dryhands

Day 1

2025-10-16

i opened the game from the switch menu with a modicum of fear for what was ahead of me. there's going to be so many words.... so many words and i won't have memory to lean on....

immediately after the language selection, i was stuck. not on words but on my Image. so stuck, in fact, that after spending ages customizing and getting through the bajillion new kanji in the first minute of the game, i actually wiped my save file to redo my look. i have intentions towards naveen because he was the most appealing out of the prerelease characters shown to me, so i designed my player character with that imaginary future relationship in mind. my boy is named キョウヤkyouya, his canon name, since i prefer using those. thank god i'm not playing in english or else i'd have to come up with my own name-- paxton is not my style.

there is a LOT of vocab for me here. i immediately decided to get choosy about which words to make anki cards out of in the interest of playing the video game, otherwise i would be making 1 to 3 cards for every single line of dialogue. i mostly pick words that i think i'll see again, like 地方chihou, region, and not words that seem situational, like all of the train-related words, since i don't think i'll be traveling by train again in the course of the game. the more common words that i learn, the more i'll start reaching for those situational ones.

i'm a little annoyed that the game displays furigana with no option to turn them off. it does make lookups and card-making magnitudes easier and quicker, but it's so so easy to just not look at the kanji and only read the furigana. at least i have my non-furigana anki cards to force me to parse them, but still... i wonder if it's something that could be added in a future patch? i don't know what pokémon is like in this post-release-updates world.

one thing that made me suddenly want to play a different game altogether was when i walked to the end of the train station and heard the trees rustling in the wind. this is something i ache for everytime i leave the city i live in.... i miss trees. i hope the wild zones are big enough to hear more naturey sounds like this, or else miare city is going to start making me feel ill.

i eventually escaped the train station and met the recolored girl player character, who had the three starter pokémon and dragged me into some publicity recording thing for a hotel without telling me her name. we got interrupted by a loud public broadcast of some bigshot corporation president lady (ジェットjetto, jet) who gave the "welcome to pokémon" speech normally given by professors. so many words.... it was taking me long enough just to look them all up; i declined to card any of them with those starter pokémon sitting there just waiting to be partnered with.

while that was happening, a ヤンチャムyanchamu, pancham stole my luggage, and thus began my first Mission. probably feels like routine for players who kept up, but for me it was almost jarring looking at a big mission title banner appear on my screen in a pokémon game. then it unleashed me in some real-time chase thing with moving dialogue and i immediately saved and suspended the game. that's a problem for tomorrow me.

number of anki cards created today: 15

total anki cards: 15

total playtime: 1:02

Day 2

2025-10-17

thank goodness for screenshots and recordings or i'd just have to die about all the auto-passing dialogue. it seems there's going to be quite a bit of cutscenes and such.... yay....

the girl finally introduced herself moments before my first battle against the owners of the ヤンチャムyanchamu, pancham thief: タウニーtaunii, tawnie is a pretty comprehensible and moderately enthused speaker whose personal speech style gimmick is that she often ends her sentences with しshi. this is one of the lesser understood ones to me, but it gives a certain casual but semi-expert explanatory air that suits her guide-like position.

i bent to my indulgence and chose chikorita as my starter. i feel like i "shouldn't" have just because it's the only one of the three i have used before (in a long ago heartgold playthrough) but it's just so cute guys. and meganium is awesome. i thought about letting the random pin in my preorder decide my starter, but when i thought about how i would feel getting each one, i knew i'd be disappointed if i got anyone but chikorita. and indeed, i ended up receiving tepig, who was my lowest ranked choice.... i decided to commit it to my future english playthrough, and when i met the starters i swiftly became pleased with that because tepig is actually ALSO very cute. i hadn't really seen its 3D model before-- never really a common chance for it-- but the way it looks up at you.... so cute.

i wasn't given an opportunity to nickname my chikorita (yet?) which is perhaps a good thing because i have no idea what to use. it might be fun to rescucitate my naming scheme from y (two syllables + っちcchi) but i'd rather let that be its own thing where it properly originates. i'll see what comes to me when the keyboard is presented to me....

somehow キョウヤkyouya is a solo tourist in a foreign city with no battle experience at all. 危ないじゃないか…！？isn't that dangerous...!? my guide even accidentally allowed us to become trapped in a battle zone. i'm gonna give her a bad review on yelp. thankfully, even after failing to fully understand the tutorial popup earlier, i was still able to easily ascertain what the key buttons do and get a sense for the flow of battles. for now i can rely on my memory of the common early moves, but soon enough i'm gonna have to start studying before it costs me in battle.... not just for what the moves are, but for what they do, cuz i've skipped enough games to feel like i'm going to get blindsided by new stuff or realize i've forgotten some oldies.

we met フラエッテfuraette, floette, who thought it would be appropriate to blast a Light of Ruin or whatever it's called in english beam in the middle of the city. could it be, there's a way to run from trainer battles after all...? i honestly forgot eternal floette could do that and i'm glad mr. az looks like he's just a nice old man running a hotel now, going by prerelease stuff. a guy like that with a grudge as heavy as his history could bear.... would be a second-war-of-kalos level problem.

タウニーtaunii, tawnie gave me a mock-professional little bow as she welcomed her Honored Guest to the hotel. were she the guy character i might have shifted my sights a little.... but such a move on タウニーtaunii, tawnie just feels more like a well-rounded girl. i don't yet feel like she's my friend-- she's kinda just doing her job right now-- but i think we'll be working together for a lot of the plot, so we'll get there eventually. it's a bit refreshing after the fast or preestablished friends of previous generations.

i've stopped just outside the hotel for the night after being exhausted by the running around and battles and ten bajillion kanji. i definitely stlacked on creating cards today because i wanted to play the game.... hoping the long conversation i'm bound to get into with az will be interesting enough. at this rate, will i meet naveen within the next century....?

number of anki cards created today: 8

total anki cards: 23

total playtime: 1:55

Day 3

2025-10-18

my enjoyment of the rearranged soundtrack is quickly waning the longer i have to listen to it while looking up my 5th kanji of the minute. i'm starting to just mute the game during such times.... i'm definitely having a very staggered experience with all the pauses i take lol. i try to move past lines that i feel i get the gist of without looking up every kanji i don't know, but i don't want to miss potentially importance nuance.... like that significant scene on the hotel rooftop with タウニーtaunii, tawnie? she corralled me into some kind of promise, flashback-able fistbump and all, and only after getting my apparent full committment did it suddenly entail joining an organization. couldn't you have led with that!? i would have said yes much more enthusiastically had i known you were asking me to work in the same place as a certain fashion designer....

the next morning, i skimmed the elevator options too quickly and accidentally revisited the rooftop by myself, and i deeply appreciated the ambiance you can hear. i felt like i might have been imagining that steady roar of road noise; that's the real feel of a city, and it transported me back to my first apartment that sat over a busy street. the intermittent pokémon cries was a really nice immersive touch too.

i gotta say the slightly-voiced player character is offputting in a game that otherwise has no human voices. scarlet and violet, to me, was where voiced pokémon games should've started. don't we already have a bunch of castings from the anime and pokémon masters? someday we'll get to hear them in a mainline game.... for now i'll just psychologically wince for more than one reason when i hear キョウヤkyouya take damage in battle (which, by the way, why are we taking damage!? it made sense in legends arceus. but we're in a developed civilization here!!! i'll call the police!!!)

it was nice meeting azさん, who as expected had a little speech for me, but he was succinct and ended it with a "that's all" in a way that felt personally considerate of my time. i find his design really charming; all the details of his height and age showing in the cane, the knee brace, and the extensions stitched into his clothes. his speaking style uses slightly less common/more archaic words that made his lines take a little longer to get through, but i found it more pleasant for some reason. maybe it was the hotel making me feel at home in its dim, aged aesthetic.

i'm not sure if タウニーtaunii, tawnie is lodged at the hotel, but it seems like デウロdeuro, lida is. she mumbled something about a brother-- it was an easy suspicion to think she was related to tierno during prerelease, and now i'm suddenly wracking my brains trying to remember if tierno mentioned having any siblings in xy. i don't have much of an impression of デウロdeuro, lida yet.... i'm too used to being spoonfed a one-dimensional personality. quick, tell me what tropes you are!!

most of today's play session was just accumulating mental fatigue as i tried valiantly to push through to The Goal. which, according to タウニーtaunii, tawnie, is the nearest pokémon center. but according to ME i have a yaoi quota to meet. i don't know what i'll do if i get to naveen and i end up not caring for him. well, there's still the returning cast i must see.... my daydreams of 12 years past of a certain professor yet linger in my mind....

number of anki cards created today: 13

total anki cards: 36

total playtime: 3:53

Day 4

2025-10-31

fear not, this playthrough is not abandoned!!! (yet) (maybe) i just have a job. and the amount of npc dialogue i got access to after leaving the hotel scared me. i don't want to sacrifice the way i usually play, which is reading everything possible to immerse myself and satisfy my curiosity. it's going to be painful, but it will have gains.... for the record, i have been keeping up with my anki reviews in the interim, so i've kept my jp processing sharp. i also grabbed a piece of the big ミアレシティmiare shitii, lumiose city map artwork and extended it to fit the background space on the ankidroid app, so now it's nice and themed :) for any that want it for themselves, download it here.

so today's session was covering all the npcs between ホテルＺhoteru z, hotel z and the pokémon center. i liked the hinty sort of dialogue like "the magazine kiosk is full of news lately" and "i just got back to lumiose and a lot has changed". things are brewing! there was also a guy with sleek hair in a suit who was looking towards prism tower, and he told me "we're watching over it". who's "we"...!? maybe part of ジェットjetto, jet's corporation i forgot the name of (quasar?). in retrospect i didn't question that opening cutscene enough, distracted as i was at the very beginning of my new jp parsing adventure, but what in the world could possibly be happening to a tower that a guy is like "we need the best mega evolution trainer for this". it's a tower??? if something's in there why is it not major unavoidable regional news?????

anyway part of why i felt pushed to come back was the official bulletin that you can only earn the kalos starter mega stones in the online battle ranking thing, which i obviously have not unlocked yet and am probably nowhere close to at this rate. but i want greninjite.... froakie was my first starter in y, then fennekin in x, so i'm excited to reunite with them down the line. i just wish it wasn't on such a timed basis.... the idea of having to login to a freaking pokémon game and work for a limited time reward is new and unwanted to me. i play enough genshin as-is.

while poking through the pokémon menu again to review the controls, i abruptly found the nicknaming option. you can just do that anywhere now!?!??!? not to mention the free & anywhere box access.... what times we live in. confronted with the dilemma of naming my chikorita, i took to google and started desperately searching up plants and flowers in hopes of inspiration. what ended up coming to mind was an episode of mushishi i recently watched, in which there was a mushi (supernatural, unseen organisms) that emitted the scent of flowers. i decided that mushi would be my naming inspiration, and so chikorita is now known as カイロウkairou. in the interest of protecting prospective mushishi watchers from spoilers, a full explanation of each of my mushi-inspired name choices will be in a tooltip separate from the pronunciation. here's the details on カイロウkairou, "looping tunnel", seen in S2E12.
this mushi uses the scent of flowers to lure
prey into a tunnel; once they go through,
they reexperience their entire lives up to
the moment they enter the tunnel again.
aside from the flower connection, i felt
the "looping" part represents the way
i'm revisiting lumiose city and a
partnership with chikorita.. please consider watching mushishi if you haven't before!

i felt my mind burning out by the time i got to the last accessible npc, so i clocked out for the night, leaving タウニーtaunii, tawnie waiting ever longer for her poor clueless gaijin.

number of anki cards created today: 7

total anki cards: 43

total playtime: 5:18