I Want To Cry: Moon Gets Heavy

A little context. In Sun/Moon, you're not traveling around a region getting eight badges to gain entry to challenge the elite four. Nope. Instead you're doing an island challenge. The parameters here, and the endgame, are still a bit nebulous at this point. Every island has a big kahuna trainer that you can challenge after you beat their captains. Effectively these trainers are all gym leaders.

I've beaten one captain and one kahuna, and just made it to my second island... but not without a price.

I beat the captain on Melemele island, and then I beat his totem pokemon, a big chubby black Raticate that really had me quaking for a minute. That battle introduced a new game mechanic where wild pokemon can call for buddies in the middle of a fight, so I found myself fighting a gigantic Raticate who had used focus energy and leer a lot, AND his little Rattata buddy. It was lucky that Smarshall was able to get a couple of sand attacks on him right out the gate, or else a critical hit Hyper Fang would have wrecked someone.

Winning that fight allowed me to start using Z Powers. Instead of XY's Mega Evolutions, this game has a function where, once per battle, one of your pokemon can use a Z Move, provided you have them holding a Z item that matches one of their moves by type. So there I was, tromping around the wilderness with my boy Smarshall the Yungoos as he did this ridiculous screaming Super Saiyan tackle to every wild spearow we saw. It was a gas... until it all went wrong.

A wild Vullaby showed up. Dark/bird, high defense. It was able to tank a Z move, and it called for help (doesn't always work, but it doesn't require an action). Before I knew it Smarshall was at 2 hp, facing two wild Vullabys, each maybe two levels below him. I dropped a super potion, figuring he'd be able to take a couple hits, wondering if he'd be able to tank through it and still get an attack off on the next turn. One hit would kill the first Vullaby.

I should have run. They killed him. RIP Smarshall. This Nuz will be no cake.

I caught a Petilil shortly after and named it Winnifred. She knew leech seed and sleep powder and mega drain after I trained her up a few levels - an unstoppable force of cheesy grass moves. We challenged the kahuna.

The kahuna of Melemele island uses fighting pokemon, and he also uses fighting z moves. Crabrawler, a fighting-type crab dude, laid Winnie out from full health with a Z move. I won the fight just fine, with Aoife the (now evolved) Trumbeak plucking the fighters to death handily and Struan, now evolved into Torracat, on deck... but the price was high.

I reluctantly caught a Zubat named Bronda and a Spearow named Dingdong, then traded Dingdong in a pokemon center for an NPC's Machop - that boosted exp will be delicious. Before leaving the first island, I explored a little cave and caught a Roggenrolla, Cleopatra, who has no face.

So Delbert and Bronda are in the party as backups, pokemon that I'm not really fond of and have trained many times before. I'd rather pump the exp into the new ones that I love (Aiofe and Struan, my OGs) than retrain old ones just to replace them later. But Macho and Cleo flesh out the party really nicely, so I'm taking them seriously. I still have nothing that's good against water, but we'll figure that out as we go.