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Unpopular opinions

You know what, considering recent events, going to drop my two scents on this "Power Plant/Volcanion" discussion.

FUN FACT: Some recent discovered of the October 2024 Mega Leak is XY location concept artwork. If you're alright with seeing leaked info, I highly recommend looking them up, because the pictures are GOREGEOUS! (There was also this one not included in the imgur collection)

And, pertaining to this discussion, several of the pictures are of the different Power Plant facilities; it gets 5 pictures dedicated to it. And most aren't just a landscape shot of the facilities outside, it's a dynamic picture showing the type of energy it gathers.

Another lesson from the 2024 Leak: A lot of initial plans get changed. Pokemon, characters, story, lore. What we see in the final product is the tip of an iceberg of years of tweaking and adjustments of what was going to be in the final product.


Point is, yes, in the final game the locked doors in the Power Plant is just that: locked doors. People need to let go any notion there is anything behind them or it was like an event that never got released. No. It was decided before the game's release, when they were finishing up that location, that locked doors may as well be a paintings on rock outcroppings. It's purpose was to allude to the idea that, yes, the facilities you are seeing in the "distance" have a entrance leading to them and the power plant is an entire underground complex instead of just the few rooms the player had to concern themselves with. End of story.

... BUT just because that's the end of the story doesn't mean it can't be speculated at some point GF may have had higher aspirations for the location. Because, say as much as you want it's just a one-and-done set piece in the final game, a lot of attention was given to it. Aside from the concept art, they did go out of their way to create the other facilities in the "distance" and giving said facility a (locked) door. They especially didn't need to do the latter part, players could just assume the other facilities are either accessible via underground passages or have their own entrance more closer to them.

And then we have Volcanion. BUT WAIT! Volcanion isn't the only Mythical in XY. We also have Diancie and Hoopa. And know what else we have two of? Seemingly random places that, in a way, vaguely match the Mythicals. pika pal already mentioned Reflection Cave (where you can find Carbink) having an isolated room off the beaten path (one where you need to use the mirror walls to even see the door to access it) which has light shining down; in the final games its just the location for Alakazite. Then on Route 22 there's the Chamber of Emptiness, a small cave that just has the Spooky Plate and Banettite; the map description reading "A mysterious void. It is said that nothing can exist within it".

It's not hard to see that people speculated that maybe originally, instead of just being given the Mythical, we would be given an item to activate an event when we went to the right location (obviously, if this was the original plan, it was scrapped way before any item or in-game script could be implemented). For Diancie it would be the Reflection Cave, for Hoopa it would be the Chamber of Emptiness, and for Volcanion it would be the locked doors of the Power Plant.

"But that would just be one of the Locked Doors, and doesn't make sense for Volcanion to reside in the Power Plant". Well, going to the location would just be activating the event, there may have been more steps to the event before we could encounter the Mythical and catch it. Some thoughts on what they could have done (or at least what I would have done):
  • Like for Diancie maybe that small event in the Pokemon Center which triggers when you get it is remnant of a bigger one. They'd appear after you claim the Key Item and tell you to go to Reflection Cave to find Diancie, you'd then have to battle through butlers and maids who want to capture Diancie for their master, and finally after catching Diancie we get the scene of their master telling the head servents to knock it off and just seeing Diancie in-person is enough for him.

  • For Hoopa, whose gimmick is creating portals to any place in the world, I can see you having to chase it all around Kalos. It appears in the Chamber of Emptiness drawn by the Key Item you got, then creates a portal it goes through. While you can't go through the portal, you can see an image of someplace in Kalos. You go there and Hoopa sneaks up onto you (maybe summons a Pokemon to battle you) before jumping into another ring. Rinse and repeat until finally getting to the location where you can capture Hoopa.

  • As for Volcanion, well who says Volcanion is at the Power Plant by its own choice? Maybe that event story would have been about the Power Plant having a malfunction, you using the Key Item to open one of the locked doors surprising the workers behind it, and deciding they need a strong trainer's help tell you that when the Power Plant was first made they captured Volcanion to help power it at the start. However Volcanion has suddenly gone berserk and is causing the Power Plant to malfunction. However the problem is they don't have the key card to access the facility Volcanion is in, but maybe their boss does. You go deeper into that part of the Power Plant, navigating a puzzle relating to its gimmick, and find the boss who, while he doesn't have the right key card, he has another facilities key card. You use that card to open another of the locked doors, navigate its puzzle, and find the person who does have the right key card. Finally you can enter the facility with Volcanion and capture it, saving the Power Plant who let you keep Volcanion as they feel guilty for exploiting it longer than they should have.

It would have made for a fun events as we'd also learn more about the Mythicals. But, considering some other things we learned about XY's development from the leak, already it seemed like GF bit of more than they could chew and had to pull back considerably. And maybe these speculated events were one of the things lost. It just seems odd to have these locations fitting for these Mythicals to not really have anything to do with them. The radiant room in the Cavern of Reflection and the whole Chamber of Emptiness just house a Mega Stone (and Arceus plate for CoE). The Power Plant having 3 interactable locked doors that are implied to lead to the other facilities, but in the game itself they're just decorations with no locations connected to them.

It's fun to speculate as I just showed, but you're right people need to let go. XY is made, there's no DLC ever coming for it. But while that's the final nail in the coffin there, we've got Legends Z-A coming.
 
BDSP and SV weren't that bad. Right? >_>
Personally, I do believe sv is pretty good (if kinda flawed)! People mostly make a huge fuzz over the optimization and the level scaling. But idk, I liked the three storylines, the new mons and as exploring all the different nooks and crannies.

Idk much about bdsp, except that people were disappointed in how loyal it was to the of diamond and pearl (as in, not adding much of anything else that wasn't in the original.

That's just my opinion tho!
 
I loved SV, and other than the occasional invisible Miraidon, I hardly experienced any glitches or other awkward moments when playing it.

I haven't played BDSP, but what made me lose interest in doing so (besides Legends Arceus being released only a couple months later) was the fact that I didn't feel like I'd be getting anything noticeable from playing them that I couldn't get from just playing Platinum (which in turn is a game I already like about 10% less than the average Pokemon fan does).
 
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Megas, in their current state and with the benefit of hindsight were a mistake. There's a world where they were actually properly utilized in boss fights and didn't get cut leading to several Pokemon that really did need them forever being crimped out of key buffs at the mercy of whenever the creators decide to bring them back. That world is not this one. Even if it was, they wouldn't have the immediacy and dependability of cross-gen evos, nor the worldbuilding contributions of regional forms. More Ursalunas and Wyrdeers, less Mega Garchomps por favor.
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Wait a minute, I love Mega Evolution
megaevolution.png

With Legends Z-A on the way I thought I'd make a new tier list and wow actually most of these guys are baller once I set aside my (still justified tbh) griping about their removal and really think clearly about their design. First USUM, then liking Lopunny, now this. Wonder what overly dour and miserable old take of mine I will disavow next
 
Here's an opinion of mine: Megas do not preclude a Pokemon from receiving buffs or upgrades, GF simply never elects to. See Gigantamax and several NFE Pokemon having one that they can't retain by evolving (including retroactively with Duraludon).

Gamefreak could make a Mawile or Audino evolution at any point, they just don't care.
 
imho, the only game that had a story worth paying atention was X/Y.

#bait

BDSP and SV weren't that bad. Right? >_>

I did play through BDSP to get the Mythicals mainly, but I barely recall anything of it tbh. More forgettable than bad for me.

I loved SV. I didn’t really experience any glitches. I’ve also always been one to not mind mindblowing graphics etc in games, its just a bonus if that occurs. I loved the actual gameplay and story.
 
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.

[...]

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.

[...]


Point is, yes, in the final game the locked doors in the Power Plant is just that: locked doors. People need to let go any notion there is anything behind them or it was like an event that never got released. No. It was decided before the game's release, when they were finishing up that location, that locked doors may as well be a paintings on rock outcroppings. It's purpose was to allude to the idea that, yes, the facilities you are seeing in the "distance" have a entrance leading to them and the power plant is an entire underground complex instead of just the few rooms the player had to concern themselves with. End of story.

[...]

FINALLY! SANE POKÉFANS WHO KNOW :volcanion: HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE POWER PLANT!​

I am so fucking sick of folks thinking Volcanion has zero lore and therefore should be hidden behind a random locked room.

HAS NOBODY EVER HEARD OF THE LUMIOSE PRESS!? You can bring Volcanion there and talk to the editor-in-chief!

X and Y said:
A nation-building...: "On the XXth day of the XXth month at Café Kizuna in Lumiose City. In the southern part of the Kalos region, there seems to be a custom to revere Volcanion as a nation-building Pokémon. People seem to believe that a steam explosion caused by Volcanion created the plain where they live. As a matter of fact, a huge mountain range suddenly disappeared due to an unexplained explosion in that part of the region in the past..."

It's not a lot, but I wouldn't say it has zero lore.
 
instead of bloating all the encounter tables and wheeling out nonsense like Champion Blue with Eternatus and Arceus (THIS IS WHAT RADICAL RED FANS ACTUALLY PLAY).
By the way, I complained about this game design, because i was stuck on the stupid lorelei battle with a Calyrex ice and i couldn't
override the hail and someone said to me, along the lines of "You're playing the game wrong by using only 9 pokemon to beat the game. You're supposed to teambuild, spend some time in the team builder to defeat each mon."
But here's the thing. I don't want to have to do that to beat a pokemon game. Come on, you're spending half an hour, on a damage calculator for CPU battles. Call me biased, but that's not what I want to do, scour the entire living Dex over and over and train them all to beat each team of pokemon. At which point I might as well play ND Ubers.
 

FINALLY! SANE POKÉFANS WHO KNOW :volcanion: HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE POWER PLANT!​


I assume people associated Volc with the Kalos power plant bc I dunno hydraulic energy? Even though the Power Plants are located on a desertic area with no water around...

Oh and since the difficulty topic seems to be popping up again, I wanted to point out. The official games got away with Ultra Necrozma, a boss that requires specific set combos to get around with, and there's quite the debate if that's good boss design or not...For me personally, I COULD consider it good, if the game's difficulty curve followed upon that, but nah. After Ultra Necrozma everything that remains in the main story is undewhelming by comparison. So if someone doesn't know the strats for Necrozma and beats it by just powering through it, then that team is likely pretty overpowered to deal with any boss after it with a lot of ease and not in a good way...
 
HAS NOBODY EVER HEARD OF THE LUMIOSE PRESS!? You can bring Volcanion there and talk to the editor-in-chief!



It's not a lot, but I wouldn't say it has zero lore.
To be fair, it’s easy to see why people wouldn’t be aware of that — it’s a couple of texts hidden away behind an unremarkable NPC in a nigh-functionless office room in the otherwise massive Lumiose City, and by the time Volcanion was revealed/distributed, ORAS were the newest games rather than XY, so a lot of people probably received Volcanion on their ORAS cart, where taking it to the nigh-functionless Mauville TV station instead lets you “watch” (that is, read) some old tapes of Pyramid King Brandon having some silly close encounters with Volcanion, with nothing being mentioned about it being a nation-building Pokémon.
 
To be fair, it’s easy to see why people wouldn’t be aware of that — it’s a couple of texts hidden away behind an unremarkable NPC in a nigh-functionless office room in the otherwise massive Lumiose City, and by the time Volcanion was revealed/distributed, ORAS were the newest games rather than XY, so a lot of people probably received Volcanion on their ORAS cart, where taking it to the nigh-functionless Mauville TV station instead lets you “watch” (that is, read) some old tapes of Pyramid King Brandon having some silly close encounters with Volcanion, with nothing being mentioned about it being a nation-building Pokémon.

And to add on to that, the distribution of the thing for most people dropped when it was a bit over a month prior to its debut generation coming to its end. It was probably getting drown in Alola hype especially when their demo dropped at roughly the same time frame Western players were even able to get serial codes.
 
As a matter of fact, a huge mountain range suddenly disappeared due to an unexplained explosion in that part of the region in the past..."

Ok, can we take a moment to discuss exactly how absurd this is? The most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated would have left a fairly modest dent in a single mountain. To wipe out an entire mountain range (a 'huge' one at that) would require energy on the order of the impact event that wiped out the dinosaurs - and would have similar globally catastrophic consequences. Like, massive earthquakes and tsunamis ravaging the entire world, followed by a rain of debris as chunks of mountain are recaptured by the planet's gravity and rain from the sky like meteorites, followed by a cloud of dust and debris enveloping the world and plunging it into an ice age kind of consequences, and yet this dude mentions it in passing as a minor event and nowhere else is it brought up.
 
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