Aphelli

Yes, Mewtwo is available. But you can only get one near the end of the postgame (as befits such a powerful Pokemon), so you’ll have to be patient.

Yay, the fic goes on, and with a Shelly episode to boot!

I hate being hunted too, so I also found this room harrowing to complete. Congratulations on managing it!

Okay, that makes sense. I think this was in the previous chapter, where, if I remember correctly, Lin has ideas about what’s a good character and what isn’t. Yes, I was talking about child Lin and her capabilities. I just didn’t want to name her first. I see… Don’t sell yourself short, I think you did a pretty good job! and even if it hadn't been as good, then you would still have written it

Yay, fEtR is back! I think you took great advantage of the color scheme, it makes it very easy to keep track of viewpoint changes! And hooray for Shelly, who is now primed to do great things! So Vanilla’s mother was humming while watering her plants… given just how infrequently she’s mentioned in the story (yet significant – although I’ve forgotten why I know this), I’d like to say this is a hint of some sort… but maybe it’s not! The queen is given a rather on-point role in the vision… but this makes me wonder (canon spoilers!!) I am, however, a bit confused as to how the events played out. If Shelly has Vanilla’s body all this time, what happened to the small black hole? How does the PULSE act on Vanilla from a separate dimension? And if the trance is mental, then how is this grey-colored figment of Vanilla’s imagination able to break the fourth wall?

Sorry to answer so late (I stumbled on this by chance -- had you created a proper thread, it might have been noticed much earlier)! I hope that you were able to come up with a solution on your own. If not, try this out (U means "give this tile a half-turn", O means "do not rotate this tile"). @Beau I can (assuming that there is a solution), so technically the answer to your question is "yes". I will not help you here, however, because this is the wrong place to ask the question, you know it and yet you're still doing it.

Hi, It’s pretty difficult to give specific info without more detail. Two important questions that come to mind are: 1) Do you want to fight the League blind? Or do you know (or want to be told) what to expect? 2) Do you play with items? I haven’t fought the League recently, and I haven’t played litemode at all, and I’m bad at this game, so I’m not very confident in my answer to your main question. But I think you will have a difficult time. (If you’re okay with spoilers, I can try to explain why in more detail.) Some advice: 0) Carry as many healing items (Potions, Revives) as you can. You’re going to need them. 1) Get everyone to level 100. You need every inch of power you can. 2) get rid of weak, redundant or otherwise useless HM moves (Fly, Rock Smash, Rock Climb, Strength). You don’t need them and they waste valuable move slots. 3) is Icy Wind really the best idea on Simipour? Ice Beam sounds better. Simipour could probably use some speed too. 4) I think Gyro Ball is a decent stab on Bronzong. I’m not sure that Metal Sound is as useful as a support move? 5) Arcanine learns an excellent priority move (E Speed), it is worth using. 6) at some point, perhaps more than once, you’re likely to end up against a mon that is simply too powerful for what you have. It might be worth having a way to neutralize such a mon (for instance, someone could know Toxic, then you use your potions and revives to survive while the poison does its job?). For slightly more revealing (but nothing big) information, I can tell you the following:

Q: What is this? A: This is (supposed to be) a guide towards understanding the magic square puzzle. Q: What do you mean, understand it? Solve it? A: Yes. Sort of. No. My purpose here is to explain a method to think about this puzzle. If you understand it, actually solving an instance of the puzzle becomes rather easy: you will be able to quickly derive sequences of moves leading towards a solution. I use the word “derive” because it’s not quite automatic, but it’s not difficult all the same. Q: Does that mean you will not give me the actual solution? A: There are several solutions and tutorials out there for the game’s original starting positions (which you can reset to, if I remember correctly). I aim to explain to you how to go about finding a solution from any starting position (it could even be a partially complete puzzle!). For this, I’ll take different starting positions from the game. Q: I don’t care, I’ve done it once and now I have New Game Plus. A: This is absolutely fair! Just remember that you have an option to stop fearing that puzzle. Q: You’re not the first one doing this. A: Indeed not. There’s a guide by Thiazzi which is certainly worth reading. But my method is different, and I believe that it is more flexible (and it produced shorter solutions). Moreover, it seems that these guide has not had the impact it deserved, given what Ame (the puzzle’s own creator!) said in her stream, about “people who were watching not being able to help her”. She succeeded without outside help, but I still think that another attempt to demythify this puzzle is worthwhile. Q: Is this going to involve math? I don’t like math. Numbers make me itch. Equations give me nausea. A: Well… yes and no. My method is definitely mathematical in its spirit. But if this question describes you, chances are that you don’t know what kind of mathematical concepts are involved. Which is completely fine! This isn’t a math class, and there are no prerequisites for this tutorial. 1°) The Rules You probably know them already, but I think it’s worth recalling them. We are given 18 digits in three rows of six: every digit between one and nine appears twice. For instance, a starting position could be (I didn't think about the pick at all; I don't think it's atypical in any way): 486411 323578 927659 The goal is to end up in a situation where a) The two 3x3 squares, left and right, contain every digit from 1 to 9 exactly once. b) In these squares, the sum of the digits on all four lines going through the center is 15. c) No digit occupies the same position in both squares, except maybe for the center. Maybe b) is a little bit abstract: concretely, for the left square, the four sums that would need to be equal to 15 are 4+2+7, 8+2+2, 6+2+9, 3+2+3. The condition is (obviously) not satisfied. The condition a) fails too, since the left square contains both 3, and the condition c) is also not satisfied, since the digit 4 has the same position in both squares. So we need to change the grid. There are two kinds of allowed operations: i. Shift any row leftwards, or rightwards. ii. Shift any column upwards, or downwards. For instance, if you shift the second row rightwards, it starts from 323578 and becomes 832357: the rightmost digit goes to the left. Similarly, if you shift the last column downwards, it starts from 189 and becomes 918: the downmost digit goes all the way up. 2°) Why do we need a guide? Well, you can try solving the puzzle on your own! It’s not too difficult to get one square right, but you run into a major issue when trying to complete the second one: every move that gets you closer to completing the second square messes up the first one. So we can’t be straightforward; we need to be craftier. Just to clarify for later: in a solved square, the 5 has to be in the center, and the two other numbers in every line must add up to ten. For instance: 368 159 247 3°) The Technique To solve this puzzle, our main tool is the 3-cycle (which I will sometimes call "cycle" since we won't consider any other kind). Please do not let this (admittedly ugly) name frighten you. It’s very simple: choose three spots in the grid, and then move them all around. 486411 > 476411 323578 > 823538 927659 > 927659 Note how all three bolded digits changed location – in a cycle – and no other digit did, hence the name. Not so scary now, is it? Now, we can’t do just any 3-cycle (apart from a column shift) in one move, but let us assume, for a moment, that we could. Then we have a lot of possible actions, because there are so many available 3-cycles. In one move, we can move one digit (in fact, two, a lot of the time) of our choice to a location of our choice, and yet preserve (almost) anything we have already built: thus we can solve the puzzle one (or two) digits at a time. Look: in the above configuration, we just need five 3-cycles (underlined indicate a cycle that was just moved; bold denotes the cycle that will move at the next step)! 486411 > 486411 > 486411 > 386411 > 386451 > 386431 323578 > 353278 > 353278 > 953278 > 951278 > 951258 927659 > 927659 > 927956 > 427956 > 427936 > 427976 Note that when you’re including two identical digits in a 3-cycle, it looks like one of them doesn’t move, which is often convenient. The point of the first cycle is to put one 5 in the center, and put both 2 in correct positions. The second cycle puts the 9 and a 6 in correct positions. The third cycle puts the leftmost 3 and 4 in correct positions, and 9 in a promising one. The fourth cycle brings a 1 in front of this 9 while putting the 3 in the second square, and the last cycle wraps the puzzle up. Note that there’s no need to optimize anything or think three moves ahead here: you really can improve one step at a time (except at the end, technically – I’ll come back to it in the end later). I invite you – for practice – to reconsider the starting position, and try coming up with sequences of 3-cycles that solve the puzzle. Do you see now how using 3-cycles makes the puzzle drastically easier? 4°) How to do a 3-cycle? But so far this isn’t concrete. We’ve pretended that we could do any 3-cycle we chose. But they’re not in the operations we’re allowed to do, so what was the point? The only 3-cycles we can apply are the column shifts, and they’re clearly not sufficient on their own for what we did in the second paragraph. But these column moves still do something important: they allow us to move three tiles around, while leaving everything else in place. The trick to do a general 3-cycle is the following: i. Put the three digits in a column. ii. Shift the column upwards or downwards (whichever corresponds to what you want to do) iii. Rewind precisely what you did in step i. Again, that’s a little bit abstract, how about some practice? Remember the first cycle: 486411 > 486411 323578 > 353278 927659 > 927659 Here, the simplest way is to put everything on the second column. For instance, we can shift the fourth column up, then shift the first row leftwards twice. This gives: 486411 > 486511 > 865114 > 651148 323578 > 323678 > 323678 > 323678 927659 > 927459 > 927459 > 927459 Now, we want the 5 to end up in the spot of the blue 2, so step ii. means shifting the second column downward. 651148 > 621148 323678 > 353678 927459 > 927459 In step iii., we rewind step i.: that means shifting the first row rightwards twice, then move the fourth column downwards. 621148 > 862114 > 486211 > 468411 353678 > 353678 > 353678 > 353278 927459 > 927459 > 927459 > 927659 For a little bit of practice, how about finding the sequences of moves for the second and fourth 3-cycles in the solution of 3°)? Remember, these cycles are: 486411 > 486411 353278 > 353278 927659 > 927956 Solution: and 386411 > 386451 953278 > 951278 427956 > 427936 Solution: 5°) The Ending Let’s sum up. While there are at least three numbers that are not at the correct spot, you can form a 3-cycle and get at least one of them (and often two) in the correct spot. But what happens at the end, if only two of them are in the wrong position? Well, we have a problem, because we can’t switch two elements only by using 3-cycles. I’m not going to prove it, because I promised we wouldn’t get into math (and also because it depends on some details -- note, say, the first 3-cycle of the solution I gave for the invented starting point). Fortunately, there’s a workaround: if you need to switch two elements, you can choose another pair to switch. Thus, instead of having two elements in the “wrong place”, you have four of them, and you can use a 3-cycle to put exactly one of the four elements in the right place. Then you’re left is just a 3-cycle. This is a bit dry, so here’s an example: 836431 951258 427976 We have to switch the 8 and the 3 in the top left corner. We can’t really do that with 3-cycles, but what we can do is switch 8 and 3, and switch the underlined 6 and 4 as well. So we do the 3-cycle 8 -> 3 -> 4 -> 8 (because the goal is to get one number at the right place; -> means “takes the place formerly occupied by”), and we reach 486431 951258 327976 Then all we have to do is the 3-cycle 3 -> 4 -> 6 -> 3, and we get 384431 951258 627976 So the puzzle is solved! There's also another way: we can do a 3-cycle with two identical digits being the same, for instance the cycle 8 -> 3 -> 3 -> 8 in 836431 951258 427976 That’s it, we’ve covered everything! I hope this was clear enough and that you now feel ready to devise your own solution to the various puzzle positions you got in. If not, please tell me how I could improve this explanation.

Wow, a new chapter! How delightful! I'm envious. There is, of course, no reason why the pajama girl shouldn't be a figment of Vanilla's imagination, let alone make another appearance in the story. So, here, the Void is indeed something different... it seems to just reflect Vanilla's negative thoughts specifically -- Shelly's, on the other hand, do not seem incarnated. I'd guess that Lin is actually running the place and that's her fun. Cain and Gardevoir are nowhere to be seen, which isn't too surprising, but I worry about Shelly, since she doesn't have a way out. I like the voice that you've given Shelly. Particularly the part where she compares Vanilla to Polaris...

It seems that the forums' guide to puzzles still provides a solution in this case. It's in the last spoiler (barring the signature) of the first post, look for "if Saphira is not abducted".

Disclaimer: I’m not a very good player. Still, I have a few remarks on your team. Greninja or Aegislash (perhaps Aegislash since it’s slower, but I wouldn’t be shocked if it was the both of them) should run a priority move – Water Shuriken or Shadow Sneak (over Iron Defense), respectively. Speaking of Greninja, I don’t understand the EV spread – it mostly has special moves, yet the EVs are in Attack? I think Excadrill is too frail to have this many status moves (and Fissure is completely unreliable). Maybe take a Steel stab (typically, Iron Head)? Swampert looks a bit redundant at this point, and I think you should at least replace Surf with a physical move (Waterfall or Liquidation) – you’re past the need for HMs. Maybe ditch it altogether and use another mon (maybe a Psychic or Fairy-type, but it’s not the only option). The tournament battles, though, are not normal battles at all; the field really impacts the course of the battle, and the challenge is unusual enough that you could need to change some mons. I don’t understand these battles well enough to give specific advice beyond “try to figure out what makes you lose and try to fix or mitigate it”. For the first (double) battles, you might want to give some thought to screens in order to boost your defence.

The League isn’t easy, but it’s definitely doable. But you haven’t answered what I felt was my most important question: how much advance information do you want on what you’ll be facing? You may want to check this thread about League-beating teams. It does contain some spoilers (the OP with the tier list doesn’t, and the first few answers looked fine, but still), so beware. My gut suggests Alolatales and M-Metagross. It’s probably worth taking at least another Fairy-type. Blaziken is apparently very popular but I’m more skeptical (but I’m a rather poor player and I haven’t tested it myself). The League has quite a few hard hitters and some quite fast mons, so Pokemon that are neither powerful enough to one-shot nor fast enough to outspeed their foes are probably doomed. In my case, I had brought a Haxorus and a Mienshao, but they weren’t able to do much because they were basically outclassed all the time.

I think this question can be answered in different ways, depending on what you want. For instance, do you play with items? How much info about the League do you want to know beforehand? Are you willing to struggle a bit (and save-scum if necessary) until you find a satisfactory team or have a lucky break, or do you want to go in there to win on your first try? I’ll admit I have rather little knowledge about most of the mons you’re using (except as opponents!). Still, I find M-Metagross extremely tempting, and Alolatales is almost certainly worthwhile. I’d like to be more specific but I don’t want to spoil you too much. At least, be aware that there are pretty scary teams in the League (while remaining manageable), so don’t neglect held items (Life Orb, Leftovers, Choice items, Seeds…).

I think that Thiazzi was mentioning Marcello because of this dev blog post. As you see, the goal of his program was to ascertain whether the puzzle could be solved, not provide a remotely practical solution. There are other guides (some complete with video) on this thread. If you're not starting from the default position, I can also give you step-by-step instructions -- or you can send me by PM a copy of your save file and I'll solve the puzzle for you.

I tend to revert to more classically “powerful” mons towards the endgame, but one that’s carried most of my runs – from about Shelly to Ciel – is Meowstic. First, the Psychic type is really good throughout the game, and Meowstic is fast with a decently powerful stab. But more specifically, it has (can have) the Ability Prankster – and learns very good support moves to use it: weather, Terrain, dual Screens. Let’s also not forget that it also learns Fake Out, Sucker Punch, and Quick Guard. I also have fond (if less specific) memories of Ampharos (it’s good and you can get it very early on) and Scrafty (for the bulk and the intimidate).