My problem with Sky’s story is…actually a lot of problems.

1) NPCs are underdeveloped. Super has this problem too, honestly, and in both cases I chalk it up to oversaturation of NPCs. Nearly every NPC other than the partner, Grovyle, Dusknoir, Lapras, Chatot, and possibly Wigglytuff are little more than walking verbal tics.

2) The partner’s backstory is ill-developed. The game never says where he got the Relic Fragment, and the one time they set up for a reveal it never comes. To me, it comes off as a last-minute throw-in to make the partner relevant to the plot.

3) The hero’s backstory is ill-developed. The game only covers their backstory up to being in the ruined future with Grovyle; anything before that is up to the player’s imagination. While this is true for a lot of PCs in a lot of RPGs, it sticks out a lot more with the Explorers hero, as their presence as a(n untransformed) human in a world of only Pokémon is never developed or even questioned.

4) Dusknoir’s reveal’s foreshadowing is insultingly obvious. Insultingly obvious. During the scene where the hero reveals his identity to Dusknoir, the game uses two unique portraits to show Dusknoir’s evil plot beginning to formulate. The hero even comments on it, saying Dusknoir was “hiding the faintest of smiles.” If you don’t get it by then, that’s on you; the game made it as obvious as possible.

5) Darkrai’s reveal has no foreshadowing at all. While the inclusion of a greater-scope villain that perpetrated much of the game’s events is certainly not unheard of (and admittedly helps patch some other plotholes in Sky’s plot, such as why Temporal Tower was falling apart), it being as out of left field as it is here poses a problem. The player is given no reason at all to think that some greater evil was at play here, which makes Darkrai ultimately feel shoehorned in.

I’d like to elaborate a bit on those last two points, as they both deal with bad amounts of foreshadowing (too much and too little, respectively). A good example of light foreshadowing is Nuzleaf in Super. He’s almost always away when news of petrification arises in the town, he encourages the hero to tackle dungeons and get stronger but freaks when the hero leaves for another town, and perhaps most subtly, he has Frustration in his starting moveset. On their own, none of these seem particularly suspicious, and even as a whole it may be hard to come to the conclusion that Nuzleaf is evil. But once the reveal drops, these traits begin to explain themselves. To me, this is the right way to subtly foreshadow a character’s secret - give them actions that showcase their true colors, but without the context of the reveal seem innocuous.