Climbing the Underground Space Castle

As I started my journey up the tower to the obvious final boss stage to fight "N" and his giant space pigeon Reshiram, I came across the six sages.  Each one of these stepped forward and told me a useful or not-so-useful life tip: "All mistakes that are not prepared for are other mistakes," "Wisdom is the forsight of knowledge," "An apple a day makes the world go blind,"...

What a dumb game, I can't be the only one who thinks that this is just stupid, right? Right?...guys?...

I thought this would be a six-versus-one battle (which would have been fun), but I was surprised when I got instead a cutscene: all eight gymleaders showed-up to back me up.  Full disclosure: this was pretty cool--which is weird because everything else in the past hour of playing time has sucked.

It turns out that Team Plasma's big plan has always been to sabotage the PC system to release all of the trainers' pokemon.  *INSERT SLOW CLAP FOR GENUINELY CLEVER PLAN*.  My only question is why they needed the Dragonite skull from the museum at the start of the game--or all of those pep rallies--or the underground space castle build next to the pokemon league.  Surely this is the sort of plan that should be executed "Ocean's Eleven" style (with a cool Frank Sinatra tune playing in the background)?  I am very disappointed in Nintendo for not casting George Clooney as "N" and Brad Pitt as "Ghestis".

Here are things I found on the way to the top:

CREEEEEEEPY

-N's creepy ass pedophilia room -->
-A pokemon storage PC
-A pokemon center

This is clearly the worst evil lair ever.  Ghestis even cheered me on!  He wished me luck!  Who the hell writes these characters, this incessant coddling is too much!

As I made it to the top, N called for his "Hyper-Pigeon" Reshiram to battle me--Reshiram broke through the wall to get in, which must end-up costing Team Plasma a lot of money in the long run on renovations, and Zekrom appeared out of the orb I was carrying.  Okay game, I see where you are going with this.

I fought Zekrom, but apparently killing him doesn't do anything and you are REQUIRED to catch him. UGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH, FIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNE!

Oh, by the way, I got rid of that dumb Psychic type since he was only good at sucking and dying.  Picked-up Rufflet from the PC.


Current Squad:

Zekrom No Findings Please, Cannot Finding Zekrom

In a shocking twist, it turns out that Zekrom suffers from "princess is in another castle" syndrome as the journey through the Relic Caslte was a colossal waste of time--he was not there. At this point, it is obvious that no one in the entire universe has any clue what is going on--and Team Plasma's success in awakening Reshiram HAS to be attributed to blind luck...honestly: they were probably trying to do something completely unrelated (because who would want Reshiram? Its ugly at best) and just played it off as being part of their plans all along. I'm reminded of Team Plasma's mission to steal the Dragonite skull from the museum (a million gyms ago) and how fruitful that turned out for them... So the "Zekrom or Lack-Thereof Award" goes tooooo the Relic Castle! Congratulations and thank you for wasting my time!

However, the trip DID reveal a few things about Alder--apparently he's more of a washed-up champion than a legitimate somebody. The Plasma sage named Ghestis (another one of those characters who the art directors started drawing and just never stopped), the guy with the laser-eyepiece from the opening video, revealed that after Alder became the most powerful trainer in the world, his favorite pokemon got sick and died and he hasn't battled since. Honestly I like this turn of events--it brings some much-needed drama to the scene--and also it hints of some kind of back story besides the expected "I worked real hard to train the pokemons and I made it".

Ghestis said that the "dark stone", the dormant Zekrom, was not there, but that we definitely need it in order to defeat N. At this point, Alder muttered something about not liking it that we had to play into Team Plasma's plans in order to defeat them. This was quite the shock to me because we were already doing just that by coming to the Relic Castle to awaken Zekrom just like N asked us to not an hour earlier. I'm not asking for much, but a little consistency from moment to moment would be nice.

After leaving the castle, I was immediately called to the museum in Nacrene City. There, Gymleader Lenora (the normal-typed gymleader) presented me with the very item I had been scouring the Relic Castle for.

I'm not sure why Nintendo figured that they should withhold that item from me for an extra 3 minutes. I mean, nothing else happened between me not having the dark stone in the Relic Castle and me getting it in Nacrene City...except I had to withdraw Deedoon to allow me to FLY there. Was it really necessary to do this?

The way it was presented it seemed like they just happened to find this incredibly important item just lying around somewhere--like they found this "dark stone" at a flea market. So many of the events in this game just seem to be lucky breaks, this is completely ridiculous!

So after finally finding the dark stone, and a lengthy conversation with everyone involved (whom I have nicknamed Team Pup-in-Suds to counter Team Plasma) the pimp of the year basically says, "so...now what?"

My thoughts exactly...

Current Squad:

Reshiram

As soon as I left the building, I was met by the namby-pamby squad of Cheren and Bianca who went on about...something or other...I don't really pay attention to what they say anymore. Anyways, Gymleader Bryce decided to join us where he pointed out that there were ninjas hiding behind our backs...no clue how we didn't notice this without his help...

I had seen these ninjas before--they're N's personal guard and they call themselves the shadow triad--why are they called the shadow triad? Why, because they lack subtlety of course!

They told me to meet N at Dragonspiral Tower, which has now been hyped-up more than Y2K, and I gladly obliged.


Dragonspiral Tower is a fairly boring ruin which is populated entirely by two things: pokemon called Golette (which I caught) and Team Plasma. After battling twenty-something of the goons and reaching the top without breaking a sweat, I found N at the top with what must have been the most gigantic pigeon in the universe--which he revealed to be the legendary pokemon Reshiram whose only rival, apparently, is a pokemon called Zekrom, the yang to his yin.

Right before N flew away upon the back of Reshiram, he told me that I should definitely awaken the second apocalyptic legendary pokemon, Zekrom. Now let me get one thing straight--it is never a good idea to awaken a pokemon whose last appearance caused the world to be destroyed in a flash of hellfire--and this is a fact that I just assumed everyone else agreed with me on. But as soon as I met up with Alder, Bryce, the pimp of the year, and the namby-pamby squad, they seemed to be under the impression that it was a good idea to listen to the bad guys and awaken the god of destruction.

Regardless of whether or not a ten-year-old boy had the ability to control a being from beyond time and space whose every movement causes ripples through reality and drive people in futures for decades to come insane, I just thought that it was never a good idea to play right into the plans of the bad guys.

However, this is a pokemon game and it looks like its time for the whole Team Plasma ordeal to be taken care of, so its off to Relic Castle!

Current Squad: