The gym! For real this time, I swear! Part 2, or part 3, or part I-don't-remember-how-many-times-I-said-we-were-really-gonna-do-the-gym-this-time, whichever! (Not that I can promise this'll be the last part of "the gym for real I swear" depending on how hard Regina curbstomps me, but we're really, really gonna fight her now!)
Sparkly Ilario's honey gathering reminded me that I could let these guys hold stuff. It just so happens that I have five oran berries and the one sitrus berry from the floor in Avocet, so now everyone's kitted out with a healing item. Hopefully no one will get knocked out in one hit and render it useless. Tierog and Ragno's low HP stats have me worried...
Deep breaths... I got this. I can win in a barn. I can beat Regina. I can do this!
Yeah!
Oh god why are you yelling don't yell I'm already on edge ;-;
"we've learned to become stronger than anyone in this town!"
Yeah you did! Normal-types are the best. (Maybe if I keep sucking up to her she won't totally destroy me.)
"You'll need it!"
I... I don't need luck! I've got the skill and I've gotta have your money! I got this! I got this!
Hell yeah! Fire up the gym battle theme! (No, seriously, this music legitimately has me excited and nervous. Good work, guys.)
Hell yeah!
...oh, hell. Her weakest pokémon is the same level as my strongest two. I... got this?
Great. Bite took him down to 1 HP, so there's no way he's surviving another hit even with the oran berry. And of course rock smash barely did anything, I dunno why I'm surprised. (To be fair, I'm not sure whether that's down to Tierog's attack being that terribad or opaby just not being a dark-type at all.) Oh, well, at least the defense drop procced before he went down.
Here's hoping that said defense drop is enough to let double kick do some real damage.
And we're back to the hell yeah! Atta girl!
Huh, she's got her own barilbil. That doesn't inspire a lot of confidence, since it's probably got hustle like Durvas here. On the bright side...
...that makes it even more susceptible to sand attoh my god it's level 16 I'm gonna die. It's gonna hit me with something a lot stronger than tackle, isn't it?
...it knows stomp. Gah. If it were a lower level Sparkly Ilario might've been faster, but no, it's level 16, and it knows stomp. I don't got this. I don't got this at all.
Maybe the harrowing sight of Kilasdann, eerily motionless and with luscious locks streaming out of the empty void where a face should be like some Lovecraftian horror in a fashion magazine, will cause it to lose its mind in abject, indescribable terror.
Probably gonna hit it with a few string shots just to be safe, mind. God but I wish she really did have fur coat.
My plan to terrify the barilbil into inaction has failed. Stomp did 30 damage, and the sitrus berry only bought me another 10 HP. She didn't flinch, though, and that means I might've bought myself at least one sand attack thanks to string shot. Of course, Ragno will probably fold like a card table if I switch him right in, and I'd like to at least try to keep Kilasdann alive to string shot whatever Regina's got next, so that means...
I'm sorry, Aenjara. I'm so, so sorry.
...and so I sent her out, and then stomp missed! And then I was so excited to screencap it that instead of pressing F11 (the last key in my screenshot key combination), I pressed F12 (reset the game).
Oops.
Ah, well. I seriously doubt I would've pulled through that hot mess even with the lucky miss, and I would've ended up restarting anyway. It's still a little frustrating that the dramatic tale of hubris and tragedy I was building up was so rudely interrupted, but at least I didn't have to sacrifice my starter after all. The moral of this story, kids, is don't settle for a keyboard shortcut that's right next to other important keys. Gonna have to remap it again.
Well, that certainly could've gone better. The trouble is, I'm pretty sure the only way it could've gone better is if I'd spent more time leveling up my team. Against level 3–6 wild pokémon—not even level 3–6 trained pokémon, which would at least pay out a little more experience—and nothing else. The best part is, the pre-demo screenshots and trailers include what appears to be a level 20 haibril (remember the goat Professor Hawthorne had?) standing against the hay bale background you see above. I don't know if it was ever explicitly stated that that was Regina's pokémon, but that's certainly the implication. Of course, it was admittedly very optimistic of me to take on someone that might've had a level 20 with a team ranging from 10–13, but I was really hoping that that was just a pre-release shot and might've been better balanced during the actual demo. I still don't know whether that's the case since I didn't get past the barilbil before I hit the wrong key like the inattentive oaf I am, but going forward I guess I'm going to have to assume the haibril is there.
I was wondering whether we'd run into anything that would actually bother me about this game. Hojacoon's dex entry is ridiculous, sure, but it's just flavor text and at least it's amusing; there are typos and graphical errors here and there, but they're either easy enough to work around or possible to ignore entirely. This, though? Not gonna lie, it's getting under my skin. The team has mentioned before that they want the difficulty of Ethereal Gates to be higher than the most recent canon games have been, and I'm okay with that. I don't generally care for extremely difficult games (with a few rare exceptions such as NetHack), but I'd certainly rather have a challenge than a cakewalk. The problem comes when the only reasonable way to meet that challenge is with mind-numbing, low-yield grinding against the same handful of extremely weak wilds. That's not difficult. That's just straight up not fun. (I should mention that the false sense of security caused by all the local trainers maxing out at level 7 before you jump to a gym with pokémon more than twice as strong is also kind of a dick move.) I should not have to spend hours and hours bored out of my skull with repetitive battles just to get a standard team of six to the point where I have even half a chance of winning. I've stopped playing games that have required this sort of soul-sapping grinding before.
I'm going to try very, very hard to give Ethereal Gates the benefit of the doubt here and assume there's something I'm missing. I've heard people mention that the game is difficult, but so far I've not heard anyone complaining about unreasonable grinding. Overall I've been extremely impressed by this demo so far, with how well it's played up to this point, with the obvious love and dedication the team has poured into making this as authentic and exciting an experience as possible. The Perihelion Productions guys seem like knowledgeable Pokémon fans, and surely they'd understand that this sort of grinding does not make for an entertaining game when you're trying to appeal to more than just hardcore nuzlockers or whatever. I'm missing something. I must be missing something. I am absolutely willing to admit that I am hilariously unobservant and that an easier method of leveling up is staring me right in the face. I'm totally okay with the possibility that I might discover said method immediately after posting, breeze through the gym and thus feel like a huge dork for making this rant. But whatever that method is, I'm just not seeing it right now.
I'm going to stop for a bit to take care of some things and then resume my search for a better training option (there has to be one, I refuse to believe there isn't one). If I can't find one, well, I'm just going to have to suck it up and push through, as I still intend to finish the game, and I don't believe that some hiccups in part of the demo are indicative of either the rest of the demo or the final product being grindy and unfun. Especially when I know there are people who have completed this and have not (yet) seen them complain about anything like this. That's probably going to push back the completion of this run by quite a bit, but I won't be posting about much if it comes to that—I'll only bother posting if something interesting happens, like I find a wild shiny of my own or something, and we'll get back to more regular posts when I'm finally ready to take on the gym.
In the meantime: while I'm trying my best to avoid spoilers or acting on spoilery knowledge, so that I can "discover" as much of this game for myself as possible, I would really, really appreciate it if any of you who have passed this point would share any tips for leveling up, or perhaps point out the lucky egg or additional area of trainers or available rematches or whatever it is I'm missing. I'm more than happy to pass up on that one bit of discovery if it means that playing Ethereal Gates will remain as fun as it has been up to this point.
(Update: No, I wasn't missing anything—there really was nothing to do but grind out a few more levels. That said, the dev team stated (and one of them actually spoke to me directly) that the difficulty spike at this point was unintentional and the lengthy grinding was mostly down to an oversight while adjusting the experience formula. As of version 1.1 the new demo has fixed the experience issue, weakened Regina a little bit and made it easier to train and catch a few new things, so anyone playing those versions of the game should have a much smoother experience. I'm leaving this little rant here because the point of this LP was to give my impressions of the game and, well, that was my impression at the time. Just remember that this does not accurately reflect the current state of the game, and your trip to the gym will likely be less painful than mine was.)