Blazed through the main story overnight, so spoilers ahead.
For a DLC pack that wears the Area Zero association on its sleeve and is designed to reach a climax in a super-secret hidden section of the place… this kinda sucked in terms of being a resolution to the Area Zero mysteries?
Like, what did we really learn here? Going down the list:
1. Terapagos is responsible for the Terastal phenomenon. Cool. We’ve known that for months.
2. There’s an even deeper part of Area Zero where Terapagos dwells. Alright, but what’s so special about this deeper part?
3. It’s where you can find Stellar-type Pokémon. Neato, but that doesn’t really tie into any of the questions that the base game had set up.
4. So, what’s the correlation between the “Imagined Pokémon” / hybrid sketches in the Scarlet / Violet Book, and the new Paradox trios? Answer:
5. Okay, well what about the big symbol etched onto the ground of the cave where you find Roaring Moon / Iron Valiant? And what about the mysterious metal plate? Heath seemed to think those things held some kind of significance, so what was up with those? Answer:
6. Alright… in that case, what about the “phantom memory” that Heath mentioned experiencing, where he blacked out and woke up with a note written in his own handwriting that he couldn’t remember writing? We actually do get an answer to that… somewhat. If you take Terapagos to the Crystal Pool, you activate a scene in which Terapagos’s power summons Prof. Sada / Turo - the real one, at a point in time before they had completed their work on the time machine - to the pool. It’s enough to assume that what happened with Heath was probably this same phenomenon, as well as the rumors about people communicating with “dead” spirits near the pool (they were people from other points in time). However, there’s a complication here… the note that Heath woke up with was written in his handwriting, which seems to suggest that he may have interacted with a future version of himself. Which of course just replaces the existing question with a new one: When did Heath travel to the Crystal Pool to experience the other “side” of this event? And why? What was the significance of the note?
7. Also, on the subject of that meeting with the real Sada / Turo, it seems that we are entangled in an ontological paradox, as through the dialogue choices, it is possible to give the Professor the inspiration for the name “Koraidon / Miraidon,” as well as the idea to contruct an AI duplicate of themselves. That’s all fine; I figured that a game with a time machine and things called Paradox Pokémon probably couldn’t resist throwing in the old bootstrap loop somewhere… but there’s a problem. We can infer that this is supposed to be a self-contained ontological time loop, because one of the Professor’s notes found on the desk at the entrance of the Area Zero underdepths describes this meeting from their point of view, and mentions that they received a white book from us. And when the scene plays out on our end, that does happen… but in exchange for Briar’s white book, the Professor gives us their copy of the Scarlet / Violet Book. The same copy of the Scarlet / Violet Book that Arven picked up in their lab and was carrying throughout the main storyline, which we used in order to shut down the time machine. But if the Professor gave us that book at a point in time before they had completed the time machine, it wouldn’t have been around for Arven to find.
8. Speaking of Paradox Pokémon, where donthey come from? Answer: The Professor in the Crystal Pool scene seems to suggest that they are extracted from alternate timelines, rather than the timeline that the Professor / we are in. Which to be honest, of all the theories I’d seen people propose for the existence of Paradox Pokémon, I feel like this is the least-interesting option they could have gone with, because it makes Paradox Pokémon little different from Ultra Beasts — those are also bizarre quasi-Pokémon that originate from parallel realities.
On the one hand, I’d like to think that there could be a Daybreak-esque free update that will also include more material to resolve some of this loose ends and problems, but on the other hand, I find it frustrating that I might have to wait yet more several months for this story to actually finish, when it seemed like that was something this wave of DLC was supposed to do.
While we're at it, Terraform Zero seems very deliberately designed to shut down Paradox abilities even though the mon itself seems perfectly fine instigating temporal nonsense rather than keeping it in check (contrast Aura Break and Air Lock)
