This is a continuation of my review of Light Platinum. Read part 1 here.
Honestly, other than the things covered in part one of my review, I was very disappointed in Light Platinum; a lot of people love it, but it just didn’t live up to the hype for me for the reasons below.
First, there are way too many rivals (around 7 IIRC) and there are rival battles in almost every town and route. The official Pokémon games usually only have one or two rivals and they battle you a handful of times at random points in the game, which adds an element of surprise to keep you on your toes. In Light Platinum however the rival battles get repetitive and predictable very quickly, which totally defeats the whole purpose of providing surprise. Plus, ~7 rivals are far too many to keep track of, and thus I had absolutely zero interest in them. For instance, at one point in the game one of the rivals called me and wanted me to come find her and her friend and battle them. I was like, “who’s this chick again and why would I want to go out of my way to battle her?” It felt like a “shit test” rather than something that I would actually want to do. So I tried to ignore her, but to my dismay I found that I couldn’t even continue the game until I fought her. Of course her house had to be located in the middle of nowhere in a huge, isolated route so it was a PITA to get there.
“Who are you again? … Oh right, rival #9000. And who is Lunick? … Oh right, rival #9001. And why do I have to go to your shack in the middle of nowhere to battle him?”
Secondly, the routes are ridiculously long in this game: they’re roughly equivalent to about two or three routes in the original Pokémon games. Personally, I prefer going back to Pokémon centers to heal my Pokémon periodically instead of wasting a ton of items, so having to travel back farther to the previous town as you go through a route is pretty tedious. Then when you add in the rival battles every five minutes, it just gets worse. Luckily I was playing on an emulator so I could speed through the routes somewhat, but if I wasn’t then it would be even slower. They should have broken up the routes into smaller routes with small towns or rest areas in between the larger stretches so that the pacing is more even. For example, in Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald, there is a long stretch of routes from Mauville City to Verdanturf Town, so they added a house where you could heal your Pokemon halfway through.
Thirdly, the Lauren region (which is the region you go to after completing the Zhery region) requires a crap load of TMs to get through. Yes, you read that correctly: TMs, not just HMs. Not only that, but you generally only use the TMs once for each route. I already hate having to use HMs (who doesn’t?), so adding mandatory TMs on top of them is absolutely stupid to me, especially when you only need to use them once or twice. How could the creators(s) even think that is a good idea? “Hmm… how can we make this game more fun and engaging? I know, let’s add some more annoying obstacles that most players hate!” I actually quit playing the game partway through the Lauren region because of this in addition to all the other annoyances I listed.
Fourthly, I could be wrong about this, but I think some of the cave layouts are repeated throughout the game. After the first couple repeats I thought, “hmm this cave looks similar to that other cave earlier”, but after going through more caves I’m pretty sure some layouts are exactly the same. I know rom hacks are extremely tedious and time consuming to make, but still they could have changed it up a little.
Fifthly, the storyline of Light Platinum was pretty bland and forgettable, but this is typical of Pokemon games, even the official ones. I don’t even remember it much other than that the main bad guys were Team Steam – which I suppose is a combination of Teams Magma and Aqua from Ruby and Sapphire, respectively – and they are trying to catch legendary Pokémon for some reason. However, this point is not a big deal to me because for Pokémon games I mostly care about the mechanics and to a lesser extent aesthetics, while I could care less about the story.
TL;DR: Pokémon Light Platinum has awesome graphics and great Pokémon selection, but there are far too many repetitive and tedious elements that ruin the fun and engagement.