Every Pokémon region has amazing features, landmarks, cities, and routes, but every region also has terrible flaws that can frustrate players to no end. Sinnoh, the region that serves as the setting for the Generation IV games, is no exception to this rule.
This diverse, northern region is home to many amazing locales and adventures, but it also has a few imperfections that make it as rough around the edges as any other region. From the infamous lack of Fire-types to the incredible League Champion, here are some of the best and worst parts of the Sinnoh region.
10 Needs Improvement: Speed
It’s an old criticism of the Sinnoh games, but the speed at which things move seems endlessly slow. Text and dialogue crawl by, the HP bar of Pokémon decreases slowly, the games take forever to save, and the walk speed seems slower than the other games that came before these ones.
Many of these slow speed issues were fixed in Platinum, but it’s an egregious problem that Diamond & Pearl are still criticized for to this day.
9 Pretty Great: Lore
Around the time of Generation IV, the makers of the Pokémon games really started to dive deep when writing out the lore of the in-game universe. As a result, Sinnoh has some of the coolest Legendaries and accompanying stories in franchise history.
Arceus being basically God, Dialga and Palkia controlling time and space, a strange mysterious demon Pokémon like Giratina representing antimatter, and the dream/nightmare duo of Cresselia and Darkrai are just some of the fantastic Legendary lore in these games. Even simple bits of lore like the explanation for the regional differences between Gastrodon is cool.
8 Needs Improvement: Terrain
One major criticism of the Sinnoh region goes hand in hand with the slowness of the games that take place there: the terrain. There are a few terrain features that slow down the player like crazy, making certain sections of the game feel like a slog.
The Great Marsh is like wading through molasses, the trek through snow-covered mountains plagued by blizzards on the way to Snowpoint City takes what feels like centuries, and there are several areas that require annoying HM-use to traverse.
7 Pretty Great: Biomes
While slogging through these terrain annoyances can be tedious, one has to give it up for the immense array of diverse regions of Sinnoh. While Kanto and Johto were mostly uniform from route to route, the Hoenn region, and soon after, Sinnoh, really experimented with different climates and regional biomes.
Sinnoh has the aforementioned Great Marsh and snowy routes, but also has a lakefront resort, mountainous cliffs, caves, mines, weather hazards, and more.
6 Needs Improvement: A House Divided
One of the problems with this extremely-diverse region is that it’s kind of divided in half in a problematic way. Mt. Coronet is an important location in Sinnoh that is tied to much of its lore and the Gen IV storyline, but it cleaves the region clean in half and serves as a large barrier between the east and the west.
This is cool in how it has made Pokémon on either side form regional differences, like Gastrodon, but it’s annoying for a player that is trying to traverse the region.
5 Pretty Great: Cynthia
One thing that many fans agree on in the Sinnoh region is how great the Champion is. Cynthia is considered by many to be the best Champion in the franchise; she’s cool, she’s competitive, she is extremely tough to defeat, and she has a great personality.
On top of all of this, her story most closely resembles the players. She started as a young trainer who was given a Pokédex and made her way up the ladder to the very top. All around, Cynthia is just fantastic character design.
4 Needs Improvement: Type Diversity
Another long-held criticism by many of the Sinnoh region is in the type diversity. For some reason. the designers made it so that there were only a couple of Fire-types that could be obtained in Diamond & Pearl before defeating the Elite 4.
If the player doesn’t choose Chimchar as their starter, they’ll probably need to catch a Ponyta for a Fire-type. There are a few more after defeating the Champion, but until then, the player has only two choices.
3 Pretty Great: The Underground
After the smash success of secret bases in the Generation III games, Game Freak seemingly decided to expand the mechanic even further, introducing the Underground in Generation IV. It functioned a little differently, though. Instead of random objects that one could make a base inside of, the Underground was a vast network of subterranean tunnels full of activities.
It’s an absolute gem of a feature and should definitely be reintroduced in the future. Hunting for fossils with your friends, setting traps, trading your findings for other items — it was a blast.
2 Needs Improvement: Backtracking
Some regions have linear designs, while others make you seemingly run in circles around the same few places time and time again. Unfortunately, Sinnoh is the latter, making the player backtrack through sections they’ve already been a handful of times.
Mt. Coronet is one of the more egregious examples. The player will have to navigate this maze-like caves a few times over the course of a playthrough, and it gets less and less fun each time.
1 Pretty Great: Difficulty
Many have criticized the newest games, Sword & Shield, for being way too easy. This has been a criticism in the past few generations, specifically in Generation VI. However, Gen IV really seemed to have the perfect difficulty curve for many people.
The gyms were challenging, but not impossible. The Elite 4 was average, but the Champion really gave the challenge that a Champion should. The games are accessible to younger players, but not so easy that older players simply hate them. The difficulty seems to be just right in many cases.
NEXT: 10 Pokémon that are Surprisingly Terrifying (That Aren’t Ghost-Types)
