straightforwardly | 357 | irl recap, recs, & pokémon shield

► I’m not sure how accurate this is factually, but I feel like I dropped off the face of dreamwidth for about two weeks. This past week (Monday through Friday), it was because I was on vacation! Specifically, a cursed vacation. This, tbh, was not fully surprising to me, because this trip was cursed from the very start of the planning process and never stopped causing problems. (I should note that there were good things too! But definitely the lowest ranked on my vacations tier list.)

The week before that, I was AWOL due to pre-vacation stress/problems, work stress, and my hand/wrist having pains that made many things difficult for me, including typing (and gaming—I’ve also made zero progress on Shield these past two weeks, though I do still have notes from the gaming I did the week before those two weeks that I never got around to sharing.) One (or rather, two) of the positive things I can say about this vacation: while my hand/wrist is not doing 100%, it’s much much better due to me spending a week mostly walking around and looking at things instead of using my hands to do things, AND being something completely different from my usual surroundings did an excellent job at hitting the reset button for how crispy I was feeling in relation to work.

So that’s my irl recap! Now for fannish things.

► Yesterday, I watched this animatic recontextualizing EPIC the Musicial’s “Get In The Water” in the context of an owner trying to give their cat a bath. It is just as funny as that description makes it sound, and I very much recommend checking it out.

► I also have a completely unrelated song recommendation—namely, I’ve been listening to this cover of “This Is What It Sounds Like” (Rumi & Jinu Duet) regularly pretty much since I first watched the movie. (The video title calls it a “Jinu Version”, but… I’m calling it a duet because that’s what it actually is imo.)

► Belated Pokémon Shield thoughts from like two weeks ago! Hopefully I’ll be getting back to this game soon (maybe even today, if I get through my chores & other responsibilities quick enough?), but for now:

Loved the Circhester town music <3

Exploring each of the rooms in the hotel in that town ended up being very rewarding! I stumbled into a Detective Conan/Agatha Christie-style moment (minus the murder), which was delightful.

In a different room, a NPC offered the following dialogue: “My partner is a germaphobe. It’s been taking a shower forever… even though it’s a ground-type.” and I have questions, but also: this is exactly the kind of flavour I want when I talk to NPCs in jrpgs.

So, objectively, ice types are not a very good typing, due to their many weaknesses and lack of real resistances against anything other than themselves. Nonetheless, due to being a grass type enthusiast, I always feel an instinctive stab of fear when I hear them being mentioned, haha. Must protect my friends!!! Despite the fact that I don’t actually have any grass types on my team in this game!

On a related note, one of the gym trainers, Liana, said something along the lines of, ‘ice types have a lot of weaknesses, but I still love them’, and I immediately went, “you and me are kindred spirits”, because that’s definitely me and my love of grass types, haha <3 Both are objectively not the greatest types, but I love my grass Pokémon with all my heart and soul anyway!

They’re absolutely going for the MILF vibes with this gym leader, haha.

I was intending to dynamax my Coalossal, but then she sent out a Lapras as her final Pokémon asdfghjkl; so Inteleon got sent out instead! It may not have been able to hit any super-effective moves on that Lapras, but the Lapras couldn’t do much damage to him either, so it evened out. IIRC, this battle extended beyond the Dynamax portion, and I actually finished the Lapras off with a different party member… possibly my Corsola? I didn’t make a note of that part, though, so not 100% sure if I’m remembering who it was properly.

The meal with Sonia and Hop and the little scene at the Not A Roman Bath made me very happy. I love all of these characters & how they interact with one another <3

I’m not the biggest fan of surfing portions in Pokémon games (scarred by the constant Tentacool & Tentacruel attacks in my childhood lol), but I love how unique the aesthetics of this one was, with the broken chunks of ice everywhere! Also, those waterways were absolutely choked with Wailmer, haha.

I wrote “god I love marnie’s design 10/10” in my notes, and while I don’t think that actually needs to be repeated yet again (pretty sure I said this when she was introduced as well?), I’m going to say it anyways, because yes <3

The reveal that Team Yell is made of Spikemuth gym trainers… tbh, while the fact they were from Spikemuth was obvious from the start, I just thought they were really enthusiastic citizens, haha.

I have….. questions…. about Pier’s hair. The spikes… (That being said, I generally liked his design! It worked a lot better for me in-game than when I was just looking at stills online.)

A rock concert with no sound… look, I don’t actually want Pokémon games to have voice acting (and am in fact actively against it), but they could have done something with the instrumentals/soundtrack, because I ended up being very amused by the scene, and I don’t think that was intended impression.

Overall, though, I really enjoyed that battle, Piers’ character, and all the little story beats surrounding it!

After that, I went hunting for a Scald TR in the wild area to give to my Inteleon. I succeeded in this fairly quickly! And that’s the last thing I did before my unintended break from the game.

► I did download like… all of my remaining unwatched episodes of Digimon Ghost Game with the thought that maybe I’d watch a chunk of it in the evenings while on vacation, but lol, nope, that absolutely did not happen. (I did watch one episode on a train on the way back home, before coming to the conclusion that I did not enjoy watching things on trains, and decided to go back to reading instead.) I did watch a few episodes yesterday, though, but I’ll talk about my thoughts on those at another date, since I think this entry is long enough~~, and I want to give my wrist a break~~.