I generally consider Bug to be up there for both cute and cool designs, but I can't stand Slither Wing. It's a massive example of the Past Paradox mons bungling their concept: there are so many interesting prehistoric animals you could have referenced, but it's more important to duct-tape a crocodile tail onto stuff.
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Unpopular opinions
- Thread starter antemortem
- Start date
Pretty sure the ground aqua bike is more famous than the acid rain one, if only because the speedrun cummunity
the new glitches are as good as the old ones I say :< (yarr, why yarr? idk know I feel like a yarr is appropriate yarrrr)
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i do agree the tail wasn't the best choice but the creativity of a quadruped bug/fighting type, and referencing the fact that ancient insects could only fold their wings up and not down, and the fact volcarona is already a goated concept that didn't need much more, all outweigh that to make it maybe my fave paradox of them all
The let’s go games were the best games in the franchise.
I will die on this hill alone.
I will die on this hill alone.
"Pokemon fans can't read" quickly became a really annoying way to deflect criticism towards the writing in the games. Oh it isn't bc you didn't like how a character, plot point, pacing etc. was handled, you clearly don't know how to read. Pokemon games have simple stories by nature, particularly it helped me (and I'm sure others) as a learning tool for my English vocabulary; so I find that statement very baffling, even as a joke.
Looks fishy. Are you being koi?
Trainer Red's team kinda sucks and is boring, it's like the most disinterested Pokemon Yellow team. ESPECIALLY HGSS where he stacks on a second Water type and adds to the Electric weakness.
I think it'd be cooler for his status if his team had a lot more rarer Pokemon from a player perspective, a team that was actually hard to get especially in Gen 2.
My Proposal:
Eeveelution
Snorlax or Tauros
Aerodactyl
Lapras
Steelix
Charizard
Why?:
Eeveelution is a one of a kind Pokemon per playthrough. (gen 2 evo probably)
Snorlax is a two of a kind, or Tauros which is a good Safari Zone signifier. I could go either way.
Aerodactyl, fossil.
Lapras, almost extinct Pokemon.
Steelix, harder evolution of a Pokemon that is already semi rare encounter in Gen 1.
Charizard, Red Starter and the only Starter that fits.
While this is mainly filled with "gift" Pokemon, it's ones that have more variety than just the Yellow starters and I think it makes for a more interesting team. This team wouldn't be that hard to make in Yellow, but it'd be harder in Gen 2, too, and I think that'd add to the cool factor. Yes, this team commits the sin of deciding choices Red did, but I think that's fine + stuff like Aerodactyl are just cool additions. I don't particularly like Charizard but it fits the most.
I also feel like this would have genuinely decent team synergy, there is still a big Electric weakness but now there's a Steelix and you only have two monotypes compared to 4 (Blastoise/Pikachu/Snorlax/Espeon). Also most of these are pretty good Pokemon on a singleplayer BST level.
Candidates I considered:
Dragonite, decided against it because Lance has like two and they share the battle theme song already, make the identity weakened.
Tyranitar, because I preferred Aerodactyl as a Rock Type.
Alakazam, I see this as more Blue's type of Pokemon.
Arcanine, same as above + Charizard.
I think it'd be cooler for his status if his team had a lot more rarer Pokemon from a player perspective, a team that was actually hard to get especially in Gen 2.
My Proposal:
Eeveelution
Snorlax or Tauros
Aerodactyl
Lapras
Steelix
Charizard
Why?:
Eeveelution is a one of a kind Pokemon per playthrough. (gen 2 evo probably)
Snorlax is a two of a kind, or Tauros which is a good Safari Zone signifier. I could go either way.
Aerodactyl, fossil.
Lapras, almost extinct Pokemon.
Steelix, harder evolution of a Pokemon that is already semi rare encounter in Gen 1.
Charizard, Red Starter and the only Starter that fits.
While this is mainly filled with "gift" Pokemon, it's ones that have more variety than just the Yellow starters and I think it makes for a more interesting team. This team wouldn't be that hard to make in Yellow, but it'd be harder in Gen 2, too, and I think that'd add to the cool factor. Yes, this team commits the sin of deciding choices Red did, but I think that's fine + stuff like Aerodactyl are just cool additions. I don't particularly like Charizard but it fits the most.
I also feel like this would have genuinely decent team synergy, there is still a big Electric weakness but now there's a Steelix and you only have two monotypes compared to 4 (Blastoise/Pikachu/Snorlax/Espeon). Also most of these are pretty good Pokemon on a singleplayer BST level.
Candidates I considered:
Dragonite, decided against it because Lance has like two and they share the battle theme song already, make the identity weakened.
Tyranitar, because I preferred Aerodactyl as a Rock Type.
Alakazam, I see this as more Blue's type of Pokemon.
Arcanine, same as above + Charizard.
It's because I see people get the plots of my favorite Pokemon game wrong like every time people talk about it
No one said the games are subtle, that's the point- the only way you can miss the meaning of a game like Sun and Moon is if you said "I'm not gonna read today", and that's why I know people didn't read it when they get it wrong lol
The sentence "Pokemon games have simple stories by nature" is exactly the thing though, most people just assume a Pokemon story is going to not have value and so they don't really read it, and then they get it wrong all the time.
i 100% agree and i also love your team suggestion, but two reservations:
- i'd still have light ball pikachu over charizard because it adds a lot of whimsy for a character that is by design very barren in characterisation
- something exclusively from johto (rather than an evo) over aerodactyl to show he came saw and conquered it too. probably heracross as it's rarer?
pikachu / steelix / heracross / snorlax / lapras / umbreon (fits more than espeon lol) is nice and also is 50/50 on gen 1 and 2 mons
It would have required forethought that Game Freak obviously didn't have back in 1996, but it would have been cute if Blue's Kadabra never evolved in Gen 1, and then in Gen 2 Red had an Alakazam while Blue had like a Golem or something. Trade evolutions that hint toward the relationship between Red and Blue becoming less "Blue is a fucking dick"
See: Sonic fans
Would have been kinda cool if Red and Blue (Green)’s teams were based on their manga counterparts.
Red
Poliwrath
Venusaur
Pikachu
Snorlax
Espeon
Aerodactyl
Gyarados and Aerodactyl are the final choices. Put in Aero cos he already has Poli.
Blue (Green)
Scizor
Charizard
Pidgeot
Ninetales
Machamp
Golduck
Porygon2
Rhydon/Rhyperior in HGSS is another option. It replaced Ninetales in rotation but wasn’t actually caught by him til the GSC arc.
And for Green in LGPE, her team coulda been
Wigglytuff
Granbull
Blastoise
Ditto
Clefable
Nidoqueen
Red
Poliwrath
Venusaur
Pikachu
Snorlax
Espeon
Aerodactyl
Gyarados and Aerodactyl are the final choices. Put in Aero cos he already has Poli.
Blue (Green)
Scizor
Charizard
Pidgeot
Ninetales
Machamp
Golduck
Porygon2
Rhydon/Rhyperior in HGSS is another option. It replaced Ninetales in rotation but wasn’t actually caught by him til the GSC arc.
And for Green in LGPE, her team coulda been
Wigglytuff
Granbull
Blastoise
Ditto
Clefable
Nidoqueen
We had a thread trying to figure out what the "Protagonist team/Rival team" for every generation would be. Short answer, it's very hard to come to a clear decision, there's always room to argue, and some gens just don't give you enough info for 6 mons. The situation with Kanto, where they give Red the 3 starters+Pikachu at least is A starting point for him, and I think it makes the most sense from a continuity perspective given the number of anime fans, but also I can definitely picture a couple people in a conference room late saying "screw it, Red gets the starters and a couple other prominent mons, Blue gets his team without the starters, I'm going home."
Literally this. Outside of Red's canon team in GSC/HGSS, there is no objective "right" team and I'm always surprised how many people can't seem to accept this. Anything you can say is entirely as valid as anything anyone else can say so it's just a debate without end. I've personally always preferred Blue's Yellow team to his RB one, but the RB team is objectively stronger so it makes sense that it was used in GSC. That said, they've mixed it up a bit over the years, giving him Aerodactyl, Machamp, Tyranitar, and Heracross among others.
Even Red's Champion team in Origins* makes sense when you consider its composition (Charizard is his starter, Dodrio is not Pidgeot, Lapras is plot-relevant, Scyther is an iconic Safari zone species, Persian is great in Gen I, Jolteon is the most iconic non-Pikachu Electric mon) but even then I could point to where I think it could be better. Why not keep Victreebel, or Snorlax, or Hitmonlee?
But ultimately Red was just given Pikachu+starters+Lapras+Snorlax because it fits. The same logic doesn't really hold for later games: none of the gift/static Pokemon from Johto, Hoenn, Sinnoh, or Unova contrive to give you a team that feels as iconic as Red's (and by then the idea that one person would have all three starters was much less prevalent - artwork for the Sinnoh games quite often shows Lucas with Turtwig, Dawn with Piplup, and Barry with Chimchar for instance). Kalos, I suppose not surprisingly given how aggressively it mimics Kanto in many regards, follows the Kanto pattern with gift Pokemon - much promotional artwork for XY shows the protagonist(s) with at least one Kanto starter, Lucario, and/or Lapras. Alola is slightly similar in that much of its promotional artwork shows the protagonist(s) with a Rockruff or Lycanroc (not an in-game gift, but given away as an event early on during both SM and USUM's release).
*I've read that it's the team Satoshi Tajiri originally used when he first played the games, though unless he traded I'm not sure that's true: Meowth and Scyther are exclusive to different games
Very minor thing here, it's possible if he played the Japanese Pokemon Blue (which had different exclusivity than R/G which served as the roster basis for International R/B even though CODING wise they took after JP Blue, as confusing as that sounds), since Bulbapedia denotes Meowth and Scyther as both appearing in JP Blue version among exclusives. I could see this being Tajiri's version since it initially was a milestone celebration sold through mail order instead of widely on store shelves (so it had this "definitive version" air to it and Tajiri might have played it once work was DONE done on the first gen games)
When will people realize the Kalos Power Plant is literally just a random power plant, out of many in the series? It has a locked door, but that doesn't mean anything. The basic description that can be read off the Kalos map already suggested it had no ties to a mythical Pokémon.
Same with the basic idea of a mythical Pokémon behind hidden away from humanity (aka not fueling the biggest city of all of Pokémon)
and Volcanion's dex entries on their own (as well as the power plant description) completely contradict the idea it had any ties to this power plant.
Power Plants were never significantly relevant in the lore. The closest was USUM hinting that some nuclear fallout from a power plant in some alternate universe caused people to evacuate to different planets then people leaving Guzzlord behind due to its diet being too big for other planets to sustain.
Zapdos was in the Kanto power plant but it's literally just there to absorb electricity to feed itself. Nothing more. Otherwise, Zapdos is a random legendary Pokémon most people in the world of Pokémon know about. This is a bad example to use as a counterargument against my point and a bad point for trying to claim a mythical Pokémon was planned for the power plant.
We've been through the leaks. The game had 10 years to be datamined. The description of the power plant is there. Volcanion, with as little lore as it has, has lore indicating no real ties to this power plant. Rather the opposite in fact.
People have just been ultra coping for this random power plant just because Gamefreak forgot to unlock the door or flat out remove the entry. For all we know it could've been there solely due to Gamefreak planning on where the player would enter during Team Flare's power plant takeover, then decided to move the entry somewhere else and forgetting to erase their original spot. This is a more realistic scenario.
Same with the basic idea of a mythical Pokémon behind hidden away from humanity (aka not fueling the biggest city of all of Pokémon)
and Volcanion's dex entries on their own (as well as the power plant description) completely contradict the idea it had any ties to this power plant.
Power Plants were never significantly relevant in the lore. The closest was USUM hinting that some nuclear fallout from a power plant in some alternate universe caused people to evacuate to different planets then people leaving Guzzlord behind due to its diet being too big for other planets to sustain.
Zapdos was in the Kanto power plant but it's literally just there to absorb electricity to feed itself. Nothing more. Otherwise, Zapdos is a random legendary Pokémon most people in the world of Pokémon know about. This is a bad example to use as a counterargument against my point and a bad point for trying to claim a mythical Pokémon was planned for the power plant.
We've been through the leaks. The game had 10 years to be datamined. The description of the power plant is there. Volcanion, with as little lore as it has, has lore indicating no real ties to this power plant. Rather the opposite in fact.
People have just been ultra coping for this random power plant just because Gamefreak forgot to unlock the door or flat out remove the entry. For all we know it could've been there solely due to Gamefreak planning on where the player would enter during Team Flare's power plant takeover, then decided to move the entry somewhere else and forgetting to erase their original spot. This is a more realistic scenario.
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do people actually think a door being locked signifies anything? do these people not lock their doors or something?
The leaks do point to some scrapped Electric/Steel Pokemon in the same section where the Legendaries appeared, which is what a lot of people now speculate to have been a more likely Power Plant encounter than Volcanion (who I agree would have been a weird choice even with the premise of that locked door starting as a Mythical Encounter spot). Also the Museum Audio Guide has two descriptions of Power Plants (whether different than the one we visit or one-and-the-same) using Fire or Ground-Heat to generate electricity, Geothermal energy and the like most closesly corresponding to STEAM as an energy source. The fact that this is 2 of the 3 descriptions given is weirdly deliberate as opposed to just a bunch of different Power Plant ideas ("Here's Geothermal, here's Hydro, here's Fuel burning [don't bring this one up to Lysandre]") simply because it feels redundant otherwise in an area that only exists for flavor text or a bit of world building that most of the players likely didn't bother with for most of the game's life.
Pointing to the description in the final game (as opposed to something from the leaked early builds/docs) feels a bit "no duh" considering the premise of this speculation is that the area was intended for something and then was changed not to be, which would include scrubbing text suggesting that now-scrapped content in the hypothetical.
It's a bit narrow-minded as well to focus on the Power Plant specifically as a location type, rather the broader "here is an out of the way or unique location that has no apparent significance in gameplay despite being given a discernible interaction," to which one could point at the Celebi Shrine in Johto, the White Rock on Route 224 in Sinnoh, or the P2 Lab in Unova (which is present in BW despite no significant draw like the B2W2 Plasma Frigate docking). Kalos also has another oddly-underwhelming location in Reflection Cave (which thematically relates to Carbink and another Mythical in Diancie), which was simply the location of the Alakazite in the final game despite nothing similar corresponding to that random locked door by the Power Plant like the Ampharosite.
And the hell is "coping" about it anyway? Coping involves dealing with something difficult or trying to explain away/ignore a problem in modern internet vernacular. I don't see how the connotation of either applies to people guessing "huh, this location with an interactable block to going into it feels very odd. It probably had some purpose at one point in this game that has clear signs of cut content," with a Legendary/Mythical Pokemon being a fairly common precedent for weird locations without a seeming purpose in the game due to later event triggers.
Well putting a Door with a "Locked" prompt takes more coding effort than just making it part of the wall, so the miniscule additional effort indicates that door had some game design purpose even if only at a very early planning stage.
It gets its energy from solar power. Solar radiation. The radiation converts to different types of energy. This information is in the game. That is the source. Not from a Pokémon.
There's more than one citation here also in the game. The ground and surface is not Solar as a source of heat.
it also generates solar power from space, which is not tied to any mythical. the coping is somehow believing a locked door of a random power plant has something very significant behind it despite no real concrete evidence, and even contradicting statements when looking into the Pokemon in question. it's all conspiracies.
You know what would be incredibly amusing to me, is if GF designed those various power plants just to provide physical context for those museum art pieces waxing philosophical about different kinds of energy harvesting. 
Thing is, I can understand why fans feel teased by the locked doors of the power plants, but at the same time, I think the fandom also often has problems with keeping their speculation in check. The reality is that we have no earthly idea what GF actually may or may not have intended to do with them at any point in development. Maybe they were an elaborate puzzle corresponding to a Mythical Pokémon, or maybe they would just be some rooms with NPCs and flavor text, like the various civilian houses you find in each town. People sort of inevitably latch on to the most exciting or vindicating option when no solid evidence exists, and then that starts to mythologize these things as lost treasures of development that we were deprived of.
Thing is, I can understand why fans feel teased by the locked doors of the power plants, but at the same time, I think the fandom also often has problems with keeping their speculation in check. The reality is that we have no earthly idea what GF actually may or may not have intended to do with them at any point in development. Maybe they were an elaborate puzzle corresponding to a Mythical Pokémon, or maybe they would just be some rooms with NPCs and flavor text, like the various civilian houses you find in each town. People sort of inevitably latch on to the most exciting or vindicating option when no solid evidence exists, and then that starts to mythologize these things as lost treasures of development that we were deprived of.
Nothing I cited states a Solar-sourced Power Plant doesn't exist. The notes were about how the game makes specific mention of power being generated by the "Kalos Power Plant" via an in-game textual source, and said power methods being through means that would very much overlap with the Volcanion speculation, much less the leak's mention of a Scrapped Electric/Steel Pokemon speculated to either be connected to this location or the Lumiose Tower.
it also generates solar power from space, which is not tied to any mythical. the coping is somehow believing a locked door of a random power plant has something very significant behind it despite no real concrete evidence, and even contradicting statements when looking into the Pokemon in question. it's all conspiracies.
I don't see what's far-fetched or "coping" about thinking the locked door is a remnant of a Mythical Pokemon encounter, with or without the above mentions, especially because I forgot to cite the most immediate parallel: the actual Locked House in Canalave City that triggers the Darkrai encounter for Sinnoh.