PB:SitBC Ep 3 Romani Ite Domum!
So, Its a lovely Autumn day and I'm a young hip Pokemon Trainer with no pressing plans, so let's see what's out there! I run into the Tall Grass and nab me a Patrat (Silas) and a Lillipup (Terrie). Having a quick look at the assets that I have now added to my party, I find that Silas has Tackle and Leer; and Terrie has... Leer and Tackle. Huh. Low levels, folks. Of course, the way you get rid of crappy low-level abilities is by leveling up your Pokemon until they replace them with somewhat less crappy, somewhat higher-level abilities!
Also, did the first game's translation team get hired based on lowest bidder, and the rest of the games have kept on for tradition? The description for Leer suggests that it's an intimidation move that lowers defenses. That's not what a leer is. There's also an ability out there called Growl that lowers attack because the Pokemon growls endearingly, making the opponent not want to hurt the user. That's not how growling usually works either. I'm also curious as to why Lillipup's description mentions how they will run away when faced with desperate odds and yet the Patrat has the Special Ability to negate escape-preventing moves. You know what? This is a game about making brightly colored cartoon animals fight. I'm probably thinking too hard. I shuffle one of my new recruits to the front and press on!
A few battles later my Pokemon are progressing nicely and I find Cheren and Bianca outside of Accumula town. We compare notes and each of them have caught only one more Pokemon each since they left home. Come on, guys, it's like you're not even trying! You didn't even need to get different species! You could have snapped up three or four Patrats and creamed my corn!
Just then, my Crosstranciever goes off! It's the Professor, telling us that It's time to form Voltron! that she's waiting to give us the nickel tour of the local Pokemon Center! The Pokemon Center is an elaborate glass building with an orange roof, probably to try to evoke the image of a giant pokeball, which might work better if the building were at all pokeball shaped. Inside, we have the local Nurse Joy, who will heal your Pokemon for free. They also have a PC that's also free to use! Sweet! I can look up porn now!
No! The PC is where you store Pokemon you can't use right now for one reason or another but don't want to release back into the wild. Bianca notes that your login is handled under "Someone's PC" and asks who "Someone" is. Professor Juniper responds almost exactly with "That's a great question Kid, Shut up". Next on the tour is the Poke-mart, because despite what you might think, we're not running a freaking charity here. Here you can buy Pokeballs of various levels of sophistication, medicines, snacks and drinks for your Pokemon to enjoy, and souvenirs that you can send home to your folks to let them pretend you're thinking of them at all while you take a break from Middle School to roam the countryside like a hobo. "This gentleman over here will help you with a smile!" And this gentleman over here will talk with you stone-faced while silently judging you for your every movement.
Tour finished, the Professor says she's going to return to her Lab but that we should continue on to Striation City and when we get there look up an inventor named Fennel, who is apparently an old friend of the Professor. There's a few things left that weren't on the Professor's tour, so I poke about a little There's a little reading area with a table, some chairs, and some literature, undoubtedly Care and Feeding manuals for various pokemon and pamphlets on things like how to tell if your Meowth has heartworm. Upstairs are three elevators vigilantly being bounced by three people who clearly found this job after their callcenter was outsourced to Pakistan. Apparently the elevators lead to the "Union Room", which they're not ready to let me into yet, so I guess that we'll get to that later. There's also a large globe clearly showing the Earth in the corner but I am also told I can't use THAT yet either.
I head outside and immediately find out that there's a commotion in the plaza. I find Cheren in the gathering crowd and we are faced by a bunch of people apparently wearing grey hoodies pulled up over their ballcaps. Out steps a guy who I think is part frilled-lizard who introduces himself as Ghetsis. Gesundheit. He is here to rep for Team Plasma which is the Pokemon Liberation Front (Not to be confused with the Liberation Front for Pokemon. Those splitters!). He explains that the commonly held belief that Pokemon are partners and companions is bunk! Pokemon are slaves to their trainers, doing all the work in the relationships while their trainers take none of the risk! The crowd is scandalized by these accusations. Pokemon aren't like humans, they're living beings of great unknown potential that Humans have a lot to learn from. The only way to do this is to release them from service, to let them find their own destiny their own way!
A bit of Reality Subtext here: Pokemon has often been slammed by Animal Rights activists who complain that the game is an endorsement of Cockfighting. And frankly, Pokemon battles, taken in a vacuum, are totally cockfights. But the game piles on themes of Companionship, Compassion, and Responsibility to the point where nobody who has ever taken the games seriously would ever subject a pet of theirs to a real cockfight. I don't think Michael Vick will come forward and say that he loves Pokemon, ya know what I'm saying? Of course, then there's People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which always strives to set itself apart from other Animal Rights groups, usually by being crazier and more extreme and more hypocritical. They liked to complain that putting Pokemon in Pokeballs was akin to placing circus animals in too-small confinements. Never mind that Pokeballs are depicted as being anywhere from the size of a golf-ball to the size of a grapefruit, but can hold Pokemon as small as the four-inch long Flabebe, to the FORTY SEVEN FOOT LONG Wailord. Which is a WHALE. I think we have some abstraction for gameplay purposes here. PETA, ever the attention whores, even put out a parody game during Gen 5 (Which is Black and White 1 and 2). I'm not going to link it, because as an animal lover, I don't like PETA.
Anyway, Team Plasma is often interpreted as an attempt by GameFreak to do a bit of a Take That at those groups, as we will see in coming installments.
So, Ghetsis and his entourage depart, and Jeremy and Cheren begin to talk about what they've just seen when they are interrupted by a young man's rapid-fire interjection. This fellow is N, who claims to be able to speak to Pokemon. Not in a Cesar Millan "Dog Whisperer" way, or a Lorax "I speak for those who cannot speak!" way (We have that already in Ghetsis), but he claims to ACTUALLY be able to speak to and understand Pokemon. Like, Dr. Doolittle style. He says that he is a trainer, but expresses doubt that Pokemon can be happy that way. He wants to hear my Pokemon talk again, and so to do that he challenges me to a battle! This seems to be a rather backwards way to go about it personally. Especially if you're concerned with the cruelty possibilities of Pokemon training.
I land my first hit and N's response is "More, Let me hear your Pokemon's voice!" and I am officially creeped out. I give his cat a bath, and once the mist has settled N states that so long as Pokemon are confined in Pokeballs, they can never become perfect beings. He has to help Pokemon because they're is friends. He wanders away and Cheren puts all this out of his head, saying that he has to move on to Striation City so he can challenge the Gym Leader there.
Me? I decide to poke around the town a little. The game is still pretty much in Tutorial Mode so a lot of the NPCs give out basic gameplay info, like you can only carry six Pokemon on you at a time, Pokemon only can know four moves at once. That sort of thing. There's an annoying kid who wants to play Pokemon Rock Paper Scissors (or more properly Fire Water Grass) but his responses are clearly scripted since he always picks the type strong to what you pick. Brat. There's a house up on a hill where a pair of musicians add a piano and drum track to the town soundtrack. A kid running around a little courtyard area insists that my Pokemon and I resemble each other. I am vaguely insulted by this. One woman muses philosophical that because people having different ideas cause conflicts, but also cause the world to expand, while her newlywed husband simply points out that there are many differences between male and female humans, there aren't many differences between male and female Pokemon. I make a note to swipe a snack from their fridge and head to the Pokemon Center to stock up for the next Route.
And that's where we'll pick up next time!
Also, did the first game's translation team get hired based on lowest bidder, and the rest of the games have kept on for tradition? The description for Leer suggests that it's an intimidation move that lowers defenses. That's not what a leer is. There's also an ability out there called Growl that lowers attack because the Pokemon growls endearingly, making the opponent not want to hurt the user. That's not how growling usually works either. I'm also curious as to why Lillipup's description mentions how they will run away when faced with desperate odds and yet the Patrat has the Special Ability to negate escape-preventing moves. You know what? This is a game about making brightly colored cartoon animals fight. I'm probably thinking too hard. I shuffle one of my new recruits to the front and press on!
A few battles later my Pokemon are progressing nicely and I find Cheren and Bianca outside of Accumula town. We compare notes and each of them have caught only one more Pokemon each since they left home. Come on, guys, it's like you're not even trying! You didn't even need to get different species! You could have snapped up three or four Patrats and creamed my corn!
Just then, my Crosstranciever goes off! It's the Professor, telling us that It's time to form Voltron! that she's waiting to give us the nickel tour of the local Pokemon Center! The Pokemon Center is an elaborate glass building with an orange roof, probably to try to evoke the image of a giant pokeball, which might work better if the building were at all pokeball shaped. Inside, we have the local Nurse Joy, who will heal your Pokemon for free. They also have a PC that's also free to use! Sweet! I can look up porn now!
No! The PC is where you store Pokemon you can't use right now for one reason or another but don't want to release back into the wild. Bianca notes that your login is handled under "Someone's PC" and asks who "Someone" is. Professor Juniper responds almost exactly with "That's a great question Kid, Shut up". Next on the tour is the Poke-mart, because despite what you might think, we're not running a freaking charity here. Here you can buy Pokeballs of various levels of sophistication, medicines, snacks and drinks for your Pokemon to enjoy, and souvenirs that you can send home to your folks to let them pretend you're thinking of them at all while you take a break from Middle School to roam the countryside like a hobo. "This gentleman over here will help you with a smile!" And this gentleman over here will talk with you stone-faced while silently judging you for your every movement.
Tour finished, the Professor says she's going to return to her Lab but that we should continue on to Striation City and when we get there look up an inventor named Fennel, who is apparently an old friend of the Professor. There's a few things left that weren't on the Professor's tour, so I poke about a little There's a little reading area with a table, some chairs, and some literature, undoubtedly Care and Feeding manuals for various pokemon and pamphlets on things like how to tell if your Meowth has heartworm. Upstairs are three elevators vigilantly being bounced by three people who clearly found this job after their callcenter was outsourced to Pakistan. Apparently the elevators lead to the "Union Room", which they're not ready to let me into yet, so I guess that we'll get to that later. There's also a large globe clearly showing the Earth in the corner but I am also told I can't use THAT yet either.
I head outside and immediately find out that there's a commotion in the plaza. I find Cheren in the gathering crowd and we are faced by a bunch of people apparently wearing grey hoodies pulled up over their ballcaps. Out steps a guy who I think is part frilled-lizard who introduces himself as Ghetsis. Gesundheit. He is here to rep for Team Plasma which is the Pokemon Liberation Front (Not to be confused with the Liberation Front for Pokemon. Those splitters!). He explains that the commonly held belief that Pokemon are partners and companions is bunk! Pokemon are slaves to their trainers, doing all the work in the relationships while their trainers take none of the risk! The crowd is scandalized by these accusations. Pokemon aren't like humans, they're living beings of great unknown potential that Humans have a lot to learn from. The only way to do this is to release them from service, to let them find their own destiny their own way!
A bit of Reality Subtext here: Pokemon has often been slammed by Animal Rights activists who complain that the game is an endorsement of Cockfighting. And frankly, Pokemon battles, taken in a vacuum, are totally cockfights. But the game piles on themes of Companionship, Compassion, and Responsibility to the point where nobody who has ever taken the games seriously would ever subject a pet of theirs to a real cockfight. I don't think Michael Vick will come forward and say that he loves Pokemon, ya know what I'm saying? Of course, then there's People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which always strives to set itself apart from other Animal Rights groups, usually by being crazier and more extreme and more hypocritical. They liked to complain that putting Pokemon in Pokeballs was akin to placing circus animals in too-small confinements. Never mind that Pokeballs are depicted as being anywhere from the size of a golf-ball to the size of a grapefruit, but can hold Pokemon as small as the four-inch long Flabebe, to the FORTY SEVEN FOOT LONG Wailord. Which is a WHALE. I think we have some abstraction for gameplay purposes here. PETA, ever the attention whores, even put out a parody game during Gen 5 (Which is Black and White 1 and 2). I'm not going to link it, because as an animal lover, I don't like PETA.
Anyway, Team Plasma is often interpreted as an attempt by GameFreak to do a bit of a Take That at those groups, as we will see in coming installments.
So, Ghetsis and his entourage depart, and Jeremy and Cheren begin to talk about what they've just seen when they are interrupted by a young man's rapid-fire interjection. This fellow is N, who claims to be able to speak to Pokemon. Not in a Cesar Millan "Dog Whisperer" way, or a Lorax "I speak for those who cannot speak!" way (We have that already in Ghetsis), but he claims to ACTUALLY be able to speak to and understand Pokemon. Like, Dr. Doolittle style. He says that he is a trainer, but expresses doubt that Pokemon can be happy that way. He wants to hear my Pokemon talk again, and so to do that he challenges me to a battle! This seems to be a rather backwards way to go about it personally. Especially if you're concerned with the cruelty possibilities of Pokemon training.
I land my first hit and N's response is "More, Let me hear your Pokemon's voice!" and I am officially creeped out. I give his cat a bath, and once the mist has settled N states that so long as Pokemon are confined in Pokeballs, they can never become perfect beings. He has to help Pokemon because they're is friends. He wanders away and Cheren puts all this out of his head, saying that he has to move on to Striation City so he can challenge the Gym Leader there.
Me? I decide to poke around the town a little. The game is still pretty much in Tutorial Mode so a lot of the NPCs give out basic gameplay info, like you can only carry six Pokemon on you at a time, Pokemon only can know four moves at once. That sort of thing. There's an annoying kid who wants to play Pokemon Rock Paper Scissors (or more properly Fire Water Grass) but his responses are clearly scripted since he always picks the type strong to what you pick. Brat. There's a house up on a hill where a pair of musicians add a piano and drum track to the town soundtrack. A kid running around a little courtyard area insists that my Pokemon and I resemble each other. I am vaguely insulted by this. One woman muses philosophical that because people having different ideas cause conflicts, but also cause the world to expand, while her newlywed husband simply points out that there are many differences between male and female humans, there aren't many differences between male and female Pokemon. I make a note to swipe a snack from their fridge and head to the Pokemon Center to stock up for the next Route.
And that's where we'll pick up next time!