I don't think we give the Pokedex in PLA enough credit for the storytelling buried in there.
In this case I'm talking about the Lake Guardians, specifically one research task and what it says about the three characters with which they align.
See, each of the guardians has a research task that nets double the normal research level, requiring the player see them use a specific move a certain number of times. This task is identical save for the move required for each.
Mesprit, the being of emotion, aligns with Cynthia. This one is the most obvious, design-wise, but her (English) name can be taken as a degraded form of sentia, meaning "to feel" in Latin. Cynthia is prone to getting carried away with the things she enjoys, and often needs to take time off to put herself back together after a particularly passionate engagement. The move needed to understand Mesprit is Recover.
Uxie, the being of knowledge, aligns with Cogita, whose name means "to think" in Latin. Cogita takes her time to put her thoughts together in order to provide guidance where she's duty-bound to do so, maintaining an even keel no matter what's happening. The move needed to understand Uxie is Calm Mind.
Azelf, the being of willpower, aligns with Volo, whose name means "to want" in Latin. Volo is driven to the point of obsession, determined to reach his goal no matter what it takes or how long he has to try, even when he fails over and over and drives away everyone and everything that cares about him in his fervor.
I wanna give my take on Urbain (and Taunie by extension, but I got Urbain so I'll be talking about Urbain), because I feel like a lot of people are extremely uncharitable in their interpretation of the character in a way that...bothers me? Like for a lot of people it's a complaint that he's gotta be the main character when we're the main character, but that's really not the issue.
To be clear, while this post is not hating on Urbain, and I would ask that folks who like the guy read it all the way through before getting pissed off, I have to lead with the fact that I straight up can't stand him. Urbain is the first character in this entire series that I genuinely loathe, but that doesn't make him a bad character—and I want to do a proper breakdown and analysis so people understand how sympathetic he actually seems to be.
He's actually really well-written! My issues with him relate to how the rest of the narrative is written around him, which is the core of the problem, but is not an issue with the character.
See, Urbain is written like...a jackass. He's arrogant, self-righteous, controlling, demanding, and extremely ungrateful in spite of his assertions that all he wants is to give back to the people who have helped him throughout his life. This guy has a list of character flaws a region wide. This is fantastic. This is what we want to see in a "rival," isn't it? I think Kieran (another highly divisive rival, my second-favorite in the series behind Volo) was handled significantly better, but if we exclude the surrounding narrative, they're written more or less equally well. They have about the same amount of depth with behaviors and implications related to their upbringing and how they came to be where they are, et cetera. They're actually extremely similar, but go about things in different ways because of this apparent difference in upbringing.
Here's the thing: I don't think Urbain is a good person, and that this fact is his main character motivation.
(Spoilers and lots of long-winded character analysis under the cut.)
See, while Urbain talks about how he's so great and helpful, this is not actually how he behaves. At all. Ever.
He uses people constantly. The MC is the one who does 90% of the work on the Rogue Mega Evolution problem, while Urbain takes all the credit and continually reminds everyone that he's the team leader. He doesn't even lead team meetings.
He is intentionally mean and belittling toward other people's interests. He is genuinely nasty to Naveen about Canari for no discernible reason. He knows Naveen better than we do, he knows that maybe Naveen is particularly interested in this woman because he's also a person who was raised by a single grandparent just the same as her. Maybe he took interest in Canari to begin with because her grandpa supported her in leveraging her hobbies into a career in ways that his own grandmother never has and never will. Maybe he likes her because he looks at her and he sees that things could be better, the way that a lot of people IRL—especially teenagers, and Naveen is probably about 17—look at their favorite celebrities. But Urbain doesn't care about any of that, he just cares that it's another way to rile Naveen up, like not calling him when they arrange to meet up, like constantly making a dish he knows Naveen doesn't want to eat and then getting offended when he doesn't eat it. Lida also openly likes Canari, to the point of getting distracted during a team meeting the same as Naveen, but he's only ever nasty to Naveen about it.
He gets other people roped into his problems and doesn't care. Lida gets dragged into his debt with the Rust Syndicate, and he not only blows her off, he never really apologizes and basically is like "sucks to suck, good luck with that!" He does not thank her for taking on the interest, either, even though it was her decision to do so, leaving him to only pay off the principal investment.
He doesn't actually care about other people's goals and intentions. AZ is very clear that he doesn't care about getting any customers at the hotel at all, but Urbain insists that he's doing everything he can to help make things better by trying to drum up business that AZ doesn't even want. (Also, based on some NPC dialogue, his ads may actually be putting people off from staying at Hotel Z. But he doesn't listen to criticism either, obviously.)
He will only inconvenience himself on his own terms, even if the inconvenience would align with a previously stated goal. One of his major stated goals throughout the story is to make Hotel Z more popular, to garner the notoriety he believes it deserves, but as soon as he's given an opportunity to actually network with people in a place where that would be possible, he can't even be fussed to change his clothes. He took out a 100k loan to "help Hotel Z," which put his friends 900k in debt some time later, but won't even change his clothes for the same reason.
But, at least in my interpretation, there's an important core thesis here: Urbain wants to be a good person. He doesn't know how, so he's trying to do whatever he can think of to at least be seen as one. Fake it 'til you make it. He's very performative (see again: AZ and the hotel), but is really bad at maintaining the performance when push comes to shove (see: how he acts about everything related to Jacinthe).
He talks about his mother basically working herself to death, and I think that's true. I don't know that it was actually because she wanted to help people, or because she was so passionately dedicated to her work that it killed her (as we saw with Turo and Sada in SV), but either way she's gone and now he's gotta fend for himself. The problem is that he was brought up by someone who appears to have been old guard Team Flare, which we know had a very self-absorbed concept of how to "improve" things. His mother went no-contact with Jett because Jett disagreed with her methods and intentions—we never find out what those were, but she was Team Flare. We can probably make some assumptions!
Urbain has no idea how to actually be a good person in a sincere, genuine way, and he's throwing spaghetti at the wall trying to figure it out. He desperately wants to be the kind of person that his mother can actually be proud of, he wants to avoid falling in with bad people the way she did, he wants to be a force for good the way she seemingly asserted she was, but he doesn't know how. She never taught him. He is grasping at straws.
But he's got too much pride to admit that it's something with which he could use some help. He can't let anyone know he never learned how to be a good person, so he'll just keep saying that he is even as he fumbles it over and over and over.
Instead of congratulating the MC on making rank A, he immediately takes the spotlight by announcing that, conveniently, he also reached rank A today. Somehow. Somewhere. Off-screen. Even though that goes directly against how the Royale is meant to be structured.
He sets the terms to decide who will go with Floette to control Ange, and then reneges on his word if it doesn't go his way. He literally starts streaming the whole thing when he gets up to the control room, where he says that the MC "had better be watching" and reminds them that he still expects them to essentially dance on command in front of the camera for him when this is over.
Later, he literally screams "WATCH ME WIN!" during Reward Match 15, stomping his foot like a child throwing a tantrum. (This is the single most off-putting scene in the entire game for me.)
He does not win, and instead of talking about it, he grabs the opportunity offered by Jett to abandon his promise to AZ, pawning off Floette to the MC because it'll be inconvenient to keep her (even though the game still has him in the lineup for Reward Matches sans Floette, so he's apparently got time to participate in the Royale!), leaving Hotel Z and becoming an instant nepo baby billionaire.
Oh yeah, and he tells the MC to break the news to Naveen and Lida. He won't even walk back to the hotel to tell them himself.
His only comment during visits to the hotel after this is about how he's so busy being a super amazing president in spite of the fact that he literally hasn't done anything.
Throughout all this, he continually asserts that he's doing good. He's doing the right thing. He's the leader, he knows what he's doing, he's helping people. There is no indication that he actually is, but he keeps saying so—like he's trying to manifest that goal into reality.
This is actually a great fucking character. Like. This is really good. Again, they did something similar with Kieran, where he played at being good and sweet and delicate, but was actually pretty unpleasant underneath. The difference is that other characters called this out (Carmine literally warns the SV MC about it) and the narrative makes it exceptionally clear that it's not acceptable behavior. Kieran drops the pretense and just lets himself be a piece of shit, and we have to beat some sense into him. That's his character arc.
For Urbain, that never happens. Everyone around him continually treats his decisions as good and correct, the narrative never allows him to be questioned in any capacity, and even at the very end characters are asserting that "he'll always be the leader of Team MZ."
There is no Team MZ. Urbain is gone. His goals, related to mega evolution and Hotel Z, will never be reached. He failed. He left. And for some incomprehensible reason, that's touted like it makes him The Very Best Like No One Ever Was.
Urbain is a good character because, at least to me, he's very clearly not a good person, but he's also trying desperately to be one. He's doing a shit job, but he is genuinely trying! I don't think a lot of people who dislike him seem to pick up on this, but he deserves that much credit. He takes the CEO position without hesitation not only to escape the embarrassment of having lost to the MC again, not only to finally get out from under what he sees as the MC's shadow, but because he genuinely believes it will give him the opportunity to be the kind of force for good he keeps telling everyone he is. He doesn't know how to do that, but at least he can afford therapy now so maybe he'll figure it out eventually. (Preferably before the economic collapse of Kalos as a whole.)
What makes him so divisive is that he's written this way, and then the story is written around him so that none of this is ever sincerely acknowledged. It feels like being literally gaslit by a video game.
I understand why some people like Urbain. He's a good character. He's a good enough character that he deserves to be treated more candidly by the narrative, but he just...isn't.
Minor PLZA DLC spoilers—nothing storyline, only a short dialogue exchange and some related character interactions, so I'm not putting it under a cut.
I love Mega Dimension strictly for the shit it is giving to Urbain. It's brilliant. He's straight up just not responding to any of it so far, and that genuinely makes me dislike him significantly less.
When a character asks "Between [you and Urbain] who's the stronger trainer?" One of the options is literally just "Oh, it's me." Choosing this, Urbain looks at the player, but says nothing. A moment passes in silence while the character asking thinks about it, then replies, "Yeah, I can definitely see that!"
Urbain says nothing at all—this may be different in a playthrough where he beat the player at Prism Tower, but he suffered a resounding loss to Izzie that night, and he's lost to Izzie again an additional three times in Reward Matches since then, so it's the truth. There should be no argument, because there's nothing to argue, and he needs to learn to be okay with that.
Honestly, I desperately want him to learn to be okay with that. This is the exact kind of character I can absolutely adore—but only if the narrative treats them appropriately, only if they actually learn from their mistakes, only if they grow as a person. Like, I love Kieran to the ends of the earth and will die on the hill that he's one of the best rivals in the history of the series strictly because of his character arc. I don't care how divisive he is, he's a brilliant character and a fantastic trainer and I love him. He's my second-favorite actual rival in Pokemon as a whole (the rest of the Paldea crew are not true rivals in this sense), and it's a very close second behind Volo.
Even if this doesn't last, it's fantastic to see the narrative finally give up on contorting itself around Urbain in such a way that he experiences absolutely no character development and faces no consequences for his actions because nobody ever seems to care what he does for more than a picosecond at a time. This isn't about punishment, I don't think he's done anything worthy of what I'd consider punishment, but that boy needs to get taken down multiple pegs, and this DLC is doing that in a very casual, simple way—and he's taking it instead of fighting about it. This is character development. This is an improvement. I love this.
I really, really hope it lasts, because if it is does, he might end up having my favorite character arc in ZA.
