Kithros

Yeah, he was vulgar and walked away. He never actually did anything that harmed anybody, he just said mean things. That's my point.

While Fern is an asshole, he hasn't actually done that much to screw people over (so far he's mostly just been vulgar or being a minor nuisance) - when you think about what he's actually done it's not really comparable to what Blake has (ie. trying to starve a city) - though, that's fairly likely to change since he's joined Team Meteor. The worst Fern has done is leave you in a cage, but then it's a bit of a hasty assumption that he would've actually left you in there until you starved to death if it came to that (possible, but uncertain).

If he gets anything with bounce (one of the move tutors in the circus can teach bounce) and outspeeds Samson's pokemon he's not really at all challenging because of the bounce/fly mechanics in that field. High speed bounce/fly can easily sweep him almost regardless of anything else - the only risks are running out of PP or him using fly/bounce in the same turn as you if you outspeed him.

Well, Team Meteor's goals probably involve hooking up Arceus to a PULSE machine - for someone who talks so much about power etc. it's only natural they would have an interest in a PULSE Arceus...

Until it gets at least flame burst yeah Vulpix kind of sucks - but once it gets flame burst it's been incredibly good for me. Flame Burst is like an instant win against Shelly, and once it gets flamethrower/fire blast + evolving it hits insanely hard. Arcanine might have a better variety of moves, but I prefer Ninetales over Arcanine still - with sunny day + STAB neutral fire moves hit harder than super effective moves anyway, which kind of makes coverage largely irrelevant. Any move that doesn't hit for super effective against something that resists fire is almost completely pointless.

Frankly the Kiki thing happening is small in the grand scheme of things - he's already shown that he's willing to kill countless people (and has long before Kiki) with all of the things he's done with the PULSE tTangrowth etc. - there are lots of people that died from the PULSE Tangrowths, and he was trying to kill a lot more than just Kiki on Mt. Pyrous if the volcano erupted. Kiki is just a drop in the bucket (and I'll add, there are other characters in the game that have killed multiple people as well, including Saphira, and possibly even Heather by the end of episode 14). The Kiki thing was just more dramatic, and happened to someone that you were actually introduced to - but when you take away the bias there's nothing new really being shown there. It's more of a calculated thing - he perceives that what he's trying to accomplish is more important than the lives of a few hundred/thousand people, and as such he does what he has to to accomplish it. I don't think that's necessarily a wrong way to approach things *if* he had complete certainty that what he was doing was worth more than the cost, however there are a huge number of questionable assumptions that need to be made before he can conclude that his plan will work, let alone that his plan is actually worth it even if it succeeds. My view of good/evil is perhaps a bit different than most, but I don't really see anything definitive for whether he's good/evil at all. I see it more in terms of whether his goals are self-motivated or for the sake of benefiting the world as a whole, and how much he's willing to personally sacrifice to accomplish it, and neither of those has a very clear answer yet. Whether or not he's actually accomplishing what he thinks he's doing is another issue, but I don't see that as relevant for good/evil judgments.

Same thing I always do at the elite 4 when it's difficult - buy 99 revives and hyper potions (well, maybe I'll go for max potions if they're avaialble seeing as we're going to be level ~100 and 200 health might not be enough anymore..) and exploit the hell out of revives being stupid (I mean, really, I've played hacks where the elite 4 was 20+ levels above my pokemon and I could beat them by using 30+ revives). Destiny bond Gengar with revives is especially silly against the AI since the AI has no clue how to play around destiny bond and you can just revive it over and over again. Anything slower than Gengar is a non-issue, and Gengar is pretty fast.

It used to be a level 100 normal abra - but at some point it got changed to a PULSE Abra (which is psychic/steel instead of just psychic and higher base stats than a normal abra I think). The PULSE pokemon used to be just overleveled pokemon without the 'mega evolution' so to speak.

I've played through it twice - I didn't do a challenge run exactly, though I chose not to use any of the pokemon I used in my first playthrough and I avoided grinding pretty much altogether (to put it into perspective, in my 2nd playthrough I beat Charlotte with an average level of about 60 - that's 10 levels under the level cap, with no EV training etc. and I didn't switch out any of my main team for it which meant I had pokemon that were almost deadweight like Chesnaught). I also always play on set mode because switch mode feels like cheating to me. I've considered doing Nuzlocke runs before, but I feel as though it would slow the game down too much for me to enjoy it. If I were actually going to take a Nuzlocke run seriously then I would never fight any significant fight without having all 6 pokemon fully EV trained and at the level cap (well, if I were *really* serious about it I would even go well past the level cap since a level 100 that doesn't follow orders is still a hell of a lot stronger than a level 50...) - and that just sounds way too tedious to do.

I don't actually get the impression that Solaris is some ultimate evil or somesuch that other people seem to think he is - to me it feels more like a case of combining the 'do whatever it takes' mentality with some very questionable logical assumptions (the whole 'rebuild the world from the start' notion might sound nice and all, but he has absolutely no reason to actually think the world would end up any better the 2nd time even if he succeeded for instance, not to mention all the consequences of what he does if it turns out he's wrong about just about anything). Ruthless perhaps, but that's a bit different from actually being evil.

Most recently I had 2 pokemon with sand attack, 1 pokemon with leech seed, 1 pokemon with knock off and I just grinded the fight out with enough accuracy hax. I helped stall it out and do damage with fake out on a Hariyama + a spiky shield on my Chesnaught, and by switching between Hariyama and Chesnaught he usually used earthquake on chesnaught + fire fang on the hariyama, and they could survive 1 hit of those attacks (since Hariyama has thick fat and Chesnaught has really high defense + a ground resistance) and heal back with leech seed. Makuhita is an easy way to get sand attack (it doesn't really matter if the sand attackers are only level 10-12) - i'm not sure if roggenrola is available that early in the game but if it is that would be ideal since it can have both sand attack and sturdy, but makuhitas can still do it by just save/reloading until he uses dragon rush and misses. I wouldn't really consider this the most reliable way to beat it by any means - however, it didn't require grinding any pokemon or getting anything difficult to find so I ran with it and just save/load spammed until it worked. When I think about it - if you had any low level sturdy pokemon then you could beat him as long as you landed a leech seed on the garchomp, since the sturdy pokemon will heal back to full every turn from leech seed (unless fire fang burns them I guess).

When you get the itemfinder you'll find like 3x as many items as this. Items are littered practically everywhere - if you haven't searched an entire screen for items before, chances are when you use an itemfinder there it will find something. Move 8 spaces up and use the itemfinder again and you'll find another item most of the time.

I think it's more that it's just way too RNG heavy and makes the game way less fun rather than being 'overpowered' exactly - I mean, double team *on average* does about as much as something like cosmic power would, it's just that cosmic power doesn't feel so cheesy because it doesn't vary so wildly.

I mean, in theory something like this might sound cool - but in practical terms, there are *A LOT* of legendaries in the game, and having some huge event chain + several areas in the game for every legendary would take way too long to implement - if you did something like this for every legendary it would probably take longer to finish adding the legendaries to the game than it would for the entire story unless you made the events really repetitive - and having really repetitive events is worse than having no events in my opinion (if you're going to add something to a game it has to be done well - a bad feature is worse than no feature).

So.. you're forced to switch out one of your pokemon, and have a team with 4/6 pokemon that resist fire + no weaknesses tof ire (since mamoswine has thick fat), tons of attacks that hit both of her pokemon in a 2v2 fight (and are super effective), *still* take 3 attempts to beat her, and then proclaim that she's a joke. Pick any or all of the above and this is pretty much just a troll post targetting anyone that has difficulty with Charlotte - a fight that forces you to switch out one of your main team (and spend a link stone at that) and still beats you 2/3 times when you already had lots of favourable type matchups is not what I consider a joke of a fight.

For pokemon with good ground/water/grass/fighting/steel moves you can grind in one of the caves on route 3 pretty well (right next to the healing machine) - there aren't many unevolved pokemon there and even if your pokemon faint you can heal them by walking like 10 steps. Occasionally a sturdy graveler with earthquake can mess you up - but again, you're right next to the healing machine so it isn't that big of a deal.

Honestly, that has almost nothing to do with gigalith anyway. Trick room + any rock/ground pokemon that has a move that hits both of her pokemon wrecks charlotte. The actual pokemon being used don't matter that much (though, ideally they would be pokemon that can reliably take a hit) - it just matters that they have earthquake or rock slide and you get trick room up.

As far as axing pokemon goes - I think it mostly has to do with making us actually work to build our team up, instead of having the team we plan to use from the beginning of the game and then never switching pokemon out afterwards. By forcing us to use weak pokemon early on and then giving us access to better pokemon as time goes on it lets us feel like our team is actually improving over time - the alternative would be we find the pokemon we're looking for by the 2nd-3rd gym and then we stick to the same team for pretty much the entire game. By doing it this way it encourages people to keep catching new pokemon throughout the game instead of only having wild pokemon for completionist purposes, and not so much about if a pokemon is the best pokemon at the time (it's only a problem if it stays the best pokemon to use for an extended period of time). I don't think it's inherently a good/bad way of going about things - I enjoyed pokemon hacks like blaze black/volt white too where you could get access to practically all of the pseudolegendaries before the 3rd gym in the game, it's just a different style of gameplay whether it's aimed towards developing a single team or constantly trying to improve your team.

The puzzles that bothered me personally were: 1) The pokemon puzzle in the team meteor place. 2) The puzzle in Shelly's gym (particularly, only because it wasn't made clear that part of the puzzle involved going to Shelly's room..) Honestly, I found route 2 really easy (albeit a bit time consuming) - the puzzle there wasn't complicated at all when you thought about it. Chrysolia forest was also almost a straight path once you stop worrying about seemingly going in circles (just don't turn around..)

Pichu is already available in the game (and as such you can evolve to pikachu/raichu too), and it's possible to get it pretty early in the game too. As far as deino goes - yeah for most of the game right now it would be deadweight, but it's still too strong for late in the game right now anyway. There might not be much for hydreigon to do right now since it can only really be used against charlotte/terra - but a few episodes down the road and it'll have plenty of playtime for it (this looks like it's going to be going all the way to level 100 by the last episode, and level 64 to 100 is still a lot of playtime) - there's still going to be 6 more gym leaders and the elite 4 + champion, and Hydreigon is going to be too strong for that portion of the game still I think. Additionally, access to Deino really early would be gamebreaking for early gyms because dragon rage is a stupid ability (and Deino starts with it).

I don't think any sane person is really arguing that the fights can't be beaten - but the problem is grinding new pokemon takes ages because grinding wild pokemon is really really slow, and knowing that some pokemon can beat a gym really easily doesn't really help if you don't have those pokemon. I mean, for instance you're talking about against shade getting a jolly scrafty with moxie (which involves beating a level 50 pokemon while you're level capped at 35 - not that it's too difficult to beat the pokemon but you're either going to have to repeat that fight over and over again or go through the slow process of breeding it until you get a jolly+moxie scrafty). Then you have to level it up all the way to level 39 when there are 0 trainers left to fight unless you've missed something in the past, so that means grinding the scraggy up purely on wild pokemon (which give terrible exp) from at the least level 15. I mean, yeah it's 'possible' to do, but realistically nobody is going to have a scrafty for that gym fight (and that's not even going into the speed EV training). Things like getting a flygon for Aya - yeah a flygon wrecks Aya, but if you weren't already leveling a trapinch beforehand it's going to take a ridiculous amount of time to get a Flygon at that point. It's not easy to just switch pokemon into your team when the game was practically designed for grinding to be slow. I already had a level 40 vibrava when I got to Aya and I still had to spend hours grinding before I could evolve it, let alone if I had to start from scratch. I didn't have too much difficulty with any of the gym fights without rotating any pokemon in, so I didn't find it much of a bother - but if I did have to start switching in pokemon just to help me with 1 single gym fight before boxing it in the PC again I would've been pretty annoyed at the gym fights too, because it takes a really long time to grind new pokemon from scratch in this game.

Like: The difficulty and story etc., been said enough times I think. Dislike: A lot of things seem like they make the game more tedious - I mean, i get that they didn't want us to just grind to beat gym leaders every time, but the ridiculously low exp gain in the wild doesn't really disincentivize grinding - it just makes it way slower, and particularly it makes it really annoying to try switching any of your pokemon out for new pokemon. If grinding past the badge levels becomes a problem you could probably reduce the exp gain for pokemon that are above the badge level limit at the time (I don't know how the game is coded so I'm not sure how difficult that would be, but it doesn't seem like it should be that difficult to implement that). The exp. share also comes pretty late in the game, and I don't feel like it was necessary to withhold the exp share (the exp. share has no value in helping you win fights, so I don't see that it breaks the balance in any way - it's just a convenience item, and I don't feel like convenience items should be made difficult to get. It just makes the game more annoying, not harder when you can't use the exp. share). Similarly for things like fly - not having fly isn't making the gym leaders any harder (well, except Samson I guess because fly is an actually really good move against him), it's just making people waste their time more. While I like the psychologist that lets you change your natures, it's really tedious to actually use him too since he just randomizes the nature every time - can anyone honestly say that they use the psychologist without just save/reload spamming until they get the nature they want? And if nobody uses him without save/reload spamming then what's the point of even making it random instead of just straight up choosing - the only thing it would cut out is the tedious save/reload spamming (I wouldn't even mind if his cost was higher if it felt too easy afterwards, at least it wouldn't feel so repetitive then).

I'm pretty sure it was just RNG - in the past when he sent out swampert first and then switched the AI would often use energy ball still (though, since he has magnezone being sent out first now the AI is more incentivized to use fire attacks than it used to be because fire is super effective against 1 of the pokemon too). Streaks of having a bad opening 4 times or so in a row aren't really that unlikely. It's kind of a psychological thing - everyone notices the times the AI screws you over by using an unexpected move when you try to switch pokemon, but then there are all kinds of times when you don't switch a pokemon and your opponent uses a not very effective move instead of a super effective move and people just think 'Why on earth would the AI do that? This AI is retarded!' without realizing that those are really the exact same thing happening in both cases. It's a lot easier for people to intuitively think that the AI uses hax half of the time and is just stupid the other half of the time instead of just attributing it to RNG.

He rips you off anyway - in the obsidia department store first floor you can get pokesnax for only 400 instead of the 650 that the random NPCs try to sell it for.

None of the gym leaders gave me too much trouble once I caught up with my pokemon levels (my first attempt at each gym was usually with pokemon about 5-7 levels below the level cap). Aya, Luna, and Charlotte were the ones that actually made me grind my pokemon to catch up with the level cap to beat them - though that might not be the same thing as being the hardest since my pokemon wouldn't be as underleveled for the following gym after I had grinded too etc. Aya was giving me a ton of trouble at first but then I kind of overprepared and I got my growlithe to level 45 before evolving it and evolved a flygon etc., and the first attempt after that was pathetically easy - so I'm not sure if it's fair to say the fight was hard because I had to grind or if it was easy because after I had grinded there was no difficulty to it.