Lily really is a no-nonsense sort of woman. She may have lost her research partner (and as far as my headcanon is concerned, Fey's secret biological father), but she's soldiering on like a champion, being so bold as to... order us to go get her a vital component. And, of course, we will be accompanied again. This is the last time Fey will be joining us though, thank goodness. Brace for jump cut!
Advantages of using an emulator: Gateon Port looks even prettier than it normally does.
Disadvantages of using an emulator: Fey's oddly gaunt mouth and proportionally non-existent nose in full HD.
Disadvantages of bringing Fey: her tendency to aggravate Groose's distant and more aggressive relative, Thug Zook. Sorry, Zeke. This one actually works by virtue of not being too far removed from the original name.
Not to mention his Shadow Zangoose. Again, spoilers for about five seconds from now.
Fortunately, we don't need to fight said Zangoose, which is Level 28+ in the original game. That will instead be done by the right hand of mysterious old dude seen at the start of the game who totally isn't the villain because we did that in Colosseum and we wouldn't just repeat a plot point like that, Mr Verich. Again, Mr Banks works well here because he's supposed to be loaded. What works less well is the redubbing of Ardos as Troy. Ardos sounded like some sort of uptight elf prince, which worked well with his conspicuous outfit and blue hair. Troy just makes him sound like a camp hairstylist.
You will note that I said Zangoose was 28+ in the original. It isn't here. This indicates that the penultimate dungeon had had a sharp level increase. Welp. Another interesting thing about this fight is that Troy's Manectric has Intimidate. In an earlier build of this fight, there was apparently a chance for Zeke's Zangoose to win, which somehow caused it to flee from battle and led to there being two Shadow Zangoose in the game via a mechanic we'll get to later. This clearly got overfixed.
Tl;dr: Troy obliterates Zeke, glitches don't happen.
STOP ZOOMING IN ON PEOPLE. THOSE EARLOBES CAN'T BE HUMAN.
Foreshadowy interlude over, we run into Fey's friend Emili (sic) and her mother Acri. Since these are very minor characters, their renaming isn't as big a deal. They tell us where the Parts Shop is, and we move on.
The Parts Shop owner, however, isn't here, and his grandson is also out. We actually saw the shop owner briefly at Dr. Clark's House, so back there we shall go. The name Perr, incidentally, is mercifully retained from Colosseum. He was part of a group of kids that assisted the protagonist of that game, all of whom had a double consonant deal at the end of their names except for one. This gives me hope that the BEST CHARACTER has also kept his name...
Before we head off, though, the stand-in has one last gift for us. He'll give us a choice of items with which to evolve our Eevee. We'll be going with Espeon, since whenever I play this I usually pick something that wasn't in Colosseum and I feel like a change.
Obviously, the Stones work like Stones, but the Sun and Moon Shards are slightly different. For one thing, they're Key Items. Simply possessing one will allow Eevee to evolve into Espeon or Umbreon when it reaches the relevant amount of happiness. This means we'll need to wait a bit longer to evolve our Eevee, but eh. I'm not even sure I want to use Eevee through this entire game, especially not if I have Gardevoir. Since I have no idea what other Shadow Pokemon are in this, I have made no hard decisions at all as to final team. We'll play it by ear.
Jump cut! Chobin's got his act together a bit here. In vanilla, it's a mighty Magikarp that he brings in to supplement his Sunkern. And now, I shall fansplain how the Heart Gauge works. Incidentally, I'm not a massive fan of the word I have derived 'fansplain' from. Partly because I feel nearly every single human alive has done it at least once and I'm pretty sure the world's at 50/50, mostly because it's an incredibly clunky portmanteau clearly not designed by someone who understands closed syllables and they missed a trick by not coining the infinitely more satisfying and flowy 'dicktation.'
As you've probably worked out, the purple meter where the Exp. Bar should go is Ralts' Heart Gauge. This gauge can be lowered by a number of different methods, the effectiveness of each dependent on your Pokemon's Nature. As you walk around with it, the gauge goes down. It also goes down a bit the first time you send it out in battle.
Once a bar is completely empty, the Pokemon usually regains a move. Once the third bar goes down, you're actually told what your Pokemon's Nature is. Don't ask me why. Anyway, here we've regained Fairy Wind, which is nice. However, both our opponents resist Fairy, so we'll use 'Shadow Pulse' instead.
'Shadow' type moves are super-effective against all non-Shadow Pokemon, and not very effective against Shadow Pokemon. This was not the case in Colosseum, where there was only one Shadow move, Shadow Rush, which was a 90 power physical recoil move. All Shadow Pokemon in vanilla XD normally come with at least two 'Shadow' type moves, usually an attacking move and a support move, but apparently that's no longer the case. This hake also seems to have added new Shadow moves. Shadow Pulse here is a 50 power Special move that has a chance to make the opponent flinch. I am completely on-board with this.
When a Shadow Pokemon uses a Shadow move, there is a chance that it will enter Reverse Mode (Hyper Mode in Colosseum), or 'Aura Burst' as it's called here. I actually like the new name, it better indicates what's happening, namely that the darkness is taking over and all inhibitions are dangerously absent. While it's in this mode, you can't use items on it and if you command it to use a non-Shadow move, it might use a Shadow move anyway. Also, it takes a small amount of damage at the end of the round. Back in Colosseum, it also increased the critical hit ratio of Shadow moves, but I'm not sure if that happens now.
To cure Aura Burst, you need to use a command unique to Colo/XD: Call. Because all battles in Colo/XD (well, 99% in XD) are Trainer Battles, the Run command's a bit useless, so it got replaced with Call, a multi-purpose command. It can be used to cure Aura Burst, taking off some of the Heart Gauge. If a Pokemon is asleep, it can be used to wake it. If neither of the two previous conditions are true, it raises a Pokemon's accuracy by one stage (it doesn't do this in Colosseum). It's also super-useful if all you've got left to do in a battle is catch a Pokemon and you can't weaken it any more, as it can be used to conserve your PP in a technique I call 'the ol' Ball 'n' Call routine' preferably in the most faux-western accent possible.
One final note, and then I swear that's it. The lower a Pokemon's Heart Gauge is, the higher the chance it will enter Aura Burst if you use a Shadow move. Right, now we can move on. Except... we can't. One last bit of admin first. From this point on, I'm using the newest version of Dolphin instead of my old one. I wasn't able to import my old save, so I've just started again. Everything's the same, except my Ralts is now female, my team's Natures are different, and my name is not ALL CAPS. NOW we can move on.
Inside the mansion, we find Makan/Mitch, the owner of the Parts Shop. He drops some plot hints and toddles off back to his shop.
Following him back to Gateon Port, we're able to meet Perr, who has finished fixing these rotating bridge things. This unlocks a bit more of Gateon Port, which is good for us because we have two more Shadow Pokemon to snag!
First off, there's a Casual Guy sitting out near a bit of rock face. In vanilla, he has a Ledyba, but now it's a Phanpy, a Pokemon we'd normally get a bit later in the game via a different method. The first time I played this game, I didn't even know this guy existed. He's so out of the waaaaay.
Anyhoo, Phanpy get! It has Shadow Rush as its only move right now, which in this game is a basic 50/100 Physical attack.
The other snag we can get is from the Bodybuilder at the top of the local Lighthouse, which is also filled with basic items on the way up. Poochyena is vanilla for this game, save for an increased Level (the same's true for Phanpy).
Pooch also comes with a new Shadow move, Shadow Creep. It's a 40/100 Physical priority move. I like.
It also comes with a different Hold Item! I don't remember if it just has Blackglasses normally. The Ultra Ball is just because Phanpy has Pickup. Funnily enough, I used Donphan in my last playthrough of XD. This probably means that neither of these two will see use. I mean, I used Gardevoir as well, but it's got a new Type here.
Back the Parts Shop, Perr gets us what we need. We return this to Lily, who needs a bit more time to finish the Purify Chamber. As such, she suggests we head elsewhere to purify our first Shadow Pokemon.
Namely our first returning location from Colosseum, Agate Village! It's home to a mythical Pikachu-using Trainer called Eagun. EAGUN. I'm sorry, but he didn't need to be made even more of an obvious reference. This is going in the pile along with Chobin.
On the plus side, his wife, Beluh/Bella, hasn't been renamed Misty or something, so I don't think he's been made the same person or anything. The sad thing is, Ash is a perfectly fitting name for him, it's just ruined by the baggage it comes with. Anyway, he instructs us to come to the Relic Stone, a legendary rock that was the sole method of purification back in Colosseum.
On the way, there's a small cave with four Trainers in it who offer us purification advice. They're not very difficult.
As a side note, what you are witnessing in the glitchtext screen is the effect of Ralts using Psybeam (the final move it remembers after Heal Bell). In vanilla XD, this is actually a beam, but here it seems to share Confusion's graphic. I'm not really sure why this is. After all, no new graphics were added. Right?
By the end of the trip, Ralts is ready to have its heart opened, something that can only happen once the gauge is at zero. We also get the Cologne Case, which holds massage scents that can be purchased in Agate and used to lower the Heart Gauges of Shadow Pokemon or to increase happiness.
Before we can reach the Stone though, one last challenge.
I say challenge. I mean drubbing.
With that out the way, Ralts is freed from the trappings of Shadowdom!
At this point, it regains the move in the slot the Shadow move occupied (here Will-O-Wisp), and all the experience it gained as a Shadow. It would appear that level-up sets got a rejig. This should help with the whole 'non-reusable TMs' thing, especially with how cheap the Relearner is.
We also get a special Ribbon and the chance to give it a nickname. The Name Rater is also here in Agate, so I'll take this chance to name everything else, too.
Much better. I have no name scheme here, I'm just doing whatever. So Beldum is Dwemer tech, Eevee leads the Society of Light and Ralts is top ballerina.
Returning to EAGUN's house, he tells us that a friend of his at Mount Battle may have a clue as to the whereabouts of the mysterious group that abducted Professor Pine. Unfortunately, I did waaaay too much exposition this part, so you'll have to wait a bit for the next time before we head out there...
