#you can probably feel the research i spent scraping lore off my pla and platinum playthroughs lately

[volo-omnia]

PLA and DPPt: The Great Plate Anomaly and Bridging the Gap Between Generations

The Pokemon series has quite the level of world building. With the series currently in its 9th generation and the Indigo Disc DLC releasing very soon, there's no shortage of lore in this colorful Nintendo staple. While each game individually may build a world within the confines of its own region, how well does Pokemon world building hold up between games?

While some of the remakes of previous generations tend to revise mechanics like the inclusion of the Fairy type, Pokemon Legends Arceus takes a different approach to the remake formula where it sends the player to past events from the well-beloved Sinnoh region. While fans analyze which NPCs were ancestors to their beloved blorbos and the questionable lack of animation in this game, it left me wondering: does the lore of PLA even hold up to the original Pokemon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum games?

(Disclaimer: This analysis will only take a small glance at continuity related to the canon and requirements to catching Arceus, as well as what role the plates and azure flute played between both generations. This also won't take into account theories regarding multiple universes or timelines. This analysis also doesn't take into account the Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl games because, well, who gives a shit about those ones.)

Let's take a brief look at PLA. Upon its release it became the first game that put Arceus in the forefront of its title, as in previous generations the only way to obtain the mythical pokemon was through long-gone events and cheats. (Even with the release of BDSP, which did allow the player to capture Arceus any time, it would only be allowed if....the player already caught Arceus in PLA?)

The requirements were fairly straightforward. Capture every pokemon in the region, obtain all 18 plates to create the azure flute, get into some minor conflicts with the local politics, stop the world from ending, and fight blonde guys with god complexes.

Pretty straightforward.

Now a quick look back to DPPt. The requirements to capture Arceus in the original gen 4 games are....esoteric at best. While one would assume the plates have the same power in obtaining the azure flute, Arceus had for the longest time been restricted to an event-only pokemon, as the original azure flute event was never actually officially released. While HGSS had a special Arceus event, it was reported to only activate if the player had the azure flute from DPPt. Which would be hard, on account that the azure flute technically didn't exist.

This appears to be the first revision by the developers, as the plates appear to have little to no importance in relation to Arceus- well, aside from using it as a held item to changing its type. This is possibly the only similarity the plates hold in regards to function. (I will not be counting the Legend plate introduced in PLA, as that plate is only given after obtaining the azure flute and as such, doesn't count.) As far as the player is concerned the azure flute may as well as fallen from the heavens, as the flute was simply a distributive mystery gift event.

What importance does all of this information hold? Well, what if I told you that this inconsistency actually fixes the canon retroactively?

Taking into consideration the history in regards to Arceus and its official game releases and appearances, we can come to the fair conclusion that the Arceus event in DPPt was never canon. Since the player character never had an official means to capture Arceus, the azure flute was never obtained; and as such Arceus never came down from the heavens.

.....but the player in DPPt technically didn't have all the plates, did they?

Remember that in PLA, there are specifically 18 plates. Do you remember how many there are back in DPPt?

There's only 16.

You see with the release of PLA, Gamefreak decided to include the Pixie plate and the Blank plate. This, retroactively, fixes the event discrepancy. It would actually make sense that the player character in DPPt wouldn't be able to obtain the azure flute, because you technically didn't have all the plates! You were missing two of the ones required to create it, and as such you didn't meet all the requirements to call Arceus down.

This unfortunately however, is where the uniformity ends. While the overall theme with the plates was loosely tied between generations, Gamefreak had quite a mess to work with DPPt. Something they oddly didn't account for when writing PLA was deciding whether the plates were one-of-a-kind artifacts, or were they simply collectibles?

While in the story of PLA the plates were only obtainable via noble pokemon, back in DPPT they were hidden items scattered across the Sinnoh region. Both of these comparisons hold the idea that the plates are ancient artifacts of a time long-past, and were a rare collectible that were associated with each pokemon type at the time.

I'm just kidding, DPPt completely fucks this up. The plates were also random spawns in the Sinnoh Underground. This means that even though each plate has its associated location in the overworld, you can simply mine a duplicate one in the underground. (This oddly enough actually happened to me by accident in a recent Platinum playthrough of mine, where I ended up getting 2 Draco plates simply because they kept spawning while mining.) So technically you could say they were ancient Hisiuan artifacts you would dig up, with the exception there was simply an Amazon warehouse stock of them simply sitting there.

So, in regards to canon, this is where the worldbuilding falls short. If the plates were ultra rare Arceus items only allocated to ancient noble pokemon.....why are there multiples of them in the modern day?

This is where I'm gonna have to put a disclaimer that the rest of the post will be diving into headcanon territory, as I'm gonna be trying my best to tie these inconsistencies together.

How does one explain a rare item in the Hisui era, but seems to have plenty of duplicates in the modern Sinnoh? Well it's simple really, we can assume the many plates were forgeries! Archaeological forgery is a practice that occurs quite often in the business of archaeology and history, and I'm sure the Sinnoh region is no stranger to bad actors trying to get a quick buck.

The forged plate headcanon works fairly well whichever angle you wish to take it! One can assume there are plagiarizing historians trying to ruin the name of the Celestica's ancient ruins (no pun intended), but this idea can be freely added for other characters as well! After all one can clearly see which character with the biggest fascination with the Arceus plates- that being Volo.

After all at the time of writing this, Volo's fate post-PLA is currently a mystery. Who's to say he wouldn't find alternate ways in trying to summon Arceus? Since the plates were now permanently on the player's person, it would be interesting trying to imagine him finding ways around this in order to achieve his goal. And funny enough, even though the plates are implied to be given originally from Arceus, there might be evidence that crafting plates were possible.

Consider: the shards. Perhaps considered as a miscellaneous trade item introduced in generation 3, they appear to consistently be described as "shards from ancient items or tools". This is quite telling, especially since the shards appear to have the same proportions and color palettes as the Splash, Flame, Meadow and Zap plates. It could be very likely that these "ancient items or tools" were actually plates, and that crafting man-made Arceus plates were possible- or at least attempted.

With mania, obsession, and many years of immortality on his path, it's possible imagining Volo trying to attempt this, grasping at every possible shadow that could tie him back to the Celestica- and most importantly, overthrowing Arceus. If he simply couldn't obtain the plates from the player, he would simply have to make his own. Whether he succeeds or not in this...well that's up for interpretation. It would be quite poetic overthrowing the creator with tools you created with your own hands.

Oddly enough headcanoning the plates being man-made or forgeries also fixes the DPPt event cancellation paradox, as if we assume the plates the player had on hand were forgeries, then it would also make sense that such false tools wouldn't create the azure flute. Can't exactly DIY your way into heaven, hm?

Concluding this post, I think it's time to go back to my original question: does the lore of Pokemon Legends Arceus hold up to the original Pokemon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum games?

Uh, no.

All in all, Pokemon's world building is both fantastic- and messy. Naturally there are gaps to leave in a little of mystery and theorizing, but there's quite a fair bit of difference between a literary gap and a literary pothole. And the path this series has followed is quite overdue in it's road maintenance.

Nevertheless this was simply a tiny blurb between my favorite games, and just having some fun trying to craft the threads tying the 16 years of difference between these games together. I've had these ideas swirling in my head for quite a while and wanted to write them down eventually, so if you actually read to this point, thank you!

Now I figure it's time I move on to the 2nd biggest mystery between DPPt and PLA:

Why the hell did the price to buy them jump from $40 to $80???

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