If I were doing the dang thing right, I should have done my Gen 3 Hoenn favorite Pokémon list first, but since this is more topical with the Gen 4 remakes announcement, I’m skipping ahead instead. It’s the end of the month, and I still don’t have a book report, but I do have some renewed Pokémon enthusiasm, so let’s do another Top Five!
Anyone who’s talked to me for more than six minutes about Pokémon knows that Gen 4, in particular Platinum Version, is my favorite Pokémon generation. I loved everything about the Gen 4 games, from the Sinnoh region (snow! Mountains! Actual deep snow and a blizzard that’s difficult to walk through and see!) to the mechanics (no more fainting outside of battle due to poison! One bike with different gears! The Pokétch!) to the music (not the grand trumpets of Gen 3, but prettier and more understated piano tunes). The difficulty curve was much higher in Gen 4 than in any other game, in my opinion; Pokémon Champion Cynthia and her Garchomp are legendarily difficult, and the rest of her lineup are no slouches, either. The NPC battle strategies were more sophisticated, the bad guys, Team Galactic, coming in with a cosmically huge plot, and the Bad Guy himself, Cyrus, more than a little intimidating.
In particular, Platinum Version introduced the Distortion World and Giratina, Pokémon Satan and tied for my favorite legendary of all time. And so many good Pokémon designs! Gen 4 did something Gen 2 was famous for and introduced a lot of baby Pokémon (pre-evolved forms of Pokémon that didn’t have one previously, most notably Munchlax, pre-evolved form of Snorlax) and stronger evolutions to old favorites (like Magnezone, Roserade, and Togekiss). The introduction of gender-specific evolutions also began in this generation, from Combee, who can only evolve if it’s the rare female iteration, to Gallade, the male Ralts-line evolution that got a fighting-psychic dual typing, the first of its kind. And nearly every Pokémon line got some form of sexual dimorphism (differing traits dependent on a creature’s biological sex), most dramatically of which is the Hippopotas line); if you are a recent Pokémon fan wondering why female Pikachu has a heart on the end of its tail, this generation is why (though, notably, originally it was just a notch; the smoothing into a heart-shape came later).
Whittling down my favorites was hard, because I have so many, many favorites from this generation, but I think I did it. So, without further ado, here they are: my Top 5 for the fourth generation of Pokémon games taking place in the Sinnoh Region!
Turtwig is tied with Torchic for my favorite starter (another Grass/Fire split, who would have guessed), and getting to see Torterra in Detective Pikachu brought me to tears. I love the Grass/Ground typing, I love how cute Turtwig is, and I love how useful it is for the first gym and how it becomes a powerhouse for the final gym. Given that I own a plush toy of this one, I think that speaks for itself.
Shinx was the first wild Pokémon I had ever encountered in Gen 4, before the days where I would check Serebii relentlessly for Pokédex updates to see what new Pokémon we were getting. The second I saw it and heard its little digital cry, I fell in love with it, and only loved it more as it evolved. Luxray is on my short list of Pokémon that need Mega Evolutions (Electric/Dark, it would be sick), and one of my top Electric Pokémon of all time. It isn’t the hardest hitter or the tankiest, but it does come with both speed and a decent move pool. Plus, you can’t beat it for style. It’s wearing little pants, after all!
And then there was Gible, my second Dragon/Ground love (after Gen 3’s Trapinch line). The whole Garchomp line has one flaw, and that is that its family of cries are hilariously high-pitched and sound like confused recorders, but laying that aside, in design and concept it’s a certifiable badass. A land shark? Awesome. A hammerhead land shark? With sickles for hands and a fin on the back? Amazing. Its Mega Evolution doesn’t thrill me, but that could be my bitterness over never being able to get its Mega Stone in later games. Plus, it’s this generation’s pseudo-legendary, so as far as raw power goes, it doesn’t get much stronger than this line. An adorable killing machine, all around. Just…keep it away from Ice types.
Leafeon is my favorite Eeveelution, not just because it’s Grass-type and its cry sounds like crickets, but because it’s also a surprisingly bulky contender. Its shiny scheme leaves so much to be desired (why are Chikorita and Trevenant the only Grassy types with cool autumn-themed shinies?), but that’s Gen 4 in a nutshell, really, lackluster shinies. What it lacks in shiny appeal it makes up for in that Defense stat—and its Attack stat is nothing to sneeze at, either. Plus, it’s easy to get early in the game, which gives it a major advantage over its Ice-type counterpart Glaceon, in my book.
Gen 4 boasted a ton of great Ghost-type Pokémon (notably Rotom, who has been pretty much done to death for in-game utility by Gen 8, as well as Froslass, based on the Japanese myth of the snow woman), but of all the great Ghost-types we got, Drifloon is the cutest. It’s a balloon Pokémon that steals children by floating away with them! It’s adorable! One of my friends got me Platinum version for my birthday and made me a little Drifloon balloon along with it, since I’d seen it in commercials and loved it; I think I still have it in my storage somewhere. And the way to catch it, or at least one specific Drifloon in the game, is so whimsical—you have to visit a certain location once you clear the side quest for it on a Friday, and there will be the balloon Pokémon, ready and waiting for you and not at all intending to carry you away! It has little hearts on the ends of its string-feeler-things, what’s not to like?
I know this counts as six, but the creation myth that Gen 4 sets up gives us my favorite Legendary (tied with Gen 3’s Rayquaza) and an endless source of humorous Pokémon theological debate, so it’s going to get an honorable mention. Sinnoh is a deeply haunted region, with lots of dark corners and interesting Ghost-type Pokémon introduced, and part of that darkness is the legend of Giratina, or more colloquially, Pokémon Satan. We find out in the games that Arceus, the creator of all matter (Pokémon God), after creating Time and Space (and the Diamond and Pearl legendaries who stand for each concept, Dialga and Palkia), then created Giratina, and gave it control over antimatter. It was then banished to the Distortion World “for its violence”, according to its Pokédex entry, and since has watched the real world from its prison. Giratina is a Ghost/Dragon dual-type whose appearance in Platinum marks it as a serious divergence from the Diamond and Pearl storylines; it shows up after the bad guy Cyrus manages to bind and subdue Dialga and Palkia, thereby taking control of reality and bending it to his will in order to make a “perfect world” without spirit and the instability he believes it brings. Giratina shows up without warning, in a pool of inky antimatter that slowly bleeds into reality, and it’s the closest to a horror movie Pokémon has ever gotten, watching literal Pokémon Satan emerge from a pit just to drag the villain to Pokémon Hell.
Of course, you the player character go after him, and have to navigate the Distortion World, find Cyrus, defeat him, and battle and capture Giratina to set the real world right again, so it isn’t a permanent thing, but that image will probably never leave me for as long as I live. Giratina has two Formes, Origin and Alternate, depending on its hold item, and though the Ghost typing gives it some fragility, it’s still an awesome and formidable contender on the field of battle. Also it looks cool. Can’t have a legendary Pokémon like that if it doesn’t look cool.
My actual thoughts and opinions on the Gen 4 Diamond and Pearl remakes will be a subject for another post, possibly a review once the games are out; for now, I’m happy about them, but I do have some disappointments about the art style they chose and some concerns about whether or not these are going to be remakes in the style they’ve done before, where it’s the same game just polished up and with fun new features, or just the same rehashed reskinned game with no changes at all. My avowed hope is for something like the Gen 3 game remakes, Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, which didn’t include an Emerald remake but had a post-game Delta Episode that included the Emerald legendary subplot. I really, really want to see a Giratina episode with that horror element dialed up, and an updated Distortion World (and that’s the main reason why I’m upset with the art style they’re going with, keeping the original scale of the game; I wanted to see the Distortion World in the same sweeping, beautiful scope that Pokémon Sword and Shield had. Maybe we’ll get something like that in Legends: Arceus, but I am…unsure if I will play that, given the projected difficulty of the game and how different it is from the core games). We will hear more the closer we get to the release in November. But the originals will always have a special place in my heart.