Sinnoh's routes definitely have samey-looking tiles that make the whole region seem uniform. There are 'ehh' tracks/missed opportunities on the OST (I don't care for the Route 210 song, and the Gym/E4 music being the same with minor differences, being examples of the former and latter problems). It gave us Bidoof, which is widely considered a poor design. It gave us a really wacky evil team (which I described in earlier posts). And there are other issues with DPPt. Despite all this, Platinum is probably my most played version and my second favorite. This is for several reasons:
1) The upgrades to the Pokedex gave the region soo much variety and flavor. You get some nice gift Mons in Eevee, Porygon, and Togepi (was Togepi Plat only?). It gave players opportunities to be exposed to the new evos of 1st/2nd gen Mons, in the wild or in battle, during the main story. It also let Flint have a full Fire type team, and gave new signature Mons to some Gym Leaders/E4 members.
2) This game is, in my experience, the toughest one for me to Nuzlocke. Whenever I fail I find myself returning to it again (after I cool off of course).
3) It might just be me but I like the look of Sinnoh, despite it being samey. And Platinum gave some nice touches (snow in Twinleaf, the new grassy patch pattern, revamped Gym designs, etc).
4) Many of the tracks in the OST resonate well with me and make me nostalgic, despite picking this game up in HS and starting from Gen 1. Favorites of mine include the Eterna Forest theme, the Old Chateau theme, Stark Mountain, and Route 209. And that's only a few off the top of my head).
So...is having Platinum as one of my top faves, despite Sinnoh's flaws, an unpopular opinion?
Edit: Another potential unpopular opinion: I like Flint's team in DP. Despite only having 2 Fire types, there were moves in the non-Fire type Mons' movesets that would take advantage of Sunny Day (except Drifblim). It also meant he couldn't be a "free win" by anyone using Surf/EQ.
I do have to agree that Platinum was a very noticeable upgrade over DP. I started off with Platinum as my first game, so I'm a bit biased, but when I later on got Diamond, it just felt much worse. For me, Platinum had some very important changes:
- The bigger pokedex. In particular, not getting more than 2 fires was irksome in DP.
- The gym leader order. I think someone had talked about this earlier, but the order of the gyms in DP was rather odd and it required more and more backtracking.
- THE DISTORTION WORLD. MY GOD THAT WAS AWESOME. It felt absolutely fantastic to walk on wall, down waterfalls, jump from huge pits casually, and be surrounded by randomly reappearing and disappearing plants. I remember I tried fishing in the Distortion World just to see what would happen. :-)
- The new Elite 4 teams. I didn't really hate Flint's DP team that much but his new team is just so much better and more competent at battling. IMO the E4 in Sinnoh is really easy all the same though.
Really though, I just love Sinnoh. I'm biased because it was my first region, but when I look at the criticisms of it all I see are moot points that honestly could be applied to any other region. In fact, let's go ahead and do that!
I hate Hoenn.
I mean, this isn't that unpopular, but considering the recent r/pokemon poll showing that a lot of people have played Hoenn (Emerald was the most played game by a lot), it just might be.
- The design of the region. If you look at the map you're gonna see that it loops twice, both ending in Mauville City. I know that Sinnoh has this, but the loops are not ginormous. In Hoenn, they are. It gets annoying. I won't deny Sinnoh's are too.
- OH GOD THE HMs. I think Hoenn has the biggest problems with too much HM abuse. As I said earlier, in Sinnoh you could get off without Defog entirely, Flash as well, and that Rock Climb was rare. Other regions were even nicer with their HMs, most notable Unova. Unfortunately, the same could not be said about Hoenn. Everywhere I see things I have to cut, or Rock Smash, or use Strength. Tons of the region is water so that's another one (be honest here. I'm not trying to be a meme but quite a bit of the region is water - I'd say 40% at most and 30% at least). While the game does give you Linoone as a good HM slave, it's just not on par with Bibarel, and is not enough.
- Speaking of the water meme, there
is too much water. I know this sounds stupid, but I don't believe it's ok to make nearly 40% of the region water. Then comes the fact of diving. It's long, tedious, and confusing - I nearly got lost. It also fails to significantly contribute much to the experience, and it also fails to differentiate itself enough from standard on-land travel. When I first got a Hoenn game, I thought it'd be some grand adventure. I was wrong. Regardless of diving, I felt like I had to spend way too much time on the water trying to progress. There are I believe 4 mandatory water routes, and they are really quite large. For the comparison, Kanto had two, only one of which was leaning towards the long side (and even then it wasn't that long). Johto had one small one in the middle of the region, more of a roadblock of anything to force you to get Surf, and half of one on the way to Victory Road. Sinnoh had one large one (I will admit, it's pretty large) and one small one post-game. Unova (BW2) IIRC had none at all, or maybe 1. Kalos had none. Alola, IIRC had none.
- As I've gone on about for a rather long time, I didn't like Team Aqua/Magma.
- I didn't like the soundtrack.
I know this is subjective, but way too many people treat this objectively and say it's the best. I get the idea of trumpets, but like, I personally found the tracks to be weak, not as fitting or just flat out inferior to other region's OSTs. IMO it had the weakest OST of the whole series sans Kalos.
- There's no post-game areas outside of Emerald, and even then those areas aren't exactly strong. They for sure don't stack up to Sinnoh's post-game island, Unova's post-game half-region and John's going to Kanto (though I felt that Kanto wasn't long enough personally).
I could go on about other things, but those would be way too subjective for this (The music isn't because I've heard way too many people saying it's objectively better because of trumpets. Not on Smogon, but elsewhere, it's a huge problem). But
tl;dr the design had lots of looping around, there's tons of HM abuse, there's too much water, diving sucked, Team A/M sucked, trumpets don't magically make the soundtrack better, and the post-game sucks when it exists.
In Platinum its explained Cyrus's parents were neglectful which resulted in Cyrus preferring to spend more times around machines and computers. You can probably see where this is going. Cyrus saw machines being superior to people, they do what you want and there's no emotions or differing opinions to get in the way, so Cyrus began seeing those things as problems with the world. He eventually got so fed up that he decided to RECREATE THE UNIVERSE...
Yeah, even when you know his backstory there's still a major jump. Actually for all the villains aside from Giovanni, Lysandre, Guzma, & Lusamine we don't really know the "trigger event(s)" that caused them to do something so extreme. It's one thing to believe the world would be better if there was more water/more land/no emotion/under one's rule but it's another to go through with it without there being some event(s) that convinces you the world can't go on as it is and must act.
Also I was more talking about what the Team's goals were, not the leader's true plans.
We did know Lusamine's trigger. Her husband was studying the UBs and disappeared, causing her to fall into monomania about them. I mean, I was glad that we got Lusamine because she proved to be as dark as Cyrus, which was big for me.
Damn this all took forever to write.