Pokemon!

Last Game Played: Y

When X and Y first came out, I was eight years old and wasn't paying attention to the box art. I got X while my sister got Y because I thought X was the one that had The Cool Legendary, aka Yveltal. So when I finally figured out X was not in fact the game that I wanted, I kind of gave up on playing it for the next decade. When my sister was getting rid of her old 3DS games, I was the only sibling left who was still regularly playing Pokemon games so she gave me all of her's, including Heart Gold, White, and Y. Y was the one that I was most looking forward to playing but when I tried... the cartridge was busted. It would crash when I tried to do certain tasks and I was in constant fear that it would crash while I tried to do something mandatory and softlock me. So again, I gave up on playing pokemon Y. Until! I complained to my mother about the game crashing so when we were birthday shopping for me at a local used book store, we also checked out their used games just in case and lo and behold, Y was the only Pokemon game they had! So I played through the entire game in a week.

Back when I first played X at eight years old, my starter was a Chespin named Cheshire but ever since that attempt, I gave in to my furry nature and have been choosing Fennekin instead. My various Fennekins over the years have mostly been named Alfred, but I did have one named Cadmean, in reference to the Cadmean Vixen, another name for the Teumessian Fox from Greek mythology, a fox that can never be caught. In this playthrough, I named her Azugrath, a name I got from Fantasy Name Generators' demon name generator. I picked a demon name because I had this silly idea for a nuzlocke comic of my playthrough where my Fennekin is possessed by a demon. Yeah, this playthough was supposed to be a nuzlocke but then a portion of the way through I realized it was kind of a dumb idea to try and nuzlocke a game I've never fully played through. So I stopped doing that. I'll probably try to nuzlocke this game again some day though.

For a game that came out over ten years ago, I was surprisingly unspoiled going into this! I knew a lot of people found the story lackluster so I didn't have very high expectations but I was kind of surprised! It certainly wasn't the best story a Pokemon game has ever had, but it was entertaining enough. That might have just been because I find Lysandre extremely funny though. The part where he called me, got philisophical about mega evolution, then immediately hung up without letting me talk was I think my favorite part in the entire game. Something about villains that monologue at random tickles me. Other than that, Lysandre is kind of just Cyrus again. And Cyrus even does the monologuing at random thing too! In the Distortion World he just starts talking about DNA!! So Lysandre and Team Flare could have used more work. I wasn't big on the rivals/friends either to be honest; Calem/Serena are generic but servicable, Shauna's I think the best one but she doesn't really get a good conclusion to her arc of not knowing why she's on her journey, and there's just not enough of Trevor or Tierno for me to care about them at all. I understand they were going for a friend group sort of thing but they just didn't have enough to do with any of these characters for me to get attached to them much. Shauna was my favorite of the four because 1. you spend a lot of time with her, even more than you spend with Calem/Serena and 2. between her and Calem/Serena, she's the more interesting one.

Stylistically X and Y are my favorite fully 3D pokemon games. I think the 3D style they used is vastly superior to the new games, which use way too many "realistic" textures. There is a problem though, and that's the horrible way many of the 3D models are colored. Why are their colors so desaturated and washed out?? I actually think the desaturated colors could have worked with these games alone; the environment has a kind of pastel color palette that I think could have worked if it was unique to these games and some of the colors were just a bit more saturated. But instead these sad colors carried over to new games! Bulbasaur still looks like he needs to be watered! If you don't remember how beautiful the colors used to be, look up the sprite art done for Black and White.

That's pretty much all I have to say about the game as a whole, now I'm going to talk about my team! My starter was a female Fennekin named Azugrath, which I kept the whole game. In Santalune Forest I caught a Pikachu which I named Sakallid (a name also found through Fantasy Name Generator) who I also kept the whole game because I forgot to get a Mareep. I'm tempted to replay just to get a Mareep at the right time because using a Pikachu with such shit defense against the elite four was truly awful. An Ampharos would have been so much better. "Why didn't you evolve it into a Raichu?" you may ask. Because I wasted my thunder stone on an Eevee and didn't know where to find another one. I also got a Fletchling pretty early on who I named Brimstone and kept up until I caught Yveltal and replaced him. I know some people prefer not to have legendaries on their teams, but I don't have any problem with it. And Yveltal gave me more type coverage. My grass and water types were a Vileplume named Oleander and an Azumarill named Glory. I evolved my Vileplume too early though and it never learned Giga Drain. So. That's another thing I would do better next time. Glory's perfect though. The last member of my team was the free Lucario Korrina gives you, which I named Mordred.