Unpopular opinions

The RNG on status chance feels inevitable because status is binary: either it is applied on a given attack or it isn't. So the only way for Discharge to be a middle ground as a damage/status tradeoff between Thunder Wave and Thunderbolt is for it to sometimes paralyze and other times not paralyze. You could put Wave back to 100% accuracy and remove Bolt's paralysis chance, but Discharge stays where it is.

From a playstyle perspective, the main way I mitigate RNG is by focusing on passive damage. I don't gamble on the opponent getting fully paralyzed or multiple sleep turns because they're poisoned or burned instead, while losing a turn myself is less notable in a 40-turn game where I'm doing damage regardless than a 10-turn slugfest. Crits hurt, but I can at least respect them working as intended by limiting exactly what I'm trying to do. This strategy isn't set up to work in VGC, but if RNG is the big problem maybe it should be.
 
This is wayyyy too far. You can’t just arbitrarily remove certain luck based parts of a game that is at its core based on probability.

There’s a ceiling on skill level in the game because it’s basically a souped up prisoners dilemma: you are constantly gambling on what your opponent does. Now, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t take skill. But an inexperienced opponent can sometimes “outplay” an experienced one by making unconventional moves.

You don’t see this in chess because you don’t move at the same time.

Crits are an important part of the game. They stop defensive walls and add in variation, which is fun. They already neutered crits once.

Some types of moves are inaccurate or have more drawbacks: flying and rock are two of those types. Taking away those drawbacks just makes everything play more similarly. And some moves have disadvantages built in for a reason.

And why in Gods name is everywhere, Jirachi flinches somehow above question. Like yeah, a 50 percent chance you’re confused, that’s bad. A lower of accuracy in certain weather, that’s bad.

But somehow a 60 percent chance you can’t move, increased to 70 percent if you’re paralyzed (and you certainly won’t be outspeeding then) is legitimate. Just because good players like the strategy doesn’t make it any more legitimate or less luck reliant, or frankly, uncompetitive than anything else.


Like explain to me how a No Guard Machamp is any worse than Paralyze/Para Jirachi





There’s no such thing as “safe plays” that you deserve to be rewarded for, inaccurate moves are such for a reason and similarly for moves with side effects. The game is meant to be fun, you’re not playing chess here, and winning says a lot less about you, which is why the games best players win less in comparison to the Chess Greats.

If you don’t wanna miss air slash, use aerial ace. Problem solved!!
What I'm specifically targeting is chances of 10% or less, especially ones that aren't part of a decision by any player. Jirachi is fine(as is Machamp), because when you're at 50% or above of hax, it's not hax, it's the likely outcome, and building a mon or a team to take advantage of that is just good play. Someone puts TBolt on their Gengar for coverage, it gets the Para, that's not good play by the Gengar player, that's the RNG deciding to screw their oppt. Whereas if they put Discharge on a mon, that's sacrificing power for a greater chance to para, which is a tradeoff and if the RNG decides to support it, I think that's a good thing. That's also why I think Fire Blast is fair, the person has chosen to trade 15% accuracy for 20 base power, that's a decision they are making.

Crits, 10% status hax, 5% miss chances? No one is choosing those. The closest thing to an interesting decision is which god you pray to when your oppt clicks Ice Beam in a game you've clearly won.
 
The RNG on status chance feels inevitable because status is binary: either it is applied on a given attack or it isn't. So the only way for Discharge to be a middle ground as a damage/status tradeoff between Thunder Wave and Thunderbolt is for it to sometimes paralyze and other times not paralyze. You could put Wave back to 100% accuracy and remove Bolt's paralysis chance, but Discharge stays where it is.

From a playstyle perspective, the main way I mitigate RNG is by focusing on passive damage. I don't gamble on the opponent getting fully paralyzed or multiple sleep turns because they're poisoned or burned instead, while losing a turn myself is less notable in a 40-turn game where I'm doing damage regardless than a 10-turn slugfest. Crits hurt, but I can at least respect them working as intended by limiting exactly what I'm trying to do. This strategy isn't set up to work in VGC, but if RNG is the big problem maybe it should be.
I agree with what you're saying about making up for bad RNG through style of play, and not letting fishing for good RNG become a major part of one's strategy. And like you said, these effects work in an inherently binary way, which can't be helped.
I just can't help but think that despite this solution, stuff like crits and cumulated effects can still throw big wrenches into game plans at no real cost or investment for whoever benefits from them, and it feels pretty bad when those moments occur. Especially in metas that are faster-paced like SV OU, where containing offensive threats can already be difficult, and in which it feels as though a single good or bad turn (sometimes as a result of RNG) can be incredibly pivotal for the game's result.

Part of me kind of wishes some aspects of cumulated effects could be reworked. For instance, in the case of damage-dealing moves with a chance to inflict a non-volatile status condition, maybe said status could only last for three turns as opposed to requiring Lum Berry/Heal Bell/Aromatherapy etc, to get rid of it.
It wouldn't remove the occasional tough luck, and dedicated status moves would be unchanged, but at least you'd have the possibility of weathering the storm for a few turns and being back to normal after that, whereas your opponent would benefit from considerably altering your game plan for a limited time.

Another example is how flinch can heavily reward fast mons by avoiding damage/status for a turn, despite their superior speed already being a key advantage in and of itself. Moves with a flinch chance don't have the highest BP out there far from it, but potentially getting 2, maybe 3, even 4 attacks in before getting any pushback from your opponent is a really unhealthy dynamic to me.
If it could be reworked into maybe reducing the damage dealt by your slower target during that turn, the momentum gained from Flinch (or whichever name would suit that reworked version better) wouldn't be as substantial.

Hope this isn't too rant-ish. But all in all, I would like to see cumulated effects feel less impactful, so that despite their inevitable nature, their general consequences wouldn't be as problematic.
 
I’m playing Moon rn, not heeding the advice I was given in Questions thread… i did it because my students really hyped that Generation up, and I saw a lot of ppl list it as their favorite in the current favorite game thread… But I’m rlly not feeling it.

1. The black screen: after doing almost anything, exiting from a section of the menu, changing areas, wild Pokemon battles, trainer battles, my screen on my 3ds goes black for a few seconds.

I understand this may be due to hardware limitations on my 3ds but it’s frustrating because it slows the game down, and the game was made for 3ds. It should be able to work well on the platform.

This slows the game down, and in a game where I wanna spend time grinding and catching, it makes it boring. I turn off animations and maximize text speed for a reason.

2. Camera Angles: it would be nice to see where I’m going and not have my angle be like i have crooked posture and am staring at the ground. Some of these routes and cities look nice, but I feel like I constantly miss things and struggle to get my bearings.

3. Cutscenes: this isn’t unpopular. It’s like they go from a vacation to a foreign country (the old games) to a trip to Disneyworld or other amusement park (this game). A guided experience, with no autonomy.

Ppl say Black/White suffers from this too, but the story takes much less time to happen. Collectively every single interruption there takes less time than it took to get my Pokemon lol

4. Story: I stg every single game after Black2/White2 makes the characters such uhhhh, children. The story of Pokemon is always formulaic sure, but it’s one thing when less time is invested into it.

Now they always seem to have you saved by an important legendary at the beginning, someone’s taking care of a weak Pokemon, and there’s always some Make-a-wish kid who needs extra love and learn to support themselves (ie the Little Brother in the DLC or Sc/Vi)

4. The SOS system. They cut down on random trainer battles here, they are infrequent and feel more explicitly unnecessary. So, as I’m playing without xp share, and wanna find all the Pokemon in the area, I’m definitely trying to spend some time catching wild Pokemon.

The SOS system clearly has some advantages and some cool consequences, the problem is that it punishes weak Pokemon: if they’re struggling to kill a wild Pokemon, the wild Pokemon will have time to call for help, and then you will have to fight two wild Pokemon.

It punishes catching Pokemon because lowering its xp makes it take longer to catch.

Unless you can OHKO it, OR the Pokemon in question has enough xp it’s worth killing multiple as quickly as possible, it’s simply too time consuming to be worth it. And in a given patch of grass, that can obviously be hard to find, as your leading Pokemon may have a good matchup against some but not all.

Oh, and if you wanna take advantages of the cool parts of SOS battles involving chaining, there’s a bunch of coin flips involved in that so it will be extra time consuming and require more convoluted strategies.

5. Kanto. I never really understood why ppl had such a big problem with Kanto. Ofc they’re gonna let Charizard have fun with the new mechanics, it’s Charizard!! And ofc they’re gonna make remakes of their most iconic gen more frequently.

But Alola loooves Kanto. They talk about that place like Americans think foreigners talk about America. I wanna make a joke about them having a shrine to some mid Kanto Pokemon but they often do shout them out in one way or another…


Idk. There’s a lot I do like about the games. I actually love how they look, I love the regional forms and despite my complaints, I’m curious where the story goes from here.


I don’t like how the Pokemon looked on the Switch but the models here are actually really good and make collecting Pokemon fun again. I just beat the 2nd totem Pokemon and the battles were challenging. My rematch with the first Trial Captain also ruled.

The story is actually interesting so far to a degree, and I love how the enemy team is [redacted]s (not a bad word but I may get in trouble for saying it on here and I don’t wanna get banned)

Edit: I kinda fw talking Rotom functioning as an anime side character but I wanna see the map pls. And have a real map. Also they are sick for that Crabrawler placement. The guy is literal ass embodied and they’re making u think he’ll be a star
 
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One of these days when I'm sufficiently grumpy and in a writing mood I'm gonna do a "Souring on Sinnoh" essay. Platinum's a fine enough game but so much of this series has long surpassed it on multiple fronts and I'm getting a bit tired of it being held up as part of The Good Old Days. Compare this to BW2, which I think is more or less adequately hyped once you filter out the "last good pokemon game" doomer comments
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...

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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.

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.

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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.

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:
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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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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.

With that out of the way, lemme give you a taste of why I've been...

View attachment 705589
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.

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.

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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.
Great post, I've never been in the "Sinnoh is peak" camp, finding it to simply just be a good game, no more, no less, but never been able to express why. The dex in particular has always been the main iffy point for me despite it containing my favourite pokemon of all time, Magnezone, because it feels like a lot of the dex isn't trying to pull its weight. Something like chatot, which is fine enough on its own, shouldn't really be in a dex that small for new additions that don't branch off older mons. I don't really have a comment on the map, as I find it to be simply just alright, had some good parts and alright parts.

However Heatran is peak, fuck you.
 
my beef with sinnoh is that hokkaido is one of the most beautiful and culturally rich regions of japan, despite gaudy tourism from both other countries and japan itself taking over it + the assimilation of the ainu people, and yet sinnoh is a boring as fuck region with a gaudy color pallete, awful town designs and the worst snow areas of the entire franchise. howd they make fuckass britain look more gorgeous and lively than hokkaido
 
my beef with sinnoh is that hokkaido is one of the most beautiful and culturally rich regions of japan, despite gaudy tourism from both other countries and japan itself taking over it + the assimilation of the ainu people, and yet sinnoh is a boring as fuck region with a gaudy color pallete, awful town designs and the worst snow areas of the entire franchise. howd they make fuckass britain look more gorgeous and lively than hokkaido
Genuinely Johto is a significantly more interesting region, Johto by all accounts should be "Kanto 2" but Sinnoh feels more like that to me lol
 
I understand this may be due to hardware limitations on my 3ds but it’s frustrating because it slows the game down, and the game was made for 3ds. It should be able to work well on the platform.

This slows the game down, and in a game where I wanna spend time grinding and catching, it makes it boring. I turn off animations and maximize text speed for a reason.
Fwiw, it was known that Pokemon SM/USUM were basically the limit of what the 3ds could handle and it's a miracle they even run.

USUM world championship was expecially tragic cause the game would slow down to < 10 fps whenever a field + Mega Rayquaza were on field. Even the 3DS XL couldn't keep up.
 
I want to quickly add that the disjointed feeling I mentioned in my post also extends to the human characters. Obviously this is pre-Unova so I can't raise the bar too high but even then there's still something not quite right with the Sinnoh gym leaders and E4 especially.

Crasher Wake's a good example of what I'm talking about. "Pokemon-wielding pro wrestler" is a hilarious concept that I'm sure they would've had lots of fun with in a later game (see: Masked Royal) but instead he gets a non-descript raising/lowering water puzzle for his gym. You would also think that given the high-concept gods and monsters stuff at play in this region that we'd have trainers like Morty and Clair who tie in to the mystical/ancient tradition aspects of the setting but no not really. (Cynthia kinda does this but it's underemphasized and doesn't really amount to much)

Also they just kinda look bad. What is Aaron's design even going for
 
The trainer sprites also have weirdly poor poses for most in DPPt, sailors notably suffer from having tiny arms despite the huge body. BDSP copying it made me annoyed

Also they just kinda look bad. What is Aaron's design even going for
Better than this sadly
1737230939004.png

Gen 4 was when Sugi's issues with drawing humans started getting bad. It's why Ohmura came in to assist for HGSS, then BW they exploded for new designs
 
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!
I was thinking about this and:
Kanto, Johto: Linear early game, open midgame, linear endgame.
Hoenn: Overlapping circles constantly taking you back where you were before with new options.
Sinnoh: Recurring paths through Mt Coronet with new options
Unova: never played
Kalos: Linear paths that constantly return to Lumiose City, with lots of side diversions.
Alola: Wholly linear with lots of side diversions
Galar: Linear path, repeatedly taking you through the one open area.
Paldea: Wholly open-world.

First off, how would y'all that played it define Unova's intended route? But beyond that, it definitely seems like we can define some clear progression in type of game looking at it this way, which is interesting.
 
I was thinking about this and:
Kanto, Johto: Linear early game, open midgame, linear endgame.
Hoenn: Overlapping circles constantly taking you back where you were before with new options.
Sinnoh: Recurring paths through Mt Coronet with new options
Unova: never played
Kalos: Linear paths that constantly return to Lumiose City, with lots of side diversions.
Alola: Wholly linear with lots of side diversions
Galar: Linear path, repeatedly taking you through the one open area.
Paldea: Wholly open-world.

First off, how would y'all that played it define Unova's intended route? But beyond that, it definitely seems like we can define some clear progression in type of game looking at it this way, which is interesting.
BW1 was mostly linear with some side areas, never played BW2.
 
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.

With that out of the way, lemme give you a taste of why I've been...

View attachment 705589
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.

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.

AD_4nXdozHtpqYP4CQ5fRGtiIQ25vjikAtjWWrJNsJfI4kpIyZiOOVhX06z2jbN4yWbBTCzHfmwHSfvzi0C_4rIovQn9CSmcD-tI5MTcm-l8BaK_uKv8VQOstqBUOm0UtZY3icBGt8NyXw

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.

As a Platinum fan, this is an excellent post. It almost makes Platinum's case as much as it detracts from it (the map design is explained brilliantly well). Not much else to say other than I appreciate this balanced, comprehensive critique of my favorite game in the series.
 
BW1 was mostly linear with some side areas, never played BW2.
BW2 is also linear with side areas + previously inaccessible areas you can backtrack to and explore with certain HMs, but the way you traverse the region doesn't feel quite as on-rails as BW1. The one big change is the following :

The game throws a little curveball at the player after Mistralton's Gym, and sends them to Eastern Unova ; instead of the BW1 route to Opelucid, you go through three gym-less towns and have some story-related events take place before reaching it, and travel to a new city for the final gym. BW2's East Unova offers new biomes that increase the variety of locales in the region compared to BW1, which is also a pleasant addition.
 
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.

With that out of the way, lemme give you a taste of why I've been...

View attachment 705589
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.

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.

AD_4nXdozHtpqYP4CQ5fRGtiIQ25vjikAtjWWrJNsJfI4kpIyZiOOVhX06z2jbN4yWbBTCzHfmwHSfvzi0C_4rIovQn9CSmcD-tI5MTcm-l8BaK_uKv8VQOstqBUOm0UtZY3icBGt8NyXw

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.
Great write-up! I do think it would be iconic if you revealed in a subsequent post that you'd never actually played Platinum, a la The USUM Incident.
First off, how would y'all that played it define Unova's intended route? But beyond that, it definitely seems like we can define some clear progression in type of game looking at it this way, which is interesting.
As has been stated, BW and B2W2 are both pretty linear, with B2W2 having a fun twist post-Skyla and also extending and recontextualising a bunch of locations from BW to reflect the two-year time skip. The only mandatory backtracking in BW is the Relic Castle/Nacrene Museum sequence, while the only mandatory backtracking moments in B2W2 are the return to Aspertia City for your first Gym Badge and the return to Undella Town to access the reopened Marine Tube (neither of which really feel like backtracking to me).

-----------------------------

I'll piggyback off this overall discussion to say that one thing I've soured on with B2W2 (which are overall excellent entries in the series) is that they're the first games after Gen 1 where I feel like the early game is the slog I have to get through to reach the fun stuff, at least on replay. If I use Gym Badges as my unit of progress, the first three all have something I take issue with:
  • Badge 1 is where the new exp. mechanics really bite, making it surprisingly grindy to raise any new team members
  • Badge 2 has the mandatory Pokestar Studios segment (well, immediately after it I guess), which is annoying even as someone who enjoyed digging into the mechanic in my main file
  • This is totally my fault as someone who can't bear to skip even the littlest chunks of content, but Badge 3 has Castelia City, which I always find tedious to 'clear'. Taking an elevator to different floors in a building doesn't magically become fun if the numbers are big!
Additionally, all the Team Plasma stuff in the beginning of B2W2 is pretty boring. The Grunts are characterised as kinda pathetic, but not in a fun way. The early-game encounters are all like "run a short distance to have one battle!" except the first one where you don't even battle the guy. Things improve from Driftveil onwards in a major way, but they're pretty lame until then.

By contrast, while I've complained about BW's first Badge of content before, Wellspring Cave through Pinwheel Forest is a very strong section for me.
 
Last edited:
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.

With that out of the way, lemme give you a taste of why I've been...

View attachment 705589
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.

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.

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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.
Alright, here we go, I got a story section up and running

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:
AD_4nXegAAN_HxUpU7Bf2JZ7lgkbOL3er6a1eHqpMURtpLCN1N4vfqpT0SAaiFXFjLpAUMZr8teFDEKlAN8RgLcskCFUhyKQHPNSNyHq1exeQRpwfJBSlWHLHv8_UzliD9czYqFgD8M1Pw

There are two ways to interpret this ragtag trio of NFEs, and both of them majorly dampen Cyrus’ threat level. The least embarrassing 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 problem 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.
 
I feel like the plot of sinnoh is hard carried by the giratina distortion scene, which to be fair IS really cool, but other than that ive never seen people talk about or reference the galactic plot in any meaningful way. I think the only other part that has a bit of fame is mars purugly. maybe the lake bomb but even then I only see a meme of it once in a blue moon.

which is weird, because sinnoh is supposed to be this very important region for religious and cultural texts, and yet we kinda just get nothingburgers all around
 
I feel like the plot of sinnoh is hard carried by the giratina distortion scene, which to be fair IS really cool, but other than that ive never seen people talk about or reference the galactic plot in any meaningful way. I think the only other part that has a bit of fame is mars purugly. maybe the lake bomb but even then I only see a meme of it once in a blue moon.

which is weird, because sinnoh is supposed to be this very important region for religious and cultural texts, and yet we kinda just get nothingburgers all around
Oh yeah what I just typed is certainly not an unpopular opinion but it's an addendum to one and I haven't really seen anyone dive into why the Sinnoh story doesn't work
 
Alright, here we go, I got a story section up and running

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:
AD_4nXegAAN_HxUpU7Bf2JZ7lgkbOL3er6a1eHqpMURtpLCN1N4vfqpT0SAaiFXFjLpAUMZr8teFDEKlAN8RgLcskCFUhyKQHPNSNyHq1exeQRpwfJBSlWHLHv8_UzliD9czYqFgD8M1Pw

There are two ways to interpret this ragtag trio of NFEs, and both of them majorly dampen Cyrus’ threat level. The least embarrassing 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 problem 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.
In defense of Cyrus's team, I feel like unless specifically mentioned or at least otherwise heavily implied, most team progression for NPCs is pure gameplay contrivence. Sort of like how gym leaders in-universe (or at least in Paldea) weaken their teams for newer trainers, but without any Wattsonian explanation. Or like how wild Pokemon just happen to have their levels correspond to the order in which the player is intended to reach them. It's unsatisfying, but there isn't really a good way to explain the growth of trainers who aren't themselves on journeys parallel to the player.
 
In defense of Cyrus's team, I feel like unless specifically mentioned or at least otherwise heavily implied, most team progression for NPCs is pure gameplay contrivence. Sort of like how gym leaders in-universe (or at least in Paldea) weaken their teams for newer trainers, but without any Wattsonian explanation. Sort of like how wild Pokemon just happen to have their levels correspond to the order in which the player is intended to reach them.
I agree with this.

It's unsatisfying, but there really isn't a good way to explain the growth of trainers who aren't themselves on journeys parallel to the player.
I disagree with this. I see lots of possible narrative explanations of such mechanics. The Gym Challenge can exist in-universe not as "Each leader tries their absolute hardest every time", but "A difficulty curve is intentionally proscribed in-universe to allow trainers to progress, grow, and improve despite not starting out as masters." (This is my headcanon.) Higher-level Pokemon can represent stronger threats in more dangerous areas, areas the player isn't able to access until they prove they're strong enough for it. (The SWSH Wild Area kind of uses this, awkwardly.) I think GameFreak just doesn't care enough to provide explanations.

In defense of Cyrus's team, I feel like unless specifically mentioned or at least otherwise heavily implied, most team progression for NPCs is pure gameplay contrivence.
An addendum about gameplay contrivance: In a vacuum, I'm fine with GF using that as an explanation. Not everything needs in-universe justification. However, it gets awkward when GF tries to use these "contrivance" elements for storytelling, too. With teambuilding as an example, they use Silver's Golbat becoming a Crobat for narrative. Here, a mechanic can simultaneously become "Don't think about it too hard, MST3K" and "Think really hard about this to uncover new information." These conflicting directions can invite bad conclusions / analysis / overthinking and signal reduced commitment to mechanical storytelling, causing it to have less weight.
 
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