With that, the game finally gives us some space. With the basic mechanics established and enough supplies last us a while, we get to actually play the game for a bit. Nemona even heals us up if we talk to her. That’s nice of her.





Remember that glowing spot I passed? That was one of the game’s many, many item pickups scattered across the map like Ubisoft collectibles, and you can pick them up without stopping by running over them and mashing A. These red, shining Poké Balls are ordinary items (Poké Balls, healing items, vendor trash) and are by far the most common, but you can also find yellow glints on the ground (rare and powerful items) or yellow Poké Balls off in corners (TMs). Playing conservatively and making sure to use Pokémon Centers frequently, you can be the game without ever buying an item just by picking up stuff you run across in the overworld.



Unfortunately, we are still at the beginning of an open world game. Big chunks of the overworld are either difficult to access or possible to get to without travel upgrades we’ll be getting later.





Poco Path has a nice spread of simple starter ‘mons, but they aren’t very interesting to fight or worse catch. Up on a cliff near some palm trees we run to our first actual target – Pawmi, the first stage of this generation’s electric mouse line. Just hitting it paralyzes poor Sylvando and forces me to trek back to Nemona for a free heal. We have our first party member! Unlike in certain past generations, you can just rename your dudes from the main menu, so I don’t have to stop the game in its tracks to ask for your input.

Anyway, after a bit of puttering around, we come near a split in the road in front of the lighthouse. As we walk up to it…

We only take a few steps down the side path before the game takes control from us for a cutscene.



As we walk up to the top of a cliff…







… The camera pans to reveal the Pokémon from the opening, collapsed on the ground and menaced by a pair of Houndours.





It scares them off with an earthshaking roar.



One so earthshaking it breaks the cliff, sending Juliana off the edge.





We need a name for our new Pawmi. And, if you have an absolutely name for the Lechonck, I’ll throw that in too.

Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Dec 20, 2022

This isn’t exactly a complicated battle (despite the theme). A level 5 Skwovet is a level 5 Skwovet; two Water Guns from Sylvando send it packing. This fight only exists to signal that the game won’t throw unwinnable situations like in the cave at you very often. That said, it is entirely possible to throw the battle. The games even calls you out on it.

The first time I played this game, I was kind of confused why Arven’s “in the humanities track” despite being in what seems to be high school – what is this, college prep? Turns out, it’s actually a thing in Spain. Now, I’m no expert and most of this is based on Internet research, so take the following with a grain of salt; I’ll happily edit out parts of this section that aren’t accurate and add commentary from people who’ve been through the real deal to this post, but given how much emphasis this game puts on schooling, it might be useful to go through the Spanish education system.

So, like school systems in a lot of English-speaking countries, Spanish schools have four levels: preschool, primary, secondary, and college. Unlike most Anglophone schools, however, they don’t use a year-based educational structure; they do measure what years people are in, but progress is structured in multi-year “cycles” which (as far as I can tell, my sources aren’t too clear) concentrate assessment testing in the last part of the cycle instead of at the end of each year. Preschool (no cycles, ages 3 to 6) isn’t mandatory but primary school (three two-year cycles from 6 to 12) is; schools mostly focus on Spanish, math, science, and social studies (which is broader than its Anglophone equivalents), with phys ed, the arts, and a secondary language to a lesser extent. If the school’s in her part of Spain with a recognized local language, like Catalonia or the Basque Country, they throw that in there too. Catholicism has had a huge influence on Spanish education, and there used to be religious classes in there as well, but those were made voluntary and supplemented by civics courses just a couple years ago. In fact, the whole system is currently undergoing a bunch of reforms around curriculum and teaching methods, and soon enough technology courses might take up as much school time as any of the four core curriculums, but the laws putting that in place haven’t gone into effect yet.

Secondary education covers two cycles from ages 12 to 16. The first cycle covers the same subjects in more detail with a few elective courses added; the second puts even more emphasis on electives until by the last year students are designing their own curriculum. Mandatory education ends at 16, but students often spend the next two years either going to a vocational school or sticking around for a sort of college-prep program called the Bachillerato; it has three rough focuses, arts, technical sciences, and humanities/social sciences (that last one splits into two tracks in the second year), each of which funnels you off into applying for a certain type of college program.

I bring this up because, even though Pokémon generally likes to keep the ages of its protagonists vague, that one line from Nemona tells us roughly how old everyone is. For reasons I’ll go into a bit later, Arven’s probably just starting that humanities/social sciences track, which puts him at 16 at the start of the school year; Nemona is still directly involved with the student body but also old enough to run the studentcCouncil (however that works in Spain, I wasn’t able to find info there), so she’s likely 15 and at how many courses on battling she’ll get to take. Our protagonist looks of lot younger, but since we just started at the school and the director paired us up with Nemona like that, we’re probably 12 and just starting ESO, which makes Naranja either a secondary school or a combined primary/secondary school.

I don’t know how much of this the devs actually intended and how much of it is me seeing patterns that aren’t actually there, but it lines up well enough that you can assume that’s everyone’s ages going forward in the LP. Of course, my research might be completely wrong, so .

Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Dec 28, 2022

Explopyro fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Dec 28, 2022

So, it has come to my attention that I have, in fact, hosed up every single music link in the LP so far! I needed to cut back on music links anyway (finding the right track out of 130+ unlabeled ones for 20-second clips wasn’t exactly conducive to running an LP), so I’ll try to keep things more focused on that end. From now on music links should actually go where I say they’re going but I’ll be going back and fixing them when I have the time. One by one. For half a dozen updates.



Anyway…

Now we reach the open world trial area. Poco Path taught us how to play the game in the more casual sense, but this area is structured like any other region of the map (albeit smaller and with only two exits).



It even has our first random trainer! Older Pokémon games frequently used trainers as unofficial gates that blocked off areas until players were strong enough to either match them in ability or just plow through them with overleveled Pokémon. Now, with “open world” the rule of the day and gating mechanics thrown out the window (sort of, I’ll get to that), you have to actually walk up and interact with trainers to pick fights. They’re also a lot rarer now, to the point you can travel between some cities following the roads and see two humans, one of which even want to fight you. I think it’s to encourage exploration, which makes sense, but it does make grinding take forever.

The trainers themselves are also significantly tougher than they were last time around, more on par with Gen 7 than Gen 8’s infamous pushovers. This kid had one bug that nearly flattened poor El Picachu before Sylvando bailed him out.



Just like in the last couple generations, you don’t wander around tall grass hoping you find something interesting anymore; now, the Pokémon roam freely in little spawning areas, so you have to run around the whole overworld hoping you find something interesting. The screenshot is a little misleading, though, and the overworld teems with various random encounters. Like… I shouldn’t catch a Psyduck. I already have a Water type, I know it’s a little early to care about type overlap but I’m probably just to get rid of it anyway. But… .

Actually, I have an idea!



Each route has places where rare Pokémon spawn, usually off in a corner somewhere. But even in those places, those Pokémon spawn maybe once an in-game day – and that’s about 40 minutes of real time, so if you flub a catch or get a lovely Pokémon, you’re out of luck unless you actively try to farm it. Ralts here is South Province (Area One)’s rare Pokémon, it only spawns in this area, there’s only ever one of it at a time, and the game may prevent it from respawning until you reach the next area. I know in my first time through I caught one with worst possible nature, came back the next day, and found nothing. Fortunately, I was able to catch this one pretty easily (proving auto-catching doesn’t happen anymore in the process, it took three shakes for the ball to settle down) and put it in my party.







Didn’t show this before because I wasn’t able to catch the right screenshots, but every time you get a new Pokémon, it shows you their Pokédex entry, then plays a little animation where the entry spins around and slots itself into a little bookshelf of potential entries. It’s a nice little touch.



Fortunately for me, this Ralts doesn’t suck. For those unfamiliar, natures influence Pokémon stat growth by boosting one stat and penalizing another (or sometimes they cancel each other out). My last Ralts was Adamant, raising its Attack (which it would probably never use) and dropping its Special Attack (which is the whole point of that line). Fortunately, that’s not the case with this little guy, so he;s likely to be in my party for always to come. Plus, I don’t have to catch that Psyduck now!



I went back and caught it anyway. Oh well, it fills party space.



What’s this?



That was a Gimmighoul, but the game won’t let us catch it, instead just giving us a Gimmighoul Coin as it runs away. We’ll be seeing more of these things later.

Speaking of later, once we hit the end of this route…

… We run into our first Pokémon Center and a handy Nemona with another tutorial dump. As you can probably tell, I rather like how this game tutorializes for the most part, but I’ll go ahead and take the reins for now.

Pokémon Centers work the same way they have in the last few generations. At the outskirts of every major city and a few spots out in the hills you can find these outposts with a handy place to heal your Pokémon for free (in this generation giving you hints on where to go next in the process) and buy items you may or may not need all in one trip. Unlike in previous generations, you can’t buy TMs there. Or rather, you can’t buy them from the wage slave behind the counter. You have to make them instead.

At any Pokémon Center, you’ll find a big machine next to the nurse that manufactures TMs with a few ingredients. I haven’t been showing this off to save space, but every time we defeat a wild Pokémon, we automatically harvest some of its body parts; these serve as raw materials for the machine, which grinds them into a horrifying mulch and compresses the bloody slurry into shiny new TM discs. You also need to pay it with the game’s new secondary currency, League Points (or LP, which will not at all get confusing when we talk about LP in this LP), but most of the ways you get them haven’t even been introduced yet, so the game doesn’t explain them and neither will I. But it does explain something completely unrelated right at the end of the sequence.



By pressing R you can toss Pokémon at the front of your party and take them on walks. You could do this in Gen 8 too, but it actually has a purpose here; instead of just following you around and clipping through objects, your Pokémon can auto-battle nearby wild Pokémon. I’m still not sure exactly how you trigger these autobattles, even after beating the game. Sometimes your guy follows you around and sometimes they start beating anything nearby, I dunno.



Either way, these fights are entirely automated, give reduced experience, and don’t consume HP unless your Pokémon runs into something more powerful than them, but most importantly, they give you Pokémon parts without you having to sit down and manually beat up pigeons forever. I didn’t use this function much my first time around, but this time I may have more time to sink into it – let me know if you have a better grasp of the mechanics than I do. Next time we’ll be exploring our first town and possibly finally reaching school, but before then I’ll need names for our Ralts and Psyduck.

Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Jan 9, 2023