vanguard333

@Jotari What did you think of the additional point I brought up (namely that we don't know how Anankos killed him, but it was likely in a way that there wasn't much of a body left)?

I see. …I can't really think of anything else to say.

Oh, okay. Isn't Heirs of Fate a sort-of elseworlds/bad-future thing?

Oh, don't get me wrong; I think we're all in agreement that Fates' writing and exposition is horrendous. Uh... I'm sorry; I don't understand what you're saying. I haven't played Heirs of Fate, and I don't understand what you mean by "he had [them] back"; could please be a bit more clear?

I agree with everyone pointing out that Anankos killing Azura's father was the thing that brought about his final descent into madness and is something he'd want to avoid remembering, especially since, in his mad rants, he refers to himself as "the betrayed king", suggesting that his madness had led to false, self-serving memories. Adding to that, there might also be a simple practical reason: depending on how exactly Anankos killed him, there might've been nothing left to reanimate. With Garon, Mikoto, Sumeragi, etc., he had complete corpses to work with, and Arete died from the curse he himself created, so her body that vanished was probably brought before him by the curse or something like that. With Azura's father, however, he probably ate him, destroyed him with his dragon breath, or tore him to literal shreds with his claws. So, there'd be nothing left except dragon poop, charred bones, or tiny irreparable pieces.

Human transmutation isn't illegal; it's a taboo among alchemists and, given the way characters talk about it, was labelled a taboo by alchemists after seeing the result of attempting it, and not something Father himself imposed. The fact that multiple alchemists can deduce that Edward and Alphonse committed the taboo by seeing Ed's missing limbs and Al's missing body supports this. Father could not control whether or not alchemists were willing to commit the taboo, so he did everything in his power to assemble enough sacrifices by creating the State Alchemist system to keep as many alchemists close as possible while also having his minions constantly scouting to find any other alchemists who have committed the taboo or who can be manipulated or pushed into committing it. That's the reason they consider Roy a candidate despite him not committing the taboo (as they believed they could get him to commit it under the right circumstances); not counting on Edward finding out from Hohenheim that human transmutation cannot ever create anything more than a soulless cadaver and telling Roy this.

I left her out because the story largely treated her as irrelevant; she was a side-character at most and little more than another villager. After the prologue, she has almost no screentime whatsoever. Of course, one could argue that the script spending any time at all on her and her obsession with Alm was too much time (and I'd completely agree with that argument).

I don't really get the joke/10

I still maintain that it should've been Edelgard rather than Byleth. Yeah, I agree; I can understand a bit of frustration at a seeming waste of potential variety. I understand why there are so many swordfighters in Smash: so many fantasy protagonists, when given a weapon, are usually given a sword. But there are multiple major characters that are magic users, axe fighters, spear fighters, archers, etc., that they could choose from. Zelda definitely could make a great magic rods or staves user, as could Micaiah from Radiant Dawn (alongside light magic).

I see; I didn't know if you did know it or not, so I made my statement with the definition included both as a "just in case" and in case someone else who didn't know what verisimilitude is also reads it. Forgive me; your view just seemed rather binary because of statements like, "Fiction is inherently unrealistic" and probably because I'm a bit too used to these discussions and might've failed to notice the differences. For that, I apologize. Perhaps one thing that would help would be to provide examples; you say "they" a lot and bring in non-specific examples, and I think something more specific might help with clarification. Perhaps an actual comment or a clip from a review video or something like that. For instance, you bring up Naruto in this reply; perhaps maybe a clip or quote of that "Naruto: the Self-Made Hypocrite" video on YouTube that has a lot of views for some reason. Just something specific to help me get a better sense of what you're referring to, because right now, all I have to work with are generalizations, which don't really help my autistic (and I'm using that in the literal sense: I have autism) brain understand your points. You make a good point. For an example from actual media, people who are supposed to be experts on medieval warfare sending a huge thing of light cavalry directly into an army that badly outnumbers them, and at night no less, while also putting all their siege engines on the front line, outside the castle. GoT Season 8 episode 3; that was really bad. These are things that even people who are not experts in medieval warfare were able to point out were dumb.

@Ottservia Again, I got this weird feeling that I was able to predict everything you were going to say. How many times have we have variations of this discussion across different threads? I can think of around 6 off the top of my head. Oh, wait, I just noticed that you said, "I know I've said this like a million times by this point"; never mind. Anyway, what do you mean when you say "realism"? Realism in narrative is broadly defined as representing reality, but that can mean different things depending on the context. For instance, it can refer to a grounded narrative, it can mean a less stylized narrative, and lately, it's been misused a lot to mean "gritty, dark, pseudo-edgy narrative" as part of a fad that I hope dies very soon so we can move on from all this poorly-written pseudo-edgy nonsense. There are even subgenres of literary realism that approach "representing reality" in different ways based on different definitions. You seem to think of "representing reality" in very binary terms, and you even use words that have multiple definitions as if you're using the same definition both times when you're really not; it's a common logical fallacy that's easy to do accidentally that I learned about in a critical thinking course that I took. I think the term closer to what you're looking for when you mention realism and believability is a term that's more often used to describe the effect of certain editing techniques and stuff like that, but still very much applies here: it's verisimilitude: the plausibility of a fictional work within the bounds of its own genre. Essentially, it's talking about how well the viewing audience can buy in or suspend disbelief, but in objective terms where stuff like suspension of disbelief is more subjective. You're right in that a work of fiction is inherently unrealistic; it cannot 100% mirror reality and still be an interesting narrative. However, a narrative still needs to be verisimilitudinous; it still needs to be a work that is intuitive for the audience to be able to buy in (again, in objective terms). For an example that Wikipedia was kind enough to provide, "In the production of the classic superhero film, Superman, director Richard Donner had a picture of the title character holding a sash with the word "verisimilitude" on it in his office during the project. That display was to remind Donner that he intended to approach the story of the fantasy superhero in a way true to the source material that would make it feel intuitively real to the audience within the context of the story's world. The result was a highly acclaimed film that would set the standard for a film genre that would become dominant decades later." In other words, where a lesser director (cough Zach Snyder cough) might look at the superhero genre as inherently silly & unrealistic and ultimately overcompensate when directing a superhero movie, Donner instead remembered that what actually mattered was that the film be intuitive for the audience to buy in. The results speak for themselves with the first two Donner Superman movies being widely acclaimed to this day. In this regard, when people are criticizing something being "unrealistic" or "unbelievable", often (not always, but often) they are really talking about a moment where the story failed to maintain verisimilitude. For the example of a character's emotional reaction being unrealistic, they are often not talking about the reaction being unrealistic to them, but unrealistic given what's been established about the character. That intuitiveness is broken by an ill-fitting reaction. Plot holes, plot contrivances and inconsistencies similarly break the story's verisimilitude. Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood says hi. Seriously, the attention to detail in that show is amazing and one of the things I most enjoy about it, alongside the compelling characters, narrative and magic system. Anyway, no one is expecting stories to be completely perfect, but problems in a narrative are still worth pointing out to prevent them from happening again. Without criticism or feedback, how do we expect to improve? A couple of small problems are blemishes in an otherwise good story, while a story riddled with holes, contrivances and inconsistencies (cough The Last Jedi cough) are bad stories because the rest is not enough.

I wouldn't want to add anyone unless they contribute in some way without taking away from the other characters. Radiant Dawn already has almost more characters than it knows what to do with, and one of my major problems with Shadows of Valentia was the addition of a bunch of characters that took up a huge amount of screentime only to add almost nothing to the actual game, such as Berkut, Rinea, Ferdinand and Conrad; coming across as the character equivalent of filler/padding. I would only add more characters if the remake was also adding additional chapters to flesh things out and address problems with its story.

I suppose; I can't remember if there was a specific stated reason either, but if there wasn't, I guess I just figured that he was just another victim of the Pokémon theft; nothing particularly special except for also being the shop owner. You're welcome for the explanation for the energy. I remember playing through Pokémon Y, getting to the part involving Team Flare and a power plant and thinking something along the lines of, "Really? I know this game has something of a 'greatest hits' vibe like Fire Emblem Awakening, but did you really have to rip-off Diamond/Pearl/Platinum with the evil team stealing electricity to fuel a machine that's part of their evil plan?" That is a good point. I guess that didn't really bother me because, after that, it's just the 8th gym and the elite four left, and it made sense to me to have no other major plots happening during that stuff. As for Cyrus, yeah; his evil plan didn't seem to have any real presented motivation, but for me, to quote Arnim Zola, "The sanity of the plan [was] of no consequence, because he [could] do it!" For me, the motivation didn't matter so much because he compensated for it by being a serious and effective villain. The fact that so much more of his plans and schemes were in the forefront, with stuff like the lake being blown up and storming the base to rescue the Lake Legendaries, the fact that the schemes were all building towards the big showdown (unlike with previous generations where the team was a recurring for but they either had no overarching plan or they weren't the real threat once their plan was in action) and that the player goes through so much in the quest to stop him: raiding the base, ascending Mt. Coronet, fighting the elite goons alongside your rival, and then facing Cyrus (if I recall correctly; I can remember fighting him in Platinum but I can't remember if you fight him in Diamond/Pearl) was, to use a commonly-overused word correctly, epic. Don't get me wrong, Platinum was definitely an improvement in the story area; I'm just saying that the stuff the story did well (the buildup, the feeling of going through an epic narrative, etc.) was enough for me to look past the issues.

I admit that it's been a very long time since I played Diamond and I'm working from memory, but I'll do what I can to answer the questions: It's mentioned multiple times early on in the game that Team Galactic grunts are stealing people's Pokémon; there's even one grunt you can talk to who looks at you and goes (and I'm paraphrasing), "...Your Pokémon are too strong for me to attempt to steal without it being a hassle; I won't bother you". The Bike Shop owner is just one potential victim. As for why they're stealing Pokémon, I honestly don't remember, but I'm pretty sure there was an explanation. As for the energy from Valley Windworks being stolen, isn't that to power the machine they use for holding the three Lake Legendaries so they can create the Red Gem? Also, to be fair to what happens after beating Cyrus, this was their first time writing an Evil Team that is both a) actually evil, and b) has an evil plan with intentionally very high stakes. Team Rocket was just a Pokémon mafia, Team Magma and Aqua were well-intentioned extremists who believed Hoenn's landscape needed to be reshaped and they fail to realize what they're messing with until it's too late. This is the first main-series Pokémon game where the evil plan is something you would expect from the villain of a Legend of Zelda game or other high-stakes fantasy epic.

That's a good point about Rotom, since its thing is that it explicitly takes over electronic items, though maybe a more primitive version of it could exist; maybe one that can take over stuff like furnaces, umbrellas, etc. As for magnemite, magnetism is hardly new (though Nosepass is definitely better for representing old magnets), so I could maybe see magnemite being the game, but yeah; it probably won't appear. Yeah; I doubt there'll be Pokémon from outside Sinnoh other than the starters, both because this is Feudal Sinnoh and because it allows them to not have to make new animations and such for too many Pokémon (and if the battle footage is any indication, there are definitely new animations). Not only that, but the explanation for the starters not being from Sinnoh is that they're a gift from a professor who's from another region. We probably won't see the fossil Pokémon either since I doubt the Pokémon world has fossil-reviving technology in the... it's rather ambiguous, but I'm going to guess 18th Century, and even the Feudal Period is way too late for the fossil Pokémon to exist in the wild.

Ah; thanks. True; they could use Zorua/Zoroak.

Thanks for the info. Yeah; that's probably enough Japanese History. I don't know enough either; after maybe two minutes of reading a Wikipedia article, all I really learned that I thought could work was a plucked string instrument called a Tonkori, and then I realized that the only Pokémon that could pull off resembling it, such as the Kricketot/Kricketune line, are Sinnoh Pokémon. Yeah; Rapidash isn't bad, especially for a story team, but it being the only option for a fire-type if you don't pick Infernape as your starter is not good. Since I pretty much always picked Torterra, my teams ended up never actually having a fire type simply because I didn't go out of my way to catch a ponyta. Oh, okay. I was just confused because you had quoted a part where I said, "So if someone knows anything about Hokkaido...", so I thought that your suggestions were referencing something about it. Yeah, Vulpix and Ninetales would have been a good choice, especially since one thing they wanted to do with the region was place a greater emphasis on history and myth, so having what is essentially the Kitsune Pokémon would've been a good addition. I can't remember; was Vulpix/Ninetales in Platinum's regional Pokedex?

I see; I honestly didn't know this. I don't know much about Japan's history; I'm much more knowledgeable in European History (and even then only for specific time periods). That would certainly explain why the Sinnoh region is shown as something of a wild frontier in the trailer for Pokémon Legends: Arceus.

That could certainly work. For another possible regional variant, Hokkaido is apparently also home to three populations of the Ussuri Brown Bear, with more brown bears on the island than anywhere else in Asia besides Russia, so perhaps a regional variant of Ursaring? Admittedly, I'm getting all this from a quick read through Wikipedia. Also, apparently the original settlers of Hokkaido were a group of people, that still exist today, called the Ainu. Perhaps some regional variants could relate to Ainu culture in a way that would be respectful.

Interesting. Question though: what do these regional variants have to do with Hokkaido? The Sinnoh region, being based on Hokkaido, was designed to be a cold, northern region when compared to the first three regions.

The Platinum Sinnoh-dex would be good. Sinnoh Regional Variants would also be cool, though I'm not sure which Pokémon would make the most sense. I know that the region is based on the island of Hokkaido (the northernmost island of Japan), but I know nothing about Hokkaido, so if someone knows anything about Hokkaido, do you have any idea what would be a fitting regional variant? True; the battle models have proper proportions. Though is it just me, or does the battle animations for Barry in the trailer not convey his personality at all? The original had people pose rather than animate because it was sprites, but his pose clearly conveyed his personality: he's hasty, hyperactive, and full of energy. Since the remake is using 3D models, one would expect them to show his personality with facial expression and animation. But, instead, he just has a generic happy smile and doesn't do any unique animations; he's like every late-gen friendly rival in how he's animated.

1. I really hope it's not an HM; that would be really annoying. Speaking of which, they said this would be a faithful remake, but I wonder how they will handle HM moves. Then again, if they get rid of HM moves, what'll happen to Bidoof?! 2. Huh; I hadn't thought about chibi Cyrus. In terms of characters, my concern was the rival. The gen 4 rival was easily my favourite of them because there was just so much character to him: he was friendly, sure, but he was also eager, hot-blooded, hyperactive, hasty, and extremely energetic, and the game got his character across in very creative ways; I will likely not forget how fast and in-your-face he was at every moment in the beginning of the game; always rushing on-screen and out-of-screen. They made the character's movement in a 2D sprite game convey the character. With the chibi art style, he looks largely like his artwork, but I just don't see that haste and energy. I mean; he still moves energetically, but does he look like someone hasty and energetic to you? To me, he looks more like a late-gen generic "friendly" rival: just... happy-go-lucky. 3. Yeah; the Wii U would've been good for remakes of the DS Pokémon games. Yeah; you made poffins by swirling the mixture in a pot. 4. Oh, yes; they definitely should use Platinum's dex. A Fire-Type member of the Elite Four should have more than 2 fire-type Pokémon!

Funny enough, I was thinking of making a thread for this before noticing that people were posting about the remakes on the other thread. I'll just quote what I said on that thread: Yeah; I was hoping for a Platinum remake as well. I really liked going into the Distortion World as well, and I liked how the champion Cynthia was heavily involved in the plot without taking away the protagonist's involvement. I don't remember the Battle Frontier; I don't think I played much of it, but I agree that it would be good to see these features return.

Okay, so they've announced the remakes. Quick likes and dislikes before I get into speculation: I like that the remakes are being outsourced; Gamefreak has demonstrated that they do not have the manpower to do two games at once, and this enables them to focus on Legends: Arceus. I'm not sure about the art style. I don't think it looks bad; it actually looks like it could be neat. I just don't think it fits; the Sinnoh region was based on the island of Hokkaido, so it was designed as a cool, northern region (compared to the first three games) with an atmosphere of rich history and myth. I'm just not sure if this bright chibi art style fits that. I do think you can have a chibi art style that fits the region's climate and atmosphere, but I'm not sure if this one does. Now, onto speculation: I wonder how they'll handle the stuff that used the DS pen without, well, the DS pen. How will making those treats for your Pokémon work? How will the radar for the underground work? I wonder if they'll do anything to fix walking through deep snow. I understand using deep snow as an obstacle for traversal, but it wasn't a challenge; it was just an annoyance. I hope they'll add a snowshoes item to make traversing through the snow easier. Yeah; I was hoping for a Platinum remake as well. I really liked going into the Distortion World as well, and I liked how the champion Cynthia was heavily involved in the plot without taking away the protagonist's involvement. I don't remember the Battle Frontier; I don't think I played much of it, but I agree that it would be good to see these features return.

Oh, yeah; true. Wild Pokémon have seemed willing to harm (or at least scare) humans before in main-series games. My guess would be that it all depends on the Pokémon. Some are friendly, some are hostile/territorial/etc. I agree; I've been wanting to see a Pokémon game set in the past for a long time, and I hope they don't just treat the Feudal Period like it's modern times but with older buildings. Resource gathering and crafting are pretty much a staple of open-world games these days, so collecting resources to make Poke Balls and such will probably happen. Pokémon Centers and the Pokémon storage system shouldn't exist in this time period, so it should be interesting to see how they handle that. True. I can already imagine one such meme: a team of all majikarp splashing you to the village's physician.