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.