Archive
07/11/08 Ugh, this needs an update.
Sorry I got lazy.
Okay, you probably know everything that's happened already, but to recap:
- The real Sky Forme Shaymin looks like this, is a Grass/Flying type and has the Serene Grace ability. I think this artwork looks kind of odd, but I've seen other pictures that looked adorable. Unlike some, I wasn't personally that fond of the fake Shaymin, and as I said, this one can be cute, so I'm not complaining.
- As a matter of fact, it was first seen in this CoroCoro scan. It also contains various other interesting things such as the box art (pretty neat-looking, if you ask me), an ominous picture of Mt. Coronet with a cloud of shadow above it, new and warmer clothes for the protagonists (although Dawn can clearly still wear a miniskirt despite the supposed climate changes in Sinnoh), a screenshot of you walking sideways in the rather messed-up "Torn World", the place that Giratina comes from (and the only place where it can be used in its Origin Forme), two mysterious new characters on top of a screenshot of Eterna City (the one on the left is apparently a member of Team Galactic while the other one is a police officer), another screenshot of you walking into a castle of some sort, and stuff about how Shaymin automatically turns into its Sky Forme when traded to Platinum.
- This scan is just cool. And has a screenshot of Dialga and Palkia at Spear Pillar, etc.
- This scan shows one of those Sky Forme Shaymin being cute pictures (along with a bunch of Butterfree, yay), a couple of screenshots showing new sprites of both the Origin Forme and Another Forme of Giratina as well as what appear to be new sprites of Bidoof and the Land Forme Shaymin.
- This scan shows the new Battle Frontier located in the Fight Area of Battle Zone, a new Poffin-making feature (according to Serebii, anyway) having to do with Swalot, the new Global Trade Center, a Giratina figurine and some other locations we don't recognize (possibly part of the new Battle Frontier).
- Platinum will be released in Japan on September 13th.
- There is more Wi-Fi stuff, and Poffin-making can apparently be done over Wi-Fi (according to Serebii again).
- Giratina's Origin Forme does have the Levitate ability.
Yeah. Hopefully I'll update sooner next time.
05/23/08 Possible Alternate Form Shaymin
So this picture has been going around the Internet:
Interestingly enough, this is definitely a Sky form if it's real, despite the rumours mentioning an Ice-type form.
Let me say right away that this does not mean (if it is real) that those Serebiians were right and Regigigas has an Ice form. Regigigas was directly said to have a "Sky" form; Shaymin was only said to have "another form" which might be part-Ice. In fact I think it would make sense for all three of the movie's legendaries to have alternate forms with the Levitate ability, if we go into that. Either that or Regigigas has three alternate forms of Ice, Rock and Steel to represent the three lesser Regis.
It does look like Sugimori's art, but there are Pokémon fandom artists who have imitated it well before. I remain skeptical, but who knows?
EDIT: It's fake. The Sugimori-like artist is PurpleKecleon, who also designed the remarkably realistic-looking Dark/Psychic/Fighting starters that were floating around before the Japanese release of Diamond and Pearl.
Also, apparently the spelling "Forme", in reference to Deoxys and Giratina's multiple forms, has apparently been confirmed as non-Engrish. I'm still rather iffy on using it. It just looks wrong to me. :/
05/15/08 Platinum Announced
So, Pokémon Platinum has been officially announced at the official Japanese Pokémon site, which provides a full version of the Origin form Giratina's Sugimori art (I like it) as well as clearer versions of those two screenshots that were printed in CoroCoro. Nothing new, but this is nice for those interested in images.
*goes to cut that Giratina sprite out of the screenshot and save it*
EDIT: Okay, the screenshot wasn't as clear as I'd have liked, so... I randomly spent a couple of hours recreating it pixel by pixel using the D/P Giratina's palette. If you want a crystal-clear PNG to use in edits, you can use this one if you like:
Also, I don't know if you noticed on the screenshot, but you can see the tiny little shadow underneath the Giratina on the sprite. I find it kind of funny because it's a really tiny shadow and because Giratina is so big, it's actually a pixel above the bottom of Giratina's body.
05/13/08 Bigger Pokémon Platinum CoroCoro Scan
We now have a high-resolution scan of that CoroCoro page mentioned in the previous entry. It's too big for showing here, so just click that link. This is a considerably better-resolution scan than on Serebii, by the way; I got it from the Pocketmonsters.net Imageboard.
Okay, to exercise my limited Japanese skills: Near the top, in yellow and then white katakana, it says "Poketto monsutaa shiriizu". "Poketto monsutaa" is obviously Pocket Monsters, but I made a few attempts to make some sense of "shiriizu" (it is katakana, which most of the time means it is a transliteration of a foreign and usually English word) and couldn't figure anything out that made any sense EDIT: Crystylla pointed out that it's "Series", so it's presumably referring to a new installment to the Pokémon series. The Platinum logo still says Poketto Monsutaa Purachina or Pocket Monsters Platinum as I detailed in the pevious entry. I'm guessing the part after 2008 in the white box under the logo is an approximate release date, but I don't actually know what it says. The blue katakana above the Giratina's head says "Giratina" and the katakana in the silver box below it says "Origin Form". The yellow box beside that has some Origin form Giratina facts; the species says it's a "hankotsu Pokémon", but I'm afraid the trusty online Japanese dictionary I looked hankotsu up in returned no results. It's hardly the most interesting information there, anyway, but I can't help not assuming it's any different from the normal form. The type is Ghost/Dragon as with the normal form; the ability is "???", however, as opposed to the Levitate reported by the earlier rumours, which might mean they are wrong in more aspects than that. (Of course, I think it will be Levitate anyway; it's just not what CoroCoro says, so if that blog reported that as being said in CoroCoro, that's not true.) The height is 6.9 meters (22'7" for all you feet-using people) and the weight is 650.0 kilograms (1433.0 lb), both of which I think we knew already although I'm not sure.
The most interesting thing on this new scan is that the game screenshots are a lot clearer. Again, it is clear that the Giratina shadow on the first screenshot is the normal form because of the shape of the wings. Dialga and Palkia standing behind it and Cyrus in front of it are also clearer. However, there are some blotches of black, kind of like ink blots, instead of what I took to be cracks in the floor or broken pillars. Maybe Giratina is spreading shadow around the world somehow at this point in the storyline?
In the other screenshot, we finally see that supposed new battle interface properly: Giratina's status bar is dark-colored with a notably different HP bar. I'm toying with the idea that this will only be used when you battle Giratina, with each legendary Pokémon having its own color status bar, which would be pretty neat. Either that or we get that color for all the legendaries. It seems to look too dramatic, somehow, to be applied to all battles we get into. Maybe it's just me. Then there is also no ground under Giratina, which I originally thought was just because it's still on the "Wild GIRATINA appeared!" screen but in D/P would have had ground under it, which might mean that flying or levitating Pokémon will not have any ground under them in battle. We'll see.
We also see the Origin form sprite clearly (it's pretty neat) and that Giratina is level 47 when we battle it, showing for certain that we will be seeing Giratina, a National Pokédex Pokémon in Diamond and Pearl, in battle before beating the Elite Four. Presumably the Sinnoh Dex will either be shuffled around or we get the National Pokédex considerably sooner (possibly having it at the beginning of the game, which is what I'm hoping for). Finally, we get to see Lucas's new outfit in detail: he now wears a blue sweater and has a silver (or platinum) backpack. Personally, I think it looks pretty silly with the red beret, but eh.
Not much else on the scan. The most interesting thing, as I said, is the lack of indication that the Origin form Giratina's ability is Levitate, which casts some of the other rumours into doubt.
EDIT: I changed the banner (and then link colors) to reflect the current subject matter of the CoST better. Yay?
05/11/08 And it rises from the dead
The Cave of Speculative Theories lives!
The reason for this revival is obviously that we have more main-series game speculation at last. Enter Pokémon Platinum, the long-awaited third version to Diamond and Pearl. Or so says a Japanese blog and a supposed CoroCoro scan:
Now, CoroCoro isn't actually supposed to be out yet, and there have been fake CoroCoro scans before, but this looks pretty darned real for a whole host of reasons.
To go briefly over what we see in the scan:
- The top says Pocket Monsters Platina. Platina is what the metal platinum is called in a number of languages, including Japanese (and incidentally Icelandic).
- There is a screenshot showing Spear Pillar and Cyrus of Team Galactic standing in front of the HUGE shadow of Giratina. Interestingly, Giratina appears to be in its normal form in this screenshot. Dialga and Palkia stand behind it, Dialga on the left and Palkia on the right.
- There is a screenshot of a battle with Giratina, this time clearly shown in the "Origin form" revealed in relation to the eleventh movie a while ago. Serebii speaks of a "new battle interface", but I'm not seeing how it is much different from the current one. Can anyone spot the supposed change?
- The background shows a large Sugimori picture of Giratina's Origin form. I'm not entirely sure about this, but I really don't think we've seen this picture before. Have we?
Now for some speculative theories. Firstly, despite the many who cry out in alarm at the idea of the game being called Platinum rather than the speculated Opal for a Giratina-based game (due to a type of opal called girasol), this actually makes perfect sense in Japanese and in fact I think we are all idiots for not having noticed this before. Being that Japanese does not differentiate between R and L, the "ratina" part of the name is exactly the same as the "latina" in the Japanese name of the metal. The actual katakana is different (Giratina is written Gi Ra Te i Na, the Te-small i combination being a recent workaround to the fact that Japanese has no Ti syllable, while the metal platinum, presumably being an older word in the language, is written Pu Ra Chi Na, Chi being the native syllable replacing Ti), but both of them are obviously approximating the pronunciation of the same foreign word.
Presumably, the storyline involves Cyrus trying to get both Dialga and Palkia in order to use them to somehow awaken Giratina, which would be why Dialga and Palkia are present on the pillar. It would make sense.
Now, Serebii also reports that the Japanese blog from where he got the information about the game's name and featured Pokémon, blue skY, claims the following information is revealed in CoroCoro as well:
- Volkner is no longer the Sunyshore City Gym leader.
- The Sinnoh Underground can be used with the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.
- A "Battle Island" working similarly to the Battle Frontier in Emerald has appeared.
- In addition to Giratina's Origin form being in the game, Regigigas supposedly has a "Sky" form and Shaymin has some sort of another form. Giratina and Regigigas's alternate forms supposedly have Levitate, and Shaymin's new form "might" be part-Ice.
Volkner leaving reeks of Wallace, but it's not as if the Pokémon games haven't repeated themselves before. This has, however, led fans to speculate that Volkner will be the Champion of the Elite Four, and here I'm extremely skeptical. Supposedly he has some in-game dialoguein D/P which I'm too lazy to confirm, saying he'd like to try to challenge the Elite Four out of boredom, but I can't really believe they'd pull such an identical bit of plot twice. Perhaps he takes his friend Flint's place in the Elite Four or something? At least, if he replaces Cynthia, I will not be happy. We need to keep the female champion, damn it!
The new Sunyshore Gym leader has been speculated to be Jasmine, who after all had a cameo in Sunyshore City in Diamond and Pearl, trains Magnemite (perfect chance to show off Magnezone) and is connected to an Ampharos (the one in the Olivine City lighthouse in G/S/C). Interesting thought, especially since she has a history of changing the type of her Gym (somebody in G/S/C revealed that she used to train Rock-types before her Onix evolved). However, it would seem a little odd for them to move an established Gym leader from another region to this one. Hmm. (Heh, it would be funny if SHE were the new Champion...)
The "Battle Island"... I'm skeptical about. Mostly because we already have a "Battle Island". I could believe some changes being made to the Battle Tower on the island, however, adding some more of the Battle Frontier's features. I could see this being a misunderstanding of words.
The new forms of Regigigas and Shaymin sound interesting enough. (Am I the only person who does not think they are overdoing the legendary forms thing? I like it.) I suppose the movie will tell us more about them. There is a crazy discussion on Serebii about it being the other way around, with Regigigas having an Ice-type form and Shaymin having a sky form, but that sounds... extremely unlikely to me, to say the least. Mostly since the lord of the Regis should not have a form of the same type as just one of them and because there is in general no reason to think they got it the other way around.
I'll be posting more when it comes.