Now that we have conquered the Johto League, the entire Kanto league is upon us. This something between "postgame content" and "an entire additional game tacked onto the first game." Kanto is an entire
region, you see--the region in which the generation 1 games took place, to be precise. Much like Johto, there's even an entire questline to get all eight gym badges before facing the ultimate challenge. On the other hand, Johto was clearly the "main story" of this game. The entire character arcs with both Team Rocket and Silver played out here. The ending was a suitably climactic showdown against the Elite Four and the Champion. There were even end credits. We saved and quit before this happened, technically, but very shortly (like, within the first few minutes of starting up) next time, we can expect to unlock the National Dex, which is usually around the point when most Pokemon games have declared it to be postgame time. "Yeah, you beat the main game with the regional roster, so now it's time to just open everything up and let you play with whatever at this point."
The end result of all of these mixed signals: We still have an entire region to go, but all of the safety locks are now disabled, or at least they will be once we get that National Dex. Our team options have already
drastically increased, and we can expect them to increase even further very shortly after we start the next session. (I know using the Pokewalker already let us have certain Pokemon far earlier than it would be possible to obtain them within the actual game--ahem, hi Murkrow--but
even by those standards the roster is about to explode. The National Dex acquisition will unlock about a zillion new Pokewalker courses, for one thing.)
This leads us to the point of this Special Aside entry, along with the next few that we intend to follow it. We're going to be getting a lot of new recruits in a very short amount of time, with potentially as much as half the team or more replaced either by next session or the one after. So that these all-new characters can better fit in with the established team whose heartfelt journey was built over the course of everything they've been to up to this point, I feel like the new recruits need... you know... an introduction. Who are these people, and what brings them to our team? Why should you care about them when the Neverending Six already have your heart? Hopefully by the end of this series, the expanded team won't feel
as out of place compared to the ones who have been here from the beginning.
That said, the perfect example for what I mean and what I'm going for, the perfect introduction to this topic, comes with our first new addition. This is a Pokemon whose debut I've been planning and waiting for with excitement since early on in this LP, one with almost as much nostalgia and backstory to it as Empress Moonchild herself (even if for completely different, almost polar opposite reasons,) even if I was able to go without mentioning it and keep that fact a surprise all the way until now.
In this entry: Meet a science project searching for meaning. An engineered monster of sorts, born out of frustration and bred solely to be a weapon, now freed and left to learn how to live and love.
( Read more... )And there you have it; our first new recruit. More new faces to meet next time, perhaps?
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