>>54518026 Cut, Waterfall, Rock Climb, and Rock Smash are all just "click A to pass thing in front of you" and they removed Rock Smash's mechanic where it will sometimes spawn rare Pokémon, which they used in Gen 3 for Nosepass, so the move is even more pointless. The game spams Strength boulders yet there isn't a single actual Strength puzzle in the game. RBY, GSC, RSE, BW2, and XY all managed to have at least one decent boulder puzzle in the game. Why doesn't Platinum? Instead of puzzles, the HMs are entirely used for railroading and backtracking to find underwhelming items, such as vitamins, that the player never really actually needs thanks to the game's toddler level of difficulty.
The hilarious part is, they put all these HMs in the game for railroading purposes, yet they STILL lazily have a tons of NPC roadblocks in the game. Mount Coronet alone has at least three different NPC roadblocks over the course of the game (Team Galactic Grunt blocking the northern path to Snowpoint City; Team Galactic Grunt blocking the shortcut that leads to Celestic Town; the fucking painting that blocks you instantly after the Rock Climb roadblock on the first floor) and there are the news reporters who block you from going to Pastoria City early (this wasn't even in the original DP, they made Platinum MORE linear for no fucking reason), then there's the Sunyshore City NPC who blocks you because of a power outage. Eight (effectively nine) HMs and they still couldn't figure out how to design the fucking game without obnoxiously spamming NPCs blocking you. Meanwhile Gen 1 only has FIVE HMs yet there are effectively only three generic NPC roadblocks in the whole game.
