Negrek _Admin

Website: Thousand Roads

Posted September 22 2017

Chapter 27 Reply

What happened to Leonard Kerrigan?!

Haha, well, you know that now! Hopefully the wait wasn't too bad.

The cradily with storm drain and the role play ability swap was definitely my favourite part of this chapter. After the lovely, evocative description of what it's like to be a cradily, the child immediately follows it up with a comment about how weird it is to just freaking pretend to be a cradily in the middle of a battle. Love, love, LOVE it.

Thank you! I think that overall this is probably the best battle in the story--it's definitely my favorite, and the part with the cradily is my favorite part of that. I'm really pleased with how it turned out.

One thing I appreciate about the battles you write is how cleverly they incorporate strategy from the actual games.

Glad you like it! I have a lot of fun putting together the battles, and I do try to make them a little more clever than simply trading attacks until one of the pokémon falls down. It's cool that you go look things up on Bulbapedia and so on--I never thought anybody would do so much work for one of my battles, heh.

Also, even though Jason Muskowitz had maybe two or three lines that aren't direct orders to his pokemon, he comes across as oddly endearing. I like it.

People seem to like Jason! It's always fun when a super minor character gets some fans.

Anyway, rambling aside, it's a solid chapter with some really interesting battles, but after the last one, it feels like a weird hiccup in pacing. It seemed like the story was gearing up to really knuckle down into the plot, but suddenly there's another battle for the championship.

Yeah, like I think I said elsewhere, the high density of battles do cause pacing issues in the tourney arc. It's tricky because I don't want to skip all of them, because what happens during them is important, and it would seem kind of pointless to have a tournament arc without showing any of the actual battles. Ultimately I think there just isn't enough marriage between the battles themselves and the larger questions of the plot... it's something I've thought a lot about how to fix, but haven't come up with a good solution for yet.