The bonus is the ninja wheel.

Last time on Pokemon Omega Ruby we met Team Aqua, an Abba-inspired peppy eurodance group famed for songs like "Cartoon Heroes" ... Wait no I'm sorry this is a gang of weirdos cosplaying men/women of the sea who want to flood the planet. A very easy mistake to make.

Anyway they showed up to stop Team Magma and Brendan showed up to stop Team Magma and Lime showed up to stop Team Magma but somehow Team Magma didn't get stopped. Is it in fact possible that Team Magma is more competent than two teenagers and a group of Danish music pirates led by a community college swim instructor?
( THE ANSWER AWAITS underneath the cut. )

NEXT TIME: ... Let's go home, shall we?

Last time we walked around a shopping mall/apartment building and I discovered my pun game is nowhere near as clever as I thought it was. I briefly considered retiring in deepest shame to a far-off island and becoming a hermit, but y'know I'm already set up to blog about Pokemon on the internet so I guess I'll just keep rolling with that.
( It's a good option. )

So next time, we might actually get up that mountain I've been talking up! STAY TUNED.

When we last left our intrepid heroine, she had relentlessly mocked Team Magma (Did you know humans stand on the land? It's true!) and moved on to Mauville City.
( It's a giant mall! )

See you next time!

It is almost impossible for me to overstate how suspicious I was of Kemono Friends at first, thanks to the current landscape of anime.

An anime with an all-girl cast airing late at night ("Otaku-o-clock") with obvious mysteries surrounding the landscape and identity of one of the primary characters, with nebulous monsters involved? And it's all sweet and innocent and gentle, to the point where critics were calling it "mind-sapping" or "intelligence-draining"? Yeah.

I was 99% sure this would be a cunning trap designed to lure in viewers and punch them in the face with "deconstructions" and "oh look everything you loved about this show was secretly evil and gross haha".

Kemono Friends never does that.

What looks sweet and gentle stays sweet and gentle through the whole thing. The mysteries are tied up well but just vaguely enough there's an opening for a season 2. All through the 12 episode run, it remains a Nice Show about cheerful anime-furry girls. Every one of them is a Friend. However, there's this new girl. She doesn't know what animal she is, but she's very good at solving problems. What kind of Friend could she be?

It is not perfect. The fact is, this is a tie-in show to a mobile phone game that was canceled before the show came out. They basically just handed some 3D rendering software to a VERY small animation studio and went "Whatever, do what you like."

Visually, this is ratty-looking. Vehicle wheels will forget to spin, Friends will skip along the top of the grass instead of walking on the ground, the action scenes are mostly just big jumps, characters "fly" like they're being click-dragged across a Windows desktop and one character (Plains Zebra Friend) in the background of a shot was so poorly rendered the fanart imageboard tag for her is "Savannah Striped Giant Slug".

So it doesn't look great and it's chirpily sugar-sweet, but... I feel like this show just has so much heart. Somebody cared, and that snowballed. Kemono Friends has a loving sense of humor, it treats its characters with respect. It knows what to leave unsaid. The big moments it has are predictable but treated without irony or a wink to the audience. It's earnest and I loved it.

It's still really clearly for kids (WHAT was this doing in a late-night time slot?!) but I enjoyed it as a weird furry adult, and I'm not alone. Kemono Friends was a smash Japanese hit, to the point where not only will there be a season 2, there will also be a new mobile phone game, one based on the anime this time.

It honestly warms my heart to see that happen. I look forward to season 2.

(If you're going to try it, please note episode 1 is maybe the weakest and reflects -all- the problems I mentioned. By episode 3 and 4, the series has hit its stride and if those do nothing, it's worth moving on.)

So! Remember when I said this:

"It is while doing this gym that Mint starts trying to evolve. I have JUST ENOUGH Pokemon knowledge to whap the B button a couple times and stop him. If I don't evolve him, he'll learn a cool move. I'll explain why in a different post, it's not just that I want him small and cute forever, I promise."

...in today's post? Well, we're at that different post now.
( This is a sidebar, and you can skip it but I think it's interesting. )

Last time, we got things off and rolling and I was a bit surprised by the narrative structure of this particular game. By which I mean - so far there isn't much of one. By now in Pokemon Y we had been introduced to some distinct characters and given a heartwarming speech or two about free will from Professor Hug-Me.

Maybe we'll get a speech and/or a hug later. I've never played original Ruby, Sapphire, or Emerald. I dunno any specifics about what's coming.

( Onward. )

See you next time, as Lime and Mint challenge their first gym. Are they prepared? Ahahaha I have no idea.

Oh where do I even start...

Explorers of Sky is another in the Mystery Dungeon series, so you can expect a nigh-fetishistic focus on exploring randomly generated dungeons populated with dangerous pokemon. Your character is a member of a guild of explorers, adventurers who sally into the unknown to discover new lands or chase down outlaws normal pokemon are too distressed or weak to deal with. As hybrid defenders of justice and mappers of the realm, you'll be shuttled around from dungeon to dungeon, recruiting new pokemon and collecting items to help you survive.

I chose to name my partner-to-be "Wattson", as he was a Shinx, an electric-type pokemon. Ahaha it is a joke. And then, running with it, I chose "Sqrllock" as my Eevee stand-in's name and we became Team Deduction.

By the end of the game I was treating these two like a married couple and the game was doing NOTHING to put me off the idea. Actual Sherlock shippers would be side-eyeing me like "Whoa there dial it back a couple ticks?" but NO I WILL NOT. Horrible plot things would happen and these two little fluffs would assure each other that they cared for one another and would never give up or surrender, never let a moment of doubt come between them. I mean, geez, normally I would be off drooling over other pokemon because I'm a goddamn furry but in this particular case no. Aside from one special guest star who stole my heart and a trio of charming explorers I was faithful to my chosen partner the whole way through the game.

Also, the Mystery Dungeon series is where you go to get punched in the heart by masters of the Emotional Heart-Punch Combat School of Creative Writing. If I wasn't breaking down in heaving great emotional sobs at some tragic twist of fate I was getting all teary-eyed over the Power of Friendship. There are lines in here I'll never forget, the context around them is too meaningful, too powerful.

"It's just not possible for either of you to be unwanted in this world."

I'm sorry, I broke like glass.

*ahem*
Now, all that said...

I spent -ninety two hours- on this game.

I don't DO THAT.

Like, unless it's an MMO or something, I am usually OUT by hour 30 or 40. So I was SUCKED IN. You know why I stopped playing it, after 92 hours? Because I have ordered the sequel, Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon, and I want to play THAT without suffering burnout. I am so hungry for this game I bought a second game to keep gorging myself on.

Maybe it's a sign that I am a jumbo-sized baby person, I don't know. What I do know is I desperately needed this game. I needed it to exist and I needed to play it.

(Also, now that I've read her post, Celine wrote something very similar to what I did when SHE finished it. Makes sense since we talked the HELL out of this game on IM. Like, hours and hours of picky scene-by-scene analysis. If I have become trashy fandom sludge it is her fault.)

This game reignited my Pokemon spirit. Expect to see a lot more Pokemon for a while -- I am seriously considering an Omega Ruby gameblog.