-
Welcome to Smogon! Take a moment to read the Introduction to Smogon for a run-down on everything Smogon, and make sure you take some time to read the global rules.
-
Congrats to the winners of the 2023 Smog Awards!
SPOILERS! Indigo Disk Discussion
- Thread starter DHR-107
- Start date
I did the Perrin quest now and I'm flabbergasted at how minimal this is
Forget comparing it to the Teal Mask perrin quest, even compared to the Team Star quest (which is brief, but very cute, characterful and yo uunlock clothing out of it) in this same DLC it feels tacked on
Why does all the stuff pertaining to Area Zero act like this....the dex entries don't even mention the book! Even looking at the Violet paradoxes Boulder is the only one that mentions "an old book"* but when Gouging Fire is over here saying there's video of it it's like ???
girl give me something
*a reminder that the official site for Wake/Leaves says its in the book but specifically meant to reference the Sketch, not some other unseen entry! Aaaagh!!!!
Well it depends on what exactly you want to unlock.
Simply unlocking all the pokemon spawns (aka "increase biodiversity") is 12k on its own..
Fwiw, it goes WAY faster in multiplayer, since you're getting BP for every player's completion on top of the extra BPs for the group quests (and needing them for the legendary cookies anyway)
Well eventually I do wanna unlock everything. Guess my prio would be Coaches, Item Printer, Dark Style, Terrarium (i mean I already have em all), anything else
You need so much BP if you want to see everything
It takes I think at least 3 calls on all the Coaches and they're 200 BP a pop
The Item Printer requires some unstated number of uses between the actual upgrade costs
Discounting the terrarium, coaches & item printer you need another ~3200 for buying everything else, not counting extra costs associated with actually getting to change styles
I think the BP Grind is meant to be relatively long term but honestly, it's pretty ridiculous. And then it becomes relatively trivial if you do an yextended group session together so I dunno man.
It takes I think at least 3 calls on all the Coaches and they're 200 BP a pop
The Item Printer requires some unstated number of uses between the actual upgrade costs
Discounting the terrarium, coaches & item printer you need another ~3200 for buying everything else, not counting extra costs associated with actually getting to change styles
I think the BP Grind is meant to be relatively long term but honestly, it's pretty ridiculous. And then it becomes relatively trivial if you do an yextended group session together so I dunno man.
I mean, sure. Certainly unresolved mysteries are nothing new to Pokémon (“No, you’re not the one…”), and to an extent, I don’t mind that. Leaving ambiguity and room for interpretation is fun.
I think the difference in this case, though, is that they used the mysteries as a part of the hype build-up and promotion for The Indigo Disk. The official website hinted at Walking Wake and Iron Leaves having some kind of relation to the Imagined Pokémon hybrid sketches. One of the trailers for the DLC teased the Area Zero finale by showing pictures from the Scarlet / Violet Book, including the big cave symbol. That kind of thing creates an impression that these mysteries are going to be a focal point. To use your example, it would be like if, prior to The Crown Tundra’s release, the official website put a picture on Calyrex’s page of it Dynamaxed and had the blurb, “A blue Dynamax glow?! Does this Pokémon have a unique connection to the Dynamax phenomenon?” and then left that unexplained, instead of not mentioning the blue glow at all and just leaving it as a surprise detail for us to find and start speculating about.
I mean the hidden Pecharunt epilogue is a thing, a thing people only found because they were looking for Pecharunt and that can't legitimately be accessed yet. Maybe there's more hidden things that people haven't found or can't yet find.
Also, unless they plan on tossing Liko in the bin after gen 9, Terapagos is gonna be hanging around in the anime for a while. They probably don't wanna dump all its secrets at once.
Even if we weren't hunting for Pecharunt, people would have found it. It's full of dialog, cutscenes, & a boss battle.
If there's anything major like that we likely would have seen it, especially with people looking at the full text dump and stuff.
I wonder if that whole phantom memory plot was scrapped for the Professor sequence, honestly. We know the base game had an unused dialog tag for Heath (like with O'nare and Billy), and whatever happened to him sounds similar to what happened with the Professor at the lake. And the end result is we have a plot thread (who was he speaking with, what about, and what were the schematics for?) that just got cut. At least with the glyph and plate you can just go "oh its Mysterious!!" which is worth an eye roll for different reasons, but the memory feels like it was specifically meant to lead somewhere.
If there's anything major like that we likely would have seen it, especially with people looking at the full text dump and stuff.
I wonder if that whole phantom memory plot was scrapped for the Professor sequence, honestly. We know the base game had an unused dialog tag for Heath (like with O'nare and Billy), and whatever happened to him sounds similar to what happened with the Professor at the lake. And the end result is we have a plot thread (who was he speaking with, what about, and what were the schematics for?) that just got cut. At least with the glyph and plate you can just go "oh its Mysterious!!" which is worth an eye roll for different reasons, but the memory feels like it was specifically meant to lead somewhere.
It's entirely possible this is what they do: I get the distinct impression that Horizons is meant to be the "Generation 9 content" anime, since shortly before and also after they ended the Ash anime, they have shifted to smaller scale animation projects, whether related to the games or not (Hisuian Snow, Paldean Wind, the Concierge show, etc).
It is entirely possible Liko doesn't stick around past the story they have before Gen 10 considering Ash's absurdly long tenure was a meme about the old anime. At the very least it's as plausible that she leaves after Gen 9 as she sticks around, and this is in turn assuming that even if she stays that Terapagos remains on board long term too.
What’s this about some hidden Pecharunt epilogue? Did i miss something?
It's in the game but not accessible yet. It's ~an hour long or so iirc.
My assumption is the trigger item will be given out for Pokemon Day.
If you have a currently unobtainable Key Item called the "Mythical Pecha Berry" and you talk to the Pecharunt doll at Peachy's you'll start a hidden epilogue chapter for the Teal Mask that leads to an encounter with Pecharunt.
I did this the other night and couldn't help but wonder if having to render this gigantic sphere is maybe not the best use of processing power, even if it is impressive that you can get up there
How did they fumble a plot as obvious as that oneBlazed through the main story overnight, so spoilers ahead.
For a DLC pack that wears the Area Zero association on its sleeve and is designed to reach a climax in a super-secret hidden section of the place… this kinda sucked in terms of being a resolution to the Area Zero mysteries?
Like, what did we really learn here? Going down the list:
1. Terapagos is responsible for the Terastal phenomenon. Cool. We’ve known that for months.
2. There’s an even deeper part of Area Zero where Terapagos dwells. Alright, but what’s so special about this deeper part?
3. It’s where you can find Stellar-type Pokémon. Neato, but that doesn’t really tie into any of the questions that the base game had set up.
4. So, what’s the correlation between the “Imagined Pokémon” / hybrid sketches in the Scarlet / Violet Book, and the new Paradox trios? Answer:
5. Okay, well what about the big symbol etched onto the ground of the cave where you find Roaring Moon / Iron Valiant? And what about the mysterious metal plate? Heath seemed to think those things held some kind of significance, so what was up with those? Answer:
6. Alright… in that case, what about the “phantom memory” that Heath mentioned experiencing, where he blacked out and woke up with a note written in his own handwriting that he couldn’t remember writing? We actually do get an answer to that… somewhat. If you take Terapagos to the Crystal Pool, you activate a scene in which Terapagos’s power summons Prof. Sada / Turo - the real one, at a point in time before they had completed their work on the time machine - to the pool. It’s enough to assume that what happened with Heath was probably this same phenomenon, as well as the rumors about people communicating with “dead” spirits near the pool (they were people from other points in time). However, there’s a complication here… the note that Heath woke up with was written in his handwriting, which seems to suggest that he may have interacted with a future version of himself. Which of course just replaces the existing question with a new one: When did Heath travel to the Crystal Pool to experience the other “side” of this event? And why? What was the significance of the note?
7. Also, on the subject of that meeting with the real Sada / Turo, it seems that we are entangled in an ontological paradox, as through the dialogue choices, it is possible to give the Professor the inspiration for the name “Koraidon / Miraidon,” as well as the idea to contruct an AI duplicate of themselves. That’s all fine; I figured that a game with a time machine and things called Paradox Pokémon probably couldn’t resist throwing in the old bootstrap loop somewhere… but there’s a problem. We can infer that this is supposed to be a self-contained ontological time loop, because one of the Professor’s notes found on the desk at the entrance of the Area Zero underdepths describes this meeting from their point of view, and mentions that they received a white book from us. And when the scene plays out on our end, that does happen… but in exchange for Briar’s white book, the Professor gives us their copy of the Scarlet / Violet Book. The same copy of the Scarlet / Violet Book that Arven picked up in their lab and was carrying throughout the main storyline, which we used in order to shut down the time machine. But if the Professor gave us that book at a point in time before they had completed the time machine, it wouldn’t have been around for Arven to find.
8. Speaking of Paradox Pokémon, where donthey come from? Answer: The Professor in the Crystal Pool scene seems to suggest that they are extracted from alternate timelines, rather than the timeline that the Professor / we are in. Which to be honest, of all the theories I’d seen people propose for the existence of Paradox Pokémon, I feel like this is the least-interesting option they could have gone with, because it makes Paradox Pokémon little different from Ultra Beasts — those are also bizarre quasi-Pokémon that originate from parallel realities.
On the one hand, I’d like to think that there could be a Daybreak-esque free update that will also include more material to resolve some of this loose ends and problems, but on the other hand, I find it frustrating that I might have to wait yet more several months for this story to actually finish, when it seemed like that was something this wave of DLC was supposed to do.
It's like Isayama ignoring his own worldbuilding in the final chapter of AoT
Ok, my turn to critique the DLC.
Plot wise, Indigo Disc, was bad, very bad, the first part is the standard Pokémon gym leader campaign, but they are called the E4 to make it seem different, either way, none of the characters except for two do much, one being the white haired dude as you actually see him more than twice and have something close to a personality, leaves before the climax but good for him, he didn't miss much. Then there is Onion boy, who receives more hates than what he deserves but still deserves some, I get what they were going for, but they really jumped over his character arc to have everything resolved quickly so what could have been an interesting story about envy and frustration, ends up being just one of the most annoying characters in the series, him falling to his dark side happens completely off-screen as they couldn't be bothered to add some flash backs like what we had with team star in the main game, so we go from him wanting to take things more seriously at the end of Teal Mask to becoming an annoying teenager, and obviously everything is solved because we beat him, despite the fact that it was the cause of his frustration in the first place, if they didn't felt the need to rush from the league battle to the Terapagos plot line right away we could actually have time for some character moments were things can develop more naturally instead of rushing through the predictable character arc they were going for. Also the Terapagos storyline was bad, the dungeon was very simple and repetitive, only Kieran does anything, you could cut the other two characters there, and it would have been the same as they didn't add anything as they weren't allowed to do or say anything.
As far as gameplay goes, I wish GF don't ever balance things around cooperative ever again, because the quest system just like the ogre mini game last time, just an annoyance to play solo and is such a repetitive experience that I would feel bad asking anyone to help me grind for them, as you need to play a lot to get anything from it and in the end they only exist to help you grind for competitive, but you don't really get to do anything a competitive player would enjoy, just make a battle tower with multi battles if you want to force people to do cooperative to grind for competitive that much...
Synchro is nice, but is mostly just a model swap, so after a bit it ends up just being "autobattles, but your mon doesn't randomly stop attacking at times", doesn't really add much to the game on this tech demo state, so I hope it comes back more polished in the future, and it doesn't become one of these one time ideas that end abandoned after one try like so many things in this franchise lately. I also have no idea what Flying adds to the game, specially when it comes so freaking late, why wasn't this in the maingame? By the time you get it there is nothing left to explore other than the giant disco ball in the sky with 3 whole items.
Also I lost a shiny Inkay because of synchro, 0/10 worst dlc every, just kidding, shiny chances are broken and I found another 10 minutes later.
Oh, and why is the Item Printer completly random? This is a straight downgrade from the Cram-o-matic, somehow.
As far as gameplay goes, I wish GF don't ever balance things around cooperative ever again, because the quest system just like the ogre mini game last time, just an annoyance to play solo and is such a repetitive experience that I would feel bad asking anyone to help me grind for them, as you need to play a lot to get anything from it and in the end they only exist to help you grind for competitive, but you don't really get to do anything a competitive player would enjoy, just make a battle tower with multi battles if you want to force people to do cooperative to grind for competitive that much...
Synchro is nice, but is mostly just a model swap, so after a bit it ends up just being "autobattles, but your mon doesn't randomly stop attacking at times", doesn't really add much to the game on this tech demo state, so I hope it comes back more polished in the future, and it doesn't become one of these one time ideas that end abandoned after one try like so many things in this franchise lately. I also have no idea what Flying adds to the game, specially when it comes so freaking late, why wasn't this in the maingame? By the time you get it there is nothing left to explore other than the giant disco ball in the sky with 3 whole items.
Also I lost a shiny Inkay because of synchro, 0/10 worst dlc every, just kidding, shiny chances are broken and I found another 10 minutes later.
Oh, and why is the Item Printer completly random? This is a straight downgrade from the Cram-o-matic, somehow.
Last edited:
Teal Mask has 2 sets of levels for everything. The first set is designed to be interwoven and something yo uca nstar the moment all the path start and ends around the late 30s, the second has levels (but not Pokemon...) that hover 60~70.
Indigo Disc can only be done when you do everything (Way Home + Teal Mask) and will be 70~80s
You get the exp charm out of the Teal Mask so level swill never be a problem
There's a interesting thing... I've recently picked back up Scarlet, and I assumed that in order to start Indigo Disk you needed to have beaten the first DLC and the story.
However, as I was going through the Teal Mask bit, I actually got the call to visit Blueberry.
Which is... interesting as I've neither finished the main story (I'm halfway through) nor the dlc one (I'm at the part where you visit the Ogre cave the first time)
You can physically go to BlueBerry and explore the terrarium, but the story is locked to those requirements.