primrose

that may be a game-changer. thank you so much for sharing this!

not sure if this is a dumb question of me, but better to ask and have an answer than remain clueless! i've been pondering whether to attempt a novelization style fanfiction of reborn, since my love language is writing and this game has been something i've loved for the last 9+ years. the biggest practical hurdle that's occurred to me is the inclusion of canon dialogue. i think i will lose my mind if i ever try to write scenes with a painstaking textbox-by-textbox replay of the game just to have canon-accurate content. it would be a lot kinder to my mental health if ctrl-f and copy-pasting were the option i had instead. if anyone knows of a nice document, instructions on how to find said document, and/or an extremely comprehensive video playlist of game cutscenes and character interactions throughout the entirety of pokemon reborn, i would greatly appreciate learning of it. <3

i've got adhd so i totally get it. sorry i couldn't be more helpful on that end. metagrossite no, sadly. charous path is right between victory road and the elite four—endgame, for the main story at least. and yes, you absolutely can quicksave between the battles. there's a decently lengthy pause after each fight before dialogue boxes turn back up. that's your chance. it's indeed SO helpful. (and it's not difficult to return to an earlier save to alter your team. there's resources somewhere around on how to do that.)

not sure how many explanations of evs and ivs you've tried to get through, so bear with me if i can't make it make sense in the end. gotta try! evs, which stands for 'effort values,' are points you can invest into a stat to increase its total. think rpgs that give you points to put into skills/abilities like intelligence or health. you get these points by defeating other pokemon, and what species of pokemon they are determines what type of points you earn from them and how many. like if you were training against actual enemies with specialties for you to improve against. sometimes it's intuitive, sometimes not. ivs, which stands for 'individual values,' tell you what the individual pokemon's potential is in each stat. it's often compared to genetics, especially because you can manipulate ivs through breeding pokemon, and i think it's a helpful analogue. the value for a given stat will be anywhere in the range 0-31. the higher the value, the higher the stat total the pokemon has the potential to achieve through levelling up and ev training. now for numbers. pokemon reborn very helpfully gives a page in a pokemon's summary that lays out its evs and ivs for viewing (canon does not do this). here's an example of one of my own pokemon. the numbers on the left of the slashes are the evs invested in each stat; the numbers on the right are the ivs. as you can hopefully see, my gardevoir has 252 evs in spatk and spdef, 4 evs in speed, and a dangling 2 in defense. the numbers might be a bit confusing, but basically every 4 evs will boost the stat it's invested in. multiples of 4 are all that matters. the maximum multiple of 4 you can get in one stat is 252. (canon unhelpfully puts the upper limit at 255, which is not a multiple of 4, but pokemon reborn does us a favor and maxes it at 252 for us.) keeping this in mind, an individual pokemon can also only have a total of 510 evs in all. that's enough for two stats with max evs and one stat to have a small boost of 4. that is, 252+252=504, with a leftover of 6. you can of course distribute evs in whatever way you wish, not just 252/252/4. the most important thing to remember is that evs are only helpful in multiples of 4. my gardevoir has two max ivs: def and spdef. this means that she gets the highest possible stat totals in each, counting how much ev training she has in them. with effectively no ev training in def (2 not being a multiple of 4), she gets no additional boost the way that her spdef does with 252 evs. in that sense, you can think of each iv representing a range of potential stat totals dependent on the number of evs invested: 0 evs being the lowest of that range, 252 evs being the highest. for additional illustration, gardevoir also has an iv of 4 in atk. in the iv range of 0-31, this value is what we would call 'dogshit.' so it's a good thing that my gardevoir has no need for a good atk stat; she's entirely a special attacker, something that her moveset and species' base stats reflect as well. if most of that does happen to make sense, then i definitely recommend doing some ev training. (ivs are a hassle that i do not recommend bothering with at your experience level lol.) evs can make a big world of difference in damage calculations and such, especially at higher levels. you can buy the power items (which in reborn give the pokemon holding it 32 evs per participating battle for the stat that corresponds to each item) either at the 4th floor of the department store or in agate circus from one of the clowns behind the northernmost stand, beside the big top iirc. they're fairly expensive though. if you can't quite afford them, the other primary ev training item could be picked up in one of the coral ward warehouses pre-restoration: the macho brace. in reborn, holding the macho brace increases the evs received from defeating a pokemon by a multiplier of 8—that is, if you beat up a pokemon that drops 1 atk ev, the macho brace will up it to 8 atk evs. there are also locations for ev training in the game where all the wild encounters give evs for a single specific stat; here's one thread with a list for e19. to remove any pesky unwanted evs, the friendship berries subtract 20 evs each from their corresponding stats. they're available for purchase from the 2nd floor of the department store or from a clown in one of the south-southeastern stalls at agate circus. as for advice you've actually asked for: i definitely think mawile and metagross could be good options for you. steel types offer good resistances against most of the glass gauntlet as well as super effectiveness against ice types. metagross will resist psychic type moves, too. mawilite is obtainable at your point of story progress if you haven't picked it up already (in the teknite range from the tourmaline desert), so you could have a mega evo on your team. medicham with its pure power ability, fighting type options, and medichamite are similarly possible (medichamite can be found in sugiline cave). there are more helpful held items than the plates, though i don't know how many you've managed to collect. if you've done the spyce sidequest, the one where you fulfill what's effectively a grocery shopping list for the chefs there, you receive 2 leftovers that you could give to your tankier party members. quick claw and lax incense/bright powder can be surprisingly clutch, at least in my experience, and imo worth it for team members on the more glass cannon side who don't benefit much from any other items you might have. if you do decide to look into ev training, there's plenty of resources out there on recommended ev distributions and suitable movesets to go with for pretty much every single pokemon, and i know i have my own personal quirks re: training and listening to others' advice. my biggest advice really would be to play to your pokemon's strengths. look at their base stats, ivs, and possible moves, and strengthen what they're already good at. your results will almost always be powerful and much more reliable. if you don't mind a bit of cheese, quicksave is your friend as well. it's usually toggled to the 'd' key, and if you try it when there is no dialogue, you will be able to save right at that point. it certainly helped me out a lot, not having to repeat already tough fights. hope that all helps!

seriously, i've been following reborn for coming on 10 years now. the passage of time is so weird, but i'm so excited to play the game's best and possibly final version. appreciate you guys and the monumental culmination of work this episode will represent! both from e19 in specific and from every update that's preceded it. team members have come and gone but every one of you deserves at least an internet high five for such an engaging, passionate fangame. <3

i just saw the dev blog's update to 100% and went :OOO in real time. so happy in fact that i'm making my first post in... over 6 years. the long-awaited e19 u-u. i need to replay this game.

to answer your actual question, the reason you couldn't catch absol here was because absol was doing what it usually does: foretell doom. an absol will also appear right before you enter Corey's gym for the first time. (although this was after finding all 5 policemen before the PULSE battle, so i'm not sure about the other timeline.)

i'd personally recommend an intimidate ekans -- you can catch one in the grass right outside the grand hall, particularly at night. arbok gets to be a great help, especially a little later once you get to places like beryl ward and apophyll academy. make sure you keep glare as a move too, since paralysis is very helpful. hyper cutter kricketot/kricketune is pretty much the early-game must, if you want to sweep through your opponents easily. volt absorb pachirisu or lightning rod goldeen are also pretty helpful against Julia, for obvious reasons. and honestly, i wouldn't recommend getting noibat this early, as it's virtually dead weight until it evolves (the level caps only allowing you to do so once you get past Kiki, iirc). leavanny's also available pretty early, since you can get a sewaddle by jasper ward, and swinub/cubchoo/event smoochum in the cave by shade's gym once you have rock smash (received under the grand staircase iirc).

no one can really know, like Arcana said, but i think a solid guideline to getting the 'true' timeline would be to always pick the 'tougher' choice, like deciding to refuse giving the ring to Blake even if that means you might never see Heather again. (same thing for the yureyu battle -- Sirius has the higher-lvl team compared to Connal.) this includes the optional battles (as in garchomp and ditto-arceus), since we've now gotten a significant story split related to whether you defeated Solaris's garchomp or not.

mainly because the current ai is terrible, from essentials iirc. if you're looking for challenge from trainers and gym leaders, they're already at a disadvantage because of the ai that's making decisions for them. it's not a human on the other side of the screen, it's a set of algorithms that, for the most part, suck at their jobs. until Ame can fix up the ai, i don't think you'll be getting the kind of challenge that you could find on, say, pokemon showdown. not this way, at least. for the lack of reborn city you're bothered by, did you expect the entire story to take place in just the central city? the entire area you're exploring is the reborn region. the gyms are going to be in different locations, and one region is not going to be covered entirely by a crumbling metropolis. just look at the real world for one. despite the advancements we've made, you still see quite a lot of prairie, desert, jungle, forest, etc. a region is going to have geographical variety, if only because some land is just unfit for urban growth, and frankly, if the reborn region was just this crumbling city, it'd be small. tiny. that's not a region, that's a box you'd be trapped in. everything else on this point, however, is just your opinion. i won't argue with that. i just wanted to point this out. the one other thing i'm confused about is your mention of grinding. personally, i've never had a need to grind unless i'm creating a new team member completely from scratch. not for any gyms, trainers, areas, etc. unless i felt a personal need to (as i'm a perfectionist). honestly, you may have been going about the game the wrong way. you can get plenty of team members in the first third of the game or so that remain useful for a long time after you receive them. personally, i've once used an ekans/arbok from the beginning of the game up until Tanzan before i finally replaced it, and it was my ace for Kiki and Solaris's garchomp besides. you can't judge potential team members based on their value in competitive battle, for instance (looking at your signature mostly), because this isn't competitive battle. this is just a pokemon game.

welcome to the forums! you can find pidoves in the peridot garden and the obsidia slums. :] .. jokes aside, wild staraptors can be found on route 3 iirc, which is after agate circus.

we're not actually spoiler-heavy so feel free to do so. :] we're just naming names and some sidequests in particular, no real details. you can find those out yourself.