Part 38: Satellite Corps
Hello everyone and welcome back. Today's update will be a nice slow one after the horror of what happened last time.
First off, I replace Magnolia's Petal Blizzard with Petal Dance.
With that out of the way, let's head out to Route 15.
Route 15 loops back on itself several times, and it's impossible to get to Amphitrite City without first passing by the large tower in the middle.
It's a lot like Terraria in that regard. For what it's worth, biking on this route is indeed much faster than normal. Playing sped-up like I am, it's practically uncontrollable. It's good stuff!
I don't really know what purpose they serve in a diegetic sense, but there's these neat little smoking chimneys all along the route that don't show up anywhere else that I've seen!
...Oh, a pokemon battle? Sure.
I love these random trainers.
Exploration of Route 15 will have to hold on for a bit. That's the second piece of the taxi, so let's return to the dude in Oranos.
And now when we use him, we get an option.
Soaring will only let us go to any town we've already been to, plus a couple Soar-only areas that don't have very much to look at yet.
The game's final challenge is here. We can land here, but we can't do shit with it until we have Rock Climb.
difficult.
I've said it multiple times before, but I do not find competitive battling fun. Getting pokemon to max level in the postgame isn't as easy as it is in story mode because the level cap is 120, while the Audino trainer caps at 100. So you're reduced to grinding the Audino trainer for 10 levels, and then grinding the much harder level 110 Elite Four refight for the remaining 10 levels. Or just grinding the Audino trainer for 20 straight levels.
What do you get for beating the devs? The ability to fight and catch Mespirit, Uxie, and Azelf.
To put it bluntly, fuck that noise. While there is a "reward" for completing the pokedex, I don't have the patience to see it through nor the desire to even do so.
So instead of dwell on that, here's a list of pokemon that you can find while soaring. All of them are scaled to the party's average level.
Swellow
Pelipper
Altaria
Salamence
Drifblim
Braviary
Delta Drifloon
Delta Pikachu
And because finding them is down to pure luck...
Delta Drifloon and its evolution are Fire/Flying type. Their abilities are Flash Fire (Powers up the Pokemon's Fire-type moves if it's hit by one), Vital Spirit (Prevents the Pokemon from falling asleep), and No Guard (Hidden; Ensures attacks by or against the Pokemon land).
There's not very much to say about this guy. Like regular Drifloon/Drifblim, its stats suck except for a shockingly high base HP. (150!) At least it's kinda cute as a hot air balloon.
Delta Pikachu's line is Flying/Fairy type. All three have the same abilities: Cute Charm (Contact with the Pokemon may cause infatuation), Cloud Nine (Eliminates the effects of weather), Gale Wings (Hidden; Gives priority to Flying-type moves).
There isn't much to say about Delta Pikachu either. Everyone and their brother's mother's sister's aunt's cousin's former roomate knows why it's good. It learns quite a few Flying-type moves, and only two Fairy moves, though one of them is Moonblast. In fact, one of Delta Raichu's four default moves is Moonblast.
Anyway, that's enough soaring for now. It's actually kind of a pain in the ass to land, because you have to position the marker right over top of a pokecenter and then hit confirm.
Back on Route 15...
I like Route 15. It's short, it's memorable, and it has a huge tower in the middle.
There are indeed!
Here's one cave now.
So many nice mega stones and we're constrained by the once-per-battle rule.
There's those chimneys again.
Don't worry, we'll be heading into that building here in a minute.
It's because all you had were the final evolutions of the Kalos starters.
Hell yeah!
busted.
While we're in here, the screen occasionally flashes bright aqua to I guess signify electric discharge.
Just upstairs is the first locked door. My first time playing, this stumped me for a bit because who would think of clicking on the door that's obviously locked?
And it takes us to this minigame. I actually really like this one, but I also enjoy putting together jigsaw puzzles. It's a really simple 16-piece puzzle, without any rotating. If you look closely at the border, there's little black lines showing where two of the pieces should fit.
Kinda like that. I can tell you right now that the bottom left one is incorrect even though the lines, well, line up. But once you get the first two pieces down, you can somewhat follow the pattern on the tiles to build a lot of the rest of it.
Not quite right, but almost.
Not too bad, right?
Finishing the puzzle unlocks the gate and lets us move on.
There's another locked door up on the third floor.
This one is a little trickier. You might notice that all the pieces are tilted. This is, once again, the developers of Insurgence being merciful. A piece that's crooked is not aligned right! If you press the Z key, you can rotate the pieces.
If you don't, you can see just how poorly they fit together. It's subtle, but I like it.
I didn't notice it at first either. But once I did, I started making pretty good progress.
A few lucky guesses later and the second puzzle is done!
One last puzzle up on the fourth floor. Our culprit is just barely visible in the shot.
Even though I love these, let's just skip to the end of this one.
This one didn't take very long at all. Matching up both the edges to be straight and the designs on the tiles themselves really helps!
What this little guy thinks he's doing I don't know.
NATHAN TYPHLOSION was the clear winner of the informal poll.
Mega Delta Typhlosion (Inactive Mode)
Mega Delta Typhlosion (Active Mode)
Shiny Mega Delta Typhlosion (Inactive)
Shiny Mega Delta Typhlosion (Active)
Alright, this one is gonna take some explaining. Delta Cyndaquil is Electric type. Its abilities are Static (Contact with the Pokemon may cause paralysis) and Lightning Rod (Hidden; Draws in all Electric-type moves to boost its Sp. Atk stat). Delta Quilava is the same as Cyndaquil, except it also gains the Steel secondary type.
Delta Typhlosion loses Static in favor of Motor Drive (Boosts the Speed stat when it's hit by an Electric-type move). Then there's its mega forme, which has Supercell (Special Attack surges in the rain and darkness) as its ability. In plain english, Supercell boosts SpAtk by 1.5x in either weather condition. Supercell activating is shown by Mega Typh looking about 200% more metal.
As far as usability goes, it's friggin' Typhlosion. Of course it's great!
Don't forget to nab this before leaving!
There's more to do there in the postgame. The extreme late postgame.
guessed.
Continuing on with Route 15, we're down on the lowest level.
I like to think that after the battle, Amy revived and healed her pokemon. It was just for practice after all!
This cave is actually a second way across the route.
If I had thought about it at the time, I'd have been on the lookout for the heirloom that guy told us about last time. It's hidden somewhere in here.
According to the wiki, it's in that boulder just ahead.
That's an attention-catching design. It's actually the second one of those we've seen!
What are you talking about?
It's actually a fairly short cave.
And finishing it spits us out over by the exit to Amphitrite City. We could follow the road west back to the Satellite Corps., but we've already seen everything over there. So let's talk to the gentleman behind the fence instead.
Yes. Yes I would like to buy out your stock of TMs.
Let's head south into Amphitrite.
challenge!Yeah, he's not fuckin' kidding. This is the home of the 7th gym in the region. The kid gloves, such as they were, are long since off by this point.
It does look rather nice next to the lake.
here?
Looking the answers up on a wiki... Trapinch is.
Fucked if I know! The wiki says Jolly so I guess that!
would.Looking it up, I can see why. SpAtk down Speed up is not great for a Jolteon. Though calling out a nature that doesn't do anything as being a hindrance seems odd. Whatever! The ways of competitive battlers are not mine to know.
I'm gonna be honest my eyes glazed over when you said "Water-moves" but the wiki says "nothing" so I'll trust that.
Once we're in the postgame, Dream Mist lets us change a pokemon's ability to its hidden one. I can also, y'know, just use the debug menu because I figured out how to access that.
Once we walk up the stairs outside, we get a cutscene.
: Ah! Amy! There you are, I've been looking all over for you. Amy, this is Calreath. He's the Gym Leader of Amphitrite.
: Nice to meet you, Amy. You've already met my girlfriend, Diana. She called ahead and told me to expect you. I've been looking all over for you two.
: I plan on it. Diana and I would love to join you two, if you're willing.I like Calreath already.
: But... I can help you out much better by introducing you to someone. When I was younger, I lived in the Aroma Region. My best friend and I were accomplished pokemon trainers... and I guess someone took notice. We were both chosen by pixie pokemon. My friend was chosen by Victini, and I, Manaphy.
anyone else chosen by the pixies.: I'd appreciate it if you two could see him. He has... an interest in you. There's a cave in the lake to the south. Just continue through, you can't miss it. I promise you you're on the same side. You have a common enemy, and he said he had something to give you.
: I run the Gym here, after all! You can have your challenge. You can get your badge and we can discuss strategy. Sound good? Good.
: I'm curious, though. I'm going to head into the cave. I know... I shouldn't trust him so easily, but if he really was chosen by Manaphy, he can't be that bad, right?I dunno, his shitty taste in girlfriends aside, Cal seemed like a decent dude.
: ...jeez, we really can't trust anyone, can we?
Okay I'm actually going to end this one here.
NEXT TIME: Exploring Amphitrite and heading into the Crystal Caves