ORAS also has 8 chapters on the first volume, and 7 on each of the other two. So yes, we should be near the end of volume 1 content.
But I'm not sure if they can afford not having mini-volumes for SwSh. We don't know long it'll take for the full volumes to even reach Gen 7, due to them having to add extra content to XY and ORAS.
It's possible they are waiting to see before releasing any mini-volumes. Like, with DLC now being a thing, we don't even know for sure how long Gen 8 will last, and it would be awkward if they made mini-volumes and the full volumes reached SwSh before it's done. But if they already decided to forgo SwSh mini-volumes entirely, it could likely mean they also decided to not have an LGPE arc.
By the way, I mentioned it in the previous thread, but I said there was a tweet where Yamamoto talked the International Police in the XY arc. BenLee and I have already talked about it in my profile posts, but the tweet was
this one.
I misremembered what Yamamoto said. He didn't say Handsome didn't fit in XY's plot, what he actually said was that because Green was already watching Kalos, fitting the International Police in the story would be hard, and that is maybe that's why Handsome (Looker) didn't appear. The fact Yamamoto himself said "maybe" is a little strange. Perhaps he never asked Kusaka about it.
That said, Green is only in the XY arc because he's mentioned in the games as having studied in Kalos, and to allow both Mega Charizard X and Y be shown side by side. Handsome being cut is likely a mix of intersected roles and Kusaka and Yamamoto generally avoiding putting the same character in two arcs that are running at the same time.
He would be more likely to appear in the XY arc if the games had gone with the
allegedly scrapped alien invasion plot where Handsome had a larger role.
Yeah, there's a rumor about that. I heard about it this week. Basically, in 2014 a 4chan post by "XYSider" claimed to contain scrapped elements for XY, and in 2019 the post got some attention on the fandom because a lot of the elements mentioned in it reappeared after XY with a lot of accuracy. I mean, for one example, allegedly, Mega Stones were supposed to be broken pieces of AZ's spaceship when he crashlanded on Earth. That is very similar to Sparkling Stones being brolen pieces of Necrozma's body. That post also claims that Xerneas and Yveltal had their colors swapped during development, and in LGPE, the option for Mega Evolving Charizard and Mewtwo
have a red X and a blue Y.
For what's worth, Team Flare's theme does sound like it was made with an alien theme in mind. Furthermore, ORAS, which came out months after XYSider's post, retconned the first Mega Pokémon to be Rayquaza instead of Lucario, made it Mega Evolve from
eating meteors, had Episode Delta be basically about an alien attack, and retconned Sootopolis into being built in a crater when in the original RS it was a dead volcano. The ORAS part kind of makes me wonder if Game Freak was preparing to bring back the alien plot for
Pokémon Z. Would be fun to have that, as Kusaka could have made the new Dex Holder be an alien.
Unfornutaly for me, that post makes no mention of
Professor Patrice. They probably scrapped Patrice when they decided Professor Platane (Sycamore) and Fuladari (Lysander) wouldn't be the same character, but still, I wish to know what that guy was like.
I mean, if Kusaka really wanted to do arcs based on side stuff, why not make a Pokespe spinoff manga?
Have Yamamoto work on the main book while another artist does the other.
I wouldn't be surprised if he already suggested something like that, but the higher ups said no.
I didn't answer this in the past thread in case people still wanted to discuss here, but I don't think Kusaka wanted to do arcs based on every spin-off. I mean, I doubt he wanted to do arcs based on the Game Boy TCG or
Trozei. Heck, how would a
Pokémon Pinball arc even work?
As far as I know, he only ever mentioned wanting an arc based on
Colosseum, as that's the only quote included in that Japanese wiki, and that's probably because, out of all spin-offs, the Orre games are the ones that are the most similar to the main series.
I mean, look at the other spin-offs: The Game Boy TCG is about the card game instead of actual Pokémon. The
Ranger games don't have Trainers.
Detective Pikachu doesn't even have a full region.
Mystery Dungeon only has humans as part of character backstories.
Conquest isn't even set in the modern age!
I could go on and on if I knew more about each spin-off, but the fact is, the spin-off games are colossally different from the main series. But the Orre games? They don't have Rivals or a Pokémon League, but they have multiple cities, Trainers, Pokémon Centers, an entire region, and you can catch Pokémon. Heck, you could even say
XD is
Colosseum's third version. It is basically a B2W2 situation
before B2W2.
Colosseum and
XD, to this day, are the only spin-offs even remotely similar to the main series, and that's something everyone probably noticed back in the day. This week I googled to see if there was discussion of a
Colosseum arc among Japanese fans during Gen 3. Turns out there were some posts but not much. But I found a 2017 post were a fan mentioned back in the day they thought Celebi being in the RS arc was foreshadowing a
Colosseum arc. And who knows, maybe it could've been.
I also remember PokéSho having, at one point, fan art that was basically fake screenshots of the anime with
Colosseum characters appearing and meeting Satoshi's group. There was nothing similar for any other spin-off. That is possibly an example of how
Colosseum's similarity to the main series was in the fans' minds. But I don't think we can know for sure how common the association was.
So, a
Colosseum arc wouldn't be as strange an idea as it sounds. I don't think Kusaka's wish for an Orre arc is indicative of a desire to make spin-off manga. In my opinion, Kusaka's
Ranger manga only exists because of the Manaphy egg, which is the one mission the story focuses in, so they could reference it coming from Fiore when they eventually put it in a Gen 4 arc.
As for why it didn't happen, I think it has to do with timing. As can be seen
here, shortly after the DP arc started, all the Grade magazines got to serialize it, leaving no place to serialize any other new arc. Perhaps due being the most recent game DP had priority, as
Emerald, at the time named
Battle Frontier, was removed from the Grade 4 magazine and was basically left to serialize in a magazine with
an irregular release schedule, which unfortunately at the time happened to be yearly releases. Perhaps because of that, they decided to finish it in the volumes instead of waiting for
Pokémon Wonderland vol. 11, which was apparently still planned at some point but never came out.
Basically, the
Emerald arc was B2W2 before it was cool.
By the time the elusive volume 29 with the
Emerald finale was out,
Pokémon Platinum had already been released, and volume 30 where DP starts was released one month later. Probably because of all the problems with serializing
Emerald, the end of Gen 4 being basically in sight, and the
Emerald arc being a perfect end point for Gen 3 due to the Dex Holder reunion, Kusaka decided to scrap
Colosseum.
Furthermore, doing a
Colosseum arc would make people expect an
XD one, and this would just delay DP being collected for an undetermined amount of time. There were no mini-volumes back in the day, and online magazines weren't as popular as now. There was basically no solution that allowed a
Colosseum arc to exist comfortably, and it could risk having all the problems PokéSpe had for the last few years start earlier, so it was not made.
It's probably for the best. If a potential
Colosseum remake retcons the Relic Stone Celebi into an Orrenian Celebi, Kusaka won't have to worry about dealing with that if he writes that arc. Seriously, I can't even think of what Kusaka will do if future XY remakes bring back the scrapped alien invasion plot. A potential reveal that Xerneas and Yveltal were alien superweapons all along works fine, but how do you explain Team Flare suddenly being aliens?
ORAS had to make the new Magma and Aqua admins into separate characters because of how different the new designs were. And I also vaguely remember a Coronis summary mentioning some metaphysical shenanigans to explain Matsubasa and Aogiri (Maxie and Archie) switching personalities. What was that again?
But explaining Team Flare members suddenly not even being human is something you would need a ridiculously over-the-top excuse for.
