Completed Platinum after Yellow, Crystal and Emerald in my brothers’ playthrough series. It’s quite clearly a fan favourite and argued constantly that it’s the best Pokemon game however after replaying, it seems that opinion is filled with a lot of nostalgia and ignoring the issues that were present.
I’m going to breakdown my biggest issue with the game: the Pokedex. (Huge nitpick of a review)
The Pokédex is by far the worst dex we’ve ever had, both at the point of release and today. With around 210, 93 are Sinnoh region Pokemon (including their beginning stages and middle stage too) and 56 are fully evolved. You’d imagine this is a good pool of Pokemon to pick from but the issue stems from the lack of viable new Pokemon and creativity. 24/93 are some sort of adaptation of gen 1 to 3 Pokemon as in introducing an evolution or pre evolutionary stage, 17 of which NEED Platinum to even access them.
As a separate generation from the other 3, it’s off putting to rely on fixing those Pokemon to fluff the Dex instead of creating new Pokemon for your region itself. I’m not saying this as if those Pokemon aren’t good because believe me, they are. I ran a Porygon-Z which is an excellent sweeper and with previous playthroughs and my brothers using some, a good chunk are so viable. However I find the approach quite polarising. They take an old Pokemon that has middling stats and nothing going for it and evolve it to be a beast. It’s a good thing that they want to essentially fix shit Pokemon but with them existing amongst original Sinnoh Pokemon, it’s hard to see why someone wouldn’t just run the updated evolutions.
This leaves us with Sinnoh’s Pokemon count of 69 including first and second stages. I mention this because no one really is going to run a Luxio over Luxray or Gabite over Garchomp. This would leave 37 Pokemon to pick from but you can only have 1 starter, not all 3, one Fossil choice out of two, Dialga/Palkia/Spiritomb are post game, and Manaphy is an event. So we got 30 Pokemon now. This is the reason why so many people have similar Sinnoh teams. The remaining 30 have some stinker Pokemon with very little reason to use them. If this was Diamond and Pearl, you could say since there’s no updated evos from old games, they could have been used. But in Platinum? No way. Why use Carnivine when Tangrowth and Leafeon are miles better and are also available?
It may seem arbitrary to complain about something so minor like Pokemon variety but I think it sets the game back quite a bit. Original D/P are far worse though. Also Mt Coronet is mid, the region design is lacking and too many HMs still needed.
Cyrus is an interesting villain. That’s it. He’s got nothing else worth talking about other than being somewhat interesting.
I’m going to breakdown my biggest issue with the game: the Pokedex. (Huge nitpick of a review)
The Pokédex is by far the worst dex we’ve ever had, both at the point of release and today. With around 210, 93 are Sinnoh region Pokemon (including their beginning stages and middle stage too) and 56 are fully evolved. You’d imagine this is a good pool of Pokemon to pick from but the issue stems from the lack of viable new Pokemon and creativity. 24/93 are some sort of adaptation of gen 1 to 3 Pokemon as in introducing an evolution or pre evolutionary stage, 17 of which NEED Platinum to even access them.
As a separate generation from the other 3, it’s off putting to rely on fixing those Pokemon to fluff the Dex instead of creating new Pokemon for your region itself. I’m not saying this as if those Pokemon aren’t good because believe me, they are. I ran a Porygon-Z which is an excellent sweeper and with previous playthroughs and my brothers using some, a good chunk are so viable. However I find the approach quite polarising. They take an old Pokemon that has middling stats and nothing going for it and evolve it to be a beast. It’s a good thing that they want to essentially fix shit Pokemon but with them existing amongst original Sinnoh Pokemon, it’s hard to see why someone wouldn’t just run the updated evolutions.
This leaves us with Sinnoh’s Pokemon count of 69 including first and second stages. I mention this because no one really is going to run a Luxio over Luxray or Gabite over Garchomp. This would leave 37 Pokemon to pick from but you can only have 1 starter, not all 3, one Fossil choice out of two, Dialga/Palkia/Spiritomb are post game, and Manaphy is an event. So we got 30 Pokemon now. This is the reason why so many people have similar Sinnoh teams. The remaining 30 have some stinker Pokemon with very little reason to use them. If this was Diamond and Pearl, you could say since there’s no updated evos from old games, they could have been used. But in Platinum? No way. Why use Carnivine when Tangrowth and Leafeon are miles better and are also available?
It may seem arbitrary to complain about something so minor like Pokemon variety but I think it sets the game back quite a bit. Original D/P are far worse though. Also Mt Coronet is mid, the region design is lacking and too many HMs still needed.
Cyrus is an interesting villain. That’s it. He’s got nothing else worth talking about other than being somewhat interesting.