>>48459435My ideas, to long for previous post:
Make the early plot focus on helping with purification research by hunting down straggler shadow mons Wes never found, stumbling upon Cipher's activity for yourself. Build up some mystery by seeing shadow lugia for the first time flying overhead in the travel cutscene then go investigate - was it an escaped experiment that's been lurking in the desert all this time? Is it new? - with a few sightings leading up to following it back to the key lair instead of showing it off in the opening cutscene and never again until the end of the game. After kicking some asses makes it obvious they've been discovered THEN Cipher kidnaps Professor Krane to both strike at Michael directly and hinder efforts to combat them, steals the cargo ship to get pokemon to ramp up shadow mon production, full hostile takeover of Phenac, ect plus some new events. The individual events of the game were fine they just weren't tied together in an interesting way. Basically fight Cipher, their admins, and shadow lugia a few times (treat it like a regular trainer pokemon that can't be caught, change the message to something like "the ball just bounced off, it's no use" if the player tries) throughout the game with it totally curb-stomping you at first then as you get stronger it flees after a while until the 2nd to last time you fight it and actually win weakening it enough to be catchable in the final fight. Greevil shouldn't try to hide under the nice persona, just hide away on Citadark Isle with all the admins mentioning him so he doesn't feel like a literal who. Maybe tie in finding out the details of what happened to Micheal's dad with some involvement from Cipher in his death, or maybe it turns out he's been their prisoner this whole time and you bring him home in the end since this is pokemon and the happy ending would give them more wiggle room to go into detail without making it too grim instead of handwaving it like they did.
