Well, wasn’t that an exciting couple of weeks?Pokemonfans have lapped upevery drip of lore that has leakeddown the high-security walls of Game Freak HQ, despite the fact that none of it will ever be considered canonical.
It’s wild that Pokemon developers ever thought it would be a good idea to implement lore aboutPokemon/human relations, but the fable-esque style andYokai-inspiredstories have done more to build a rounded world than the games have managed in a long time.
Concept art has also leaked for games as wide-ranging as Diamond & Pearl, Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire, and Legends: Arceus. These images are incredible, the kind of things I’ve wanted to see in Pokemon games for years, and that we might have seen if Game Freak wasn’t so intent on rushing the things out so often to keep the Pokemon machine rumbling.
The combination of these two factors has ignited a passion I didn’t know existed within me: a passion for Gen 4.
Gen 4 Is The Worst Pokemon Generation
Now this is entirely subjective, and I understand that every Pokemon fan’s favourite generation is the first one they played, but I’ve never understood the love for Gen 4. While a generation of kids discovered the first Pokemon game on the Nintendo DS and have fond memories of Diamond & Pearl because of that, the games arrived at a time when I was a teenager discovering girls and pints, and Gen 4 didn’t have enough to compel me to keep playing.
I took a break from Pokemon at this point, skipping Black & White and their sequels completely and only getting back into things with X & Y. As the games that reintroduced me to the series, I hold them in better regard than most. But that doesn’t change the fact that I find Gen 4 boring.
Yes, I’ve played Gen 5 since. It’s great.
Legends: Arceus started Sinnoh’s redemption arc. The Hisui region is a brilliantly realised proto-Sinnoh, and the subtle storytelling brought life to a region I previously thought bereft of inspiration. I like that Zorua fled the region after it was hunted to extinction, that the Professor is constantly confused by the appearance of Porygon in an epoch long before the advent of computers, and that Snorlax is a serious problem for grain farmers of yore.
Exploring the open-world sections is exciting and, if the game looked any better, the design philosophies would be thoroughly wallpaper-worthy.
The Leaks Make It More Exciting
I still wasn’t sold on Gen 4, though. I was trying to Nuzlocke every Pokemon generation this year (in a system called a Hatelocke), and stumbled at this point. After Let’s Go, SoulSilver, and Emerald Kaizo, I couldn’t make it through Diamond without getting eye-rollingly bored. Maybe I should finally play Platinum to spice things up with some Giratina action, but time to finish my year-long goal is rapidly running out.
However, the leaks draw me to Sinnoh. Building on the groundwork of Legends: Arceus, these darker takes on mythology make the Pokemon world feel deeper and more interesting. Not every game needs Dark Souls levels of lore, but the mystery of Arceus in Diamond & Pearl is so much less exciting than the tale ofthe God Pokemon splitting itself in two to create Dialga and Palkia.
This is the kind of thing that Pokemon excels at. I’m a big fan of N in Black & White, and his qualms about capturing Pokemon and forcing them to fight one another are the only time that the series has genuinely made me think twice about what I’m doing. Hoenn’s tale of global environmental catastrophe has roots in real-world issues, and climate change has featured in Legends: Arceus and Sword & Shield since.
If the Gen 4 games had a little more of this grit, a little more depth, I’d be more inclined to replay them. I’ve finished the games once but I’m happy to never play them again – I didn’t even finish Shining Diamond, which is unheard of for me.
I hope that Game Freak sees the reaction to this leaked lore and works with it. Yes, it was probably the right decision to not include the stuff about interspecies romance, butthere’s room in the series for a deeper mythologybased on Norse epics and cautionary tales of Japanese Yokai. If Pokemon had added any watered-down semblance of this lore to Diamond & Pearl, if it had implemented more of the epic concept art into the final games, then there’s a chance my Hatelocke wouldn’t have faltered and I’d have a lot more respect for Gen 4.
