Last update, we finally got Oliver and company out of Mordor, and dropped a rock the size of a supermarket onto a lava lizard. This time, we'll mostly be playing around with filler game mechanics as opposed to making story progression, due to a combination of being under the weather, being genuinely curious as to how this stuff works, and oh yeah... Staring down end-of-semester exams next week. Namely, we'll be trying to recruit as many Imagines as possible within 2 hours.
Let's start out by freeing up as many team slots as possible. A quick trip to a green manhole reveals that you can bench EVERY Imagine presently in your team... Except Rucci and Drippy, which means that we'll have at most 8 slots to work with out in the field. After quickly throwing Maru onto the team, we're ready to begin...
...
...
NOW!
... Huh... When we left, those 3 knights from earlier apparently turned up in the square of this desert town... Ominous... But whatever, it's time to get some Imagines!
Our first encounter has us run into a skeletal swordsman and two of those two-legged goat-lizard things... Both of the latter appear to have taken a liking to Maru... So we'll focus on getting one of them. Recruiting one of them turned out to be laughably easy. 2 rounds of appeals from Maru were able to convince it to join the party. ... And since I have no idea what to call a goat, I think I'll hit the "Don't Care" option for naming. (It's something with 3 katakana, "Oshichi" apparently. Oshichi joins the party at Level 10 with 64 HP and 35 MP, and a stat spread of 32/39/27/27/24. Alright, moving on.
An encounter with another goat reveals that these things might be incredibly easy to recruit... Seeing as it had a heart from the start of the battle... Oh well, let's ignore it in favor of attempting to recruit the acorn that showed up alongside it (because those skeletons hit HARD). In the first turn, we put Skeletor down for the count and... Oh right, those acorns apparently can hit for a decent chunk of health... Well this will be... Interesting... In the next turn, we give a rather blunt "Sorry, but we've already got a goat" to acorn's buddy and have Maru appeal to it as it curls up to shield itself from our attacks (which consisted of a rather pathetic wand swat from Oliver)... And we've got a heart! The next couple of rounds, we have everyone other than Maru defend while we try out different appeals. The first one drew a question mark... The second one got us a music note... Looks like we'll try spamming that one for a while. And another instance of it is enough to net us a new buddy. Being the creative genius I am, I name him 'Acorn' (lit. Donguri). Donguri also joins at Level 10, surprisingly he's not quite as sturdy as he looks. He joins with 79 HP, 21 MP, a 36/35/30/30/13 spread (in other words, he might actually lose to a snail in a race). Oh, he apparently burns easily like Drippy, too.
Our third battle has us run into another goat + skeleton combo... Let's focus on the one Imagine we DON'T have here by now... ... Playing around with Maru's appeals reveals that these guys are apparently as responsive as brick walls... (Also, the little buggers cast defense debuffs.) Let's try a little more before we give up though. ... 10 appeals later, this thing STILL isn't budging. Whatever, let's find a different Imagine to recruit- ... And it's after we finally knock the thing upside the head that it FINALLY decides it likes us... Interesting... We try Maru's first appeal, which causes a blue note to appear over Skeletor's head. Let's repeat i- ... Now it's getting a question mark? ;/ I don't get you, skeleton... Playing around with Maru's second appeal, and we have apparently frustrated it... Seeing as we get a black scribble in its speech bubble... Guess we weren't supposed to do that... We play around with Maru's 3rd appeal... And it's enough to finally recruit Skeletor here. Hmm... What to call an undead blade wielder...? Hmm... What about Cortez? (Hopefully he doesn't eat our souls when he's low on HP though, that would suck.) Our gallant swordsman with a bad case of the 'dead' joins the party at the same level as our last 2 recruits, with 62 HP, 27 MP, and a stat spread of 45/34/30/24/34. He resists physical attacks and... Is weak to wind? Huh. Wasn't expecting that.
Hmm... There aren't that many Imagines left around here, barring that unicobra and those fire things... Looks like we should start making our way towards Golden Grove... After a brief ambush, we learn that Donguri's type of imagine can apparently hit all movement cells with a quake move. Which dealt out 10-12 HP damage to everyone on the field. As we make our way back into the dungeon after a brief HP / MP restoring pit stop, we notice that those broken fungal bridges from a few updates back that we fixed are mercifully intact.
Our first encounter here puts us up against one of those sunflower things and a those white heart-clover-eared things. The former displaying a heart right off the bat. Let's try and recruit them both. In battle, we find out just how utterly overpowered we have become relative to these guys. EVERY attack they throw at us does one measly HP of damage. After a few attempts at appeal spam, we wind up frustrating our sunflower buddy when we try a different appeal... Uh... Guess it doesn't like Maru's second appeal... (The yellow one.) Rucci winds up getting poisoned about a turn later by the aforementioned sunflower. And the turn after THAT, we finally get our sunflower buddy to join. One down, one to go. Although the remaining Imagine isn't particularly threatening (indeed, most of the danger from these guys comes from them healing their friends), it's about as responsive as Cortez was... Oh well, appeal spam for the win! ... 10 appeals later, we decide that cloverhead isn't worth the effort right now and proceed to one-shot her. Our sunflower friend, whom I have named "Himawari" (lit. "sunflower" Yeah, yeah, real creative, I know) joins the party at Level 9, with 58 HP, 25 MP, 27/33/32/26/44 for main stats. Also he comes with a resistance to wind and weakness to fire.
A few steps up, we run into another sunflower Imagine and one of those spear-toting deformed Sentret things. After a scant 4 rounds of appealing, Sentret joins the party. His stats are about as impressive as his namesake's. Level 9, 43 HP / 33 MP, 29/27/35/28/25 for major stats. UNLIKE his namesake, he can take a punch... He'd probably keel over from an Aerial Ace though. Heading off to the overworld (because we're going to have to backtrack eventually anyways) for Ding Dong Dell, we run into one of those bird-pachyderms and those unholy offsprings of Flareon and Vaporeon. The latter is recruited in a whopping 2 turns. The latter takes 3 to go from heart over head to recruit. Unfortunately, Flareon doesn't fit in 4 kana, so we wind up using the naming equivalent of 'Phone a Friend' and call our orange cat-mutt 'Rascal.' (Technically 'Gorotsuki', but whatever.) We name our Pak. E. Derm expy here Dumbo, because I'm short on ideas. Since we're down to our last free spot, let's make a pit stop at Ding Dong Dell before we recruit any more Imagines.
After our pit stop, we run out to take on a vulture and a couple purple leaf things... Seeing as it more or less just shrugged off like 7 appeals, let's give it a gentle swat... Huh. Looks like beating birds upside the head makes them appreciate harp music better. After playing around with Maru's appeals a few times, we finally are able to recruit our Vullaby expy with better fashion sense, now let's go for that leaf... In other news, they can apparently inflict sleep status... Something we find out with Oliver. Which could be annoying... If you know, it could actually reasonably HURT us... Hmm... Let's try that same strategy of 'apply weak dope swat, then music' again. ... Nope. This leaf doesn't want to cooperate... And Oliver apparently hits hard enough to 2HKO it. Oh well, we got a Vullaby from it. Unfortunately, 'Vullaby' is apparently 5 kana, as is 'Mandibuzz', so not-Vullaby here is joining the rapidly-growing "literal and unimaginative names" club as "Hagewashi" (lit. "Vulture"). A quick look at our avian recruit's stats and those of his latest buddies reveals that the Imagines here are kinda pushovers. All of the last 3 Imagines joined the team at level 3. Dumbo held the record for most HP (33), our totally-not-a-Vullaby friend has the highest MP stat (15). And spread winners are Rascal for attack (21), Hagewashi for speed and magical defense (12 and 19), and Dumbo taking the crown for Defense and Magical Attack (17 and 19).
A short backtrack to the very first dungeon with 30 minutes on the clock reveals that for a bunch of woefully underlevelled Pokemon rejects, these guys can be ANNOYING to recruit. Indeed, over the course of 5 encounters averaging over 10 rounds a turn we were able to recruit Imagines successfully in ONE of them (A venus flytrap thing and a purple snake-lizard). Before our time ran out, Pakupaku and Chintosu join the party at Level 2. Their names developed by much painstaking thought, and NOT by the "Don't Care" option. They both started at Level 2. Pakupaku has 12 HP, 15 MP and 10/23/8/16/10 for stats. And Chintosu has 17 HP, 18 MP, and 10/12/13/15/12 for a spread.
All in all, we managed to recruit 10 Imagines in 20 minutes. A bit slow by Pokemon standards, but fairly decent considering how I more or less had no idea what I was doing during this whole exercise. Let's backtrack back to that desert town and save and pick up there next time.
Oh, in other news, en route back to the desert town, we managed to recruit 2 additional Imagines. A uniraptor and one of those rhino-pigs. The uniraptor (who upon closer inspection seems more goat-like), I named by using the guidance of the "Don't Care" option. He's apparently called Shipapa. The pig, I named Pokey. Go ahead and take a wild guess here. Like the earlier batch of level 3 recruits, these guys have some rather unspectacular stats. Neither of them have HP stats that break 30 points, nor MP stats that break 15 points (29/14 for Pokey and 25/12 for Shipapa). And both of them have only 2 out of 5 stats that are greater or equal to 15 points. Attack for the two of them (19 for Pokey, 15 for Shipapa), Shipapa's 21 point strong speed stat, and Pokey's 18 points in Defense. But hey, a few levels ought to shore them up (especially considering how the reigning level champ on the team has 18 levels on the two of them!).
But yeah, returning to the desert town reveals that Oliver's order of stalker knights apparently moved on without us, so let's save and end here for now.
Takeaway Points:
- You cannot bench Rucci. EVER. Even with a full team of 12. Drippy also cannot be benched, for obvious character and story reasons. The closest you can come to being rid of the two is to keep them off of the field. That said, Rucci kinda hits like a Mack truck, so it would probably be pretty hard to think of situations where you WOULDN'T want him handy.
- Catching Imagines, TL/DR version:
- HAVE MARU IN YOUR ON-FIELD PARTY
- Wait for a pink heart to appear over the head of an Imagine.
- Use an appeal from Maru. If you get a musical note, you're making progress. If you get a question mark or a frustrated spiral, use a different appeal.
- Play around with appeals until you find the one that finally convinces the Pokemon reject you're facing to join you.
- Keep the Imagine's battle abilities in mind while attempting to recruit it. Remember, even if it can't do more than scratch damage, it will be attacking you, and you will be susceptible to any status-inducing moves even if you're like 15 levels above your desired buddy.
- Imagines apparently have an equivalent of catch rates. Some of them will be pathetically easy to recruit. Others will make you want to tear your hair out. Exercise caution, especially with Imagines that aren't woefully underleveled.
- The "Don't Care" option is a godsend for naming Imagines... Time will tell whether or not there's a Name Rater analogue in this game too.
- The Order of Stalker Knights has apparently been shadowing us for a while... Just WHAT they're up to remains a mystery... In part because their ramblings are in moonspeak.
- There were no VAs or cutscenes barring the one of the knights in this update... Probably because we didn't really progress anywhere in-story.
Stats:
- Oliver: Level 18: 104 HP / 77 MP
- Rucci: Level 21: 151 HP / 82 MP *
- Maru: Level 16: 91 HP / 89 (with +50 bonus from equipment) MP*
- G: 5888
- Play Time: 31 hours, 59 minutes, 52 seconds.
In the next update, we will press on with Oliver's saga... And will potentially see a more active updating schedule on account of school letting out.
Comments
