Pokémon Legends: Arceus' Bagin Is The Worst | Screen Rant
There are many delightful and charming characters in Pokémon Legends: Arceus, but there's also one that's already universally hated by the fanbase, and that's Bagin. The Security Corps member who doesn't seem to do anything but guard one stairway and charge exorbitant prices to help the player character upgrade their inventory, Bagin has quickly become the target of many fans' ire due to his less-than-reasonable price tags. Already, there's a slew of memes and fan art expressing just how much Bagin has irritated players everywhere, and he's largely considered to be even worse than the game's main antagonist.
In Pokémon Legends: Arceus, players start out with 20 inventory slots, each one of which can hold any number of one type of item. It may sound like a lot, but between Poké Balls, medicine, materials, and miscellaneous items, they fill up quickly. Traversing the Pokémon safari that Legends: Arceus offers is treacherous, so players need a lot of items. Thankfully, the game has included the option to buy more slots, with the aid of a Security Corps member named Bagin, conveniently located just within Galaxy Hall. He charges a fee for each slot, and while it may seem like a good deal at first, it doesn't stay that way. His prices quickly rise from a mere 100 to the tens of thousands, ending at 1,000,000 units of the game's currency.
Bagin's high prices are only a part of the reason why players agree that he's the worst character in the game, however. The eerie statement he tells players when they refuse his services has many choosing to believe that he's actively malevolent. Many fans seem to agree that Legends: Arceus' inventory expansion was implemented poorly, but there are ways the developers could have improved it. Just like the Arc Phone, Pokémon Legends: Arceus doesn't need poorly-implemented mechanics like this. Hopefully, it'll be fixed in future DLC, and players who have already paid Bagin in excess will get some compensation for it in the game.
Many fans agree that Bagin is the worst character in Pokémon Legends: Arceus by a mile, and it's easy to see why. His inventory expansions are a huge drain on the player's hard-earned funds, and although items like Stardust and Pokeshi Dolls help to close the gap, the fact remains that he charges too much for too little. More than that, however, is what he says. When players choose not to buy another inventory slot, he leaves them with a message that, while innocuous at first glance, becomes almost threatening when one thinks hard about it: "There're times when a single item can mean the difference between life or death, you know." It's creepy, to say the least. Pokémon Legends: Arceus' protagonist's age is just 15, which means that Bagin is price-gouging and possibly threatening a minor out of four million of Hisui's currency by the time they get all of the game's extra inventory slots.
Possibly the worst thing about Bagin, however, is that his services are sadly necessary. Inventory slots in Legends: Arceus fill up fast, so players need all of them that they can get. Between the various types of Poké Balls, medicines, and stealth items, to say nothing of the materials needed to make them all, satchels can never be big enough to hold everything that one needs when creating Hisui's first Pokédex. More than that, however, Bagin doesn't even change the satchel at all. He only teaches players how to more efficiently pack it, which makes little sense given the sheer amount of items that they carry around at any given time. Pokémon Legends: Arceus' great art design means that there are a lot of stunning sights to see in the game, but the satchel isn't one of them. It remains the same basic bag that players get at the start of the game. Bagin wouldn't be so bad if he at least enacted a visual change on the player character's satchel, but he chooses not to.
Although many agree that Bagin is one of the most hated characters in the Pokémon series, he didn't have to be. There are many ways that the developers could have better-implemented Legends: Arceus' inventory expansion, and one would be to keep the prices low. Capping the maximum prices at around 10,000 or so would go a long way towards lessening the fanbase's hatred of Bagin. Alternatively, the inventory slots that he provides could have come in groups. Pokémon Legends: Arceus should have learned from BOTW and not given players only one slot at a time when upgrading. There are five slots in a single row, so getting five for each expansion would have been a much better way to stretch the satchel.
Another way to make expansion better would be to have players use items, instead of money, to get more inventory slots. Instead of just teaching the player character how to play Tetris, Bagin could have upgraded the satchel itself, and used items like Caster Ferns and Stardust to do so. Although it would still be an annoying grind that would involve hunting down a lot of rare items as time went on, it would be better than the current system, especially if the satchel got some visual changes like Jubilife Village and its shops do later in the game.
Bagin might be bad now, but he doesn't have to stay that way. Legends: Arceus' DLC could feature more than Pokémon that weren't in the base game, and will hopefully include a fix for the inventory expansion. A DLC pack, or at the very least, a free update, could patch the game and make Bagin's practices a little fairer, whether it's with one of the methods mentioned above or one that the developers choose for themselves. It could even take the opportunity to poke fun at itself, and have Cyllene or Commander Komado call the player into their office, where Bagin is waiting, and force him to apologize for his relentless price-gouging.
If this is the case, then it may seem like too little, too late, but it could come with some form of in-game compensation for players who have already shelled out millions to Bagin. Some see Legends: Arceus as a template for Pokémon games yet to come, so it should fix its mistakes in order to give players the best gameplay experience possible, and set the tone for the series moving forward. Although it's unlikely that the developers will choose to refund all of the in-game currency that they've spent getting expansion lessons, it could give them some rare and valuable items, or at the very least, a pile of Poké Balls. Pokémon Legends: Arceus may have the most hated character in the series so far, but it's not too late to fix it.