Whoa, it's been a while. I blame procrastination and being overscheduled. Anyway, before we go too far on Gym Leader stuff, I wanted to get a few ideas out that might end up affecting those.

Major points are in italics, for the sake of finding them fast.

First of all, as we know, the moveset in Topaz is a little...behind compared to the canon games. I'm not going to go off against that. In fact, I have a way to justify it in game. As it stands right now, Caldera-Kirant is pretty underdeveloped technologically compared to the other ones we've seen. The C-K League has just been established before the events of the game, which means that because Caldera-Kirant is so isolated it wouldn't be out of the question that the region's metagame is behind, and hasn't picked up on some of the tactics the other regions have.

Furthermore, we could run with the whole idea of the region being more rural until recently. The western parts of the region have seen an urban boom, resulting in Colussus, Enechestra, etc. Team Rocket has taken control of some things behind the scenes in order to gain more turf. Eastern Kirant would be almost entirely rural, but starting to modernize, with Orion forwarding it...but in much more moderation than Rocket.

I also wanted to cover a few potential edits to the region's geography. Don't write it off just yet, I know what you're thinking; I have some legit reasons behind them.

First of all, you might notice that central Caldera is very...chaotic, with two mountains, two cities, and an artificial desert. All of those, as of right now, have very little room to work with. As it stands right now, there isn't any way to expand any of them, because of how packed together they are. I believe the best way to give us more room to expand on them is...

...Move the Eye of Sand and Saharan City to southwestern Kirant, and remove Portwind. As of right now, Portwind is just filler...IB said it himself. There is no reason to do anything in the southwestern part of the map right now, just sidequests. And since the Eye of Sand was created way back by expy Egyptians, it isn't limited to where it can be. It also moves the 11th Gym closer to the 12th one (Aquapolis), and makes the location of the late game gyms less of a one way path.

I also have a plan for a village to replace Portwind. Soma Island would be expanded into a small village, and would be the location of the Dragon gym. The locals would all have some experience in dragon training, and would stick out a little compared to the visiting trainers and the people running the Gym and Center. This would also give players a reason to explore the southwestern ocean. There just needs to be a plot-related reason to go there in the first place...

The Dragon gym would be 9th in this case, so the last four Gyms would go Dragon->Ice->Ground->Dark.

Comments? Critiques? Try to keep responses organized, so nothing gets lost in the crossfire.