Z-Rune
zrune.bsky.social
Z-Rune
@zrune.bsky.social
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It's nice to go into a building with the familiar music and seeing trainers and Pokemon alike hanging out and resting. Having someone loitering around the stand doesn't scratch that itch. It's the same reason why traditional JRPG's still have inns instead of Healing Oblisks or whatever.
But it's funny a pair of games from two decades ago might have predicted what will come with Generation X.

Mind you, I miss the centers. Pokemon is fast paced enough if you know what you're doing. Between not needing to grind and level curves being flattened out, I'm not really hurting for speed.
Mind you, these games are for all intents and purposes non-canon. The Orre Region, Team Snagem as well have never been referenced in any mainline game (or even spinoff as far as I could find) and the team that made those two games weren't at all familiar with Pokemon when they were subcontracted out
And it shows. A lot of them look pretty dead-eyed. The healing machine seems to be even more self-service with a drawer you seem to pull out and close.

Y'know, in the Colosseum duology, the healing devices were free standing and entirely self-service. Only 2-ish towns with centers in the region.
The healing machine is now self-service and, I guess, the nurse flips the on switch. With ZA, Kalos seems to have all but abolished the PokeMart worker and now the nurse is pulling double duty. Healing Pokemon in the middle of the night and selling them 300 Great Balls with 30 free Premier Balls.
After all, why have an entire job for this? Starting with Gen V, the PokeMart ended up getting moved to inside the Center unless they were remaking a game that predated this. Starting with Scarlet and Violet, the entire thing seems to have been shifted to a small stand.
Another interesting evolution between Pokemon games is the streamlining and subsequent redundancy of the Nurse Joy character along with the Pokemon Center as a whole.

Back in the day, the healing machine was behind the counter and seemed to require at least some degree of finesse.
If it sounds like I'm being overly critical about this, I'll clarify: I am not and I love this turn of events. I love it because it keeps the history of the Pokemon world more vibrant but I love it even more because it makes solid use of continual story telling.
MGS3 is a prequel where we see the origin story of major bad guy Big Boss. Turns out in 1964, he saved the world in a covert mission. For the first four major Metal Gear games, this wasn't part of canon but after MGS3 came out, every MGS game heavily references it with critical plot points.
And Kalos is running a full bore exhibit on Hisui with actual artifacts from the period and region on display. Hisui lives historically and it's great.

Wanna know what this kinda reminds me of? MGS3's relevance after it came out.
But now Legends Arceus is made and part of the Pokemon canon. Now we run into people with a knowledge about the region. Professor Laventon is now being taught in classrooms (as he should be, making the first PokeDex).

Perrin has two Hisuian Growlithe as if her family breeds them.
And, again, the framing during the time of Arceus was this was so so so far back that only historians would have a shred of knowledge about this place. This is the in-universe explanation as to why characters in Gen 4 weren't bringing up alpha Pokemon or the Diamond/Pearl clans.
See, it's been so long since the days of Hisui, the region became far less harsh which meant Pokemon like Stantler and Ursaring not having the same intense environments that would encourage their evolution. Similarly, it seems Pokemon like Avalugg, Liligent and Braviary go extinct in the region.
I think its a little funny that when Legends Arceus came out, the concession about Hisui was the events of this game happened so long ago that much of it has been outright lost to history and that includes new Pokemon and forms.

But now both SV and ZA are running contrary to that and I love it.
Now, there isn't really an excuse for his little luncheon with Sycamore and the Kalos 5 where he basically talks like Sephiroth for five minutes and Sycamore basically applauds him for the philosophical poetry and ignores this world class scientist with the funds to enact his horrid philosophy.
They go on and on about how a beautiful world is coming and they imply pretty bluntly that what's coming can't be stopped.

I'm not saying the story was told perfectly or that you have to like it. I'm more saying I think the Gen VI villain isn't given proper credit for the antagonist he is.
Teams Galactic and Plasma seemed to keep their lower rung grunts in the dark about the endgame of the villanous team. Not a single soul in Team Skull had a clue about what Lusamine was up to and Macro Cosmos's "grunts" were just hired security.

But Lysandre seemed to have told the team the plan.
The rest just go to jail or, in the case of Sada/Turo... they time travel? Regardless, Lysandre was a man consumed by nihilism and misanthropy and his flock only gathered around him because they wanted to be under his umbrella when the deluge came. This is some compelling stuff, honestly.
Dude very bitterly tries to overload the weapon that would basically cause an apocalypse and he goes down with the ship. That's kinda bold for Pokemon. Before that, we got Ghetsis's nervous breakdown, Cyrus's weird Distortion World migration in Platinum exclusively and Lusamine going catatonic.
And to be clear: both of these people are greatly misguided with bad plans, but that's the tragedy of the character. They think the situation is so hopeless that they think mass killings is the only real way to keep the program going.

Lysandre is also the only Pokemon villain to explicitly die.
And like... Thanos had the exact same plan and everyone across the USA talked about the nuance of his character, some people developed such a misanthropic streak that they outright said Thanos did nothing wrong.

Yet Lysandre gets shit on.
When XY came out, a lot of people poked fun at his weird "beautiful world" nonsense. About how he didn't see resources as sustainable and felt that over-consumption and the majority of people being too selfish to work on a solution, he figured the only way to preserve life was mass genocide.
I know Pokemon characters and stories kinda get dumped on as being terrible, but I just wanna say, antagonist motivations starting with Gen V really ramped up complexity and depth.

Ghetsis is an easy pick so I'm gonna talk about Lysandre because the dude was kinda ahead of his time.
I swear this thread wasn't supposed to be about this. I just wanted to joke about how much Kalos changed in five years.

But then I started thinking and it all spiraled out of control.
If all 50 states in the USA were their own countries, an organization like the FBI wouldn't get anything done, given that on concept the idea of a deployed super police that requires local authorities to transition into working for said international super cops instead of being... well, cops.