#Leon x hop pokemon how to#

Unlike the player character, Hop already has a Pokémon when the game begins – a Wooloo – but he receives a Galarian starter Pokémon from Leon alongside us, and according to his Pokémon League trading card he learned how to battle from watching every single one of Leon’s televised matches.

As the younger brother of Galar’s Champion, Leon, Hop makes it clear from the very start of the game that he feels he has a lot to live up to, but seems pretty confident that he can prove himself worthy of Leon’s legacy, and indeed surpass it. I’m going to repeat the characterisation of him that I gave in my contemporaneous notes on playing the game: that, in terms of other rival characters from the series, he’s a mixture of Hau’s relentless positivity with Blue’s intense competitive attitude and ambition. It’s sweet, it’s uplifting, let’s talk about it.Īt the beginning of Sword and Shield, Hop is a young boy growing up in the same town as the player, the sleepy south Galarian village of Postwick. The theme here isn’t even all that complicated or particularly unusual in a Pokémon game: Hop’s story is about growing up in other people’s shadows and learning to find your own path and excel in your own way, not comparing yourself to the achievements of others. That means I can just… talk about what Hop does in the story, then say what I think about it, like I used to do back when I was still pretending that my life made sense.

Nor (thank Arceus) do we need to get especially deep into the lore of any particular legendary Pokémon to understand what Hop’s deal is Zacian and Zamazenta are relevant to his story, but we can do this without them. This one isn’t going to be super heavy on sweeping themes and allegory I don’t have, like, a hot take about how Hop’s character arc is actually a commentary on British masculinity, or anything like that.