Anyways, maybe you take a class trip to Lumiose City and you happen to meet Mr. Sycamore there (who takes an interest in you). Perhaps... he sends to your school a pack of Pokémon for your class in specific and you decide that you like traveling... or I'm just really off the mark. But the "school trip" scenario seems like a possibility.
Really hoping for Zakuro to be our first Dark gym honestly... but he plays sports... one can hope.
Ahh, the juicy part of your commentary!
It'd be cool, but I wonder how long the beginning story script would take for that? There's a monster Trainer game that was downloadable from the DSi-Shop that had a similar scenario, where the main character is at school, his friend is getting bullied, there's some talk about the monsters that inhabit the world, and by the time you actually get into a battle, you've been learning about everything but how to survive with the core gameplay element for the first 10-12 minutes of your playthrough. If Prof. Sycamore pulled a Juniper and delivered your Pokémon for you to pass out between your friends, that makes for a nicer transition into battling, which is what most kids would rather do than get a good long story of what their life is like in the world of Pokémon.
And please, Game Freak, don't make Zakuro a weird Bakutech or Reborn ripoff, just because his Japanese name is Zakuro (the Bakutech character Zakuro uses Dark types and I guess the Zakuro from Reborn is the one that everyone actually knows about, who shoots himself to become a demon?). A small group of Japanese writers have a weird obsession with calling their shady characters "Pomegranate", prolly because it sounds really cool in Japanese (ZAKUROOOO~). His English name is Grant, which sounds like Granite, and his first character image shows him in a climbing stance wearing rock climbing gear. It'd be a stretch if they made a guy with an implied apparent connection to rocks a Dark type leader, or anything besides Ground mayhaps.
All I'm really asking for is for some way of increasing the number of pokémon you can catch in the region, even if it's done by special events. Maybe you could even make some pokes exclusive to certain seasons, that would add a ton of replayability to the game and would let them introduce some of the older pokémon to the younger audiences.
Yeah, but they could use old Pokémon year-round as well. The image I'm getting from your post is "in the springtime, there's only Kalos Pokémon available. in the Summer, there's only Kanto Pokémon". It looks like they already plan to reintroduce a good number of old Pokémon as it is, and while it may be seen as a shame if we don't get to learn about every Kanto Pokémon without trading around and migrating, it's not like they HAVE to cram all of them in there.
