Pokémon Y journal - entry three

I’m really glad to see the incredible creativity of the gym layouts in the generation IV and V Pokémon titles carried over and expanded upon in the sixth generation games. Though the first few gyms were relatively easy to breeze through, the fifth gym – run by the Electric type leader Clemont – provided the most notable challenge. In this case, I don’t feel that my choice of starter Pokémon would have made a significant difference in the challenge factor I experienced. I think it’s simply the case that Clemont’s Pokémon knew more powerful, generally better moves than the Pokémon trained by the previous gym leaders. It was a fun gym battle, not obnoxious like Elesa’s in Black/White (with her constant spamming of Volt Switch).

As the ‘hub world’ of the Kalos region, Lumiose City is certainly full of people and places, though I don’t yet understand the need to have so many different cafes in one single area. In truth, I’ve not yet bought anything from any of these cafes, but the sheer number of them seems like overkill. The boutiques, on the other hand, are a little bit annoyingly restricted at present. It’s cool that the shops offer new clothing items each day, but barring access to the largest boutique inside Lumiose City because I’ve not yet reached an arbitrary ‘style’ ranking according to the shopkeeper is plain stupid.

As for the routes between cities, they’ve been incredibly short between the last three cities. There was a neat little diversion before Lumiose City that expanded Team Flare’s role as resident villain team. But aside from a brief ride on a Skiddo and a receiving a free Lapras that I used to surf across a tiny waterway, there wasn’t much to do during this most recent leg. The Mega Evolutions have only been slightly touched upon, with the third gym leader giving me free Lucario capable of Mega Evolving. It’s an interesting feature in the sense that it makes select Pokémon temporarily more powerful, and I won’t lie that I find most of the Mega Evolutions have really cool aesthetic appearances, but the whole business of Mega Evolutions seems – for the moment, at least – very much tacked on for the sake of having another gimmick in the mix.