Hey, Fobbie. Sorry for the mix-up with your earlier prize review; I’m here to round out the five chapters with comments on Chapter 40. Which is kind of unfortunate to read as a standalone, since it’s mostly battle and otherwise mostly brief scenes of characters coming or going. Definitely transitional fare.
I get the impression that the battle sequence is primarily here to bring together some groups of characters who haven’t interacted in a while as well as introduce a new complication that will prevent the Siglo Swellow crew from catching up with
Pleo’s group for a while. I think that works fine narratively, although from an in-universe perspective it feels a bit weird to me that the pirates are content to just rough people up a bit and then leave, instead of trying to inflict more serious damage. I think the idea may have been that they were losing and the “roughing up” thing was an attempt to save face, but I had some trouble tracking which groups were winning or losing throughout the fight, so I’m unsure.
The various scenes checking in with different factions and introducing new complications definitely bring home just how many different groups of characters there are floating around out there! It does get a bit many for me to keep track of, and I wonder if spreading them out a bit rather than having several together in a chapter like this would make them less overwhelming.
The scenes with Team Traveler were my favorite here. I like that they’re continuing to wrestle with despair and paranoia after what happened on Mengir, and it seems like hope/the loss thereof is likely to be the theme of this arc. Which is great! I think it makes sense for the characters to feel some of their youthful optimism fading at this point in the story, and I’m curious to see how they deal with it. I’m glad they at least got a bit of a break this chapter. Faith in pokemonity restored!
I imagine I’ll be back for more of this story ere long, but expect to see me over on Once a Thief first. Tis the season for some catch-up!
I get the impression that the battle sequence is primarily here to bring together some groups of characters who haven’t interacted in a while as well as introduce a new complication that will prevent the Siglo Swellow crew from catching up with
Pleo’s group for a while. I think that works fine narratively, although from an in-universe perspective it feels a bit weird to me that the pirates are content to just rough people up a bit and then leave, instead of trying to inflict more serious damage. I think the idea may have been that they were losing and the “roughing up” thing was an attempt to save face, but I had some trouble tracking which groups were winning or losing throughout the fight, so I’m unsure.
The various scenes checking in with different factions and introducing new complications definitely bring home just how many different groups of characters there are floating around out there! It does get a bit many for me to keep track of, and I wonder if spreading them out a bit rather than having several together in a chapter like this would make them less overwhelming.
The scenes with Team Traveler were my favorite here. I like that they’re continuing to wrestle with despair and paranoia after what happened on Mengir, and it seems like hope/the loss thereof is likely to be the theme of this arc. Which is great! I think it makes sense for the characters to feel some of their youthful optimism fading at this point in the story, and I’m curious to see how they deal with it. I’m glad they at least got a bit of a break this chapter. Faith in pokemonity restored!
I imagine I’ll be back for more of this story ere long, but expect to see me over on Once a Thief first. Tis the season for some catch-up!