Part 12: It’ll Be a Scream
Update 12: It’ll Be a ScreamRoute 3 - Pokémon Sword and Shield OST
Let’s start this update out right – television!

Reporter: …A Pokémon battle, course!
Cameraman: Good Pokémon and Trainers really shine on-camera!

As I mentioned before, you often run into double battles when you’re alone; if so, you just send out your first two Pokémon and things proceed as normal. These games have an uncomfortable number of moves tweaked specifically for double battles, which is baffling, since they tend to be pretty rare.
Here… would be picture of the Pokémon Daycare, but I think I forgot to take it and can’t do so yet; I’ll go back and upload/edit it in later. Pokémon Daycares have been around in various forms since the beginning, and they started out as a solution to the XP grinding issue. If there was a Pokémon you want to trained up but you didn’t want to bother grinding with them, you could head to the Daycare, drop it off, and run around doing other things. While it was there, it would gain one experience per step you talk, which was also extremely slow but at least it let you do other things. In Gen 2, they not only let you drop two Pokémon off, but if you did (if they were the right genders and Pokémon types), you’d eventually come back and find an Egg, which you could carry around until it hatched (after taking up a slot in your party the whole time, the bastard). The process of producing and hatching eggs in different circumstances to get different results is called Pokémon Breeding, and it’s a whole complex world I won’t be indulging in unless there’s some huge demand for it in the thread. After several generations (probably as they made leveling easier), they dropped the XP gain aspect from them and renamed them Nurseries, as is present in Galar. When we stop in to take a look around, some rando we start pestering casually hands us a Toxel, a Pokémon rare enough you probably shouldn’t be handing them out to people you don’t know the first time you see them. What should I name it, should I or should I not include it in my party, and if I do, what Pokémon should it replace? There’s a current party list in the OP. Those of you with

Team Yell Appears! - Pokémon Sword and Shield OST

Team Yell Grunt: We’re gonna use that bike to chase around Gym Challengers! It’ll be a scream!
???: How barbaric! It wouldn’t work anyway. You don’t even have a Rotom with you! Hey, young Gym Challenger! They’re trying to steal my bike! Please, if you could give them a good thrashing, I would be in your debt!


Team Yell Grunt: Oi, we’re not tryin’ to steal the bike! Only borrow it! We’re going to use it to chase after Gym Challengers and make ‘em all tired!

Team Yell Grunt: I dunno, yell at them a bit? We’re tryin’ to tire ‘em out, not hurt ‘em.

Team Yell Grunt: We’ll be careful –

Team Yell Grunt: Oh yeah? And how do YOU know what Marnie wants?

Team Yell Grunt: That DOES sound like Marnie, maybe she’s telling the truth.. Well… Maybe this wasn’t the best plan, yeah. But we ain’t stoppin’ yet! You haven’t seen the last of us!


Route 3 - Pokémon Sword and Shield OST
???: Thank you, young lady. It was looking a mite dangerous there.

???: And I see you have a Pokédex, two! That means you have a Rotom with you! Fantastic! I think I’ll give this bike to you, then. Better you have it then Team Yell!

???: Absolutely! Now, you know that Rotom love motors very, very much, right? Enough to jump right into machines that have motors! So, that got me thinking… If I attached a motor to a bicycle, then maybe I could get a Rotom to pop into that as well! Come now – give it a shot! Enjoy cycling together with Rotom to the fullest.

And now we have some new wheels. Bikes are an old Pokémon tradition, something you acquire a couple Gyms in that lets you travel at a respectable speed. Back in Gen 1, they had yet another subplot where you had to hunt down a voucher to buy a bike that would otherwise cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for some reason, but they quickly dropped that. As time passed, they started experimenting with different things they could do with bikes; in Gen 3, for instance, you had bikes that could speed across railings or bunny-hop over obstacle courses.

This time around, we start out with a nitro ability that I honestly barely use, but we’ll be gathering upgrades for much of the of the game. Unfortunately, I’ll probably avoid using it. Why? That uniform. The game forces it on you every time you go for a ride and won’t let you take it off. It’s painfully gauche.
The bridge the Team Yell goons were talking about really is long; it’s designed to make you want to use the bike and build up a little bit of experience as you go. Of course, that means you don’t always see the Hop at the end of the bridge waiting to fight you.


Fortunately, the game doesn’t force you into a fight and gives you a second to catch your breath/rearrange your team. Normally, I find the cushioning this game provides you with a bit much, but I like the way they laid out this area.
Not that that means I’ll go easy on Hop.


Pokémon Sword and Shield: Hop Battle Theme Remix


I, of course, get too caught up in writing this update and forget to heal up my Pokémon, but it doesn’t matter much. Hop still has the same team as last time, though he has levelled them quite a bit (and evolved his Rookidee and Bonham). It isn’t the clean sweep I’ve had before; none of my Pokémon are really in danger, but they do take hits and lose some health.

Bonham is also looking pretty nice, now evolved and with a level comparable to much of my party. He even survives Bruce’s most powerful attack and deals a dozen HP of damage to him, probably the most of any Pokémon so far. Unfortunately, he goes down in the next hit, but we’re seeing some definite improvement. The game never becomes hard, per se, but it does ramp up over time, and we are finally seeing the pace start to pick up.

In older games, HM moves like Strength could only be learned through the relevant HM. Now, you just learn them leveling up sometimes. I also only just now realized that Murphy knew Rock Smash, another old HM move, back when I caught her, since I haven’t changed her moveset since. I love it.
Route 3 - Pokémon Sword and Shield OST













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Hulbury - Pokémon Sword and Shield OST








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