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Spoilers Rainbow Rocket and the 4 timelines

I agree with Unown Seer here, to many things don't add up. In addition to the points they made I would also like to point out there's still the minor issue of how these villains can even work together when their ideals are so different and outright contradict each other.
 
You guys ever stopped to thunk that with the Festival Plaza takeover, the bad guys winning is kind of a metaphor? Like the younger players never played the old games, so with SM as theit first games, they never got to stop the older Teams in the first place, meanwhile for older players its a neat what if.
 
I repeat: "Giratina and Arceus couldn't stop Cyrus? The Ultimate Weapon wiped out an entire world except for Team Flare? Maxie and Archie could survive Groudon and Kyogre going too far?"

The above plans had obvious flaws regardless of the player's involvement. You can come up with contrived explanations, but chances are that Game Freak don't even care.
It's possible for all of them to succeed.

Archie or Maxie could have controlled Kyogre or Groudon by awakening them with both Blue Orb and Red Orb, not just with one orb like they did in every game they appear in. Cyrus could have captured or controlled Giratina and Arceus. Probably he won't use them in USUM battle, but still, it doesn't mean he couldn't have captured or controlled these two. Lysandre and his team could have survived using the ultimate weapon on the global scale. Since the USUM Lysandre knows about alternate universes, he could hide himself in some other universe while his own world was being wiped clean.
 
I don’t see any reason why the ultimate weapon wouldn’t be able to cause a global genocide. The thing is a beast and we’re never told it won’t work.

Regarding Archie and Maxie, it’s clear that you can control Kyogre and Groudon for some duration of time if you have the correct Orb, since that’s literally what Archie/Maxie tells us in ORAS when they give us our mascot’s Primal Orb, which we then proceed to do any time we use their Primal forms in battle.

But of note, the Archie and Maxie that we’re dealing with here seem to come from versions of RS’s reality. I can’t help but wonder if Hoenn’s history even progressed in the same way in that reality. The meteors that plagued ORAS’s world don’t seem to have been as big or yielded the same intensity in RS’s history - Meteor Falls isn’t as cratered, Sootopolis wasn’t formed by a meteor strike, and Deoxys landed on Earth without destroying it. Perhaps these meteors weren’t the only difference. Maybe in RS, the world was never brimming with the kind of natural energy that fueled the Primal Reversions. So maybe the universes that this Archie and Maxie are coming from are sort of an in-between; universes in which they took the correct Orbs from Mt. Pyre, but in which Primal Reversion didn’t exist, so Kyogre and Groudon couldn’t go one step further beyond Archie/Maxie’s control.

And then, Cyrus could have defeated Giratina and/or Arceus, as others have said or drowned them in a pit of mercury. Besides, I know which idea I’d hate more between Dialga and Palkia actually having the power to unravel the spacetime continuum and recreate a spiritless world, versus Arceus really acting like a God of the Universe and preventing Bad Things from happening at the last second in the event that everybody else fails to stop them. The former at least makes Cyrus’s threats feel a little more genuine. The latter would remove all sense of threat from the games forever. “Don’t worry, if all else goes wrong, Llama God will save us!”
 
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You guys ever stopped to thunk that with the Festival Plaza takeover, the bad guys winning is kind of a metaphor? Like the younger players never played the old games, so with SM as theit first games, they never got to stop the older Teams in the first place, meanwhile for older players its a neat what if.

Your not wrong. And don't get me wrong it will probably be a blast battleing these guys again. But just because the battles are fun doesn't mean that the story makes sense. I love these characters (except Lysander) and I want them to have a good reason for showing up.
 
Your not wrong. And don't get me wrong it will probably be a blast battleing these guys again. But just because the battles are fun doesn't mean that the story makes sense. I love these characters (except Lysander) and I want them to have a good reason for showing up.
It didn't make sense thinking they could reasonably retcon megas into the earliest points of the series, but here we are 3 years later with a god damn multiverse. I think they can pull this off if they want to.
 
Regarding Archie and Maxie, it’s clear that you can control Kyogre and Groudon for some duration of time if you have the correct Orb, since that’s literally what Archie/Maxie tells us in ORAS when they give us our mascot’s Primal Orb, which we then proceed to do any time we use their Primal forms in battle.
The important difference is that player controls the Primal Reversion after capturing the legendary, Archie or Maxie tried to do that without capturing. Probably because the captured Pokemon can't use its full potential, as it is mentioned on Cyrus' computer.

Archie or Maxie also admits that you managed to use the opposite orb well, the one you get at Mt. Pyre. It implies that having both orbs would allow to control the legendary without capturing it, but Archie or Maxie stole only one of them because they are incompetent in the universes where games take place. Same goes for Cyrus and Lysandre. Their plans are imperfect in games to give the player a chance to be involved in the story events. And obviously, the USUM counterparts of the villains are the ones who succeeded because they thought of absolutely everything while carrying out their plans.
 
It means Gamefreak doesn't care much about the player characters, which isn't surprising, given how little we saw of them in Generations.

How? I don't see how the implication that somewhere in the vast multiverse the MCs lose is a sign that GF don't care about them. If anything the fact that RR exist makes stopping these guys an even bigger feat for the protags. They were the only things preventing multiple cataclysms and their failures or absences in those events are a threat to the multiverse. Besides that though it's not like the MCs are infallible gods and implying they can lose is a some big disrespectful slight, and again it's just as likely they just didn't exist in these universes period.

I repeat: "Giratina and Arceus couldn't stop Cyrus? The Ultimate Weapon wiped out an entire world except for Team Flare? Maxie and Archie could survive Groudon and Kyogre going too far?"

The above plans had obvious flaws regardless of the player's involvement. You can come up with contrived explanations, but chances are that Game Freak don't even care.

I mean sure logically the plans didn't make sense but most things in Pokemon don't. We might as well not talk about the llama god, sun snail, or apple bunny of victory either at that point.

Besides all that though I still don't see why you keep bringing up Giratina and Arceus like Cyrus didn't already have control over two of the other gods associated with them on Spear Pillar. What makes it so unbelievable to you that Cyrus could have done the same to them? Hell somebody already brought up that 11 year olds can do it.

I don’t see any reason why the ultimate weapon wouldn’t be able to cause a global genocide. The thing is a beast and we’re never told it won’t work.

Regarding Archie and Maxie, it’s clear that you can control Kyogre and Groudon for some duration of time if you have the correct Orb, since that’s literally what Archie/Maxie tells us in ORAS when they give us our mascot’s Primal Orb, which we then proceed to do any time we use their Primal forms in battle.

But of note, the Archie and Maxie that we’re dealing with here seem to come from versions of RS’s reality. I can’t help but wonder if Hoenn’s history even progressed in the same way in that reality. The meteors that plagued ORAS’s world don’t seem to have been as big or yielded the same intensity in RS’s history - Meteor Falls isn’t as cratered, Sootopolis wasn’t formed by a meteor strike, and Deoxys landed on Earth without destroying it. Perhaps these meteors weren’t the only difference. Maybe in RS, the world was never brimming with the kind of natural energy that fueled the Primal Reversions. So maybe the universes that this Archie and Maxie are coming from are sort of an in-between; universes in which they took the correct Orbs from Mt. Pyre, but in which Primal Reversion didn’t exist, so Kyogre and Groudon couldn’t go one step further beyond Archie/Maxie’s control.

And then, Cyrus could have defeated Giratina and/or Arceus, as others have said or drowned them in a pit of mercury. Besides, I know which idea I’d hate more between Dialga and Palkia actually having the power to unravel the spacetime continuum and recreate a spiritless world, versus Arceus really acting like a God of the Universe and preventing Bad Things from happening at the last second in the event that everybody else fails to stop them. The former at least makes Cyrus’s threats feel a little more genuine. The latter would remove all sense of threat from the games forever. “Don’t worry, if all else goes wrong, Llama God will save us!”

It is not an interesting notion if they're all going to lose to a single kid in the span of a few hours.

Not to saw you can't be interested in it, but I don't see how that is considering the Esserise's big post in here. Or all the talk in this thread in general for that matter. Clearly RR gives a lot of chance for speculation and theorizing even if they will soon be the playthings of a bunch of kids and GF probably didn't think to hard about the details of all of this.
 
Honestly, Head Canon FTW!

I've always been against the whole multiverse thing. I've been playing Pokemon since the very beginning and the thing I loved about it back then was the simplicity of the concept. Subsequently, I really enjoyed the fact that after the original games, Johto through to Kalos just kept adding layers to the organic Pokemon world, with Unova (in my opinion) a peak in Pokemon narrative.

When ORAS came out and brought with it the suggestion of a multiverse, I sort of just dismissed it in my head. If the original Pokemon Professor could have been unaware of the existence of near enough 700 other Pokemon back when I was embarking on my first adventure - it's absolutely possible that Professor Sycamore and a few inhabitants of Kalos were the only ones who had been aware of Mega Evolution. To me, it could've been happening all along in the same universe. In our return to Hoenn, Mega Evolution could have been very simply introduced as a brand new discovery in that region - not a feature of a Hoenn we were supposed to believe we had never visited before (it sure looked familiar).

I can say with some certainty that I will never stop buying the main series Pokemon games. However, the multiverse stuff and this talk of there being possibly as many as FOUR(?!) alternate realities in my humble little Pokemon world...nope... not for me.

In my head canon, there is one Pokemon universe and all the evil team bosses were defeated in their respective regions. Led by the OG bad guy Giovanni, they have temporarily put their differences aside to try and make life difficult for the trainer who's been a constant thorn in their side for the past two decades. Me!

All that being said, it's very interesting hearing other people's ideas and concepts - I always enjoy coming to these forums for that! Maybe one day the Pokemon Company will release a Pokemon Encyclopedia along the lines of the Legend of Zelda one (at this moment cannot remember the exact title) and then I might be able to get onboard with some of the more outlandish stuff Game Freak have introduced and allow it to squeeze itself into my admittedly rather stubborn head canon!
 
Honestly, Head Canon FTW!

I've always been against the whole multiverse thing. I've been playing Pokemon since the very beginning and the thing I loved about it back then was the simplicity of the concept. Subsequently, I really enjoyed the fact that after the original games, Johto through to Kalos just kept adding layers to the organic Pokemon world, with Unova (in my opinion) a peak in Pokemon narrative.

When ORAS came out and brought with it the suggestion of a multiverse, I sort of just dismissed it in my head. If the original Pokemon Professor could have been unaware of the existence of near enough 700 other Pokemon back when I was embarking on my first adventure - it's absolutely possible that Professor Sycamore and a few inhabitants of Kalos were the only ones who had been aware of Mega Evolution. To me, it could've been happening all along in the same universe. In our return to Hoenn, Mega Evolution could have been very simply introduced as a brand new discovery in that region - not a feature of a Hoenn we were supposed to believe we had never visited before (it sure looked familiar).

I can say with some certainty that I will never stop buying the main series Pokemon games. However, the multiverse stuff and this talk of there being possibly as many as FOUR(?!) alternate realities in my humble little Pokemon world...nope... not for me.

In my head canon, there is one Pokemon universe and all the evil team bosses were defeated in their respective regions. Led by the OG bad guy Giovanni, they have temporarily put their differences aside to try and make life difficult for the trainer who's been a constant thorn in their side for the past two decades. Me!

All that being said, it's very interesting hearing other people's ideas and concepts - I always enjoy coming to these forums for that! Maybe one day the Pokemon Company will release a Pokemon Encyclopedia along the lines of the Legend of Zelda one (at this moment cannot remember the exact title) and then I might be able to get onboard with some of the more outlandish stuff Game Freak have introduced and allow it to squeeze itself into my admittedly rather stubborn head canon!
That's a pretty cool and funny interpretation. I've had a long running headcanon pretty similar to this actually.

Fyi tho I'm pretty sure the idea of a multiverse has been in since at least gen 5.

Also funny you say 4. If we just take every universe with Mega Evolution and without, every separate version (gen 5 first implied these were also separate verses iirc), and every leader that could have won or lost (since most of their plans are contradicting each other they are likely each from their own separate universe) then

we have
og verse
mega verse

so
og verse where giovanni won
0g verse where archie won
og verse where maxie won
og verse where cyrus won
og verse where ghetsis won
(who knows if x/y forward even happen in the 0g verse)
mega verse where giovanni won
mega verse where archie won
mega verse where maxie won
mega verse where cyrus won
mega verse where ghetsis won
0g verse but green happened instead of blue/yellow/red/fr/lg/or og blue
0g verse but og blue happened instead of blue/yellow/red/fr/kg/or green
og verse but red happens holy shit I cant keep going with this

and this isn't even getting into the spinoffs! last I remember PMD is in it's own verse canonically but that may have been retconed with certain revelations in darkness/time/sky.
 
Fyi tho I'm pretty sure the idea of a multiverse has been in since at least gen 5.

Yep, at the very least.

Even before then, we had Gen 4 toying around with parallel dimensions (which aren’t technically the same thing, but they’re somewhat similar and everybody conflates them anyway).

But really, a multiverse was always a natural interpretation of the “Version” format that the series has employed since the beginning. I myself have thought of the games in that way for many years, as I am sure others have as well.

Not that people aren’t free to come up with their own ideas, but yeah, it’s not hard to see why GF have started to formally integrate the concept into the story.
 
The latter would remove all sense of threat from the games forever. “Don’t worry, if all else goes wrong, Llama God will save us!”
how is the Llama God any different from deux ex Player though? all of the games are written in mind with the fact that no matter how dire things are or may be, the PC is always there to save the day. like take XY for instance. no reference of Xerneas or Yveltal. what is shaping up to be "the big thing"? the ultimate weapon. maybe this is the time where the good guys lose? nope, sike. ultimate weapon isn't powered by a Duracell battery, it's powered by a Pokemon we can KO (well i guess in the context of the story it's a forced capture but whatever). good guys win.

and isn't that what helps to make SM's story ultimately stand out? that it's not a story about how you're ~the chosen one~ (& you just don't know it yet), but rather it's a "local" story where you help a new friend save her mother and solve a mystery behind this Pokemon? i digress...
 
At this point I believe that there are just countless timelines in the current Pokemon games, if you include every single main series game. Ruby/Sapphire definitely cannot be in the same timeline as Emerald, same for the other 3rd games, and there are mega/non-mega and now win/lose variants too, as well as remake variants. Ruby and Sapphire might also be in different timelines, judging by evil team and different wild Pokemon. Don't forget Japan's Green
Literally, with that calculation and the previous (rather poor) logic there are at least 116 timelines
 
how is the Llama God any different from deux ex Player though? all of the games are written in mind with the fact that no matter how dire things are or may be, the PC is always there to save the day. like take XY for instance. no reference of Xerneas or Yveltal. what is shaping up to be "the big thing"? the ultimate weapon. maybe this is the time where the good guys lose? nope, sike. ultimate weapon isn't powered by a Duracell battery, it's powered by a Pokemon we can KO (well i guess in the context of the story it's a forced capture but whatever). good guys win.

and isn't that what helps to make SM's story ultimately stand out? that it's not a story about how you're ~the chosen one~ (& you just don't know it yet), but rather it's a "local" story where you help a new friend save her mother and solve a mystery behind this Pokemon? i digress...

The difference is Doylist vs. Watsonian. It’s one thing for the bad guys to be doomed to fail because of the external fact that Game Freak obviously aren’t going to make a game in which the player can fail to stop them. But it feels distinctly different when they are actually doomed to fail within the narrative because of the fact that God would just step in and make them automatically lose if they got too close to winning. In such a scenario, why should the player even bother trying to stop them? Just wait for the Big White Horse to intervene.

The former is just a natural consequence of a fictional story being set in a kid’s video game. The latter is the fiction itself being rigged against the bad guys to the point where every action they ever took was pointless and had no chance of accomplishing anything. It’s a matter of putting the agency in the player’s hands and letting them achieve victory against a real threat through their own technique instead of babying them by giving them a set of divine training wheels.
 
I agree with Unown Seer here, to many things don't add up. In addition to the points they made I would also like to point out there's still the minor issue of how these villains can even work together when their ideals are so different and outright contradict each other.
It could be they all think they can take advantage of the other, or maybe Giovanni is mind controlling them with Mewtwo (or keeping them in check atleast with its power)
 
At this point I believe that there are just countless timelines in the current Pokemon games, if you include every single main series game. Ruby/Sapphire definitely cannot be in the same timeline as Emerald, same for the other 3rd games, and there are mega/non-mega and now win/lose variants too, as well as remake variants. Ruby and Sapphire might also be in different timelines, judging by evil team and different wild Pokemon. Don't forget Japan's Green
Literally, with that calculation and the previous (rather poor) logic there are at least 116 timelines
Thanks for doing the math. I wasn't going to do it myself but wanted to know. And you are probably right. They are probably going the Rick and Morty route (not even slightly the first to do this or be explicit about it but just the first one I think of off the top of my head).

But yeah there is probably a timeline where x protag lost to a bug catcher and decided to quit there. There is probs one where Blue is champion. Hell there is probs one where Red got his Pikachu went "fuck that trainer nonsense" and went home with his new pet electric rat.

Maybe that's the one RR Giovanni is from lol
 
I've always thought of Pokemon as a multiverse/differentiating timelines due to differentiating versions.

ORAS canonizing them simply confirmed long time fan theories and then some.
 
Well, according to some translations, Ghetsis does mention about how he wants another puppet... .

Giovanni had better watch his back then.

Honestly I'm disappointed that Gamefreak couldn't be arsed to come up with some original post-game content, and instead decided to drag all the evil team leaders out of their figurative graves for some wacky alternate universe shenanigans.

Since these games remind me somewhat of BW2, I kinda view this as this game's version of the PWT. The main thing that interest me about this concept though, would be actually seeing these alternative worlds.

A Kanto-Johto where Rocket has succeeded and installed a Pokemon racket(?) Ironically, this world is the hardest for me to define despite this team having the simplest goal.

A world that has been flooded out creating a Waterworld, or a desert world like Tatooine from Star Wars.

A world... well I suppose Universe where Cyrus is a god? Honestly, did they say why he's teaming up with the rest? I wonder if his bid to remake reality didn't turn out like he wanted, or he now wants to end strife in every reality. Seems risky on Gio's part...

A world where Hilbert/Hilda losses the battle against either N or Ghetsis. Easiest to envision, as this simply means that Plasma controls and enforces Pokemon via a dictatorship. The world isn't separated into Black/White because Ghetsis is here rather than N.

A world where the ultimate weapon was fired yet again. This world would probably be too dark for a Pokemon game. We would only see the ensuing Fashion/Fascist Team Flare living it up anyways, as this was similar to the conspiracy that rich elites want to wipe out everyone else.

Honestly, I can see why Gio, Max, Arch, Ghet, and Faba would pool together for self benefit, but the genocidal duo make it a bit of a stretch. They would either want to repeat their own outcomes, or would simply be content within their dark timelines imo. I also only feel like Gio is the leader simply because he was the first (tbf he is the most business-wise/sane), which I suppose doesn't matter as the real leader is probably just Ghetsis again anyways. I guess Ghetsis & Gio may be smart enough to manipulate Cyrus? Certainly Lysandre.

I know we likely wouldn't get to see the dark timelines, but a Switch side game follow up would be a cool way to capitalize on the concept.
 
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You know what? Instead of fighting the evil team members, we should have gotten a chance to travel to their dimensions and fight them on their own turf. Rainbow Rocket would still exist, except the team leader's bases correspond with their dimension. It's also a good way to introduce other Pokemon from that region, too.

Then again, storage limitations exist
 
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