Welp, that's Cynthia and the Elite Four down yet again. As expected, she was no joke, with her Garchomp outlevelling nearly my entire team. I led with Infernape, and thankfully I was able to U-Turn onto Electivire when she switched into Milotic, letting me get the big roadblock out of the way early on. It still wasn't easy, though, and it made me wish that every battle made me think as much as Cynthia did. The one that gave me the most trouble, oddly enough, was Flint; my team doesn't really have a good answer for Fire-types, so I ended up having to play hopscotch with my mons a lot and blew through two Max Revives just to come out on top. (Although realistically, I probably could have done it in less.) I didn't expect Cynthia to give me a sticker, of all things, for beating her a third time, but hey, that's fun, I guess.
I also snagged all the legendaries in Ramanas Park earlier, which gave me surprisingly little trouble for the most part. Regirock, Raikou, Suicune, Mewtwo, and Kyogre all got caught in one ball, and Groudon and Rayquaza kindly put themselves to sleep for me so I could catch them. Registeel and Entei were kind of annoying, mainly because the former kept Struggling himself to death and I kept accidentally killing the latter, but other than that, I didn't run into any major issues. I can confidently say gathering the shards I needed to summon the legendaries was way more painful of a process than actually catching them; seriously, if you plan on getting all these guys, be prepared to mine for shards for legit HOURS. (I will say, though, that the special rooms they made for each of the legends are pretty baller, and that Giratina fight alone was worth every second of the grind.)
But yeah, that's the ball game. My teammates and their final levels were Infernape at level 85, Mamoswine at level 86, Electivire at level 86, Bronzong at level 87, Spiritomb at level 87, and Rampardos at level... 96. Yeah, Rampardos must be in a really good experience group or something, because that guy quickly became my most overlevelled party member and stayed that way going into the postgame. (And he was still probably the least useful, all things considered... sorry, Roark.) Overall, I really liked this team; it was kind of unbalanced and had some glaring weaknesses, but it allowed me to use some mons I never have before (this was actually my first time using a trade evo, since I knew I'd have friends picking up the game at launch for me to trade with) and I'm glad I opted to do something new for once with the options available in this game. If there was any party member who surprised me with just how good they were, it was Spiritomb; there weren't a lot of Fairies or Fairy-type moves to worry about for obvious reasons, so I could pretty much always count on Spiritomb to tank a hit on the switch and either cripple an attacker with Will-O-Wisp or pick 'em off outright with any of Shadow Ball, Dark Pulse, or Shadow Sneak in a pinch. Easily my star player and a mon I'm super glad I decided to use this time. (I've also decided that if I ever do replay Platinum, I'm going to exclusively use mons that aren't available in BDSP [starter notwithstanding], both to dunk on this game's mon selection a bit and to make my next run through Sinnoh just a tad different.)