Part 64: My Heart Just Dancing in Anticipation

Update 65: My Heart Just Dancing in Anticipation



Oh, and what is that sweet scent I detect... wafting through the air around you?

Heh heh! That’d be the Max Honey that Urshifu loves to the max! We got our hands on a nice haul of it!







Hufufu! You did a real bang up job finding that Max Honey with hardly a hint from me! Very nicely done, Gloria! And our little Hop, too!



Well, it’s been real, Gloria. But I think you’ve learned just about everything the Master Dojo has to teach you. Which means that you and I can finally have a proper battle—with absolutely no holding back! I won’t be pulling any punches this time, kiddo.



…



We can now Gigantamax our Bart! Granted, we still have to go gather enough Max Mushrooms to get the soup up and running, but once we do…









… We get to see the fruit of our labor. It’s basically just a scaled up version of Surging Strike, Rapid Strike Urshifu’s signature move, which is why I never showed that off. But hey, Urshifu is a Gigantamax Legendary, you take what you can get.





…

(Fun fact: in Sword, she says, Ah! No! What am I thinking?! Twisted, vindictive Klara is the only one for me!)

But we’ve stalled enough, I think. We have someone waiting for us.

…



Student:… I wish you the best of luck.



Heh heh heh! That’s what I want to hear! Then let’s mosey on over to the battleground!







… About how fortunate we were to have you join the dojo… Even if it was by mistake at first! I can’t thank you enough, Gloria!



… dancing with anticipation!





Final Battle! (Mustard) ~ No Intro - Pokémon Sword and Shield OST (RECOMMENDED LISTENING)



Same Mustard animations as before here. As the thread has pointed out, you should probably look up the full animation, but I just discovered a new function on the Switch! The Switch can record videos! And I can convert those videos to gifs! I discovered it too late to get a solid shot of that G-Max move earlier and I’m not great at it yet, but it sure as fuck is going to make uploading this stuff easier.

Or so I thought. It turns out it produces massive videos that can’t be meaningfully compressed without running them through God knows how many processes. While there are ways to extract screenshots from those videos, it’s the sort of thing that screws up my archival system so badly it would delay this update way past when I’d like it to go up. So… We may be a bit scattershot on screenshots this update. Essentially, all the videos I took were of Mustard’s animations and Gigantamaxing, and you can look up all that in any video of anybody’s fight against him.



Anyway, this is by far the hardest fight I’ve ever been in. See those double levels in the Pokémon list above? For most encounters on the Isle of Armor, the first level indicates what you’re facing if you come early and the second if you come after becoming Champion. In this case, the second only comes into play after you complete something I’m never going to touch in this LP; even if you started early, you still have to face a team in the 70s, higher than Leon’s team – and that’s when the last storyline fight on the Isle pitted you against a single level 30 Pokémon. It’s pretty extreme. Since I’m probably a better player than the AI just to start with, not only have I not leveled my team far enough to match it, but I’ve dragged along poor Snuggles, currently sitting at level 60.



We start out in trouble. Though Mr. Blobby’s Acrobatics is more than intense enough to put that Mienshao down, it gets off a Blaze Kick that knocks off more than half of his health. As a Ghost-type, he’s immune to Fighting moves, and Acrobatics is my ace in the hole against Mustard’s abundant Fighting-types; I’ll be taking pains to keep him alive as long as possible.





Lycanroc here is one of Mustard’s answers to Flying-types. It comes equipped with several powerful Rock-type moves, including one that always goes first, plus a Fairy move to round it out and offer a hidden counter to any Fighting-types you roll out to exploit that type weakness.



Presumably predicting I’ll be alternating Pokémon to exploit weaknesses, the Lycanroc uses a move that will damage any Pokémon that switch in before Bart Brick Breaks it into unconsciousness; as Mr. Blobby is my only counter for pure Fighting-types, I’m not exactly happy with this.



When he trots out his Corviknight I go ahead and make the sacrifice with Bruce, even though switching him in knocks off a solid 50 HP; I want to take these Pokémon DOWN, they’re tough enough to wreck me while I try to line up any complicated strategy and I’m probably going to need to sacrifice somebody in order to get his Urshifu under control later on.



God, I love how this Pokémon looks. It’s a glass cannon based around manipulating its stats and using them to fuel powerful attacks; one of its signature moves drains a third of its health to boost all of its stats, while another drains its Defense in exchange for a devastating Dragon-type move. Sword-only, tragically. In another instance of my genius as a player, I remembered that Eternatus was weak to Ground but forgot that that only applied because of its Poison typing. So I waste a turn hitting it with a Ground moves and letting it power itself up.



Bruce faints. Whoops.

I’m at a bit of a loss here and have to take a second to restock; it outsped Bruce, which means it can outspeed anything I have, so I have to come up with something that can take a serious hit before retaliating. Fortunately, after using that stat-boosting move twice, it’s weak enough that anything I use against it will probably take it down. Unfortunately, between its boosted stats and Stealth Rock shaving off the HP of anything I throw in, I’m honestly not certain I have anything that can pull that off.

I picked Bart for lack of a better option, and it immediately unleashes its most powerful move –





Affection came to my rescue, keeping Bart at one hit point when he otherwise would’ve fainted and letting him finish the job.



Luxray here is Mustard’s other answer to Flying-types, an Electric-type that also has a variety of other moves to help it fill roles in combat its allies can’t. Zamazenta takes it down with a couple of Digs . So glad Steel isn’t weak to Electric.



Pretend you see a picture of him about to send out his Urshifu here. There’s no way he won’t Gigantamax it after he throws it out, so I have a couple choices; keep Zamazenta out and use some of her moves, or switch her out for Bart and have him nail it with a Max Knuckle. I opt to keep her out to waste some of its Gigantamax turns and maybe take it down with some well-timed moves.



I had a couple options here; I could either use Revenge, which would do more damage if it was faster than me, or Behemoth Bash, which would do more damage if it was slower. I went with Behemoth Bash, which turned out to be the right move; it knocked off over half its health before the Urshifu could hit me. Neither it nor Zamazenta were able to finish off each other before the Dynamax wore off, though, and I realized a bit too late I’d missed my chance to record its G-Max move. Zamazenta put it down easy.



Despite its anticlimactic ending, that was one hell of a fight. As dumb as this DLC can get, I think it’s pretty obvious the devs were finally able to take their time to focus on something, and this fight shows a sort of focused design we just didn’t see from, say, Oleana or Rose. While I’m not the best analyst or strategist out there by far, from what I can see Mustard’s party is specifically designed to catch you by surprise, largely by surprising you with type counters there’s no way you could properly anticipate. And it does. I’m lucky I was able to plan ahead by reading up on his team; otherwise I may very well have lost. It’s easily one of my top four fights of the game, alongside Leon, Hop post-Zacian, and that one nightmare office duo back on Route 6.

The apprentice surpasses her master… A true moment of pride for the master! It seems I will have to redo my own training from scratch!







You look utterly dashing, darling! Oh! But look at me getting all distracted... You were amazing, Gloria! Looks like we’ll need to have some Max Soup tonight to celebrate!



Well, um, how should I put this...? I thought mayhap I should offer my congratulations…



_{Look, I am ready to talk. I do need to vent, I believe. Can you find me later this evening?}



Gloria!



Sure thing, master.







…

With that, the Isle of Armor’s storyline is complete. That doesn’t mean we’ve done everything there is to do here, however; there’s a whole challenge mode based around restricting your Pokémon to one type now available, and we could earn a fight with Honey and her frankly formidable team if we scrounged up enough Watts to fully upgrade the dojo. But I’m not going to bother with all that. The only thing left that I want to hit up here is just to the right.



You like it? Heh. I thought you might be the type.



This next part comes out in one long stream without a pause; the game just skips the button prompts until his rant is done.

That’s Porygon, a Virtual Pokémon, in the flesh— Er...in the code. Just imagine, a being brought to life using the pinnacle of scientific capabilities, making it basically the ultimate crystallization of technological progress! It was designed ages ago now, which explains all its straight lines and angles. But that’s just what gives it that retro feeling enthusiasts can’t get enough of. And you can have it evolve into Porygon2 if you trade it with someone while Porygon’s holding an Upgrade. Its smooth, rounded design is top-notch, too! You get it? This Pokémon captures the entirety of human advancement and progress!

He stops for a moment.

… Er...so...anyway, you can have it. Hardly anyone ever beats Daddy at his full strength, after all. Cherish that Porygon. It’ll give you a better appreciation for human ingenuity if you do. And, Gloria…



I was watching some of your interviews. Are you really autistic, too?

Yep.

… Do you think I’ll ever be able to go outside for long periods of time?

I’d love to say “yes” without reservation, but… I can’t do that in good conscience because I don’t know. What I can say is that I was a lot less functional than you are now when I was your age, so by that logic you’ll probably be more functional than me some day. When you first start to put your inventions on the market, get in contact with me and I’ll be your first investor, right?



Ah, Porygon, one of the most infamous Pokémon in the franchise despite its otherwise innocuous nature. It first showed up all the way back in Red, where you had to spend a ridiculous amount of time at the slots in the local gambling hall to save up enough chips to buy it. But outside of the games… If you kept up with the controversy around Cyberpunk 2077, you may have heard how it accidentally induced seizures in several players; turns out, there is a specific pattern of flashing red-blue lights that causes seizures even in people not otherwise susceptible to them. Porygon’s debut episode in the anime also featured that flashing pattern, and the day it aired it caused dozens of children across Japan to suddenly seize up. The following controversy shook the entertainment industry and even made it across the ocean, to the point where they parodied it in the Simpsons; it’s never shown its face in the anime since beyond a few background shots. Beyond that, though, it’s just another Pokémon, albeit the first one to be created by humanity and one with an interesting trade mechanic. I’ll be covering that next update.