10 07 2022

Crystal: Finally got enough money for Ice Beam. Now working on Thunderbolt. Once that’s in, I’ll do one more Elite four and give Red another shot.

Platinum: Route 216 has nice music. Marched through the snow uphill… It’s tough!. Got rock Climb. HM8 EIGHT of these dang moves. UGH. Anyway, Candice was easy with whatever pokemon I got. Awkward content gate where hyper rival is up a cliff we need to rock climb, have to get Candice’s badge, get Candice’s badge, find a pokemon that can learn rock climb, climb up, get a cutscene… and fly away because Team Galactic was successful and the plot continues at their base elsewhere. There’s items to get but I ain’t bothering. Will come back if I really need the TMs around here or whatever. Back to Veilstone to go to Galactic HQ. 

    Going through a specific series of events because I need a key card to walk in the front door, our intrepid hero goes to the warehouse. And up some backrooms. And back down again to the lower level warehouse. I hope this looks cooler in a future game (it probably doesn’t) since the idea of a large HQ building on a hill that hides more HQ under it with secret underground base stuff should be really cool. It’s just tedious. Can’t tell if it’s burnout or this game. It kinda feels like this game since it just feels like a slightly more linear Silph Co., but we’re already in the faster games. At least the grunts are funnier, lots more just silly ‘why am I here?’ types. Unlike previous groups, we get to listen in on their leader giving a grand speech. It’s that scene from MGS2 but with less game going on and tiny little sprites. To Cyrus, humans are incomplete. World is ugly, they wanna change it. (Look! The Villians understand strife in the world! But they’re going to blow everything up or have horrible ideas how to fix it!)... Looker is there with us and he informs us that Cyrus is 26…. THAT DUDE IS TWENTY SIX???? Dude’s got fantasy anime aging, he either is more burnt out than me and been through some shit he looks tired and 40 something at MINIMUM. I had to go to bulbapedia and look at the artwork. Ran into his BDSP model and that softer look helps… I guess if you wanna go to a different dimension that badly you skip a bunch of meals. Of course when we get to him to confront directly, he tells us he lied, his ideal universe is just for him. He does acknowledge the player as strong and he gives this game’s master ball.

    Battle some more people who are ‘true believer’ types and free the lake trio. Head to mt. Coronet. Looker shows up at the beginning and basically admits to the small child player trainer that he, an adult investigator that is supposed to have some amount of authority and power, can’t take on an organization that’s been stealing mythical pokemon, ruining cultural land marks, and blowing up lakes with bombs and expects the small child to take care of the organization behind those acts. Made funnier by Dawn being (one of?) the shortest trainers you can play as. I think before some later interviews she was also listed as the youngest player trainer?

    After an annoyingly long gauntlet exacerbated by how slow GenIV can get in battle, I reach spear pillar and get into a team up with rival double battle with Mars and Jupiter. Actually kind of annoying, they put some moves that make my team hard to manage at points. Golbat had Giga Drain and Bronzor at this point has an actual steel move so it made my Gastrodon and Froslass hard to work around, especially when swap ins happen sometimes because of moves the partner makes.

Here in Platinum, we truly diverge from D/P even more with a new cutscene to go with the expanded story. Cyrus uses his chain to summon Dialga and Palkia. Lake trio are kinda there too? Welp. Cyrus is going to end everything, everything is working out for him. Oh right a darkness/void pokemon exists. What is basically Giratina but shadow shows up and yoinks Cyrus and the space/time pokemon into  another dimension. The lake trio go in and seem to invite you and the late arrival Cynthia inside. The space around Spear Pillar is now distorted and there’s a portal to… somewhere.

Now in Distortion World, with Cynthia who now understands the full uhh… creation story?, where time doesn’t flow and rules are broken apparently. Cool. Apparently Cyrus will sort of get his wish if we don’t fix things. Distortion world is actually really cool. Lots of floating blocks in a weird eerie palette of blue background and brown… ground? It has multiple elevations of floating islands that you can see in the background. So far coolest looking thing I’ve run into in Platinum. Perspective changes as you walk on walls because screw gravity. The most 3D the game has looked yet. Ride an inverse waterfall down… so cool. (Ok, maybe I’m a little bored with parts of this game.) Beat up a Cyrus who’s really mad. Meet Giratina at the bottom. Super cool. Game/Cyrus uses DNA to explain how the distortion world works, it’s basically the other half that makes the uhh… normal world hold together. By Capturing Giratina Cyrus can’t remake the world(s)? Okay. Cyrus is really angry and he vows one day to make a world without spirit. Now to catch the lake trio. Mesprit is a roamer, so going to get that eventually.

I actually went and just buckled down in Jubilife and got Mesprit in about 20 minutes. Becoming less attached to this game, despite the improvements to it over D/P. Quickly went on over to the 8th gym in a fun beachside town. Getting to Sunnyshore passes by what looks like a small beachfront with stalls on the route. Makes sense, coming from a resort and going to a beach town. The architecture there really reflects a beach town and has lots of elevation changes. And rock climb areas. And a big overhead walkway system? Jasmine from Johto is here too. Gym had annoying puzzles to do when you’re tired involving gears and paths. YOu have to rotate them in an order and set things up and I ended up brute forcing it because I was tired. Gym was pretty easy because I have a dedicated ground type. 

Sleepily get through the last route and the path to Victory Road and the Pokemon league. Hyperactive rival is actually getting the hang of things now and challenges me right at the entrance. He loses. He accepts he needs to do more before challenging the Elite Four. Good thing too, since the thing I do remember about GenIV is how GOOD Cynthia’s team is. Going to this from HGSS, the rooms are neat but not *that* neat. No team really gives me trouble until Psychic and Cynthia. Don’t even have the motivation to look up the psychic guy’s name. Cynthia still has one of, if not ‘the’, best champion themes. She’s one of my favorite Pokemon characters, even though upon review maybe her involvement in story is weak. There’s some good character building in the conversations, the new Distortion world stuff, and her team. When you finally meet her in the League and she’s got this kind of team, she seems kind of cool. When you realize that she builds more rounded teams than any other professional trainer you as a player or ‘you’ as a trainer character met so far in the series… Couldn’t she have single handedly taken care of a bunch of this? What’s going on in Sinnoh that has made her a Champion for so long? Maybe I’m used to newer depictions of her that place her in her mid 20s at youngest and somewhere in her 30’s at oldest. 

The credits has a cool sprite of Dawn at the bottom. It appears some stuff is gated by national dex which is gated by seeing every Sinoh pokemon. I don’t feel like doing that. There’s actually quite a bit of post game to do, but I will be returning mostly for legendaries. I’ll come back when I feel like doing HGSS’s remaining events. I just… Sinnoh is the weakest one so far. I also played it quite a bit back then. I owned Diamond and Pearl. That’s why I didn’t get Platinum immediately. I think I even beat Pearl? I know I got pretty far in it. I did eventually sell it to a friend. Maybe I would’ve liked some stuff more if I was playing this in isolation. Maybe if I played it one go I would’ve enjoyed it more. Maybe I would’ve burnt out quicker. Or found some routes and sections even more annoying. I just can’t stop comparing it to HGSS. I can’t stop comparing it to RSE. I can’t stop thinking about how annoying parts of it are. Parts that are in every pokemon game but here the annoyance is amplified. Flipping back to GenV between it all can be whiplash. GenIV is rather slow at times. In menus. In the field. In Battle. Gen VI has performance issues that also affect battle menu and has some feature bloat. Honestly, I’ve become more worried about going to BDSP now. I now have Platinum fresh in my mind. I’ve remembered more of D/P. From what I’ve seen BDSP is nowhere near touching HGSS nor ORAS for remake games. Definitely prioritizing Let’s Go and Arceus if I buy switch games. 

X: Forgot the first forest is basically mini viridian forest. Hanging out with the kids from the hometown actually works better than I remember. It seems like from GenV on, they had an idea and ran with it. The music feels a little weaker. It just feels more unpolished especially being bookended by GenV’s shift to full samples and Sun/Moon’s really well fitting soundtrack. Menu is less responsive, clearly didn’t learn from Square’s priorities for keeping menus at full speed/60fps at the time. I put a lot of time into Y back then and I kinda burnt out on it, but because of when and how I played it I forgot how anything works. I have a Level 100 Delphox in Y! I haven’t bothered leveling anything since. 

    First gym was easy thanks to an ingame trade Bunnelby for Farfetched that has Aerial Ace on it. Pumped out more damage than Pidgey with Gust. Got the new and improved Exp.Share. I don’t remember how I felt about it at the time, I only remember it getting borderline “too much” in original Moon. Ultra Moon I rotated enough for it to just be helpful. Got to Lumiose and my main goal for the game so far. Just to lightly refresh on how the intro went. In Lumiose City, I run into two of Prof. Sycamore’s Assistants. They show up again in gen VII to introduce Mega Evolutions. Sycamore challenges players to a battle and awards a Kanto starter. This is a nice upgrade over GenV’s elemental monkey trio and helps somewhat since at this point it was quite some time since FRLG and HGSS were starting to feel old. XY feel a little bit like DP, Rough games for figuring out hardware. Going to be interesting visiting Let’s Go, I skipped it at the time and sometimes I forget they exist. SwSh feel like the games that were rough outings to figure something out, but technically there was a game before it. 

    Sycamore seems to have a little bit of Juniper in him. Clearly states ideals, emphasis on broadening one’s horizons by meeting different people. XY at this point are the second in the games that travel the world. BW being abridged New York/America, XY Being Paris/France. This makes sense as Pokemon is an international sensation, but feels a little weird from the level they’re writing at most of the time. Especially Sun/Moon. I feel like I’m going to need to take an intermission at some point and watch more PreCure or some Super Sentai with a younger audience… Well they always have the same range but there’s a few I checked out, like ToQger (The train one),  that straight up have younger elementary school kids in it rather than vaguer “elementary school and middle school” range. The main one I’m watching has High Schoolers and the one I’ve finished has young working adult rangers. Anyway, I want to cross check against those because I’ve asserted at multiple times that Pokemon is running either on shonen anime level of writing (gen 1) or kids media writing (about developing one’s self). It’s not episodic like television, so it takes a while to get the whole plot going.

    Speaking of plot, the villain this time has appeared. Because he sounds like some guy who wants to make HIS perfect world. His beautiful world. Also we get introduced to some actress. Who is the Champion. But they don’t tell us. But Even if I went in completely fresh I would figure it out like last time. Oh right, we meet both of them looking like they’re in an intense conversation in a cafe. It’s a little rough, the models and choices here I think were not well thought out for ingame cutscenes. Too few pixels to make out things. Actually, I wonder if it’s sometimes rendering at half rez or something, It really does look super blocky on some textures. 

    A thing that stuck with me here, since the beginning there have been trainers that have had different ways of tackling their journey. GenIV has characters even more explicitly doing things for the professor of the game. BW’s two rivals have specific roles and investigate that narratively over two games and the series only direct sequels. Here, Prof. Sycamore gave five kids pokedexes and pokemon and tasks them with finding their path. (And fill your dang pokedexes while you’re at it!) Your player can only become champion, world savior?. As pokemon moves to more open world, will we be able to craft our own path? Will we get RPG classes? There are bits and pieces of systems that could do that, especially in a series that has had contests and other side progressions. Could a future game let me specifically become a more scientist/researcher type? Like, sure, become the champion, but would they let someone have a full endgame for contests? For Pokeathledome? A Ranger? Some sort of other profession? IS THIS SCOPE TOO BIG? Yes. Probably. Even for TPC/Game Freak. I’ve long accepted that these games exist because they’re made on a budget. Big money era SquareSoft, 90’s DraQue Enix, FFXIV Square Enix, Bethesda Zenimax/Microsoft lots of time and buggy game ship this is not. Yes TPC, GF, and Nintendo make bank on this franchise. Yes, I’ll probably never see enough of a breakdown about how all that works to understand it. Running multiple offices around the globe, online services, multiple service games, a multi region multi language TCG, etc. is difficult. Yes, they’re probably being company greedy at some point in the chain. I just know there’s a scale that they can manage at, work well at, and deliver on. Yet, the switch broke their usual scope. Here in X/Y… I think the 3DS already did that a little bit. It wasn’t til Sun/Moon when things started to look more consistently like a polished video game, and I’ve ran into other games that look better. Do wish they’d get a second pass at graphics, there were some weird material/lighting choices that stuck out more than some of the trees or whatever people were talking about when I was watching launch day arceus. Some Nintendo 2nd party devs pull off that thing EAD and some 1st party teams do where the games look surprisingly clean for no anti-aliasing, but something’s been funny in that direction. Oh, and I find pop-in annoying but don’t mind the reduced animation rate on background objects if done well. That new Kirby did that well in most places. HAL got their engine Glow-Up and I hope Game Freak gets that chance for pokemon as well.