Part 24: Sonata City

Hello everyone and welcome back. Today's pretty exciting, and we'll get into why in just a little bit. Let's not waste any time and get started, yeah?



Yet another map where you leave going up and enter coming down. Insurgence is full of this kinda thing.



A few steps into Route 9, the camera moves away and a cutscene takes over.



And it appears that Persephone is talking to Jaern.

: You're late.
: I'm never late. You're just early.





: She came to my tower, and defeated Rayquaza. It's her fault my crystal was shattered. Not only that, but she remembered. Not a whole lot, but she knew her name, which alone is too much. If anyone recognizes her...



: I gave you the kid. I promised to leave you and your cult alive when I came into power. All I asked of you was to deal with one small child. And yet, you couldn't even do that. What went wrong? Choose your next words carefully- they might be your last.
: We were very close to completing the memory wipe... but before we were done, our ritual began and we were forced to leave. When I returned, she was gone.

What I find hilarious about this is that there's no time window for these rituals. Indeed, Amy was probably meant to be sacrificed during the very ritual where Darkrai fucked off. So they only reason we're alive is because Persephone is massively incompetent.



time ago.

: Are you suggesting...?



Thanks to the pokemon following mechanic, Persephone was staring at Amy and Mew when she was "in a bad mood" after the aforementioned ritual.



: I could deal with them myself. It would be easy to use the media to portray them as fugitives. But... If the public found out I lost to them, that I let criminals escape, my reputation would be ruined.

Despite Jaern's weird cult of personality and his iron grip on the region, I sincerely doubt that telling everyone that a 10 year old is Public Enemy #1 would go down like he thinks it would.





: I'm not entirely sure, but I have a hunch about where he may have found it. If I'm right... there may be a conspiracy in Torren bigger than I could ever imagine. Naturally, I'm going to investigate this.





: Chew on that for a bit.



The sad part is, he legitimately believes this.

: I'll do whatever I need to save the world. Stand in my way, and you'll be swept aside too.



: No wonder nobody likes him. If only he wasn't as invulnerable as the First Augur was, I would have dealt with him long ago.





The answer is: nobody. Persephone is both lazy and incompetent so we will not be pursued by Darkrai Cultists. She's not especially good at doing what her boss tells her.



Route 9 is fairly simple. Following the path will show that it's actually fairly linear. You can take a shortcut through some grass toward the end, but all you're missing is like 2 trainer battles.



battle?







You forgot a zero!



Magnezone is a dangerous thing to use against Fancy.



That item we could see before is a very handy one indeed.



Not very much to say about this route. The only reason we'll ever need to come back is to get the Energy Ball TM in a few updates.









Perhaps!



Do you see that deep spot in the middle of this pond? The TM for Energy Ball can be found down there.



This little patch of grass is also the shortcut I mentioned earlier. But there's no need to take it when there's money to be had!



Anyway, that Ruin Maniac reminded me that there's a grotto on this route.





I will forever love this little gal.











It's an Engine Combee. Or, in the words of Tyty, a Combeestion Engine. The only one you can find is female, so at level 21 it will evolve into a Delta Vespiquen. It's Steel/Fire type, and its abilities are Levitate (Ground moves miss) and Speed Boost (Speed +1 stage after each turn). So it's a Fire/Steel type where its only 4x weakness is completely eliminated.

It should go without saying just how fucking good and broken this is. Delta Vespiquen was yet another member of my Champion team, and the fucking MVP of that team besides. Why? Because she's the reason I even beat the Champion in the first place. They only had one pokemon left, and it was faster than the rest of my team. Delta Vespiquen was the only thing I had that it couldn't one shot, and her Lava Plume move burned the champ's last pokemon. So over the course of 8 turns, I kept stalling with revives in order to win while Burn slowly ticked away its HP.

Delta Vespiquen is not an insane powerhouse like so many other deltas we've seen. But she's good all around, and has extremely high regular and special defenses.

Sadly the "Combeestion" pun is one letter too long, so I can't run around with the best pun name for this pokemon.



So the second best will have to do, instead.



Moving on...







She pays like $8000 when we win, so she's been collecting some tolls.



Blue and white fire burns the hottest!













And that's the end of Route 9!





Despite being just as tiny as the past two towns, Sonata City gets a big pokecenter because there's a gym here.



Races are a minigame we can play off to the south of the map above.



This lady in the pokecenter is one of three move tutors in town. She teaches healing moves.

what happened?





Pokepon is exactly what it sounds like. I'll cover it in a bit.





Many of the NPCs in this pokemall are exact clones of the ones in Suntouched City. This old man even yells at us for talking to him and then gives us this potion for doing so because he wants to promote good manners.



Sonata City has a hospital/old folk's home combination north of town. We'll explore it in the next update.





new hospital.





You're still whining about the hospital being built, but you're just doing it in a super roundabout fashion.





He's giving away his regular Cyndaquil. The one that's walking around in his house. The same pokemon you can find in the wild way back on Route 4.





This guy is the second move tutor in town. I take the opportunity to teach Ahem Boomburst about 7 levels early.





The number of people in different towns saying they recognize Amy is becoming noteworthy. That's three different people now in three different towns. Curious...





Mega what? Mega WHAT?



Harmony's ace is amazing and is my favorite bit of trolling from this game.



Normal and Fairy, you say? That sounds like it's both HenryDavid's and Rollgirl's chances to shine!



every trainer has a move with that type.



Coverage moves, my dude. Coverage moves.



Fuck off. I'm not a sports fan either, but this is just rude.



This guy here will teach Smeargle the following moves...

Spore
Ingrain
Lock-On
Sheer Cold
Quiver Dance
Shell Smash
Baton Pass

So this is the guy you want if you want to pull some utter bullshit with Baton Pass.















This lady will let us have a go in the pokepon machine. Our lead pokemon gets sent in and they retrieve a random capsule. It's literally a gachapon machine. You can't repeatedly try it, though. You have to wait 20 minutes and walk a random amount of steps, up to 1500.

As far as rewards go? Let me just steal the wiki's table...



There's only a single Girafarigite in the machine, and nobody has any idea what the chances on Delta Sunflorite is. And, yes, there's a 1/2400 chance that your pokemon will become shiny as a reward from the machine.

You can get some cool stuff, but I will probably never use it past this first time.





Mega Girafarig gets an ability called Spectral Jaws (All bite moves reclassified as Special, +30% power). It also gets a BST boost from 455 to 575! It's certainly not bad, but you need to win the pokepon lottery in order to use it.



I send Rollgirl in...



Works for me! Now to never use this thing again.



Now for something kinda cool and fun.



We're gonna enter the races.











The different tracks have different hazards. For this first time we'll race in Flower Fields.





The race minigame is pretty simple. You control your pokemon around the race track, you can go forward, left, or right, and I assume backwards as well.



These little arrows are boost pads and give a burst of speed.



Tall grass slows you down a lot, while trees and rocks bar your path.



Like I said, tall grass slows you down by a lot. I had a huge lead going in to the grass and after...



Rollgirl is being beaten by a fire monkey and a grass deer.





Rollgirl placed third... out of four. Not exactly a spectacular finish on her part.



Placing in first or second gets you points, while third or fourth causes you to lose points. -50 is so low that nobody wants to touch us.



But trying it again on a different course...







The more races you win, the better sponsorships you can get.



Kricketune Knockoffs will sponsor us as long as our value is above -10. I'd cover everything that this minigame entails, but it would take forever and would just be a bunch of text. So if you're curious check out this link instead. You can win some really nice stuff if you race enough!

Also the more you race, the better your rewards. If you spend enough time doing it, you have a chance to get some really nice TMs earlier than the postgame!



Now that we're sponsored by a Kricketune-themed company, let's win one last race...



$450 ain't bad for like 45 seconds. Like I said, the more we race, the better the outcomes we can get.



But enough of that for now. Let's go see about a gym battle...





The guide fellow is just repeating that Harmony uses both Normal and Fairy types.







And, yeeeeah. The interior of the gym is a maze.



It's not a difficult maze, but it is annoying. I'm just gonna give the highlights.





Cool. I see that the Lass trainer class has put aside all pretenses and just started wearing sailor schoolgirl uniforms.



This Clefable, annoyingly, has Magic Guard.



Strong words coming from someone with a Magic Guard Clefable.





Sally is the name of my cat who not just 5 minutes ago wouldn't stop yelling at me because I wouldn't share my Ginger Ale with her. Little brat.









Yep, that you did.









Sure it is.



Renata? I keep misreading that as Rattata.



Believe it or not, it's not Ghost.



On the other side of the maze is Harmony.



: Do you remember me from Suntouched City? It's me, Harmony! We fought the Perfection Cult together!

I must have fallen on my head because I don't remember that happening. I seem to remember you yelling at a 9 year old for having an imaginary friend that turned out to be Reshiram.

: I digress. I run the Gym here in Sonata City. I specialize in Normal and Fairy-type pokemon.

what you'll bring to the table.



: Get ready to be crushed!





First off let's... wait, what does that say?











Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.



Jokes aside, we got this shit on lockdown. Cinccino goes out first, and HenryDavid is waiting.



The paper doll damage is a little lower, but I replaced Vital Throw with Storm Throw.



The Cinccino can't really hurt HenryDavid very much, and he hits it for STAB supereffective damage... and a guaranteed crit on top of that!



Rollgirl was meant to be my answer to Harmony's fairies, but...



I didn't count on one of them having Psyshock as a coverage move.



So Rollgirl goes down hard during her... first? Her first gym battle.



It's a tad mean to Daisy, but I'd rather bait out Harmony's Full Restores early on.



So far this Sylveon has taken out two of my team members while I've only taken out one of hers. But I'm not worried.



Ahem acquits himself wonderfully leaving the sides even at 2-for-2.



Two Boombursts later and Harmony is down her Azumarill as well. It tried to use Superpower, which did hurt, but I think we came out the other side better off.



Harmony brings out her Gardevoir, so I bring out the big guns as well.



Gardevoir's focus sash is another blessing in disguise.



Because that's her other Full Restore, and now Gardevoir can't avoid being one shot.



Dracolich continues the Shadow Ball pain train.



Sure it's dangerous as shit to bring out a half dragon type against a team of mainly fairies, but I think it worked out well.





Fuck yes. This is Dark's Solar Beam equivalent. If the sky is darkened, it has no charge time.



And now the moment you've all been waiting for. When I first realized I was going to LP this game, Whitney 2.0 was a moment I couldn't wait to show off.



Mega Miltank gets an ability that does the same thing as the Metronome item. The wiki also says it stacks with Metronome, but it's an ability that only Mega Miltank can have.



HenryDavid took an Earthquake, but boosted his stats. Then he hit that Miltank for 90% of its HP.



It didn't get a chance to even try using Rollout.





: I guess that prediction was right! Congratulations!





While Harmony is talking, Nora runs up.

: Uhm, Miss Harmony?
: Huh? Who are you?
: My name's Nora. I'm a challenger, but that's not important! You know the hospital just north of the city?



: The power... cut? That's impossible. The system is protected, it shouldn't just fail like that.



: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I need to go check it out. There are people in that hospital in very critical conditions. They need that power in order to live. Would you two mind giving me a hand? If somebody really did sabotage it, they might be dangerous- and I'd love all the help I can get.





NEXT TIME: Sonata Hospital and a massive plot dump.