I hate Gen 5's stories and characters with a passion. It's as if they got rid of the usual writers and scoured
FanFiction.net for "freelance writers".
N was practically tailor-made for yaoi fangirls. Man-prettyness? Check. Ridiculous fantasy name (Natural Ghetsis Harmonia)? Check. Abusive childhood? Check. Love of animals and hatred (actually a mild dislike) of humans? Check. "Antagonist" that turned out to be good all along? Check. Lives in a magical castle half-buried behind the Pokemon League building? Check. Comes out of fucking nowhere with his legendary dragon to SAVE THE DAY! when you could have handled it yourself? Check.
It's less about the player's character development (although, to be fair, there's only as much development as the player wants to have) and more about N's development from borderline Marty Stu to full-fledged Marty Stu. They should have called it "Pokemon: N and Friends".
And how about Ghetsis? "Let's see how much retarded evil we can fit in a Pokemon character, lol!" He wasn't even a convincing villain. His whole gimmick was "Hey, he isn't transparently evil! He doesn't turn out to be evil until the very end!" Except no, his evil is as transparent as the glass on my Buick.
How about the Sages and Shadow Triad? Not relevant until the sequel. They just kind of stood in your way, with "muh plans!" as the only justification. Let this be lesson for you: write villains that are actually relevant in the current story, instead of delegating them to the "inevitable" sequel.
The sequel only made things worse, with N as a bona-fide Marty Stu and Ghetsis as an insane Mr. Freeze wannabe. In fact, when I read Ghetsis' lines, I imagined them being spoken in Arnold Schwarznegger's Austrian accent, which completely ruined my suspension of disbelief. But it was funny as hell.
They're not even "so bad, they're good", they're just bad. And from what I've heard, X/Y aren't much better. But I'm liking the rest of Gen VI, so wat do?
