Ball with the OT "Nick".
- A Midday Lycanroc named "Geode", caught in a Quick Ball, with the OT "Sydney".
- A Cosmog named "Nebby" with the OT "David". Well, that's nice to have for the living dex, that'll be one less thing to try and get off the GTS. Kinda wish it wasn't nicknamed that though, since it doesn't quite fit with the "actual" Nebby, the Lunala. Still, won't complain.
- A Yungoos with the OT "Samuel". Caught at Level 2 with an Ultra Ball, totally not a waste of resources at all.
- A Japanese Pom-Pom Oricorio
- A Geodude with the OT "Kris", hatched in a regular Poke Ball.
And that's it. The Cosmog's definitely cool, and I guess it's nice to get extra starters (even though I didn't need them for anything), but the rest is pretty dull. And believe it or not, this was the last Wonder Trade session he's done, despite the amount of time that's passed since the last update. Mainly because of Elite Four stuff, and now that Vinny's finished the game, he hasn't done a stream of it in a while (despite saying that he would do postgame, it's yet to be seen).
So aside from that, I guess I'll just go through a list of stuff I did. Much of this was brought to my attention through a "postgame checklist" found here: http://pokemonpostgame.com/src/sumo_checklist.html
By talking to Professor Kukui in his lab, I got the Lucky Egg. Even though I already did most of the evolving that I needed to do for the Pokedex, this is still definitely appreciated. Can't wait until I need to level up Deino, with its insane Level 50 and 64 evolution levels. Kukui also gives the TM for Substitute after talking to him a second time, which wasn't even remotely obvious. Before leaving, I check out Lillie's loft area and find that a Murkrow has pecked the lock off her diary, allowing it to be read. I remember hearing about this being a fairly big deal, but it honestly doesn't reveal anything that wasn't already known. It's just a recap of the events that happened to her from the moment she left Aether Paradise to the start of the game with the bridge incident. I suppose it's nice to have for flavor text, but yeah, not all that amazing.
After checking that out, I remembered that there was some stuff I could do at the Trainer's School, so I went back there. After fighting the Blackbelt guarding the door to the principal's office, it's made pretty clear that these post-game battles are no joke. He wasn't terribly hard, but the principal herself was, and I actually had to reset to beat her. That's going to be sort of a trend in a lot of upcoming fights.
Winning that battle gets me a King's Rock, which is needed to evolve Slowpoke into Slowking and Poliwhirl into Politoed. Politoed, of course, can be found in the wild through a very annoying process, and if it wasn't for my insistence on catching everything from the wild when possible, I'd probably just get another King's Rock to evolve it. Except it turns out that the only way to do that is to get them off certain wild Pokemon (as I assumed), and every single one of them is an SOS encounter aside from Hariyama, which I (at the time) didn't realize was even found in the wild anywhere, since the Pokedex doesn't indicate that it is. So yeah, have fun getting more of those.
It was around this time that I was invited to provide a Mystery Egg to Snivy (a Discord chat member, and one of my youtube fans). If you're not sure what that means, it's when you do a playthrough of a Pokemon game with six eggs provided from other people, so that what you end up using is a surprise. I decided to send a Drampa, since it's encountered at the very end of the game and therefore isn't feasible to use in a team in most cases.
I also decided to go a step beyond and breed an Egg move onto it, Hurricane. The problem with that is that the only things that could learn Hurricane in Drampa's egg group are Gyarados and Dragonite. I didn't have a Dragonite yet (and wasn't feeling up to evolving a Dragonair, since that would take a long time), and Gyarados learns it at Level 48. So what I ended up doing was Solid Snaking my way past all the trainers in the later sections of Poni Island in order to get to Poni Meadow, where high-leveled Magikarp and Gyarados could be found. After a bit of SOS chaining, I managed to snag a male Level 57 Magikarp, and then spent a few minutes getting it to gain a level and evolve. Then it was a simple matter of using a Heart Scale to learn Hurricane, catching a female Drampa, and breeding them.
I ended up making twelve eggs, and then saved before hatching them to see their natures and abilities. The best one of the litter was sent off as my donation to the Mystery Egg run, and the other eleven (plus their parents) are currently hanging out in a PC box because I don't feel like releasing them.
Here's where things are just going to turn into a series of short "I did this" snippets that I can't really link together in any meaningful way, so I might as well just list them off.
- While leveling up the Magikarp earlier, I ran into and caught a Sensu Style Oricorio. This is the first of many captures, which I'll start listing off later when I get to them.
- I scanned the Magearna code, but didn't pick it up yet since I'll want to reset for nature and whatnot.
- I did some more QR Code scans, caught a Horsea as my first Island Scan Pokemon aside from the Serperior from way earlier. Fast-forwarding quite a bit, I tried to make an effort to do two Island Scans a day (using the "special" QR Codes that give 20 points instead of 10), but I ended up forgetting on many of the days. I currently have, in addition to the Serperior and Horsea, a Venipede, Litwick, Cyndaquil, Totodile, Spheal, Deino, Luxio, Honedge, Roselia, Chikorita, Bellsprout, Marill, Axew, Gothita, and Rhyhorn. I've not done any breeding or evolving with them yet, and as with all my other living dex stuff, I will be catching multiples of the lower evolutions. So that's gonna take quite a while to finish.
- After deciding to check out Hau back in Iki Town, it appears that he's training Skull Grunts to sumo wrestle apparently. Except as usual, they're just sort of gesticulating at each other.
- Game Director Morimoto (in the Gamefreak building) is too high-leveled for me to beat. I gave it a few attempts, but couldn't really come close. I'll eventually want to do this, if not for the sake of completion, then because he gives the Oval Stone.
- Some random NPCs scattered around give away some decent items. Kiawe's Dad in Paniola Town gives a Protector, Kahili in the Great Hano Resort gives the TM for Trick Room, and a person in Mallow's restaurant in Konikoni City gives the Whipped Dream, Sachet, and Dragon Fang.
- I checked out the Po Town Pokemon Center, because I heard you can buy a Team Skull Tanktop here. That was true, but it costs a ton of money and I don't particularly want it (aside from completion purposes), so I'll be holding off on that, as with most of the clothing options and all the TMs I haven't bought yet.
- I picked up the free Porygon and Up-Grade from Aether House. At some point later on I do end up evolving it, then breeding for another. Along with Joel's Porygon-Z (which he doesn't care about keeping), that makes that family complete in my living dex.
- In the Seafolk Village Pokemon Center, I battled a guy with a shiny Exeggcute. After beating him, I get six nuggets, which is thematically fitting I suppose. I think this is the first trainer-owned shiny Pokemon in the series since the ones in the Trainer Tower in Gen 3.
- At Poni Breaker Coast, there's two female swimmers that call themselves the "Hidden Maidens". Beating them in a double battle gets me the TMs for Surf and Waterfall. Ha, Hidden Maidens, Hidden Machines, I see what you did there. Maybe because you made it really obvious in the dialogue. Apparently their plan was to sell them somewhere in Alola since they'd be valuable TMs and you can't actually sell HMs back in their home region... I still don't get how it sort of "changes" depending on where you are. Region-locking? It's weird.
- On Route 8, I ran into Colress again who gave me the four Genesect Drives for some reason. And he did so one at a time, very slowly. And then once again he left, realizing that his purpose in this game is nearly non-existent.
I could continue that format of writing for ages, but I already said earlier that it's fairly uninteresting and a waste of time, so hopefully the next few things will actually be slightly related and worth talking about.
At some point after getting the free Porygon, I decided it would be worth it to head over to Aether Paradise and get the Type: Null from Gladion. I ended up deciding that I'd rather reset for a good one though, so I still haven't actually done this yet. And speaking of things I haven't done yet, I haven't battled Faba there for his Dubious Disc, since he's pretty high-leveled. Of the trainers I'm currently ignoring, he's probably the easiest though. The other ones I haven't fought (at the time of writing this) are the Game Director, a certain callback trainer that I'll mention later, and Guzma. Remember wayyyy back to Route 2, where there was a house where a kid with a much of trophies used to live? Turns out that was Guzma. And though it's not spelled out super obviously in the English version, there are at least hints towards the fact that his dad used to beat him with golf clubs for not being good enough, leading to his current personality.
Back at Aether Paradise, I went to the basement area to check out the Secret Labs again, only to run into Wicke. She explains a bit about why Lillie went to Kanto - apparently it's because of Bill's Pokemon fusion machine, since Lusamine was sort of fused with Nihilego back in Ultra Space. They're hoping that his machine might be able to reverse the damages done. Kind of an interesting callback, I suppose. She also gives me two Big Malasadas for no particular reason.
In Secret Lab A, I don't find anything related to Type: Null, but I do get some other legendary-related items from a random employee: the DNA Splicers, Prison Bottle, and Soul Dew. Gotta love the need to shoehorn like 80 different items into every game. And lastly, in Secret Lab B, I receive ten Beast Balls from Wicke, saying I'll be needing them soon. I suppose there's no point in putting it off anymore then, I need to go check out the motel on Route 8.
And so here's where things are probably going to be sped up like crazy. Everything you've read so far was done over the course of a day or two, and I actually did have some basic notes on what I did in that time. Beyond this point, everything's going to be purely from memory.
Upon entering the motel, I come across none other than series mainstay Looker of the International Police! And also his boss, who is ... some random chick named Anabel! Apparently she's the Frontier Brain of the Battle Tower in Emerald, I sure as hell didn't remember that. Probably because I never bothered much with the Battle Frontier outside of the LP, and I'd like to forget about that experience as much as possible.
So here's the scoop: Ultra Beasts are being sighted across the region, and I need to catch them before they cause any major harm. But first, for no real reason whatsoever, I have to battle Anabel to prove that I'm strong enough, since apparently being the Champion isn't good enough. I joke about such things, but there's quite a level gap between Kukui and Anabel here. I was almost prepared to say screw it and not bother with this until later, but somehow I did manage to get through the fight with five Level 50s (I forget which ones) plus the always-unused Nebby, and I only had to abuse healing items for her last Pokemon, a Weavile.
With that out of the way, I'm told to go check out either Wela Volcano Park or Diglett's Tunnel, because Nihilego has been sighted there. Now, remember how I took the game super seriously back with the whole "Nebby wants to go on a journey with you" thing? I'm doing pretty much the exact opposite here, since my actions are not only putting people in serious danger, but also costing the government untold millions of dollars. Why? Well, here's the deal.
The game intends you to use those ten Beast Balls for Nihilego. After you catch it, you get ten more to go after the next Ultra Beast, and so on until you have them all. In the event that you use up all the Beast Balls, you can talk to Looker for one more, but he says to be extremely careful with it because they cost over a million each. He'll only give you one if you don't have any in your inventory. But you can abuse the system by giving it to a Pokemon to hold, since he won't check that.
So what followed at this point was at least five hours (probably quite a bit more) of me grabbing six Pokemon from the PC, then talking to him, getting a Ball, putting it on a Pokemon, talking again, etc, then taking those six Pokemon to the PC, getting six new ones, and repeating. I did this until every single Pokemon in the PC is holding a Beast Ball. Yeah, it's every bit as tedious as it sounds. At the time of me writing this, I currently have 428 of them. Keep in mind that from Looker's perspective, he seems me come into the room, say that I don't have any more, and then he goes into his whole "What? You used them all? Well ok, I suppose I can part with one..." spiel. He gives me the ball, I give it to a Pokemon to hold, and then immediately ask for another. And he continues to do this. It's kind of excellent, really.
Why am I doing this? Here's the thing: I DON'T KNOW. I do plan on catching the four Tapus with Beast Balls (which I imagine is going to be complete hell, since they have a x0.1 catch multiplier, and the Tapus have the standard legendary catch rate of 3), but I don't think that's my specific reason for hoarding them. Mainly it's just because they're rare items and I want as many as I can reasonably have, drawing the line at catching new Pokemon specifically to fill the PC to hold more Balls.
Also, I haven't actually started the UB quest, since I'm doing the opposite thing with them from what I'm doing with the Tapus: I want to catch all the Ultra Beasts in Apricorn Balls. Well, not the duplicate ones, but one of each. Not all of them match up perfectly, and I'll have one ball left over at the end, but I figure I'll do Lure Ball for Nihilego, Love Ball for Pheromosa, Fast Ball for Xurkitree, Friend Ball for Celesteela, and Heavy Ball for Guzzlord, leaving only the Level Ball left over. (And Necrozma will go in a Beast Ball because, again, it's the hardest thing I can use for it). I've not started any of this because I fear for my sanity.
So ignoring all that, I still have a large portion of Poni Island to explore. And since I didn't take any notes on it, you can expect this part to go by pretty quickly. First, there's a battle against Dexio to get the Mega Ring. He uses a Mega Alakazam in the battle, which I manage to take out with Laylee through a combination of spamming Calm Mind and healing when necessary. He gives the Alakazite upon defeat, the only Mega Stone in the game that isn't a huge pain to get, since all the rest have to be bought with BP or require getting a streak of wins in the Battle Tree. Ideally I would like to get all of them for collection purposes, but I dunno if I see that happening.
Poni Grove, the first area available, is short and pretty unremarkable. I did spend a fair amount of time SOS chaining for a Lucario though. Had to restart a few times because Chanseys kept showing up and giving more experience than I'd like. But I did eventually catch one, plus a regular Riolu afterwards.
The next area, Poni Plains, is quite large and took a good amount of time to fully explore. There's a number of different ways to encounter Pokemon here - regular grass, rustling shadows in the grass, moving shadows of bird Pokemon, and two different sets of rustling bushes with different Pokemon in each. All together, I got Primeape, Mandibuzz, Mudsdale, Hariyama (replacing my existing one evolved from a Makuhita), two Scythers, Emolga, and Hypno (again, replacing my evolved Drowzee). The Thunderbolt TM is also here, which is generally a nice thing to have, but Crazy Bus is more of a physical attacker and none of my other Pokemon really seemed to benefit from it. And speaking of TMs, one of the worst ones in the game, Quash, is given from the local "beat everyone first" trainer.
Located in Poni Plains is Poni Meadow, an area I already visited earlier briefly when I needed to catch the high-level Magikarp. So there wasn't anything new to catch there, but I never actually explored the area. Turns out it's mostly vertical, with a lot of climbing on tree branches and such. Reminds me of the Root Cave from Metroid Prime, actually, which is pretty cool. And at the top of it is the entrance to Resolution Cave, a fairly empty and useless cave in the grand scheme of things. It has a couple trainers, wild Crobat (which took me freaking ages to encounter), the TM for Earthquake, and a few other cool items like the Life Orb and Light Ball. I've read that it's supposed to be similar to Terminus Cave, the place in Kalos where Zygarde is found, but I'm not really sure of the connection personally.
The next area is Poni Coast. Not Poni Breaker Coast, mind you, just Poni Coast. I kinda hate how all these areas are just "Poni [noun]", especially with so many of them being similar. But I guess since there's no towns or anything, they didn't feel the need to rename any of them to Route Whatever. But yeah, this place is pretty barren. Just some rocks to break, the Dark Pulse TM, and a double battle against some tourists. I do like how the game gives this opportunity to see the original forms of the stuff that gained Alolan Forms, and I believe I have all of them registered in the Pokedex except for Grimer and Muk. Not sure where you see those, maybe the Battle Buffet. I do mean to go back there at some point. Anyway, moving on to the last area...
Poni Gauntlet, a location that is pretty much what the name sounds like. It's a series of difficult trainers (for me, at least, since I'm underleveled) and what I assume are the highest level wild Pokemon in the game, going as high as Level 59. Again, since I didn't take any notes on this area, I don't have any warstories to share or anything. The only battle that is super noteworthy here is against Mina, the extremely baked-looking trial captain that isn't actually a trial captain that I met earlier. Her team of Level 61 Fairy Pokemon seemed fairly threatening at first, but I managed to get through it with relative ease due to her bad AI attempting to use Shiinotic's Spore against Dreemurr continuously, allowing me to get up three Swords Dances and sweep the remainder of the team.
Also located at Poni Gauntlet are wild Bewears and the ability to get Dragonite through SOS chaining, which didn't take nearly as long as I thought it would. I also didn't expect it to show up at Level 10, so the only way I was able to catch it was to inflict paralysis and throw balls at full health, which is always a joy. After catching Dragonite (and doing a bunch of trade evolutions a few days earlier), my living dex was almost complete aside from legendaries, with the only missing things being Metang and Metagross, Trevenant, Poliwrath, and Politoed. The first three things on that list are there because I'm still hoping to get them from Poke Pelago, though I did eventually cave in and catch two more Beldums and evolve them. I still don't have a Trevenant at this time, and I'm hoping to not have to cave in and evolve a Phantump. That leaves the Polis.
I've already discussed how annoying Politoed is to catch, and Poliwrath isn't much better, aside from the fact that it can't kill itself with Perish Song. But through persistence and a lot of tedium, I did actually manage to catch both of them. Poliwrath actually didn't take that long to show up, and it stayed in the ball pretty quickly.
Politoed, as I predicted, took many hours of attempts and resets to actually show up, and it was a very stressful event when it finally did. I was using Skeeter (holding a Damp Rock) as my Rain Dance user, since they'll only show up through SOS calls during rain. I also had El Grapadora with me with Taunt on its moveset, since that's one of the only ways to prevent Politoed from using Perish Song and completely ruining everything. When it finally did show up, I just had to hope to lord Arceus that it didn't use Perish Song on the turn that I switched out, and luckily for me, it didn't. Taunt only lasts three turns though, including the turn that it's used on. So to switch out to a Pokemon to do something else to it, I'd have to use one turn to switch, another to use a move, and a third to switch back before getting in another Taunt, which poses a problem. I took the risk to do this and get in a Thunder Wave, and once again I lucked out, but it attempted to use Perish Song on the exact turn that I Taunted it after that, so I figured it was too risky to attempt False Swiping it with Garchomp (which I had with me just in case). It was an annoying process and took about 15 or 20 Premier Balls, but I finally got it. And with that, my Pokedex is at 99% for each Island Dex and 95% for the total one.
That leaves only one other thing to write about, and no, it's not the Eeveelution sidequest (I forgot about that for a while and then decided to not start it until after writing this). It's the matter of the Battle Tree... and not even the Battle Tree itself. Pretty much immediately after stepping foot on the far end of Poni Gauntlet, everyone's favorite jerkass and silent protagonist show up: Blue and Red, respectively. There's a bit of dialogue with Blue before he gives the option to battle either him or Red. I decided to go for Blue, since I find him a bit more interesting (since he actually has a character) and Red was already the ultimate boss of the Johto games.
And yeah, my team of Level 55s does not appear to be good enough for the job. I could probably get through it with enough Revive spamming, but that's really cheap and really boring to do, so I'm just gonna hold off on that for a bit. I'm not in any huge rush to get to the Battle Tree anyway. So at this time, I'm left with a few difficult trainers that I'll need to beat at some point, the Eeveelution quest, lots of legendary catching, and some other assorted riff-raff like finding all the Zygarde Cells. I don't really have any plans for how to tackle it yet, but I will mention that I'm at least somewhat considering picking up a new set of team members comprised of Ultra Beasts and Tapus to go along with Nebby and possibly Silvally. I've said before that it's been ages since the last time I've actually used legendaries for anything, and while it feels weird to consider breaking that tradition, it might be kinda fun. We'll see how that goes.
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