Whenever I talk about Legendary Pokemon, I am usually accused of being a filthy genwunner despite the fact that bot⛎h of my favourite Legendaries - Lugia and Suicune - are from Gen 2. This is because most people who argue about Pokemon online don’t actually pay very much attention to why they’re annoyed about something. It’s very likely that this piece, which focuses on h🐠ow Gen 4 ruined Legendaries forever, is going to cause some people to “well actually” me. To be clear, I don’t really care.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokemon Diamond & Pearl are some of my favourite Pokemon games. I have vivid memories of pumping hundreds of hours into them with my brother - next month, I’m getting Brilliant Diamond and he’s getting Shining Pearl so we can relive those memories. I absolutely adore Gen 4 for so many reasons, but unfortunately it’s vapid trio of Legendaries isn’t one of them. Dialga has a bigger egghead than Ki-Adi-Mundi. Palkia has Babybels for shoulders. Giratina looks like a centaur drawn by someone who really hates centaurs, except it’s also a slug. Designwise, they’re all atrocious - but their negative impact on Legendary Pokemon since Diamond & Pearl stems from something el♛se entirely.
Prior to Gen 4, there was a certain degree of mystery attached to Legendary and Mythical Pokemon. Gen 1’s Legendary Birds were ‘mons you just sort of bumped into by exploring esoteric areas that you never necessarily needed to seek out, let alone visit. Encountering Mewtwo in Cerulean Cave after seeing the wacky scientific scrawlings posted all over Cinnabar’s Pokemon Mansion is a moment the weight of which the series has yet to recapture - and that’s coming from someone who doe༺sn’t even care for Mewtwo all that much. The roaming dogs of Gen 2, combined with Lugia and Ho-oh’s diametric opposition, achieved similar success via mystique and obfuscation. Gen 3 integrated Groudon, Kyogre, and Rayquaza into its story in a more blatant way, but it was still restrained and tasteful - I think using the Dive HM as a means of separating where these Pokemon dwelt was an extremely subtle but clever way of invoking necessary thematic distance. Also Gen 3’s Legendary Trio rules - I don’t think there’s a single person on planet Earth capable of making an argument against how phenomenal Rayquaza is.
Gen 4 started the trend of what I like to think of as 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:oppressively boring Legendaries by not only having lacklustre designs, but hamfisting them into a story that would be much better without them. Legendaries and Mythicals are one-off static Pokemon that are intriguing specifically because of how inherently mysterious they ar💜e. The Red Chain storyline at Spear Pillar is a slog to get through. Admittedly, Giratina’s Distortion World is conceptually pretty cool - shame about Giratina itself looking like a four-year-old’s finger-painting of a draconic snail.
Aside from Gen 8’s new Regis, Spectrier, and Tapu Fini, I haven’t cared about a single Legendary Pokemon since Rayquaza. I have no idea what happened at Game Freak where someone thought, “Let’s have a sword dog, a shield dog, and write them into a story about Pokemon Jedward.” Legendaries used to be 🐽fascinating until Gen 🎀4. Now they’re usually among my bottom ten of every generation’s proprietary lineup.
Put plainly, Legendary Pokemon don’t need some convoluted narrative to stress their importance. There’s a reason Zapdos’ appearance in Kanto’s Power Plant is so iconic - it rewarded discovery and to this day still gives me goosebumps whenever I witness it. Restraint is confidence - until Diamond & Pearl, Pokemon was able to recognise that. Here’s hoping Gen 9 doesn’t make us sit through some mundane story about mundane Pokemon and their mundane relationship wi🤪th an otherwise compelling world.