People complained about the Coronet Highlands not having enough caves and I just can't really agree or care all that much for this reason. Emphasizing the Mt. in Mt. Coronet lead to much better results, I think! Climbing is fun, and so is having actual encounter variety! Frankly I've come to think that anytime DPPt iconography, Pokemon included is directly re-used/referenced in Legends Arceus it almost always comes out significantly better for it but I'll save the elaboration on that for if/when I do the aforementioned Souring on Sinnoh
To be fair, I'm actually a Caves Enjoyer in open-world games because I think they can have strengths there.
I thought Tears of the Kingdom did it well... until I saw my 20th cave, then it got boring, but one of my biggest PLA hopes was to have a cave system. In fact in my head I had this sort of "internal pitch" for a gameplay moment:
You're walking through the woods when you see a cave. You enter it, and continue to get lost within the many unique items and Pokemon, when you hear large footsteps from around the many corners.
You take a look around one with your camera, and you see one: An Alpha Garchomp lurking, is it searching for you? Or is it just wandering? Either way, it's heading straight towards you so you keep moving.
Another thing I felt is that Crown Tundra did caves right, and Scarlet/Violet also has some neat caves. So I think it is a disappointment that PLA, covering the Sinnoh region, didn't really do it justice... IMO
I don’t think there’s any problem with putting two excellent encounters on the first route. The problem is, your original two versions of the game had a worse selection of Pokemon. Which is going to make the issues seem worse than the are in the third.
Kids already had a hard enough time making a full squad, obv when you’re giving them two good Pokemon that look cool in the vrry beginning they will gravitate towards them.
Also Intim is a great introduction to abilities because you notice how the first Pokemon you fight does less damage if its a physical attacker but afterwards your Pokemon gets more fragile.
I’d say HGSS had worse availability, and you actually do end up with similar squads due to constraints with xp and resources.
The problem isn't that there's good Pokemon early on. USUM puts a Zorua in the first route. The problem is that unlike Alola, your team selection basically peaks here, with few other selections matching.
One big part of the Luxray/Staraptor lines I don't see people mention is that these lines take no additional effort in order to train up. In fact, Garchomp, too, has one of the lowest requirements of a pseudo, Level 48! That's why it's one of the only pseudo legends you'll commonly see in main playthroughs.
Staraptor and Luxray will practically be finished and evolve around the same times as your starter, and have good BSTs and likely Intimidate, so it feels more like the game is dropping an entire starter trio on you by Route 2.
I think you're being a liiittle bit too harsh (I've used Hippowdon and Gengar, they're cool, also Leafeon and Glaceon should be swapped due to where their rocks are located) but your list highlights a pretty big issue: Staraptor and Luxray are great, but they're so great to the point of DPPt being possibly the only game in this series where your pool of catches essentially peaks on the first route. It's definitely the preferable extreme to being a bunch of fodder like BW1's intro, but I'd rather have neither.
The reason I was being harsh on a lot of Pokemon is because of the above. Garchomp for instance is another Ground-Type with a better typing than Hippowdon, better stats, and the only advantage it has is that Gabite takes longer to fully evolve (basically about Victory Road), while Hippowdon will have better performance for the last few gyms.
But the later half of gyms is Steel Gym, Ice Gym and Electric Gym, two of which Gabite already can nearly solo and the third that neither want to be switched into.
So many Pokemon in this game are event / evolution stone / trade it's absud. Yeah, Gengar is a good Pokemon if you can get it (maybe, it's a TM hog - Ghost stab is pretty mediocre in Gen 4), but is it really worth training all of those up compared to the ones above?
Well, by that point in the series, these were the Elite Fours we’d seen:
- Lorelei (Ice), Bruno (Fighting), Agatha (Ghost), Lance (Dragon)
- Will (Psychic), Koga (Poison), Bruno (Fighting), Karen (Dark)
- Sidney (Dark), Phoebe (Ghost), Glacia (Ice), Drake (Dragon)
So to see a lineup of Bug, Ground, Fire, and Psychic is pretty refreshing!
… unfortunately, Sinnoh is Wurmpleland so the Bug guy wastes two slots on Dustox and Beautifly, and Sinnoh’s Fire-type population is critically endangered, so Flint is basically a Fire-type Trainer in name only…
I suppose from this perspective I can see why it'd be interesting, though I am personally a big fan of Hoenn's E4 personally, not just because of the teams which IMO are solid but because I think the character designs are better than most gens.
Like, gun to my head name the Johto/Sinnoh Elite 4, I'm dying that day. And Kanto I know because they've made me play the game and see them like 20 times lol
The way I look at this sort of thing is, I don’t think the condition of the world is what really matters. For instance, I’d describe myself as a fairly pessimistic person with a battered spirit and very little hope for the future of humanity, and very few avenues to do anything to change that, all because of, as you said, the nature of the times we live in. Make of that what you will, but my point is… even though I think that way, I still don’t want to commit genocide against 99% of life on Earth. I don’t think that would be in any way a sane solution to the problems that I observe in the world.
I think that in order to be willing to resort to a measure as malevolent and reprehensible as genocide, something within you has to be thoroughly broken, to the point that I don’t really know of the condition of the world being more idyllic than ours would make much of a difference to the hypothetical genocidal person. They are fundamentally not reacting to the world around them in a rational way. Instead, they have some kind of impulse convincing them that unleashing unmitigated violence upon the world is the key to making it work as they would prefer. Genocide is exclusively the province of megalomaniacs.
So I don’t think Cyrus needs the world to actually be so dire and full of strife in order to reach his nihilistic conlclusion — I think that idea originates from his own mind, as a result of being brought up in an environment of isolation and neglect, and then he just reverse-engineers a justification for it via confirmation bias. In Platinum, Cynthia even sort of calls him out on this kind of thing, asking why he doesn’t just fuck off to some quiet little corner of the world and let everyone else get on with their business. And Cyrus doesn’t have a good answer for that; he just doubles down on his belief that the human spirit is incomplete and that by eliminating it, he’ll be freeing everyone from a burden. But that “burden” is not one that most other people experience in such a concentrated manner as Cyrus did, so he has no right to pursue such an action on their behalf. He’s really just projecting his own problems onto everyone else. (And Lysandre is somewhat similar to that as well.)
My take on Cyrus is that he is probably the least believable villain in Pokemon history.
Giovanni: Money Power
Gen 2 Guy: I forgot his name but bring back Giovanni
Archie Maxie: Environmentalism but mistaken on Legendary Lore and bad solution to problem
Cyrus: Genocide because I think humanity sucks, because
Ghetsis: Power
Lysandre: Genocide because humanity sucks, but also because he wants to build a better future in his head. Basically narcissism
Lusamine: Trauma from (presumed) dead husband causes Mother to change a lot of her personality traits to the worse, almost manic, obsession with finding creatures that (presumed by her) killed her husband almost creating an apocalypse
Rose: Can we solve the climate crisis during the Super Bowl
Volo: Power
Rose/Turo: We want to let our childhood dream / fascination enter the world, even if at the cost of the local environment
Like Cyrus doesn't really have a core motivation outside that he is a broken person, but I'ma be honest that isn't actually interesting for a story. There are real world ideologies that are basically "let's all die", ie. antinatalism, but they have an actual reason (being that they believe life is non-consensual and that the pain is not worth it) (I don't agree with it, just explaining) but Cyrus literally doesn't have a reason.
Lysandre has a reason even if it's dumb, he believes that modern society is bad and wants to restart with his own Noah's Ark to have a world that is beautiful. Dumb, but has a reason. Cyrus is incomprehensible because there is no philosophy behind what he says that tracks with anything it's just gibberish lol
