Badge #17, Pt 2: Leningrad-Novgorod Offensive

Once in Calcenon City, there's a lot of NPCs around to talk to. The most important is Eve (next to the Pokémon Centre) who will give you info on three upcoming PULSE designs. Talk to her fully to get a relationship point, too.

When you're done, walk into the one house that everyone used to hang around in for a long cutscene. Next stop: Agate City.

Operation Bagration

The entrance from the Circus is blocked off, so return to Route 1 (the easiest way is from the Iolia Valley) and enter Agate City from the checkpoint. Walk straight upwards (and don't talk to anyone) to enter a battle with the Schutzstaffel. Continue up the stairs to the right and exterminate some more Schutzstaffel agents. Next, link up with Hardy for a d ouble battle, and finally a solo battle against Solaris.

After beating him down, use the Light Shard to heal and continue over the bridge.

Walk down to reach this surf spot; surf up both waterfalls, then down the waterfall to the left. Dive into the underwater section below.

You'll find a fork in the path here. Travel up through it and into the cave area for a cutscene with Lin. The Sanctum Basement Key is hidden here, too; pick it up to the left. If you return to the right-side route after the fork, surface and follow the waterfalls up to find the Pinsirite. Backtrack all the way back to your initial surf spot for another cutscene, where either Samson or Ciel will be disappeared (if you sided with Blake or not, all the way back in Ametrine city.)

After that, talk to Shelly again for another cutscene; after this Agate City is finally liberated and free for you to visit.

The Free City of Agate

Wow! After fifty hours, you're finally in Agate City! It's the most generic Gen 3 looking city ever! At least there's a few things to do...

• Return to the Circus and you'll find either Ciel in the main area, or Samson in the Big Top area; talk to whichever one didn't disappear (i.e. Ciel) to get some relationship points.
• You can get your 9th department store sticker now if you so wish. One more to go.
• Walk into the house directly to the right of the surf spot, and talk to the woman on the sofa for the Pokédex quest. More on that is below.
• You can also get a Melmetal now, which is busted as hell and a really good addition to your team.
• You can also get two more starter Pokémon. That leaves exactly one left!

You may have noticed this inaccessible Rock Climb point before. It takes you up to Route 4. Great. The more interesting thing is the house immediately below this, just before the stairs. Walk in and talk to the lady standing on the sofa; she wants to see your Pokédex data. There's a few rewards for this, each at 100 Pokémon caught:

Pokédex Quest

I can't believe it took this long for a Pokédex quest. The rewards from this are kinda whatever, except for the Kubfu and Ice Beam. Here's the list, and the milestones:

100. The Galladite
200. Froakie
300. The TM for Ice Beam
400. The Scirozite
500. The Electrium-Z
600. Kubfu
700. The Groundium-Z
800. The Blazikenite
897. A Poipole

Noticably, this doesn't account for the expanded Gen 8/9 dex. Oops? Oh well. By the time I had access to this, I had nearly eight hundred Pokémon caught, so...

Melmetal

If you want, you can get a Melmetal now. Now with 100% less stupid Magic Square puzzles!

Melmetal Guide

Return to the Devon Corp? building in Obsidia Ward. Go into the side room and use the computer from before. This leads to the "magic square puzzle" room, which we are simply going to completely ignore! Instead, pick up the suspicious shiny item at the top left.

Return it to Silph Co in the same ward and talk to the attendant inside to get access to the back room.

Talk to the attendant and walk into the newly opened door, then open the gate by activating the computer. As soon as you reach a certain point in the room, the gate to the Melmetal within will open up.

Walk into the gate and Melmetal will appear. Kill it, then return to the attendant. Go take one (or both!) of the Meltan in the left side of the back room, then talk to the other guy in the main room, who will ask for a bunch of items in order to create the evolution item for your Meltan. He needs:

• Five Iron
• Five Zinc
• Five Calcium
• A single Steel Gem
• A single Metal Coat
• A single Iron Ball

Return to him with all of these (you can just buy them at the department store) to get the Meltan evolution item. Good diversion.

If you didn't pick Snivy as your starter, you can get one now too.

Agate Gym

The 17th Gym is on top of a hill overlooking the rest of Agate City. If you walk in and to the left side, you'll find the gym "puzzle", as well as TM187 High Horsepower (good job, Hardy!) just lying there.

The puzzle here is that you need to put the tiles on the correct notes in the right area, then use Rock Climb to make a sick guitar strum on the left area in order to match the notes that the NPC at the top plays for you. If you don't have an ear for it (like 90% of people), here's the solution, from top to bottom:

1. A
2. A
3. Low G (the one on the left)
4. B
5. B
6. High G (the one on the right)
7. E
8. C

After that """puzzle""", you can go in and fight Hardy. Some tips:

• It's an interesting choice to have the Rock type gym be the second to last gym, really, because of how terrible the type is. There was sort of an attempt to make this into a sand team in the base game, but it's not really with only two sand abusers. The original team might legit be the worst gym team in the entire game, with fucking Archeops!
• So! Now it actually is a sand team, and he uses Ground types too. Of course that doesn't really make it hard, only slightly less pitiful than it was in the base game.
• Fighting and Water types are your best bet here, as they will handily deal with everything he has; Steel types are not the way to go because they will die easily to his Ground type attacks.
• I'm really not sure what else to say. Don't bring a fire type?

After that, it's time to finally assault Labadorra City. When you're ready, return to Calcenon City.