Pokemon Legends: Z-A, Part 4 - Canari's Coal Mine

 

Today on Pokemon: Cataluna lures Lida up onto a rooftop. How much do any of these people actually know about Cataluna? She never speaks, and everyone knows redheads are coo-coo. I wouldn't follow her onto a rooftop.

R.I.P. Nicholas Brendon, 1971-2026

Xander's namesake, the worst of these little gut-punches since Stan Kirsch.

We left off with a big boss fight. Vinnie here is a much higher rank than Cataluna, so if she wins, she'll jump up a bit from the W rank or whatever I left off on.

Activate mega evolution. Right now all I have is Absol, but I can get stones for most of my other main five or so 'Mons as well. Most. For whatever reason, Fennekin's mega stone is locked behind online multiplayer match rankings, so that's out. Puts Fennekin at a bit of a disavantage going forward, but I can still send him out as a setup 'Mon while building up the Mega meter.

The lower right meter is the Mega meter, and it can fill up a second time over the course of a fight, so leading off with a Mega evolution is a good move if you've got more than one of them.

TBH I could do without the Mega evolutions. Time-consuming animations, every fight you have to think about balancing around them... they're a bit like the L2+R2 critical attacks in the last couple of Mortal Kombat games.

After a pitched battle, Vinnie is defeated. It wasn't as difficult as I expected, and Absol really dished out punishment.

With that, Cataluna surges all the way from W to U! Alright, I skipped one. Thank God, we're not going through the entire alphabet in this game.

Wait, it's uh, it's still going

...and it stops at Rank F. Wow, we just skipped 16 ranks. So basically the game only has ten active ranks and I just reached the 5th one. Why even have the 26 rank system? It just makes the game seem way bigger than it actually is, and makes it harder to keep track of where someone is. Being "rank W" means very little compared to if it was "Rank 4" of ten. This also makes it seem like during development they decided to scrap an idea, or make the game nowhere near as long as planned. All around it just comes off really weird.

Wait, what? Urbain didn't do shit!

Every time Cataluna achieves anything, Urbain also achieves it somehow at the same time, despite not doing anything. It's actually kind of maddening. And no, she will not go back to the hotel with you, ya sick freak!

Na, na I think we're good. Get me away from this dude

From here on out, the game is less about grinding for rank-up fights and more about hunting down Rogue Mega Pokemon. These are basically all boss fights where you have to dodge around. AKA the weak part of the game. We'll get a few of these, then a grind for a trainer fight to rank up, then repeat, for the remainder of the game. It's pretty dull, all things considered. The Wild Areas are now completely optional, despite probably being the most interesting (and most traditional) thing about the game.

Back at the hotel, Cataluna and Lida chat while Urbain looks on creepily from nearby and giggles. I thought I told him to scram!

This tall weirdo who owns the hotel suspects that maybe the European Sex Tour is underway after all, considering what a good mood everyone is in...

Even the Poke Center nurse is giving our heroine bedroom eyes. What is this, the first of May?

Get near a Rogue Mega Pokemon and Cataluna gets the Highlander Buzz. Some of these fights are a real PITA to get to. They like to be up on rooftop decks that require going through a maze of scaffolding and other rooftops.

Next rogue: Victreebel. Not much to say about most of these fights. The game will send 3 of them out into the city, you can fight them in any order, and they're all pretty similar fights. Sic your 'mon, stay kind of far away from it so your character doesn't take splash damage.

Next: Camerupt. These choices for mega boss fights seem pretty damn random. Camerupt? Really? At least Victreebel makes some sense due to its tenure in the series (and never really getting much respect since it was outclassed by the lategame in Gen 1)

We also have a Mega Slowbro, where the shell creature chomping on his tail is now chomping on the entire Slowbro. Or maybe the shell creature is Slowbro? I don't know, but it's another weird choice for a boss and not very appealing.

Probably the worst choice they made with these tedious boss fights is that when you die, you get the option to just start back with the boss health where you left off.

Why? It completely removes any incentive to get good at the fights, learn the boss' moves, etc. Just spam attacks until you die, repeat once or twice, done, leave.

That said, the bosses do have a lot of HP and they are tedious fights, so... having to do them entirely in one go wouldn't be great either. Ideally they could have split the bosses into two phases, each with half the HP, and allowed you to restart on the second phase if you lost after that. This would also allow them to vary up the boss' moves for the second phase and make for a more interesting, less tedious fight.

After taking out the three bosses, it's time for another PURGE NIGHT, complete with lots of tedious grinding.

Evolution alert, Fennekin has reached final form. He's been a great asset and is usable right up to the end of the game, but not being able to mega evolve him is definitely a set-back.

Anotha one. This one is big, as Venusaur is very solid in the late-game. Toxic alone is super useful, but he also has Giga Drain which is particularly good in a game about hammering attack spam.

Next big boss fight is Canari, a popular streamer who...streams things. Not sure what she streams. Poke-battles, I guess?

Her fans are a bunch of weirdoes.

They also might be a cult. They are very cultlike, standing around waiting for Canari to stream something.

Canari makes everyone play a series of games to see who gets to meet her or whatever. It's all very weird, because I have no fookin' idea what the answers to some of these questions are.

I guess I guessed right enough times, because...

...I move on to a finals match against Captain Nerd here. Defeat him, and...

...Cataluna gets to meet Canari at her warehouse-like home. And it appears that her dad, Tarragon here, has actually been the one playing the part of Canari in the streams.

This is actually a super interesting twist and they could do a lot with this. Is he trying to relive his younger days by taking on an avatar? Is it all a ploy to micromanage his daughter's career? Does he wish he was female and this is an outlet for it?

...well nevermind, none of the above. He was just playing her today because she was busy or something. God help us if Pokemon Legends Z-A does anything interesting with the story.

Canari looks like someone had an accident with paint cans. She sports a midriff, a zippered bra, a mask, and her hair is half and half yellow and blue. Holy shit, she is SERIOUS about #StandWithUkraine!

This is the next big boss fight after Vinnie. Looks like she'll probably have a heavy electric element focus.

This team I've assembled isn't great against electric types or anything, but I've got everyone sufficiently leveled from hanging out in Wild Zones, so I just sorta roll over the fight by attrition.

Rank 6 of 10! ...are we there yet?

Canari decides to start taking life more seriously from here on out, while Tarragon looks on creepily.

It's kind of funny how the Scooby Gang back here are mostly huge Canari fans, while out-of-towner Cataluna has no idea who Canari is.

Yet another Strategy Meeting follows, and man, I am so ready for this game to be over with. The main story could have concluded right about here and I would have been fine, really. We have a couple more episodes... that I'm going to hopefully whisk through quickly. I would have done this eventually anyway, assuming I finish Pokemon. It really is the worst though, and I could have done Pokemon Platinum finally instead.

I'll say this, the main character's outfit is completely carrying the game.

Whoa, a Gyarados, one of my favorite Pokemon and a Gen 1 beast. I was unable to catch one, unfortunately. Too slippery. With Feraligator having both Water and Dragon type moves, Gyarados would be redundant anyway. At this point I really only have room for a 6th 'mon in my final lineup (Pichu is just occupying space for adorability) and it'll go to whatever I can find that can tank a few hits and take heat off of the others.

Before I go today, I've mentioned a few times how archaic the visuals of the Pokemon series tend to be. Even when the series steps outside of the main theme and tries new things, like the Legends duo, they still seem to spend as little money as possible on the graphics.

This game could have been on the Wii, and I'm not even kidding. So to help ease the eye-strain caused by these visuals, here are some Playstation 5 shots of Yakuza Kiwami 3's beaches of Okinawa at sunset:

Ahhhh, yep.

Playstation 5 visuals, bay-bee. It's a remake of a game from 2009, too, and it still annihilates Pokemon Legends Z-A by spending...any real money whatsoever on the visuals.

Next up: More of this infernal game, just trying to wrap it up and move on now.