Is there a character you think was wasted? A character you think has potential to be fascinating, but ended up to be underused and forgettable?
Hmm.
I think I have to go with Archer, the leader of Team Rocket in Heart Gold and Soul Silver. The remakes make an effort to create these four characters – Proton, Petrel, Ariana, Archer – out of the faceless Team Rocket Executives from Gold and Silver, but they don’t… do a whole lot with them. Honestly I wouldn’t even have expected them to, and I’m basically satisfied with the handling of Proton, Ariana and Petrel, just putting names and unique designs on characters who were formerly indistinguishable. Once you’ve done that, though… it just sticks out that the leader of the organisation, the mastermind of the entire plan to take over Johto, has literally one scene in which he speaks nine lines of dialogue and says pretty much nothing that we haven’t already heard from his subordinates. Why were we scared of this guy? What was his motivation in trying to recall Giovanni, rather than just running Team Rocket himself? What does he actually want – money, power, a golden Magikarp? He’s just not as interesting as either Giovanni in the previous games, or Cyrus in the contemporary Diamond and Pearl. Even after his appearances in Let’s Go I have trouble giving two $#!ts about him. It’s a shame, because Team Rocket in Gold and Silver seem to have a kind of cult of personality around Giovanni, which is really interesting, and Archer is the “cult leader,” as it were, but he never gives us any inkling of why.
I feel like the Johto games tried to be both a sequel to RBY and have a storyline that delves into the region’s own lore. And they…kinda failed to do either.
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See, at the time of the original games I was kinda fine with this (I mean, granted, I was 10, but still); it’s just that the flaws stand out more against everything else good that the remakes did.
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This is the wrong. The only objectively correct answer is obviously Looker, fite me IRL.
(please don’t, I don’t put up much of a fight)
On a more serious note, I kind of think Korrina would be my answer to this question. In a region with very underwritten Gym Leaders Korrina was the one shining beacon of interestingness, and she appropriately plays a huge part in teaching you about XY’s core new mechanic. It’s just weird that once you get the Mega Ring and beat her atop the Tower of Mastery she just fades into the background, even when Lysandre turns out to also be capable of Mega Evolving his Pokémon. Plus there’s a line she says when one of her Lucario chose to tag along with you that implies a sort of… inferiority complex? That’s so fascinating! Does she have self-doubt about her abilities as a Trainer/Gym Leader/Successor? Does Pokémon wanting to swap Trainers happen often? What are the implications of this on human-Pokémon relations? I wanna know more about all that, and what any of it possibly says about Korrina as an important figure in Kalosian culture and history.
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