Mostly Normal Monthly #0016, April 2023
Closing thoughts and Pokémon as comfort food gaming.
Joy in Repetition
By Chris Stern
Pokémon breeding is a comforting ritual.
As Prince, arguably the greatest pop musician ever, said “There’s Joy in Repetition.” I had spent much of the COVID-19 pandemic in a series of near misses, and managed to avoid catching this particularly nasty coronavirus for 3 (!) years. All that ended a few weeks ago when I wound up with a fever, cough, and being just dang wiped out. While I am (arguably) lucky to work fully remote and could continue logging into work while my limited energy reserves lasted (usually about two hours), a lot of those two weeks was a blur of rest, coughing fits, and the four walls of my apartment building.
My companions for that 10-ish day long sick period were my girlfriend, our cat, and the closing hours of Pokémon Violet. March’s Monthly featured my initial review of Violet, but boy does this game come together as all three main story threads come to a close. Area Zero and the big final boss battle are visually robust, and show Pokémon at its most cinematic. The post-game, while relatively sparse, did serve to reinforce how wonderful all the character designs in the game are.
As the GF pushed along trying to complete her Pokédex (lucky her that Walking Wake and Iron Leaves will be available in a raid this coming week, ’cause otherwise she would’ve been SOL), I fell back into my comfortable rhythm of piecing together a competitive team. Let the breeding begin.
Every Pokémon game changes some of the minutia of how exactly to hatch a Pokémon with perfect stats, but generally each game has reduced the barrier to getting competitively viable crew of monster buds up and running . Violet continues this trend in interesting ways. I won’t expound on all of the quality of life that goes into the game, but needless to say figuring out your EVs (no, not Eevees, those are different) and IVs is easier than ever. The big change this time around comes from how you actually get the Pokémon in the mood to… “find” an egg for you.
Scarlet and Violet do away with the stationary daycare centers of old, and now give you a mobile Pokémon breeding station in the form of… a picnic table. As folks may have gleaned from how I talk about Violet on the podcast, I can be a bit of a curmudgeonly old dude when it comes to Pokémon games. That attitude, and the fact that the game has a super convenient Fast Heal feature where you can fully heal a Pokémon’s health with one button press kept me from really engaging with the picnic mechanics through my whole playthrough of the main game. So I was a bit grouchy that I had to learn to make a delicious Marmalade Sandwich to increase my “Egg Power” so that the Pokémon would breed with one another.
Now, a few weeks and 6 perfect Pokémon bred later, consider me a Sandwich Artist (TM). The picnic breeding generates a full box or more worth of eggs, and all you have to do is feed your lovebirds (uh… Pokémon) and then “Set It and Forget It” while they churn out eggs for you.
Between this streamlined in-game breeding, and my old reliable toolkit of Serebii.net and Smogon University, I found myself back in a cozy groove with Surprise Trading to luck into some good IV Pokémon to start with, or Tera Raid Battling to roll the dice on the right hidden abilities and stats, and hatching eggs for hours on end. There’s something relaxing about falling into old patterns, and the cumulative quality of life improvements make Scarlet and Violet the easiest games to spin up a team in yet. I only wish the big end of game tournament worked more like the Battle Frontier of old and leaned into the need for such breeding. That said, the Tera Raid Battles I mentioned before (4-player coop fights against giant Terastallized Pokémon) can require a competitive-tier fighter for the higher difficulty levels.
Now back to the grind; I want a few more battle buds.