Alright, so here's how this is gonna work. What you're about to read is like, 50-60% of a complete diatribe on this topic. Sections on story, boss design and side content should all be in. The problem isn't laziness or lack of free time, it's that I can't think of anything interesting to say on the first two points and have regrettably not engaged enough with the lattermost. If & when that changes I'll make a Part 2.
EDIT 1/21/25: Added a story section. Now it's more like 75-80% of a full dissection!
With that out of the way, lemme give you a taste of why I've been...
Souring on Sinnoh
Above all else, the most important thing I need to establish going into this is that Pokemon Platinum is undeniably a good videogame. Under no circumstances should this analysis be interpreted as “Platinum Does Not Hold Up” - my thoughts skew too positive for that to be the case.
The thing is, they don’t skew quite as hard as they used to. While Pearl was what originally introduced me to the world of Pokemon, I wouldn’t get its enhanced counterpart until much later, snagging an Amazon purchase in late 2019 just before DS Pokemon game prices went completely insane. Even after my inaugural playthrough concluded it hadn’t broken into my highest echelon, which at that time was reserved for ORAS and SM, but it was a solid third place and I came out of the experience with basically the same outlook I now have towards BW2: More or less adequately hyped once you filter out the “they don’t make ‘em like this anymore” doomer comments. I considered playing it something of a rite of passage as a fan, my first “true” Sinnoh playthrough after spending years saddled with the obsolete version that I never even completed anyway. As the years and a few replays have gone by, however, that initial estimation has seen a slow but steady sink, albeit one dotted by occasional sparks of newfound appreciation for things I had initially overlooked. There’s no one revelation that has made the game fall apart for me so much as a menagerie of shortcomings that have dulled Platinum’s appeal to the point where I consider it less a perennial classic and moreso an important, solid product that in many aspects has been outclassed.
And one more thing: If it wasn’t clear enough, this is in fact an essay about Pokemon Platinum specifically. I will not put you through the 500th justified-but-overdone polemic about Diamond & Pearl’s 2 Fire type options because I am not reviewing Diamond & Pearl. I may bring up other Pokemon media for assorted points and comparisons, but those are supplements for the main critique.
The thing is, they don’t skew quite as hard as they used to. While Pearl was what originally introduced me to the world of Pokemon, I wouldn’t get its enhanced counterpart until much later, snagging an Amazon purchase in late 2019 just before DS Pokemon game prices went completely insane. Even after my inaugural playthrough concluded it hadn’t broken into my highest echelon, which at that time was reserved for ORAS and SM, but it was a solid third place and I came out of the experience with basically the same outlook I now have towards BW2: More or less adequately hyped once you filter out the “they don’t make ‘em like this anymore” doomer comments. I considered playing it something of a rite of passage as a fan, my first “true” Sinnoh playthrough after spending years saddled with the obsolete version that I never even completed anyway. As the years and a few replays have gone by, however, that initial estimation has seen a slow but steady sink, albeit one dotted by occasional sparks of newfound appreciation for things I had initially overlooked. There’s no one revelation that has made the game fall apart for me so much as a menagerie of shortcomings that have dulled Platinum’s appeal to the point where I consider it less a perennial classic and moreso an important, solid product that in many aspects has been outclassed.
And one more thing: If it wasn’t clear enough, this is in fact an essay about Pokemon Platinum specifically. I will not put you through the 500th justified-but-overdone polemic about Diamond & Pearl’s 2 Fire type options because I am not reviewing Diamond & Pearl. I may bring up other Pokemon media for assorted points and comparisons, but those are supplements for the main critique.
What better place to start than with the meat & potatoes of any of these games? If you’re going off pure cultural osmosis, the Sinnoh 107 seems like one of the all-time greats. Right from the gate you get one of the most well-rounded starter trios: Torterra, Infernape and Empoleon may not have the individual raw popularity of Charizard or Greninja (well, except for Piplup in Japan, I suppose), but as a set they were the last one for a pretty long time where each member was a hit and controversy-free. They did this while also being very influential on starter design going forward, being the first trio with a unifying theme - in their case, mythologies from around the world, a theme which itself ties into Sinnoh as the land of gods and legends.
Get to catching and the hits keep coming right on the first route. Just as the Sinnoh starters shifted the paradigm for their archetype, so too did the first bird. Everything about Staraptor screams “This ain’t your grandpa’s Pidgeot”: His stat block is far more optimized for attack and speed, his piercing gaze and razor-sharp head crest are reflected in-game with the ever-useful Intimidate ability and his defining coverage move is Close Combat, a merciless rush attack that makes quick work of the Rocks and Steels that stonewalled his avian predecessors. He’s not alone, either, for on the very same routes you can find the Starly line you’ll often find Shinx in tow, another great three-stage design that specs a little less into in-game viability and more into pure cute factor in its first stage and rule of cool as Luxray. It would’ve taken a monumental effort for the cuddly electric baby tiger that evolves into a sleek black predator with x-ray vision to not be a fan-favorite, so this outcome is no surprise. Already I’ve written a fair bit and I haven’t even touched upon the true Sinnoh classics: Origin Form Giratina, Garchomp and Darkrai all reached hitherto unknown heights of menacing presence for Pokemon design, while Lucario translated the stoic, mystical warrior monk archetype to great effect. I could offer more insightful dissection of these creatures but I think this is a case where the sheer amounts of acclaim and fanservice they’ve gotten over the years speaks for itself. Add in the arsenal of retroactive evolutions for pre-existing Pokemon, and you got a recipe for success.
It is with all this in mind that we arrive at the first “And yet...”
Sinnoh has an inequality problem. Obviously not every Pokemon should be the pinnacle of visual badassery or battle prowess, nevermind the unfeasability of such a thing. But Sinnoh was the last region to have a pool of decidedly weak Pokemon clearly not meant for use beyond the earliest stages of the game, and boy did the parting shot for this design ethos leave us with some real clunkers. Nestled among the aforementioned early-route bangers is Kricketune, a woefully undercooked bug that manages to be below even the Beedrills and Butterfrees of yesteryear in terms of usability, a sound-based Pokemon whose Special Attack is too bafflingly bad to use the newly-introduced Bug Buzz. Honey Trees stick out like a sore thumb for being filled with fodder that does not reward the time you’re meant to spend slathering honey and waiting: Cherrim and Wormadam are brothers-in-arms in terms of being pioneers of form-changing who are too weak to make any compelling use of those forms, while Combee makes you futz around for the rarer female form just to get Vespiquen, yet another mediocre Bug/Flying type. Ditto goes for the Great Marsh; Once upon a time the Safari Zone was the home of Chansey, Tauros, Dratini and Exeggcute, some of the most powerful and exotic Pokemon of their era. Now the RNG-laden trudgery’s best prizes are Skorupi, Tangela and Yanma, perfectly cromulent Pokemon in their own right but not exceptional enough to warrant all this extra effort for anyone who isn’t a dex completionist or a hardcore superfan for any of them.
Some might be inclined to see this criticism as somewhat unfair for the standards of the time. I myself said that making Pokemon like this used to be normal, with preceding regions having plenty of duds too. The issue in Sinnoh’s case is that, unlike Kanto and Hoenn, it doesn’t have the roster space to waste. 107 slots sounds like a lot, but one must recall that a massive chunk of that space is chewed up by the for-the-time abnormally high amount of cross-gen evolutions and legendary Pokemon. If you remove both of these categories - in other words, if you look at only the number of “regular” designs not derivative of any prior Pokemon - Sinnoh has 65. This puts it much more in line with the truncated new Pokemon selections of modern regions: Apply the same criteria to the notoriously small Kalos dex and it only has one less! Of course, the key difference is that newer regions have a whole different, quality-over-quantity philosophy that strives to make every addition count. Sinnoh, by comparison, is faced with the worst of both worlds.
Honestly, even when you add in the much-vaunted Legendaries and Mythicals of the region, there’s still a bit too many misses for my liking. I gave Giratina and Darkrai their flowers, and I’ve always been quite fond of Shaymin and Regigigas, but on the other side you have Heatran, a weird lava frog-adjacent the developers never quite figured out a place for that didn’t feel like an afterthought, the underwhelming, overly simplistic Lake Guardians and Manaphy & Phione, the first in a line of Mythicals that feel designed for spinoff material first and foremost with only tangential connections to the regions they made their mainline game debut in. There’s also Palkia and Dialga, whose otherworldly designs and deeply important places in the lore are let down by systemic problems of the time; giving the main legendaries wild Pokemon AI and no real boss fight buffs was maybe more acceptable back in the Game Boy days, but when your subjects are the God of Time and the God of Space that doesn’t cut it anymore.
When all’s said and done, I actually think the cross-gen evolutions are the most solid section of the Sinnoh dex by a wide margin. So many Pokemon owe this region for giving them amazing expansions and makeovers: Roselia being retrofitted into a superb three-stage line, Male Kirlia becoming a valiant swordsman who at one time was my favorite Pokemon, Leafeon being my favorite Eeveelution and a whole bunch of evolutions for Johto Pokemon who even at that time already were in desperate need of one. I always struggle to wrap my head around the fact that Sneasel, Togetic, Aipom, Yanma, Piloswine and Gligar were once unable to evolve - Their new stages were so necessary and effective that they retroactively made preceding appearances feel incomplete. I’m even inclined to defend the more controversial ones, like Rhyperior and Lickilicky. My absolute favorite from this batch is unironically Probopass: The way it’s tied into Mt. Coronet and shaped like a compass rose is exquisite theming for such a silly goober with magnetically attached metal filings for nose hair.
Oh, and don’t forget Munchlax. Munchlax is the world and I love him dearly.
Get to catching and the hits keep coming right on the first route. Just as the Sinnoh starters shifted the paradigm for their archetype, so too did the first bird. Everything about Staraptor screams “This ain’t your grandpa’s Pidgeot”: His stat block is far more optimized for attack and speed, his piercing gaze and razor-sharp head crest are reflected in-game with the ever-useful Intimidate ability and his defining coverage move is Close Combat, a merciless rush attack that makes quick work of the Rocks and Steels that stonewalled his avian predecessors. He’s not alone, either, for on the very same routes you can find the Starly line you’ll often find Shinx in tow, another great three-stage design that specs a little less into in-game viability and more into pure cute factor in its first stage and rule of cool as Luxray. It would’ve taken a monumental effort for the cuddly electric baby tiger that evolves into a sleek black predator with x-ray vision to not be a fan-favorite, so this outcome is no surprise. Already I’ve written a fair bit and I haven’t even touched upon the true Sinnoh classics: Origin Form Giratina, Garchomp and Darkrai all reached hitherto unknown heights of menacing presence for Pokemon design, while Lucario translated the stoic, mystical warrior monk archetype to great effect. I could offer more insightful dissection of these creatures but I think this is a case where the sheer amounts of acclaim and fanservice they’ve gotten over the years speaks for itself. Add in the arsenal of retroactive evolutions for pre-existing Pokemon, and you got a recipe for success.
It is with all this in mind that we arrive at the first “And yet...”
Sinnoh has an inequality problem. Obviously not every Pokemon should be the pinnacle of visual badassery or battle prowess, nevermind the unfeasability of such a thing. But Sinnoh was the last region to have a pool of decidedly weak Pokemon clearly not meant for use beyond the earliest stages of the game, and boy did the parting shot for this design ethos leave us with some real clunkers. Nestled among the aforementioned early-route bangers is Kricketune, a woefully undercooked bug that manages to be below even the Beedrills and Butterfrees of yesteryear in terms of usability, a sound-based Pokemon whose Special Attack is too bafflingly bad to use the newly-introduced Bug Buzz. Honey Trees stick out like a sore thumb for being filled with fodder that does not reward the time you’re meant to spend slathering honey and waiting: Cherrim and Wormadam are brothers-in-arms in terms of being pioneers of form-changing who are too weak to make any compelling use of those forms, while Combee makes you futz around for the rarer female form just to get Vespiquen, yet another mediocre Bug/Flying type. Ditto goes for the Great Marsh; Once upon a time the Safari Zone was the home of Chansey, Tauros, Dratini and Exeggcute, some of the most powerful and exotic Pokemon of their era. Now the RNG-laden trudgery’s best prizes are Skorupi, Tangela and Yanma, perfectly cromulent Pokemon in their own right but not exceptional enough to warrant all this extra effort for anyone who isn’t a dex completionist or a hardcore superfan for any of them.
Some might be inclined to see this criticism as somewhat unfair for the standards of the time. I myself said that making Pokemon like this used to be normal, with preceding regions having plenty of duds too. The issue in Sinnoh’s case is that, unlike Kanto and Hoenn, it doesn’t have the roster space to waste. 107 slots sounds like a lot, but one must recall that a massive chunk of that space is chewed up by the for-the-time abnormally high amount of cross-gen evolutions and legendary Pokemon. If you remove both of these categories - in other words, if you look at only the number of “regular” designs not derivative of any prior Pokemon - Sinnoh has 65. This puts it much more in line with the truncated new Pokemon selections of modern regions: Apply the same criteria to the notoriously small Kalos dex and it only has one less! Of course, the key difference is that newer regions have a whole different, quality-over-quantity philosophy that strives to make every addition count. Sinnoh, by comparison, is faced with the worst of both worlds.
Honestly, even when you add in the much-vaunted Legendaries and Mythicals of the region, there’s still a bit too many misses for my liking. I gave Giratina and Darkrai their flowers, and I’ve always been quite fond of Shaymin and Regigigas, but on the other side you have Heatran, a weird lava frog-adjacent the developers never quite figured out a place for that didn’t feel like an afterthought, the underwhelming, overly simplistic Lake Guardians and Manaphy & Phione, the first in a line of Mythicals that feel designed for spinoff material first and foremost with only tangential connections to the regions they made their mainline game debut in. There’s also Palkia and Dialga, whose otherworldly designs and deeply important places in the lore are let down by systemic problems of the time; giving the main legendaries wild Pokemon AI and no real boss fight buffs was maybe more acceptable back in the Game Boy days, but when your subjects are the God of Time and the God of Space that doesn’t cut it anymore.
When all’s said and done, I actually think the cross-gen evolutions are the most solid section of the Sinnoh dex by a wide margin. So many Pokemon owe this region for giving them amazing expansions and makeovers: Roselia being retrofitted into a superb three-stage line, Male Kirlia becoming a valiant swordsman who at one time was my favorite Pokemon, Leafeon being my favorite Eeveelution and a whole bunch of evolutions for Johto Pokemon who even at that time already were in desperate need of one. I always struggle to wrap my head around the fact that Sneasel, Togetic, Aipom, Yanma, Piloswine and Gligar were once unable to evolve - Their new stages were so necessary and effective that they retroactively made preceding appearances feel incomplete. I’m even inclined to defend the more controversial ones, like Rhyperior and Lickilicky. My absolute favorite from this batch is unironically Probopass: The way it’s tied into Mt. Coronet and shaped like a compass rose is exquisite theming for such a silly goober with magnetically attached metal filings for nose hair.
Oh, and don’t forget Munchlax. Munchlax is the world and I love him dearly.
Shifting the focus to Sinnoh as a setting, the first thing that has to be noted is that the map design principles at play are very, very good, to the point where I’d be willing to say that in terms of rewarding backtracking it still hasn’t been topped. There are so many nooks accessible by bringing later game HMs to old areas that give you great rewards for doing so, such as the TMs for Brick Break and Focus Punch being hidden within Oreburgh Gate, the latter even necessitating the further obtaining of Strength. Two-layer backtracking incentive! My favorite spot like this is the hidden northern section of Floaroma Meadow, which can only be accessed by finding the entrance at the other side of the river in front of Fuego Ironworks. The player’s sleuthing is rewarded with a field full of incredibly useful items including a Max Revive, a Rare Candy, the Miracle Seed, a Leaf Stone and more. Any discussion of Sinnoh’s map design is also obligated to bring up Mt. Coronet, the region’s trademark re-occurring dungeon that neatly divides the world into four quadrants its cave systems elegantly criss-cross through and conceal until the player has the ride HMs to progress further. There’s really nothing else like it in the whole series, and its omnipresence builds up the grandeur in a DS-friendly way, making the climb up to Spear Pillar in the climax feel all the more monumental for it; you’ve conquered the lower levels of the colossus, and now there’s nothing left to do but go up. I’m even willing to go up to bat for the environmental pacebreakers like the swampy water on Route 212 and the deep snow on Route 217. These are genuinely cool ways to immerse the player and make them feel like they’re on a tough journey through rough terrain!
There are other individual locations I’m a big fan of, too. The stretch between the first and second badges is a highlight when it comes to naturalistic setpieces, from the vibrant and soothing Floaroma Town to the majestic Eterna Forest, everyone and everything in it being partially obscured by the shade of the leaves with only a few beams of light filtering through the canopy. Sinnoh at its best has a great lo-fi vibe to it: Valor Lakefront and the three Lakes themselves are other great examples of places where the best thing you can do is take a break and absorb the atmosphere.
And yet...
The best-case scenario areas I’m talking about constitute perhaps a third of the region. As a whole, taken as a followup from Ruby, Sapphire & Emerald on stronger hardware, Sinnoh is a sizeable step down in terms of environmental diversity and creative, thematically resonant settlements. The aforementioned pair of routes with environmental hazards stand out in my mind in large part because not much else in the game does: For the most part you’re trekking through pretty pedestrian meadowy pathways with occasional rocky hills with trainers strewn about. Hoenn had plenty of these types of routes too, but it also had more intriguing locales that hadn’t yet been seen like the desert of Route 111, the ash-covered Route 113 or Routes 114 and 115 which more effectively link up to and expand on the neighboring landmark of Meteor Falls. That region was massively helped by having a simple but strong design theme of “land vs sea” with a hint of extraterrestrial motifs to spice things up, a throughline which gave Hoenn an easily recognizable duality that many of its locations were designed around, from Mt. Chimney to the Abandoned Ship. Say what you will about the deluge of water routes (Sidenote: Was this actually a serious critique from the beginning or did IGN just meme it into the discourse?), it certainly gives the region a distinct flavor! By comparison, Sinnoh feels significantly more slapdash. The baseline worldbuilding concepts it’s building around are definitely more esoteric, but even accounting for that there isn’t the same cohesion. It’s ok to have more oddball places, not everywhere has to be Celestic Town, but when I see a foundry nestled in a hidden cubby next to Eterna Forest or the rustic ranchers’ home Solaceon Town having discount versions of the Ruins of Alph AND Pokemon Tower right next door I would be lying if I said these didn’t feel like overly videogame-y compromises on the believability of the setting.
I think the bigger settlements are where these identity problems are most apparent. The trouble, if you even want to call it that, begins right at Jubilife City. While it’s not the biggest in the region Jubilife has always been treated as Sinnoh’s “signature city”, right down to its Meiji-era precursor being the first colony in Hisui, and yet there’s nothing about it that really embodies the region to the point where it’s Just Kind Of Another Pokemon City. Compare this to Alola’s Hau’oli, a laid-back seaside mini-metropolis with a tourist bureau and ukelele music where the local Trial Captain paints fences and lives in a villa with a swimming pool. Maybe it’s a bit of an on-the-nose adaptation of Hawaiian aesthetics, but it nonetheless feels like a place that could never be transplanted to any other region. Ditto for Ecruteak, Lumiose, hell even Wyndon or Mesagoza. A similar story goes for Veilstone, which again fails to evolve an identity beyond Just Kind Of Another (Late-Game) Pokemon City. Being the home of Team Galactic HQ and having some meteor impact sites feel like a solid starting point for a place heavy on gaudy bright sci-fi, almost cyberpunk-esque aesthetics in the vein of what BDSP’s weirdly stunning concept art depicted, but this is undermined by the gym leader being a non-descript Fighting specialist and no other techie things of note happening in this area. Once again, the comparison to the previous game is not flattering: Mossdeep, Sootopolis, Lavaridge and Fortree are big standouts with Mauville being the only major dud.
To re-iterate, it’s not all doom and gloom and none of these places are even flat-out bad. On the whole, though, Sinnoh outside of Mt. Coronet feels like a disjointed greatest hits of classic-era Pokemon map design rather than anything really striking.
There are other individual locations I’m a big fan of, too. The stretch between the first and second badges is a highlight when it comes to naturalistic setpieces, from the vibrant and soothing Floaroma Town to the majestic Eterna Forest, everyone and everything in it being partially obscured by the shade of the leaves with only a few beams of light filtering through the canopy. Sinnoh at its best has a great lo-fi vibe to it: Valor Lakefront and the three Lakes themselves are other great examples of places where the best thing you can do is take a break and absorb the atmosphere.
And yet...
The best-case scenario areas I’m talking about constitute perhaps a third of the region. As a whole, taken as a followup from Ruby, Sapphire & Emerald on stronger hardware, Sinnoh is a sizeable step down in terms of environmental diversity and creative, thematically resonant settlements. The aforementioned pair of routes with environmental hazards stand out in my mind in large part because not much else in the game does: For the most part you’re trekking through pretty pedestrian meadowy pathways with occasional rocky hills with trainers strewn about. Hoenn had plenty of these types of routes too, but it also had more intriguing locales that hadn’t yet been seen like the desert of Route 111, the ash-covered Route 113 or Routes 114 and 115 which more effectively link up to and expand on the neighboring landmark of Meteor Falls. That region was massively helped by having a simple but strong design theme of “land vs sea” with a hint of extraterrestrial motifs to spice things up, a throughline which gave Hoenn an easily recognizable duality that many of its locations were designed around, from Mt. Chimney to the Abandoned Ship. Say what you will about the deluge of water routes (Sidenote: Was this actually a serious critique from the beginning or did IGN just meme it into the discourse?), it certainly gives the region a distinct flavor! By comparison, Sinnoh feels significantly more slapdash. The baseline worldbuilding concepts it’s building around are definitely more esoteric, but even accounting for that there isn’t the same cohesion. It’s ok to have more oddball places, not everywhere has to be Celestic Town, but when I see a foundry nestled in a hidden cubby next to Eterna Forest or the rustic ranchers’ home Solaceon Town having discount versions of the Ruins of Alph AND Pokemon Tower right next door I would be lying if I said these didn’t feel like overly videogame-y compromises on the believability of the setting.
I think the bigger settlements are where these identity problems are most apparent. The trouble, if you even want to call it that, begins right at Jubilife City. While it’s not the biggest in the region Jubilife has always been treated as Sinnoh’s “signature city”, right down to its Meiji-era precursor being the first colony in Hisui, and yet there’s nothing about it that really embodies the region to the point where it’s Just Kind Of Another Pokemon City. Compare this to Alola’s Hau’oli, a laid-back seaside mini-metropolis with a tourist bureau and ukelele music where the local Trial Captain paints fences and lives in a villa with a swimming pool. Maybe it’s a bit of an on-the-nose adaptation of Hawaiian aesthetics, but it nonetheless feels like a place that could never be transplanted to any other region. Ditto for Ecruteak, Lumiose, hell even Wyndon or Mesagoza. A similar story goes for Veilstone, which again fails to evolve an identity beyond Just Kind Of Another (Late-Game) Pokemon City. Being the home of Team Galactic HQ and having some meteor impact sites feel like a solid starting point for a place heavy on gaudy bright sci-fi, almost cyberpunk-esque aesthetics in the vein of what BDSP’s weirdly stunning concept art depicted, but this is undermined by the gym leader being a non-descript Fighting specialist and no other techie things of note happening in this area. Once again, the comparison to the previous game is not flattering: Mossdeep, Sootopolis, Lavaridge and Fortree are big standouts with Mauville being the only major dud.
To re-iterate, it’s not all doom and gloom and none of these places are even flat-out bad. On the whole, though, Sinnoh outside of Mt. Coronet feels like a disjointed greatest hits of classic-era Pokemon map design rather than anything really striking.
One place where Platinum is a nigh-inarguable upgrade from RSE is in building up a threatening villain faction. From the earliest parts of the game you get windows of dialogue into Cyrus’ megalomaniacal ambitions, with his henchmen being hard at work gathering energy and posing obstacles for you. Unlike the faceless Executives of GSC Team Rocket and the laughably weak Magma & Aqua admins, Mars and Jupiter are placed early enough in the game for their respective aces Purugly and Skuntank to be serious threats that can punish unprepared players with their high stat blocks and equipped berries. There’s a good sense of escalation as Team Galactic ramps up their terror with bombings and abducting the Lake Guardians, capped off by the aforementioned climactic climb to Mt. Coronet’s summit which in turn culminates with Giratina’s harrowing intervention. Everything that can be said about how awesome of a setpiece for its hardware the Distortion World is has already been said, but it bares repeating what a masterclass in atmospheric tension-building it is: Nobody who plays it can possibly forget voyaging through the warped terrain, waterfalls flowing up and foliage spontaneously growing and regrowing, all while Giratina pounces through the void as a silhouette.
And yet...
Look beneath the spectacle, and the search for substance becomes fraught. I touched on this earlier, but the Team Galactic plotline is defined by a contradiction between the trappings of previous games and the exponentially ballooned stakes of their leader’s plan, a failure to set aside enough of the former to give true weight to the latter.
Cyrus himself is emblematic of the issue. He’s supposed to be our most sinister villain yet, a pivot to the world-remaking madman archetype prominent in more “prestige” JRPG franchises. But when you finally have your first true battle with him after a host of philosophical mutterings and accostments by his goons, this is the team he brings out:
There are two ways to interpret this ragtag trio of NFEs, and both of them majorly dampen Cyrus’ threat level. The least embarassing reading is that these aren’t the pre-evolutions of his final Distortion World team members, but a separate, intentionally weaker squad for him to test the player and get a feel for how close they are to becoming an issue. The issue is that, to put it bluntly, this is stupid. This guy is dead-set on using divine Pokemon to reboot all of reality, why the heck would he nerf himself like this? Why not just bring out his full power to neutralize the player right then and there before they can intervene further, or at least to grind their team into submission as a “This is your final warning, stand down if you know what’s good for you”? Of course, the alternate explanation is even more dire - these Pokemon are in fact the same Weavile, Honchkrow and Crobat seen later in the game, which would indicate Cyrus to be a dundering, unprepared stooge who’s just improvising his team as he goes along.
The state of his underlings certainly lends credence to this idea. Despite the aforementioned bombing sequences the Galactic grunts are more often than not played for laughs with over-the-top goon antics not too dissimilar from Team Rocket. The most illustrative sequence that comes to mind is right after the Great Marsh is attacked when you chase a grunt down. You would expect such a sequence to have at least a smidgen of tension, but instead you get a Scooby Doo chase with jokes about the grunt steadily running out of breath before being cornered and forced to battle, followed by him running off. The raid of Galactic HQ tries to paper over this tonal mismatch by presenting Cyrus as a manipulator who riles up his underlings while actually seeing them as useless clowns behind the scenes. You’d think I’d give this writing choice the “sadly relevant to current events” bonus but I can’t really do that when Team Galactic’s status in the world is so unclear. What I mean is that whereas both incarnations of Team Rocket utilized facilities like the Game Corner, Viridian Gym and the Mahogany Town souvenir shop as fronts for their seedy hideouts, and Magma/Aqua concealed theirs in caves away from civilization, Galactic has gigantic bases right out in the open in major cities. This seems to suggest that they were either once a clean organization that got corrupted by Cyrus or something cult-adjacent quietly built up over the course of years in the vein of Scientology. I can only speculate since as far as I can recall the game itself never really dives into these questions, leaving Team Galactic without any grounding that lets us understand how they got to this point (For what it’s worth, Legends Arceus seems to corroborate the first interpretation, but given it’s supplemental material released over 13 years later it doesn’t apply to this discussion).
This haze of unserious vagueness extends to the Champion, as well. Others before me have prosecuted the “Cynthia is overrated” case but they tend to criticize her actual boss fight team composition, which I believe is unfounded contrarianism. I’m sorry to tell these people but her team really is just that striking and well-balanced with an eclectic mix of Sinnoh’s strongest and most exotic species. Maybe you could shift out Roserade so she doesn’t have 1/3 of her team overlap with Gym Leader aces but that’s a nitpick on the same squad with a lead that can’t be hit super-effectively, a Mirror Coating special wall, a Lucario with the strongest priority move in the game and of course the one and only Garchomp. This is not remotely comparable to Red’s overleveled assortment of generic Kanto mascots. No, my beef with Cynthia is how she too is held back by rules made back on the Game Boy, showing remarkably little agency against the terror of Team Galactic. When she accompanies you into the Distortion World there’s no excuse for her to not lock the fuck in: As the supreme trainer of Sinnoh it is her duty to stop this existential threat instead of pawning off the final fights with Cyrus and Giratina to you. This gameplay-narrative dissonance would’ve been easy to patch up, too: All that was needed was for her to show the right determination only to be distracted by something, whether it be the disorienting terrain of the Distortion World or the Galactic personnel at Coronet’s summit leaping into the portal and zerg rushing her in one last bout of fanatical devotion, forcing you to go on alone.
As I’ve said several times, many of these problems are not unique to Platinum, but conventions like absentee Champions and goofy grunts were much more acceptable in preceding games when the stakes were not the quite literal end of the world. Pokemon stories in the classic era got too grandiose too fast, with DPPt being the climax of this; in too many ways they still tried to act like this was Kanto/Johto where the villains were distractions. Future games would generally do a much better job of discarding and reworking these old conventions where needed to give their narratives room to breathe, but Sinnoh was just a little too early to get on that train.
...And I’m just now realizing I completely forgot to talk about Barry. Honestly, says more about him than any further analysis possibly could.
And yet...
Look beneath the spectacle, and the search for substance becomes fraught. I touched on this earlier, but the Team Galactic plotline is defined by a contradiction between the trappings of previous games and the exponentially ballooned stakes of their leader’s plan, a failure to set aside enough of the former to give true weight to the latter.
Cyrus himself is emblematic of the issue. He’s supposed to be our most sinister villain yet, a pivot to the world-remaking madman archetype prominent in more “prestige” JRPG franchises. But when you finally have your first true battle with him after a host of philosophical mutterings and accostments by his goons, this is the team he brings out:
There are two ways to interpret this ragtag trio of NFEs, and both of them majorly dampen Cyrus’ threat level. The least embarassing reading is that these aren’t the pre-evolutions of his final Distortion World team members, but a separate, intentionally weaker squad for him to test the player and get a feel for how close they are to becoming an issue. The issue is that, to put it bluntly, this is stupid. This guy is dead-set on using divine Pokemon to reboot all of reality, why the heck would he nerf himself like this? Why not just bring out his full power to neutralize the player right then and there before they can intervene further, or at least to grind their team into submission as a “This is your final warning, stand down if you know what’s good for you”? Of course, the alternate explanation is even more dire - these Pokemon are in fact the same Weavile, Honchkrow and Crobat seen later in the game, which would indicate Cyrus to be a dundering, unprepared stooge who’s just improvising his team as he goes along.
The state of his underlings certainly lends credence to this idea. Despite the aforementioned bombing sequences the Galactic grunts are more often than not played for laughs with over-the-top goon antics not too dissimilar from Team Rocket. The most illustrative sequence that comes to mind is right after the Great Marsh is attacked when you chase a grunt down. You would expect such a sequence to have at least a smidgen of tension, but instead you get a Scooby Doo chase with jokes about the grunt steadily running out of breath before being cornered and forced to battle, followed by him running off. The raid of Galactic HQ tries to paper over this tonal mismatch by presenting Cyrus as a manipulator who riles up his underlings while actually seeing them as useless clowns behind the scenes. You’d think I’d give this writing choice the “sadly relevant to current events” bonus but I can’t really do that when Team Galactic’s status in the world is so unclear. What I mean is that whereas both incarnations of Team Rocket utilized facilities like the Game Corner, Viridian Gym and the Mahogany Town souvenir shop as fronts for their seedy hideouts, and Magma/Aqua concealed theirs in caves away from civilization, Galactic has gigantic bases right out in the open in major cities. This seems to suggest that they were either once a clean organization that got corrupted by Cyrus or something cult-adjacent quietly built up over the course of years in the vein of Scientology. I can only speculate since as far as I can recall the game itself never really dives into these questions, leaving Team Galactic without any grounding that lets us understand how they got to this point (For what it’s worth, Legends Arceus seems to corroborate the first interpretation, but given it’s supplemental material released over 13 years later it doesn’t apply to this discussion).
This haze of unserious vagueness extends to the Champion, as well. Others before me have prosecuted the “Cynthia is overrated” case but they tend to criticize her actual boss fight team composition, which I believe is unfounded contrarianism. I’m sorry to tell these people but her team really is just that striking and well-balanced with an eclectic mix of Sinnoh’s strongest and most exotic species. Maybe you could shift out Roserade so she doesn’t have 1/3 of her team overlap with Gym Leader aces but that’s a nitpick on the same squad with a lead that can’t be hit super-effectively, a Mirror Coating special wall, a Lucario with the strongest priority move in the game and of course the one and only Garchomp. This is not remotely comparable to Red’s overleveled assortment of generic Kanto mascots. No, my beef with Cynthia is how she too is held back by rules made back on the Game Boy, showing remarkably little agency against the terror of Team Galactic. When she accompanies you into the Distortion World there’s no excuse for her to not lock the fuck in: As the supreme trainer of Sinnoh it is her duty to stop this existential threat instead of pawning off the final fights with Cyrus and Giratina to you. This gameplay-narrative dissonance would’ve been easy to patch up, too: All that was needed was for her to show the right determination only to be distracted by something, whether it be the disorienting terrain of the Distortion World or the Galactic personnel at Coronet’s summit leaping into the portal and zerg rushing her in one last bout of fanatical devotion, forcing you to go on alone.
As I’ve said several times, many of these problems are not unique to Platinum, but conventions like absentee Champions and goofy grunts were much more acceptable in preceding games when the stakes were not the quite literal end of the world. Pokemon stories in the classic era got too grandiose too fast, with DPPt being the climax of this; in too many ways they still tried to act like this was Kanto/Johto where the villains were distractions. Future games would generally do a much better job of discarding and reworking these old conventions where needed to give their narratives room to breathe, but Sinnoh was just a little too early to get on that train.
...And I’m just now realizing I completely forgot to talk about Barry. Honestly, says more about him than any further analysis possibly could.
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