Pokémon Diamond and Pearl/YMMV


 * Accidental Innuendo: So, in Platinum, you get a villa. You can buy furniture for it. When you mix records, sometimes your friends will find a TV program that is examining furniture you have. Sometimes they say that you have a "nice rack".
 * Alternate Character Interpretation: Is Cyrus evil and twisted beyond redemption or is he a tortured soul who just needs serious therapy?
 * Interestingly, the anime depicts him as the being the former, while two different manga series and his focus short in Pokémon Generations depict him as being the latter.
 * Also, what's at the core of his motivations? Is it his own personal dissatisfaction with the world or the genuine belief that others suffer as long as the world exists as it is? Does he really think the removal of spirit is in everyone's best interest, or does he just want to be rid of his own personal pain? Is his desire to become a deity part of a warped sense of altruism and a Freudian Messiah Complex, or is it simply an ego trip because he wants to be the divine creator and ruler of a new universe? We may never know...
 * And the Fandom Rejoiced: Aside from what makes the games divisive (although not even nearly as much as Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire four years before), most of their flaws are foiled by the introduction of online play, an element first implemented with the Sinnoh-based games. Although online battles weren't implemented in the desired "versus anyone" way until Pokémon Black and White, the addition of online trades made up for it.
 * Base Breaker: Barry is either Adorkable and a worthy rival or annoying and not as Badass as Blue and Silver.
 * Can't forget about Cyrus, now, can we? He's either a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds, an Omnicidal Maniac too far gone over the Moral Event Horizon, or perhaps both.
 * Garchomp. You either love it for being an Uber Badass dragon, or hate it for being one of the biggest Game Breakers in the franchise.
 * Lucario. Depending on who you ask, it's either a badass cool looking Pokémon that's useful in battle, or a bland piece of furbait that was forced in marketing campaigns.
 * Breather Boss: Candice and Volkner serve as this among the Gym Leaders, as they come before and after the ludicrously tough final battle with Cyrus. In the Elite Four, Aaron and Bertha start off as easy while the difficulty really begins to pick up at Flint, then goes skyrocketing into the great beyond come Cynthia.
 * Crowning Moment of Funny: "Ensure the bed is unoccupied before getting into it." And you can find a Pokédoll in one of the beds.
 * Crowning Music of Awesome: Cyrus and Cynthia's battle themes. Also the Game corner music and the Battle Arcade music. And, as usual, the Legendary Pokémon battle themes, but especially Giratina's Platinum music.
 * Disappointing Last Level: After the interesting battles with Team Galactic, Cyrus and the version legendary, you go back to the same old Pokemon Excuse Plot of collecting badges (Well, one badge) and fighting the Elite Four. Along with Forced Level Grinding, probably the worst Victory Road in the series and the hardest Champion battle.
 * Draco in Leather Pants: Cyrus. The fangirls have latched onto him and won't let go, both in and out of game.
 * Game Freak themselves seemed to want the players to feel sorry for him by adding his grandfather to Platinum and telling us about his sad, oppressive past. Of course, not too much, since we still want to beat him and put a stop to his plans...
 * Ensemble Darkhorse: Looker. Also Lucario, thanks to its appearance in the eighth movie and (later) Super Smash Bros. Brawl. The fact that it performs quite well in competitive battling also helps.
 * Riley counts because he's a pretty boy with blue hair and a trenchcoat. Just see how much fanart he gets compared to the other trainers you end up teaming up with.
 * Gliscor became a staple in competitive teams this generation thanks to it's useful typing and solid defensive stats. It's badass design also helps a lot.
 * Despite being two common Pokémon that can be obtained pretty damn early, both the Shinx and Starly lines are very popular Pokémon that you tend to see on many people's in-game teams. The Starly line becomes beastly upon evolution, as Staravia gets the Intimidate ability and Staraptor learns ludicrously powerful moves like Close Combat and Brave Bird. Shinx isn't quite as good, but still able to hold it's own in fights, and is very popular design wise for being adorable, while it's final evolution Luxray gets love for looking Badass.
 * Evil Is Cool: Cyrus may have be a lost cause, but that didn't change the fact that he was badass.
 * Evil Is Sexy: Pretty much all the Team Galactic members (with the exception of Charon) are really hot. Cyrus is an unusual case because he isn't especially good-looking, yet he still manages to be very attractive in other ways.
 * Fan-Preferred Couple: Cyrus/Dawn is almost omnipresent in the fandom and has a surprisingly large following.
 * Cynthia/Dawn is also very popular.
 * Freud Was Right: Palkia is often mocked for having a long, streamlined neck and head with perfectly round shoulders...
 * Fridge Brilliance: Dawn and Lucas' Platinum art has them holding Repeat Balls, because they are repeating their adventure!
 * Game Breaking Bug: Being just slightly better than Farfetch'd, Chatot is not a powerhouse in the battlefield. However, the cry changing properties of Chatter can actually break the game due to glitches, and therefore it is banned from use in Random Wifi.
 * That, and probably the fact that some people would use it to scream obscenities at their opponents.
 * Genius Bonus: Empoleon is the same height as Napoleon Bonaparte (Care to guess what Empoleon's name was based off of?).
 * In Japan, Empoleon is known as "Emperte", so the theme is the same, except just using Bonaparte's last name instead.
 * Ho Yay: Volkner/Flint and Male!PC/Rival.
 * Internet Backdraft: The subject of Stealth Rock seems to be getting a bit of this. It doesn't help now that it's really easy to get in HeartGold and SoulSilver.
 * Just Here For The Legendaries
 * Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Dawn. Some of the characters she's been paired with include Lucas, Barry, Cynthia, Cyrus, Riley, and Volkner! And those are just some of the more common ones!
 * Les Yay:
 * Candice and Maylene, especially in Platinum.
 * According to some people, Female PC/Cynthia.
 * Mars/Jupiter has a hint of Hate Ship to it.
 * Magnificent Bastard: Cyrus, big time; he's shown to always be steps ahead of you or the other good guy characters, has an intricate criminal/terrorist operation carried out while using his team doing official business for his energy company as a front for these crimes, is highly intelligent and calculating, and has enough charisma to sway the spirits of his followers and deceive them into following his stated cause of using the powers of time/space to Take Over the World and change it for the better, when in reality he plans to literally destroy the existing world with these powers and create a new one where all living things would be stripped of spirit (what he believes is the source of all strife and incompleteness in the world) and he'd reign over it as God of a new universe. As a master of suppressing his emotions, he rarely ever loses composure and is strangely respectful and courteous towards his enemies too. Unlike other villains, he claims to not use Pokemon as friends or tools, but instead make their power his own through his man-made devices fueled by their energy such as the Red Chain.
 * Moreso in "Platinum" than in "Diamond" or "Pearl", where he makes the stupid mistake of letting you free the Lake Trio, who then proceed to destroy his plans as a result. In "Platinum", he's prepared for this, making two Red Chains instead of one so that he can bind both Dialga and Palkia, whose combined power blocks out the Lake Trio when they try to save the day.
 * Memetic Mutation: DEEDLE DEEDLE DEEDLE DEE! WHOOOOOP
 * Memetic Sex God: Cynthia. Also, surprisingly enough, Cyrus!
 * Moral Event Horizon: Cyrus' entire plan (to tear the entire universe apart with the powers of time/space and remake all of reality in his image, purged of human spirit and emotions) and the measures he takes to accomplish it (having Lake Valor bombed in order to capture the three Lake Pokemon and torture them to create the Red Chain) puts him on the line. Charon's plan for using the threat of Heatran's powers to extort money from people probably would've also qualified had it actually gotten off the ground.
 * Nightmare Fuel: In Platinum when Giratina screeches and launches itself at the screen, mainly for creating a hell of a jump scare that one wouldn't expect in a Pokémon game!
 * Giratina's cry in general is pretty creepy.
 * Cyrus and his entire plan to create "a world without spirit."
 * After defeating him for the last time, Cyrus switching from going on a screaming rant about his hatred for spirit before calming down and leaving with an ominous threat in Platinum in the blink of an eye is quite spine-chilling to say the least. The fact that he's been broken this badly by his life-experiences and beliefs is both pitiable and slightly horrifying.
 * Padding: The initial pair (fixed in Platinum and HG/SS fixing it almost entirely) makes everything take forever to play out, even with animations turned off.
 * This was likely because Game Freak had obviously had problems programming on the DS. For instance, the glitches in the 3D overworld and the drastically lower framerate despite being on far more powerful hardware than the previous titles!
 * Player Preferred Pattern: The move Stealth Rock in the Metagame. Many Pokémon who could have potentially been in the higher tiers are kept out solely because they have a type disadvantage to this move. In competitive battling, it's almost required that you have both a Pokémon who can set up Stealth Rock and a Pokémon who can counter it when your opponent inevitably does a team whose typing takes minimal damage from it, as it is far easier to get up and keep up than to remove.
 * The Scrappy: Some fans just hate Dawn's design.
 * Some find Bidoof quite goofy and annoyingly numerous.
 * Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Its evolution Bibarel can learn all TMs except Fly. Makes him the best HM slave in the whole game and one of the best in the series due to its sheer abundance (In RSE, the best HM slave is commonly believed to be Tropius, who is very rare.)
 * Ambipom. Sure it's actually not too shabby in competitive play, but most fans hate the little bugger for being an attempt at Ugly Cute gone horribly wrong. From its Idiot Hair to its creepy grin and phallic-looking fingers, this is one of the least-loved Pokémon ever.
 * Scrappy Mechanic: Stealth Rock. Holy shit. While entry hazards are essential to prevent the game from turning into a switchfest, there were two mistakes in Stealth Rock: making it a TM which everyone and their mother can learn (thankfully fixed in BW), and making it Rock-type. Rock type is pretty much the best offensive type in the game. Unlike Spikes or Toxic Spikes, nothing is immune to it, so the only way to get rid of it is the still rare, still weak, and still useless against Ghosts Rapid Spin. More than that, Flying types with their famous immunity to Spikes are weak to SR, meaning each time they enter the battlefield, they are hit for a quarter their health, along with anything Fire, Ice, or Bug. Any combination of two of those four types are hit for half. It defined the metagame so much, Pokemon analyses often go "Yadda yadda, good stats, diverse movepool, lots of resistances, all-around a solid Pokemon - no, wait. It's weak to Stealth Rock. Nope, don't bother with this useless piece of shit."
 * Sidetracked By the Golden Saucer: As with every other game in the series, there's a casino. And whenever that happens you end up spending hours on end trying to get the grand prize.
 * The elusive Feebas, a major cause of people getting sidetracked, is in the basement of Mt. Coronet, which also happens to be where Cyrus plans to unleash Palkia and/or Dialga on Sinnoh. Don't worry, Team Galactic will wait until after you're done hunting down a rare fish before they try to destroy the world.
 * Surprise Difficulty: Because the original Sinnoh dex, well... sucked (see Character Select Forcing), a lot of the gym leaders don't actually use their preferred type for the majority of their team, making them harder to sweep with a single Pokémon that knows a Super Effective move.
 * The most notable examples are Volkner and Flint. For each one, half of the Pokémon on their teams don't follow their preferred typing. The electric trainer Volkner has an Octillery and an Ambipom, while Flint's got a Steelix, Drifblim, and Lopunny. Some of these Pokémon are put there to combat the common killers of their favorite types (Octillery beats Ground Pokémon and Steelix beats Rock Pokémon).
 * Another grueling example is Candice, an Ice-type leader who has a Psychic/Fighting-type Medicham on her team, somehow making the cut by knowing Ice Punch. A Psychic/Fighting-type is super-effective against all but one of Ice's common weaknesses (that being Fire), and can seriously trip up someone who thought that they'd sweep the Gym with a Fighting, Steel, or Rock-type.
 * Note that once Platinum revised the Sinnoh Dex, however, Candice, Volkner, and Flint fall much less into this trope than they did in Diamond and Pearl.
 * Tear Jerker: Barry's Heroic BSOD after failing to save Uxie from being kidnapped. "I have to get tougher. It's not just about being the strongest trainer anymore..."
 * Hearing Cyrus' past from his grandfather in Platinum. Especially considering what it's shaped him into.
 * That One Boss: Cyrus is this in his final battle, but especially in Platinum. His Pokémon all have pretty great attacking stats, and his Houndoom, Gyarados, and Honchkrow in particular can be absolutely brutal thanks to their fantastic type coverage.
 * That One Miniboss: the unavoidable double battle near Veilstone City. They don't look like anything interesting from faraway -- just a Cool Trainer duo -- and people approach them like regular trainers, with switchgrinding and everything. And are murdered. Brutally. Good luck, especially if it's a Nuzlocke.
 * The Double Team on the foggy route to Celestic Town can be quite a nasty surprise for those who don't see it coming. Their Raichu and Gyarados provide outstanding type coverage, and can easily wreck the unprepared.
 * Champion Cynthia is easily THE hardest champion in the series. Her team is full of Pokémon of various types with perfect IV's, and all are built to suit their role rather well. Her Garchomp in particular can sweep entire teams thanks to possessing fantastic stats, but the rest of her team don't let up either.
 * Fantina, especially in Platinum where she's the third Gym Leader-- fully-evolved Mismagius included with no modifcations made to it's moveset whatsoever.
 * Jupiter can be surprisingly hard despite being only the second commander. Her Skuntank is at a much lower level than it's supposed to be when it evolves, and comes rather early in the game. Thanks to it's Poison status affects, often-critical night Slashes, and surprising bulk, she can be a real bitch to take down.
 * The Double Battle with her and Mars at Spear Pillar can be a real pain thanks to not only Barry's uncooperative AI, but the fact that he leads with a useless Munchlax which more or less leaves you stuck in a 6-vs-1 Double Battle with you on the losing side.
 * Maylene's first two Pokémon are nothing special, but her Lucario is a monster thanks to great stats and type coverage.
 * The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Commander Mars's impossible-at-that-level Purugly comes to mind. Also, is it just me or does Roark's Cranidos only ever use Pursuit if you're switching something out that turn?
 * They Changed It, Now It Sucks: In the European Platinum versions, you can't play the slot machines in the game corner, instead you can gather some coins from them once a day. This also means the only way to get the Explosion TM without trading or cheating is to hope the attendant randomly decides to give you one.
 * Stoic Woobie: Cyrus was apparently one in his backstory.
 * Jerkass Woobie: Volkner and maybe Cyrus.
 * Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Definitely Cyrus.