Darumaka and Darmanitan

For reasons I’ll get to later, this one’s a bit of an odd duck (I mean this figuratively, of course, in contrast to Psyduck, who actually is an odd duck).  Allow me to introduce the Zen Charm Pokémon, Darumaka, and his evolved form Darmanitan... two Pokémon that I personally find tremendously annoying, because if you fail to deal with them promptly they can and will leave huge smoking holes in your team.  Most Fire Pokémon are very active but these guys are turned up to eleven, their internal fires producing enormous quantities of energy that they will burn up by any means necessary – and I do mean any; they even use their droppings as a way of offloading excess heat; I know this because the Pokédex tells us that people used to carry Darumaka droppings in their pockets to keep themselves warm (Pokémon: it’s kind of like that).  Heaven help you if you get into a fight with a Darumaka while it’s fired up, so to speak – but, that said, they’re not by nature aggressive Pokémon, just overwhelmingly energetic.  Eventually, of course, their energy runs out, and that’s when Darumaka earns  his name; while asleep, he tucks his arms and legs up inside his egg-shaped body, rocking gently on his base and steadfastly refusing to be pushed over because of his low centre of gravity, exactly like a traditional Japanese doll associated with Zen Buddhism called a daruma.  Daruma are popular as good luck charms and make a cute and culturally interesting basis for a Pokémon.  It’s odd that a Pokémon based on a Zen charm should be so different from what most people picture when they think of Zen Buddhism – calmness, introspection, peace – but more on that later.  Now, if Darumaka is turned up to eleven, Darmanitan just plain blows up the meter.  With a disturbing manic grin, a core temperature well in excess of 1000̊ C (for reference, this is about the temperature of lava) and a right hook that can take out a bus, this is one orang-utan you don’t want to mess with.  Normally I might be complaining about how insane Darmanitan looks (compare, for instance, my reaction to Patrat) but I think that’s what they were actually going for this time – and it worked.  Dear gods it worked.

Darmanitan’s stats back him up on everything I just said; he’s not very tough but he’ll take a hit or two if he really has to, he’s fast but still slower than a lot of other Pokémon, and he hits like a SCUD missile.  His attack stat is high by the standards of legendary Pokémon; there are embodied divinities that don’t hit as hard as Darmanitan.  Flare Blitz, a high-powered physical Fire attack with significant recoil damage, is Darmanitan’s standby (although Fire Punch is workable as well; it’s normally a tad on the weak side but Darmanitan’s passive ability, Sheer Force, exchanges Fire Punch’s chance to cause burns for extra power, and the lack of recoil damage will allow him to last longer).  As we’ve learnt from the example of Emboar and his predecessors, Fighting attacks are a great complement to Fire attacks, and Darmanitan has two or three good ones to choose from.  The good old standbys Earthquake and Rock Slide are on his list too (don’t use Stone Edge on Darmanitan; Rock Slide is better on him because it has an effect – a flinch chance – to swap out for damage using Sheer Force), as is U-Turn, which runs somewhat counter to the prevailing instinct to stuff as much damage into Darmanitan as possible but is useful for its secondary effect: switching the user out after the attack lands.  Other than the possibility of using U-Turn, Darmanitan is really just a point-and-shoot Pokémon; you aim him at your enemies (be they other Pokémon, buildings you need demolished, aberrant geological formations, or small nations) and get out of the way.  Or at least... typical Darmanitan are like that.  See, like most Pokémon, Darmanitan has a hidden ability, an alternative passive skill normally possessed by Pokémon from Black and White’s online area, the Dream World (although you can actually find wild Darmanitan with this ability in-game).  It’s this ability that makes Darmanitan, as I said earlier, a bit of an odd duck...

Darmanitan’s Dream World ability is Zen Mode.  When a Darmanitan with this ability loses more than half of its hit points in a fight, it will suddenly metamorphose into a stone statue, totally abandoning the manic hyperactivity that characterises Darumaka and Darmanitan and becoming preternaturally calm and focussed.

Told you it was odd.

This metamorphosis changes Darmanitan’s powers completely.  His attack and special attack stats reverse, making him physically weak but granting him phenomenal energy attacks.  He slows down and can no longer outrun much of anything at all but, being made of stone, becomes very resilient.  Finally, he picks up a second type, becoming a Fire/Psychic dual-type.  From a flavour perspective this is a tremendously interesting ability that makes for a wholly unique Pokémon.  It’s just a really cool idea, and nicely ties into the Zen theme I was talking about before.

The problem is that mechanically it just doesn’t work.

There’s two major problems with using a Zen Darmanitan.  The first is that, like all Pokémon, Darmanitan can only memorise four different moves.  While he’s healthy, he’ll want moves like Flare Blitz and Superpower to make use of his monstrous attack stat.  While he’s injured, he’ll want moves like Fire Blast, Psychic, Focus Blast and Grass Knot or maybe Solarbeam to exploit his monstrous special attack stat.  Splitting his move-set up sharply diminishes the type coverage he can achieve in both forms.  The other problem is to do with training... if you know what the acronym “EV” stands for in this context, you already know what I’m going to say; if you don’t... well, without getting into detail, Pokémon can be trained to focus on two or three of their stats to the exclusion of the others, and are almost universally more effective if you do just that, since it helps to tailor them to the specific roles you have in mind.  The issue for a Zen Darmanitan is that the transition from physical glass cannon (a role which prioritises attack and speed) to special tank (a role which prioritises hit points, defence, special defence and special attack, in no particular order) when he hits 50% health is so jarring that it’s all but impossible to train one that will work effectively in both states.  Moreover, the Zen form is shot in the foot from the beginning by being a defensive Pokémon that, by default, starts with half of its health missing (and if you heal him up somehow, he’ll just shift back to his normal form).  It’s an awesome idea but making it work as intended would have required a far more complex implementation.

Here’s the thing.  I think that Darumaka and Darmanitan are cool, interesting Pokémon, but the idea that makes them cool and interesting just hasn’t translated properly into the game mechanics.  Zen Mode is what makes Darmanitan truly unique but honestly he’s much better off without it, and since there is another choice available (and Sheer Force is indubitably a strong option) there’s not much of an argument for using Darmanitan as anything other than a fairly generic Fire-type.  He’s a Pokémon that is actively punished by the game mechanics for trying to be different, and this is (I declare with all the authority of a random blogger on the internet) Bad Design and a depressing waste of a good concept.  It’s not his fault, but I have to be cruel here or they’ll never learn.

I hereby deny this Pokémon’s right to exist!  Let it be mercilessly graffiti’d in its sleep and then buried forever in the desert sands!

Tepig, Pignite and Emboar

Yes, I’ve finally gotten around to the second of Unova’s three starters, the Fire-type Tepig... and so far it doesn’t look so bad.  Tepig is pretty cute, I have to admit, and while it’s not the first time we’ve had a pig Pokémon, it is very different from the previous one – Grumpig is a manipulative Psychic-type that specialises in soaking up elemental attacks, while Tepig is intended as a physically-inclined heavy hitter with a bit of survivability.  The only major gripe I have with Tepig is that his name is a little bit daft.  I don’t know whether Tepig had a fan nickname before the English release of Black and White came out like Snivy and Oshawott (a.k.a. Smugleaf and Wotter) did, but if he had one it has to have been better than Tepig.  I understand Game Freak must be running out of fire puns by now – they’ve already used char, magma, flare, molten, cinder, lava, explosion, torch, combust, blaze, erupt, coal and heat – but was tepid really the best word they had left?  It makes me think of warm water – not even hot or boiling water, because tepid is basically a synonym for lukewarm.  I’ll let Tepig pass on that, though, because he’s cute, generally nicely put together, and actually almost convinced me, for the first time ever, not to pick the Grass-type starter for my first play-through.  So, let’s see what he evolves int-

...wait, what?

Okay... that just looks ridiculous.  Pignite and Emboar are hardly the worst-designed Pokémon I’ve ever seen, but I’m having a hard time taking them seriously.  Let’s compare them to the first four Fire-type starters.  Charizard is awesome, and that’s not my opinion, that’s fact.  He’s a fire-breathing freakin’ dragon, and he is a living symbol of the criminal negligence of the Poké-world’s government in allowing ten-year-old kids to get their hands on such ridiculous power.  Personally I’ve never liked Typhlosion much, but to be fair to him he looks a lot better the way Ken Sugimori’s drawn him in the official art than he does in-game.  I’m not sure what sort of animal Typhlosion is meant to be, but I’m leaning towards wolverine – one of the most psychotic real-world species on Earth, which Typhlosion lives up to with his access to the rare and devastating Eruption attack.  Blaziken looks pretty silly in her art; personally I think her in-game sprites are a good deal more badass.  While the execution is often less than ideal, I quite like Blaziken’s design – if nothing else, seeing a bird Pokémon that isn’t a Flying-type is refreshing (although the way her concept apparently references the practice of cockfighting has certain unfortunate implications).  I’ve talked in the past about why I like Infernape; mostly because I approve of the idea of a Fighting-type that relies on speed and dexterity rather than physical power.  I know there are people who don’t like Infernape but I for one don’t understand their position; I’ve always thought he’s pretty badass.  Looking at Emboar, the swirling patterns on his chest make me think that the designers were going for the same aesthetic as they did with Infernape (look at the golden swirls on his shoulders, chest, knees and wrists) but went completely overboard with it; Infernape’s design was more subtle with them and it worked.  The barrel-shaped body is supposed to emphasise Emboar’s stability, I guess, but I can’t help but think that it just makes him look fat.  It doesn’t help his case that his signature move, Heat Crash, does damage based on how much heavier he is than his target (incidentally, how come Emboar and Samurott get signature moves and Serperior doesn’t, huh?).  I am gradually warming to Emboar somewhat, mostly because the things I don’t like about him, in particular his total lack of grace, are almost certainly intentional to the design.  I’ve seen worse Pokémon in the past (*cough*Watchog*cough*) and I’m certainly going to again before I’m done with Black and White; I just don’t think he matches up to Charizard or Infernape.  Pignite, on the other hand, really is stupid and nothing is ever going to change that.

While I’m on the subject of unfavourably comparing Emboar to his predecessors, I’d like to bring up my irritation that the designers went for the Fire/Fighting type combination again – this being the same one taken up by Combusken and Monferno, the middle forms of Blaziken and Infernape.  Why?  No-one thought that Servine and Dewott needed secondary types, so why slap one on Pignite?  And, given that this was going to be done, why choose the same secondary type that the past two Fire starters got?  All this aside, it could be worse.  Infernape leaves you with the distinct impression that the design brief for the Sinnoh Fire starter was “Blaziken, only better.”  Compared to Blaziken, Infernape basically exchanges raw power for speed (he also gets a better selection of moves; some Pokémon have all the luck).  The thing is, though, neither one can really take a hit, but Infernape is fast enough not to care because he can level his targets before they can fight back – and Fire and Fighting are such good attacking types with such powerful attacks available to them, notably Flare Blitz, Close Combat and Fire Blast, that Infernape’s relatively weaker attacking strength doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things (in Black and White Blaziken gets her own back by gaining the obscenely good Speed Boost ability, but that’s another story).  I was momentarily worried that Emboar was going to be just another out of the same mould, since that had been proven to be a winning formula, but a look at his design and a brief glance at his numbers are enough to tell that Nintendo was going for something quite different this time.  In terms of offensive might, he blows Infernape out of the water, and he’s tougher as well, but he’s also quite slow.  The point was clearly to build something capable of taking a hit and then striking back with overwhelming force.  The problem is that it’s not going to work.  Emboar is tough... compared to Blaziken and Infernape, who take hits like teenage pop-stars.  Compared to other tank Pokémon he’s really nothing special.  The other problem is that while offensively Fire and Fighting are two great tastes that taste great together, defensively they’re really nothing special.  In particular, the idea of a Fire-type tank is badly damaged by the weaknesses to Earthquake and Surf, two of the most common attacks in the game.  I’m being very hard on Emboar again, though.  He can hit hard with both physical and elemental attacks and his movepool is pretty impressive: as well as his Fire and Fighting attacks, he can learn Earthquake, Stone Edge, Head Smash, Wild Charge... if you’re willing to work with his weaker special attack stat, there’s Grass Knot, and even a Water-type attack, Scald, making him (as far as I know) the only Fire Pokémon in existence to learn a strong Water attack.  You can even try to patch up his terrible speed with Flame Charge, a weak new physical Fire attack that makes its user faster with every strike.  With all these options, and more I won’t get into, I’m sure you could make something out of Emboar – it’s just that, once again, he won’t match up to the other Fire/Fighting starters since his defences are quite suspect and he’s too slow to forget it.

I really don’t know about Tepig, Pignite and Emboar.  Well, okay, that’s not entirely true; I love Tepig and I hate Pignite, but I really, really don’t know about Emboar.  I don’t like him personally but I’m not happy calling him an objectively bad design either.  He’s far from unusable; in fact he’s probably stronger than most of the Pokémon I’ve looked at so far, but I think we’re all sick of Fire/Fighting starters after Blaziken and Infernape and it doesn’t help that Emboar simply doesn’t meet the standard of raw kickassery that they set.

Hrmm.

Oh, screw it; I’ll let him live.  But Pignite is to be cast into the pit!

I hereby affirm this Pokémon’s right to exist!

Larvesta and Volcarona

Visit an island near Nuvema Town, the starting location in Black and White, and you might meet a Pokémon Ranger with a mysterious egg to give away.  This mysterious egg will hatch into a fascinating insect, which will probably set you on fire.  With any luck this, like that regrettable incident between Ash and Pikachu, will signify the beginning of a lifelong friendship.  Unless you just decide to squash it.  Meet Larvesta, the torch Pokémon!

Personally I think Larvesta is cute but I could understand if she had her dissenters.  I don’t think there’s any question, though, that it’s a fun design.  The solar image created by her horns stands out nicely, and the idea of a larval insect that lives around volcanoes is just cool.  Combining the Bug and Fire elements is something Pokémon hasn’t done before and frankly I think it would have been a difficult idea to screw up, which illustrates something that I don’t think Game Freak have cottoned onto yet – there’s still a bunch of type combinations they haven’t tried yet, and just picking one at random is almost certain to suggest some interesting flavour as well as creating a mechanically unique Pokémon.  Even if they had picked the boring, obvious choice as the base for this Pokémon – a firefly – I think it could have worked.  They didn’t, of course, and instead we get a caterpillar which evolves (at a ridiculously high level, I might add – I used this thing in my first play-through and believe you me, she takes patience) into... yet another moth.  There have been no fewer than six butterfly and moth Pokémon in the past and I am getting sick of it.  Beautifly and Dustox from Ruby and Sapphire were sad, depressing knock-offs of Butterfree and Venomoth and everyone knows it.  I honestly believe the pitch for them went something like this: “Okay, guys, this is gonna be great.  Let’s draw new art for Caterpie, Metapod and Butterfree, mess with their stats a little bit, tack on an alternate evolutionary path that leads to an inferior version of Venomoth, and presto!  We’ve made five new Pokémon and hardly done any work at all!  And best of all, no-one will notice the similarities because we’re not going to put Caterpie in the new game anyway!  It’s foolproof!”

That had nothing to do with Volcarona, but I really needed to rant about it.

Number five, Masquerain, I actually don’t mind because he has both flavour aspects and mechanical abilities to distinguish him from all the others; like many real-world insects, he uses the huge eye patterns on his wings to trick and frighten predators (and thus has the ever-useful Intimidate ability) and he has vague associations with weather, rain and water (he evolves from a water-strider, Surskit, and can predict rain) and so can learn Hydro Pump, Rain Dance, and Ice Beam.  Masquerain’s a good example, actually, of a Pokémon that’s not all that strong but is nicely designed and deserves to live anyway.  Mothim, on the other hand, deserves to die in a fire but I should really get back to Volcarona.  Volcarona is one of those honorary legendary Pokémon that crop up from time to time; there are stories about how her fire provided light and heat for people in times when the sun was blocked out by volcanic activity, and it’s implied that at least one ancient civilisation worshipped Volcarona as a solar deity – you find a wild one lingering in a room that looks like it used to be a shrine to them.  “Pokémon that were worshipped as gods” is a fun theme, and I like that Volcarona does it without going over the top the way many legendary Pokémon do (case in point: Palkia and Dialga, who are pretty godlike in their powers over space and time, and Arceus, who may very well be a legitimate divine being – remember, Game Freak, people are going to capture these things).  Like many of the larger moths of the real world, Volcarona has a touch of majesty about her that makes her a very impressive ally to have at your side.

So, is Volcarona powerful?  Hoo boy.  Volcarona is fast, has one of the highest special attack stats in the game, and isn’t a pushover defensively either.  She learns Quiver Dance, one of the most wonderful new moves Black and White gave us, which enhances special attack, speed and special defence all at once (it’s also exclusive to butterfly and moth Pokémon, plus Lilligant, so Volcarona is the strongest Pokémon to learn it by a long way).  She even has a cool signature move, Fiery Dance, a Fire attack which is weaker than the traditional standby, Flamethrower, but makes all her special attacks even stronger every time she uses it.  Sadly, besides her various Fire techniques and her primary Bug-type attack, Bug Buzz, the only notable special attack she has is Psychic, which is not known for wide type-coverage.  If you want to put her on a sun-themed team, there’s also Solarbeam, which is nice because Grass and Fire attacks complement each other fairly well, but it’ll never be viable without a source of sunlight (she also has access to Morning Sun for healing, which is normally somewhat unreliable because most weather conditions reduce its effectiveness, but on a sun team it would work like a charm if you wanted a bulkier Volcarona).  Compared to many other sweeper-type Pokémon, Volcarona can’t score as many super-effective hits – but between Quiver Dance, Fiery Dance and her already ridiculous special attack score, her destructive potential is already so immense that I honestly don’t care.  Volcarona isn’t perfect, of course.  Bug/Fire isn’t exactly a bad type, with five resistances and only three weaknesses, but one of those is a double-weakness to Rock attacks.  The Pokémon community at large has two words for anything with a double-weakness to Rock attacks: Stealth Rock.  Using Stealth Rock, a technique introduced in Diamond/Pearl, scatters dozens of pointed rocks that defy gravity and float in the air, stabbing your opponent’s Pokémon every time a new one switches in.  It’s not much use against AI trainers because they rarely switch at all but when you’re fighting a real person chances are both of you will switch practically every other turn, so everyone uses Stealth Rock.  The thing about Stealth Rock is that, unlike the older Spikes, which has a similar effect, Stealth Rock has an element (Rock) and so its damage scales according to how a Pokémon feels about rocks.  If it doesn’t mind so much, Stealth Rock does hardly any damage at all.  If, like Volcarona, it hates rocks with a passion, Stealth Rock will knock off a full 50% of its health every time it switches in.  Thus, if you are going to use Volcarona, you must have a Pokémon with Rapid Spin on your team, even if you have no idea what that means, because using Rapid Spin will clear away nonsense like Stealth Rock and allow Volcarona to wreak havoc like the god of fiery devastation she is.

Volcarona is a crazily powerful Pokémon, but she has a couple of flaws – a narrow movepool and that horrid weakness to Rock attacks – that stop her from going overboard, which I guess is nice as a nod to game balance, even though the notion of “game balance” is something that the Pokémon series has repeatedly beaten, tarred, feathered, raped, set on fire and crucified (and not necessarily in that order).  She’s also a good illustration of just how easy it really is to do something new if only the designers would stop thinking there’s some reason they have to reinvent Pidgey and Rattata every generation – just pick a couple of elements that sound like they’d be fun together and see what happens!  More of this, please, Game Freak – and also, more stuff like that shrine I mentioned; places and events that describe a Pokémon’s place in the world are fun.

I hereby affirm this Pokémon’s right to exist!

Maractus

Some days I get to talk about Pokémon that are just really awesome.  Whether by design, or mechanics, or the way the mechanics fit the design, or some other little twist – because Game Freak do still make Pokémon like this.  That’s the real reason for this blog, actually; I realise I probably give the impression that I’m here primarily to bitch about Pokémon that aren’t up to standard, but remember that I do still play these games and love them.  That’s right, Game Freak, I’m on your side.  I’m here to answer the people who complain that Pokémon has been going downhill since Gold and Silver (or since Ruby and Sapphire, or whatever, there’s a batch of ‘em for every generation).  And some days, I get to do just that.

Other days I get Maractus.

Maractus is a dancing cactus.  It could be worse; in much the same way that destitution could be worse, because at least you don’t have the plague yet.  We’ve had “dancing plant” before, and we’ve had “cactus” before, but Maractus is so different from the last cactus that I’m sort of willing to let her off on that one.  Cacturne, her predecessor, was a sinister nocturnal hunter whose purpose in existence is to remind you what a scary place the desert is – and in my opinion, he did that pretty well.  Maractus is a bright, happy diurnal performer, and on some level I can’t help but be annoyed by making a desert Pokémon so unrelentingly cheerful.  When Maractus dances, she makes sounds like those of a pair of maracas (hence the name) as she moves, and I think she sings too – and this scares away bird Pokémon that would try to eat her seeds.  Never mind that she’s already a cactus and presumably covered in little bristly spikes to keep the birds off.  These are specific problems that I personally have with Maractus.  The thing is, though, often when a Pokémon doesn’t appeal to me I can at least see that it might appeal to someone else.  In this case... I really don’t know who the designers thought would like Maractus.  She’s not really cute, she’s not clever, she’s certainly not badass... looking at her, I think they were going for cute, but compared to some of the things Game Freak have had to work with in the past, making a cute Pokémon out of a flowering cactus should have been child’s play.  I’m tempted to say that their mistake was straying in the direction of humanoid; I know it seems like the obvious route for a cactus but it’s clearly not the only possibility and I think another form would have worked much better (humanoid also further invites comparison to Cacturne, which is never a good thing).  I don’t often like saying that a design is objectively bad (well, unless it’s totally derivative or suffers from a complete disconnect with the game mechanics, neither of which Maractus is guilty of) but this one has me tempted.

Now, if we turn on the other hand to the mechanical aspects of how Maractus is put together, I can without hesitation come up with a whole slew of objective reasons why this is a dumb Pokémon.  To start things off, Maractus upholds the grand Grass-type tradition of having a tiny, poorly-put together movepool.  I don’t know that I’d say her movepool is as bad as Lilligant’s, but only because Maractus’s physical attack stat is decent enough for her to use Poison Jab without being laughed at.  Well, no, okay, that was a lie; no-one can use Poison Jab without being laughed at because Poison attacks are awful, but Maractus’s physical attack stat is decent enough for her to pretend she doesn’t care.  Small victories.  Even Maractus’s support movepool is pretty bad, though, which is distressing because that’s normally a Grass-type’s saving grace; the only promising techniques I can see are the traditional Grass-type mainstay Leech Seed, and Spikes, which sets up a trap to damage your opponent’s Pokémon on every switch.  If nothing else, Maractus’s passive abilities are nice.  Chlorophyll allows Maractus to actually move quickly if you have something set up Sunny Day for her, which, combined with her good special attack stat, would make her rather threatening.  Unfortunately Chlorophyll isn’t exactly unusual for a Grass-type, so using a Maractus with Chlorophyll tends to invite rather awkward questions, such as “why not use Exeggutor?”, “why not use Shiftry?”, “why not use Tangrowth?”, and “for heaven’s sake, why not use Leavanny?”, questions to which Maractus doesn’t really have an answer.  Much better to go with Storm Drain (unfortunately this is Maractus’s “hidden ability” so, unless Maractus should suddenly appear in the Dream World, we’ll have to wait for Game Freak to come up with some other way to get a Storm Drain Maractus).  Storm Drain grants total immunity to Water-type moves (which means that Water attacks represent an opportunity for Maractus to switch in for free, which we like) and also boosts her special attack whenever a Water attack hits her, thus giving Maractus the potential to act as a very effective answer to Water Pokémon in general.  She’ll still be slow without Chlorophyll, of course, and her nonexistent special movepool will quickly put a stop to most anything she might have planned when her Water-type opponent retreats and something trickier comes out instead, but, well, better a one-trick-pony than a dead horse...

You know, I think Game Freak have taken up some kind of position that there should be more Grass-types, but don’t have many actual ideas for Grass-types.  This is why they keep churning out frightfully generic Grass Pokémon like Bellossom, and Sunflora, and Cherrim, and Carnivine, and Leafeon, and Simisage, and Lilligant, which are neither interesting nor useful.  Part of the trouble is that they seem to have a number of preconceived notions about what Grass Pokémon are and are not allowed to do, and the list of things they are not allowed to do is very long and includes the vast majority of useful special attacks (example: there is one Grass Pokémon that can learn Thunderbolt and one that can learn Surf; there are two that can learn Ice Beam, and you can sure as heck forget about Flamethrower).  The result is an irritating surplus of Grass Pokémon like Maractus, whose greatest asset is an excellent special attack stat, and who nonetheless make absolutely terrible special attackers because it is next to impossible to get anywhere on Grass attacks alone, Grass being an appalling offensive type.  Many, such as Vileplume, learn to deal with it by focussing on support instead and using their powerful Grass attacks as a backup, but Maractus is just doomed.  Doomed, useless, and, if I am any judge, unloved (and if anyone can love a useless Grass-type, it’s me; trust me on that).

I hereby deny this Pokémon’s right to exist!  Hand it over to the Mexicans and see if they can’t get some tequila out of it...

Reshiram and Zekrom

Seeing as I just finished talking about the story of Black and White, I may as well take the opportunity to look a little more closely at the two Pokémon that are central to that story: the dragons of truth and idealism, Reshiram and Zekrom.  The design for these two has its roots in the Taoist concept of yin-yang, which I believe states (forgive me; I’m a little hazy on exactly how Taoism works) that the world and everything in it come into being through the interaction and harmonisation of opposites.  In much the same way, Unova, the region in which Pokémon Black and White are set, is said to have been created by Reshiram and Zekrom working in harmony, as a single being (and then devastated when the two split apart and fought).  To play into this theme of dualism, Reshiram is graceful, avian and feminine, with a soft-sounding name, while Zekrom is dynamic, saurian and masculine, with a hard-sounding name.  This is all wonderful and I love the way the designs complement each other and develop the theme and all that, and it’s very nicely done... but there’s one thing nagging at me.  They’re the wrong way around.  Reshiram, the white dragon, referred to in the Japanese Pokédex as the “White Yang Pokémon”, has soft, feminine traits – which are normally considered yin traits.  The opposite traits associated with Zekrom, the “Black Yin Pokémon”, are typical examples of yang traits.  A rationalisation does occur to me, though, as I look at the box art for Black and White.  Because you catch Reshiram on Black and Zekrom on White, they’re both set against contrasting backgrounds on the box art, which reminds me a little of the black spot in the yang half of the yin-yang symbol, and the corresponding white spot in the yin half... That seems like a somewhat fishy justification to me so I hope the designers had a better one in mind, but then again, the idea of dualism and the harmony of opposites is more important than the actual properties traditionally associated with yin and yang anyway.  It’s not something worth throwing a major tantrum about; I suppose I'm nitpicking again, but it does seem like a really basic thing to mix up when the designers seem to have been so committed to the idea (and not just in Zekrom and Reshiram either; the theme of opposites turns up repeatedly in the rest of Black and White as well).

The thing that really bothers me about Zekrom and Reshiram is that the games are so vague on the meanings of the values they’re supposed to represent.  Supposedly, when they were one dragon long ago they were befriended by twin brothers who initially worked together but later quarrelled because one was most concerned with truth and the other more interested in ideals, and the dragon split into two in response to their argument.  In the story of Black and White, you take on the role of one of the brothers and your opposite number, N, assumes the place of the other, but which way around you are is apparently immaterial (N is the hero of ideals on Black and the hero of truth on White, but it makes no difference to his beliefs or actions), since neither Reshiram’s truth nor Zekrom’s ideals can be meaningfully linked to either side of the debate about the liberation of Pokémon that forms the basis of the games’ conflict (they could have represented honour and freedom, or kindness and faith, or macaroni and cheese for all the difference it would have made to the plot).  This is the reason they’re so vaguely defined, of course: if “truth” and “ideals” actually meant something more than “generic virtue that both N and the player could reasonably be said to possess” then some much more substantial changes to the dialogue would have been necessary between Black and White, and possibly some major differences in the plot – and if there’s one thing we know about Game Freak, it’s that although they always want to release two Pokémon games, they certainly aren’t keen to be in the position of having to actually make two Pokémon games.  As a result... well, Reshiram supposedly stands for “truth,” but doesn’t demand particular honesty, curiosity or knowledge of her chosen hero, or indeed anything else that could be said to be related to “truth,” and as for Zekrom’s “ideals,” well, they’re even worse.  If you had asked me, I would have said that “truth” is itself an “ideal,” and that saying Zekrom stands for “ideals” means absolutely nothing unless you explain what those ideals actually are – which, of course, Black and White never do... not that it matters anyway.  In short, all that’s really important here is that these two dragons are opposed; the how and the why of it are largely irrelevant.

There’s not a whole lot to say about what Zekrom and Reshiram are like if you take them into battle, but I may as well say it.  As top-tier legendary Pokémon, these two are devastatingly powerful and belong in the so-called “Uber” class – that is, Pokémon so over-the-top that using them without the prior agreement of your opponent would be exceptionally bad form (examples: Mewtwo, Mew, Ho-oh, Lugia, but not, for instance, Articuno, Zapdos and Moltres – we’re talking now about stuff so absurd that a lot of other legendary Pokémon don’t compare).  Zekrom is an Electric-type with a focus on physical attacks and Reshiram is a Fire-type with a focus on energy attacks, and although they are both ludicrously strong I would be fairly happy to declare Reshiram the better of the two.  Dragon/Electric is a solid type, but Dragon/Fire is quite possibly the best offensive combination in the game.  See, only one element resists Dragon attacks – Steel – and Steel-types are also weak against Fire attacks, so the only way to resist both is to be a Steel type with a special ability that grants immunity to Fire (i.e. you have to be Heatran) – and even that doesn’t work against Reshiram because she and Zekrom are both just so awesome that their attacks ignore the effects of all passive abilities.  The result is that Reshiram doesn’t even need secondary attacks because her primary attacks alone will kill everything.  Poor Zekrom, on the other hand, loses out because Electric doesn’t have the wonderful synergy with Dragon that Fire does, and then loses out again because some jerk decided that he shouldn’t get Earthquake, which would be his go-to move for most Steel-types.  Not that Zekrom has any right to complain; his Outrage attack can still flatten the vast majority of things that aren’t made of titanium alloy, and he has plenty of other dangerous attacks to draw on, notably Stone Edge and Crunch.  Both Reshiram and Zekrom have been given awesome signature moves as well – Blue Flare and Bolt Strike.  Reshiram’s Blue Flare is just a slightly more powerful version of the Fire Blast that she would otherwise be using, but Bolt Strike really is a wonderful toy for Zekrom. As I’ve said, Zekrom focuses on physical attacks, and the thing about Electric-types is that most of their physical attacks are dreadful and make you wish you’d just stuck to Thunderbolt.  Bolt Strike, on the other hand, is stronger and much more accurate than Thunder, and like Outrage allows Zekrom to plough through most anything that doesn’t resist it.

It’s dead easy to make a phenomenally strong legendary Pokémon – just slap some big numbers and strong attacks on them; at this point you’re throwing game balance out the window anyway, so go nuts (and even this, Game Freak has managed to screw up in the past – I’m looking at you, Regigigas).  It’s far more important to make sure that your legendary Pokémon have an interesting story and add something to the mythology of the setting, because that’s what they’re really for – I mean, we do call them “legendary Pokémon” for a reason.  I’ve spent a fair amount of time in this entry complaining that Reshiram and Zekrom have a vague concept that doesn’t really make all that much sense, but I'm only doing it because someone has to.  I don’t actually dislike them; I think they’re very well done.  Zekrom is cool and Reshiram is beautiful, exactly as they are supposed to be, and they make believable opposites.  I think these two needed more work; I want that to be clear.  This is what the designers should have been spending more time on when they were screwing around making junk like Unfezant and Basculin.  But they’re not bad at all; legendary Pokémon rarely are since they tend to be given comparatively good attention in the design process.  This being the case... 

I hereby affirm this Pokémon's right to exist!

Team Plasma

Hmm.

I'll start by giving you the short version.

There's this group of hardline animal rights activists who dress up as mediaeval knights and-

Yeah, you're right; that does sound stupid.

The truth is, just like Team Galactic, Team Plasma are pretty silly.  The grunts wear costumes that look like mediaeval tunics and chainmail (and yes, I'm pretty sure that's what they're meant to look like) and they don't help matters by using “Plasmaaaaa!” as their battle-cry (it gets worse when one of them decides to coin an adjective to describe anything bad for Team Plasma: “Plasbad”).  As for their leader, Ghetsis... well, he looks like he's accidentally stumbled in from a high fantasy setting, wearing an enormous blue-and-yellow robe with huge eye-like patterns embroidered on it and some kind of angular monocle made from red glass; the whole ensemble simply defies description and is lacking only a ludicrously ornate sceptre to complete the image (his colleagues, the other six of the so-called “Seven Sages,” wear mercifully plain clothing which, while very old-fashioned, would not seem horribly out-of-place on oriental wise men).  The only explanation I can think of for making Ghetsis so ridiculously over-the-top is that Game Freak wanted to make absolutely sure that the kids would know when playing the game that he's the bad guy – because, believe it or not, if you don't already know that anything called a “Team” in Pokemon is a bad guy, you might not immediately realise it.

Team Plasma and Ghetsis appear far earlier in Black and White than any previous Pokemon villains ever have, turning up in the very first town you visit after leaving home, Accumula Town.  Ghetsis is here to drum up support for Team Plasma – and it's working.  Team Plasma preaches that capturing Pokemon and using them to battle is wrong and that all trainers should release their Pokemon back into the wild so that they can achieve their true potential, which is stifled by being subject to the selfish desires of humans.

...this is what the whole damn series should have been about!

I mean it; this is possibly the most obvious conflict inherent to the setting of Pokemon and I can hardly believe this is the first time it's been addressed in the games, but I'm glad Game Freak have finally gotten around to it.  Team Plasma steal Pokemon from trainers, but most of them appear to genuinely believe that they're doing it for the good of the Pokemon themselves.  They seem like hypocrites for using Pokemon themselves, but in fairness they wouldn't exactly get very far without any and they sincerely intend to release their Pokemon once their cause gains momentum and public opinion is on their side – a couple of them mention feeling conflicted, since they've grown attached to their Pokemon but believe that freeing them is the right thing to do.  On the other hand, the typical Team Plasma grunts are single-minded zealots who will quite happily take away the Pokemon companions of very young children, secure in the belief that the Pokemon will be better off in the long run, and the dialogue tends to emphasise their callousness – again, I suspect this is so that the kids don't get confused about who the bad guys are.  While clearly villains, they're villains you can understand, at a stretch maybe even empathise with, to a far greater degree than is possible for any of the previous antagonists.  The things Ghetsis says at his rallies are actually rather convincing and it doesn't feel forced or unbelievable when people in the crowd start asking each other whether he might be right – even the Castelia Gym Leader, Burgh, although he doesn't agree with Team Plasma's position, concedes that Ghetsis has a point and is persuaded to give serious thought to his relationship with his Pokemon. This sort of thing doesn't just make for a better story, it's exploring an issue that sticks out like a sore thumb to anyone unfamiliar with the series and I like it.

Team Plasma proper don't really exploit the potential of this concept as well as they might – as I said, the writers seem to have wanted them to be unambiguously villainous – but there is one character who absolutely does: N.  N is a profoundly strange teenager whom you meet several times throughout the game.  He claims he can understand the voices of Pokemon, and indeed he does seem to be able to get a fair bit of information out of your Pokemon when you let him speak to them.  He makes a point of referring to Pokemon as his friends, and although he battles you no fewer than five times over the course of Black and White, he doesn't appear to be a trainer in the normal sense of the word: he doesn't retain any of his Pokemon from one battle to the next and seems to call wild Pokemon from nearby areas to help him each time.  N, like Team Plasma, believes that Pokemon suffer from being with people and wants to free them from human oppression, but intends to do it by convincing the people of Unova of his point of view and doesn't "liberate" Pokemon by force.  In your third meeting with N, he reveals that he is what Team Plasma refers to as their “king” - he doesn't really “lead” them in any meaningful sense, or take part in their activities, but they all call themselves his subjects, and he is at the centre of all their plans, having been groomed for the role for his entire life (it is heavily implied that N is Ghetsis's son, but even Team Plasma's sages don't know whether this is really true).  N was raised with Pokemon who had been hurt by humans in the past, and knew nothing else of the relationship between humans and Pokemon for most of his life, hence his jaded view of the concept of Pokemon training.  After meeting you and speaking to your Pokemon for the first time, however, he is consistently friendly towards you, viewing you as a rare exception, and is fairly open about his intentions.

N believes that he can bring the people of Unova around to his point of view by befriending one of the two legendary Pokemon that created the region: the white dragon Reshiram, who represents truth, or the black dragon Zekrom, who represents ideals (the game is extremely vague about what sort of “ideals” are meant by this, exactly; I suspect a translation hiccup).  Supposedly two heroes, brothers, were once the companions of these dragons, until the brothers fell out with each other, leading to a catastrophic battle that devastated the region.  N intends to take the place of one of the heroes at the side of one of the dragons so he can win the hearts of the people of Unova and remake the region according to his vision, with humans and Pokemon living separate lives - black and white divided.  N decides that he needs another hero to oppose him at the side of the other dragon in order to test the strength of his beliefs – and what's more, he thinks you would be perfect, because you care for Pokemon as much as he does but stand for a totally opposite set of values.  When Team Plasma break into the ancient Dragonspiral Tower so that N can awaken one of the dragons (Reshiram on White, Zekrom on Black), he tells you to find the other and befriend it so you can face him as an equal, then leaves immediately for the Pokemon League to defeat Alder, the Unovan Champion, with his new friend at his side.  The other dragon, it turns out, is actually kept in the Nacrene Gym-cum-Museum in the guise of the Light Stone (on Black) or the Dark Stone (on White).  You are given the stone, but no-one has any idea how to turn the damn thing on, not even Drayden and Iris, the Dragon masters of Opellucid City, so you just carry it with you and hope it will start responding to you.  When you finally reach the Pokemon League and defeat the Elite Four, you learn that N is just ahead of you and has already beaten Alder, so it's time for you to fight.  N has decided, however, that the Pokemon League just isn't epic enough for your battle and that you should challenge him in his castle (because the king of Team Plasma has to have a castle).  Luckily, this castle is a marvel of engineering and, at N's command, rises up out of the ground to surround the Pokemon league buildings completely.  Like the sequences from the climaxes of Emerald and Platinum, I'm pretty sure that the castle is only there because it looks cool; very little happens there that couldn't have happened at the Pokemon League and it really strains my suspension of disbelief to accept that Team Plasma could build something like this, but the cutscene in which the castle emerges from the ground is admittedly pretty awesome and N is right in that it makes one heck of an epic backdrop.

Ghetsis ushers you into the hall where N is waiting with his dragon.  You still haven't managed to wake yours up, which seems to disappoint N.  He is on the point of telling you to either challenge him and get curb-stomped or just go home when your stone finally gets the idea and your dragon bursts out to appear before you.  You have to capture this one; if you knock it out, N will just tell you to try again, and if your party is full you will be given the option of sending one of your Pokemon back into storage to make room for it.  All this sets us up for an epic battle between Reshiram and Zekrom, which is exactly what happens.  N has a full team of five other Pokemon to back up his dragon too.  All in all, I think this is the most effective way Game Freak have yet chosen to handle a legendary Pokemon, which are a little bit anticlimactic under normal circumstances.  When you defeat N, he admits that he has been starting to doubt his beliefs for some time, after seeing that your treatment of your Pokemon seems to be the norm rather than the exception... but then Ghetsis storms into the room, furious, and explains the truth about Team Plasma.  All along, Ghetsis has been manipulating everyone – his followers, the other six sages, N, the people of Unova – because although he does want all trainers to release their Pokemon, he doesn't want that so the Pokemon can reach their true potential, like he says: he wants it so that he'll be the only person left in Unova with Pokemon, allowing him to take over the region effectively unresisted.  Ghetsis berates N for encouraging you to become the other hero and then losing to you, but is determined to keep his plan on track.  He decides that N can still be the hero he groomed him to be if he squashes you at once, and challenges you himself – and damn, he's tough; after all he effectively takes the place of the champion in the game's structure.  He doesn't have N's legendary dragon, but his Pokemon are at a high enough level to make up for it.  When you defeat Ghetsis, he is arrested and dragged off, while N flies away with his dragon to travel the world – and one hopes that would be the end of it...

...but Game Freak have left themselves some plot hooks to work with when they make the inevitable third game (Grey, one presumes).  Ghetsis, you learn, has been broken out of prison by the Shadow Triad, a group of three teleporting ninjas who show up a couple of times at Team Plasma operations but don't actually do anything other than be sinister; they're like the Boba Fett of the Pokemon world.  I don't think they're really part of Team Plasma per se; they seem to be more like Ghetsis's personal bodyguard and I suspect their loyalty is to him rather than N – certainly they're the only ones who stand by him after the fiasco at the Pokemon League.  The Shadow Triad appear to you, explain that Ghetsis has disappeared (instructing them not to look for him), give you a few items from the previous set of games that wouldn't otherwise be available on Black and White, and vanish.  You hear nothing more from them, Ghetsis, or N, ever.  I expect that this will be built on in the third game (if it isn't, Game Freak will incur my wrath for introducing these superfluous characters and this pointless subplot), but for now this is where the story ends.

In case you couldn't tell, I really like what Game Freak have done with Team Plasma.  The bad guys kind of have a point.  The primary antagonist is a nice guy who genuinely likes and respects you, but there's a true villain behind him for you to hate properly.  In my opinion, this is the most interesting story the main series of Pokemon games has yet produced, no contest.  There are occasional moments of jarring silliness (okay, yes, it's supposed to be a kids' game, but "plasbad"?) and I get the feeling that at least one person at Game Freak wants to toss the franchise headfirst into high fantasy (which, truth be told, I would not be wholly opposed to, but let's do it properly, no?) but overall I think these are good villains with a good story.  And now you know why I'm still playing these damn games even with all the complaining I do about the crazy new Pokemon.

And speaking of crazy new Pokemon... now that I'm home from Greece I'll be returning to my regularly scheduled quest.  There are some excellent designs in the Pokedex that I still need to recognize... and some real shockers that desperately need to die in a fire.

Here goes nothing...

Team Galactic

Okay, everyone, take a deep breath because this one's a doozy. Team Rocket's evil plans threatened first a major corporation and then an entire nation. Team Aqua and Team Magma's climate shenanigans threatened the whole world. When Game Freak went to make Diamond and Pearl, they looked at the villains they had written in the past... and apparently thought something along the lines of “now, how can we top that?” Answer: a villainous team whose evil schemes threaten - I kid you not - reality itself. And they plan it all whilst wearing the kind of bizarre silvery jumpsuits you expect of aliens in dated sci-fi movies and sporting ridiculous turquoise bowl-cuts.

This is going to be great.

Seriously though, by this point I've come to expect weirdness from these games, and besides, Team Galactic are in some ways much better at what they do than their predecessors. The important point is that the general populace of Sinnoh are largely unaware of the fact that Team Galactic are criminals. Anyone who has been directly affected by their activities knows they're up to no good, but they openly maintain two large offices, in Eterna City and Veilstone City, and look for all the world like a legitimate scientific organisation at first glance, albeit a slightly sinister one. Team Galactic claim to be researching sources of energy – and that part is actually true, since their plans demand a great deal of power. In fact, the first couple of times you encounter them, they seem to be looking into harnessing the energy released by Pokemon evolution (this sounds extremely interesting, helps to explain their predilection for stealing Pokemon, and might even have gotten into how Pokemon evolution actually works, but disappointingly it doesn't go anywhere). Later, in Floaroma Town, they take over a large wind power plant with the intention of siphoning electricity – and, according to the leader of this initiative, an androgynous redhead named Mars (who is apparently female, though I for one only learned this in the epilogue of Platinum – I mean, yes, she wears a skirt, but let's be fair here; that means nothing), succeed in collecting quite a bit before you manage to drive them off. After that, the energy theme fades away rather harmlessly; you learn what they're using the stolen power for, but they apparently have enough and lose interest in stealing more or finding new sources of energy.

So what are these sinister plans? There's a fairly nondescript sequence in Eterna City in which Team Galactic are stealing Pokemon for extremely vague reasons, leading to a battle with the second commander, an unambiguously female purple-haired twit named Jupiter. Although Team Galactic are making a nuisance of themselves in Eterna City by stealing Pokemon, you learn from Jupiter that this is not their real purpose there (which raises the question of why they would attract attention to themselves by doing it at all, to which the obvious answer is “because they're the villains, damnit”). They're actually in Eterna to research the town square's statue of a mythical dragon Pokemon, since their leader (like Maxie and Archie before him) is enamoured with the idea of using legendary Pokemon to gain power. You actually meet this leader, Cyrus, independently while traveling and don't immediately learn his affiliation. Upon your first meeting, Cyrus explains his belief that the universe was once perfect, when “only time flowed and space expanded” but has become imperfect because of the creation of living beings with emotions, and that this is the cause of all suffering in the universe. He later tells you that he wishes to create a new world, and that he believes the legendary Pokemon of Sinnoh can help him do that. Shortly afterwards, Team Galactic plots to capture three legendary Pokemon that live in three lakes around Sinnoh: Lake Valour, Lake Acuity, and Lake Verity. These are not the Pokemon Cyrus is interested in; they are in fact the personifications of the three aspects of spirit, the thing Cyrus most despises for being “incomplete”: Uxie, the embodiment of knowledge, Mesprit, the embodiment of emotion, and Azelf, the embodiment of will. Although you do get a chance to kick the snot out of the third commander, a pompous git named Saturn (whose hair is blue and forked, because the rules of Team Galactic absolutely forbid normal hair), you and your friends utterly fail to prevent the three diminutive Psychic Pokemon from being captured and hauled off to Team Galactic's office in Veilstone City. Being the glorious ten-year-old hero that you are, you bust in and release them, giving Cyrus himself a stern talking-to in the process, but for the umpteenth time you are too late to keep Team Galactic from doing what they set out to do – in this case, siphoning the powers of the lake spirits to create an artefact known as the Red Chain. With this chain in his possession and accompanied by Mars, Jupiter and a number of grunts, Cyrus sets off for Mount Coronet in the centre of Sinnoh.

At the summit of Mount Coronet, we get to meet the Pokemon with which Cyrus intends to create his new world, using his Red Chain to enslave them (he notes that capturing either one in a Pokeball of any sort would somehow seal its powers, hence the need for the chain). On Diamond Cyrus summons Dialga, a dragon with power over time, and on Pearl he summons Palkia, a second dragon with power over the spatial dimensions. On Platinum he goes all the way and uses two chains to summon both. In any case, Cyrus commands the dragons to begin unraveling the universe to make room for his new world, “pure” and devoid of emotion... and it would work, too, if not for something Cyrus did not anticipate. Uxie, Mesprit and Azelf arrive and attempt to contain the dragons, and on Diamond and Pearl they succeed and effectively ruin the whole plan, allowing you to deal with Cyrus and capture or defeat your legendary dragon to keep it from causing any more harm. That's more or less the end of it. On Platinum, however, the lake spirits aren't powerful enough to stop Dialga and Palkia at once and you watch on helplessly as the dragons begin to destroy the universe... until a third dragon appears through a dark portal and drags Cyrus into hell! No, really, that actually happens! The third dragon is called Giratina, and as far as Platinum is concerned it has power over antimatter, but I have a suspicion that this was a quiet retcon, since everything we are told about Giratina in Diamond and Pearl seems to imply that it's basically the ruler of the land of the dead. Anyway, for some bizarre reason you follow Cyrus into hell. What follows is an uneventful sequence in which you must navigate the twisted geometry of Giratina's dimension, where time and space are vague and inconsistent, and your character can walk up walls or upside down without difficulty. This sequence annoys me because I am convinced that it is only here to show off the graphical capabilities of the new game engine, which Diamond and Pearl did not exploit to their full potential. It's cool, certainly, but nothing really happens other than a bit of exposition from Cyrus explaining what he thinks this world is and that he intends to defeat Giratina so he can complete his plan without interference. I wouldn't have ditched it entirely because, again, it is cool, but I think it needs to do more than just be there saying “look at me, I'm 3D!” Anyway, in the end you beat Cyrus and then fight Giratina because... you know, I don't actually know why; you just do. This is the end for Team Galactic proper; as in Diamond and Pearl, Cyrus disappears and vows that someday he will create his new universe, but Platinum adds a little epilogue involving the rest of the team, which frankly I don't like very much.

The epilogue to Platinum is mostly about a scientist named Charon, Team Galactic's fourth commander, who doesn't appear in the other two games. He shows up multiple times over the course of the story but has little impact on the plot; he mostly just talks about how great a genius he is and talks down to the other commanders. We also see that he is responsible for much of Team Galactic's technology, including the Red Chains, but I really don't think the character was necessary to explain this stuff – it's heavily implied that Cyrus is of genius-level intelligence as well, and he explicitly has an affinity for machines and technology, so Charon doesn't really do anything that I wouldn't have been perfectly happy to attribute to Cyrus. Charon's real purpose in the story is to take over the remnants of Team Galactic and make use of them in a new plan, “one befitting the genius of Charon.” What is this wonderful, genius plan, you ask? He wants to capture a legendary volcano Pokemon called Heatran and use it to extort loads of money from people. As it turns out, although Charon was vaguely interested in Cyrus's whole “new universe” thing, he only really cared about money and power... hence this plan, which, frankly, Team Rocket could have come up with. I was hoping for more from a lauded scientific genius. The plan fails utterly; Mars and Jupiter abandon Charon when you defeat them again (Saturn is already back in Veilstone rebuilding Team Galactic from the ground up as a legitimate research group) and Charon is eventually arrested by a tremendously annoying Interpol agent codenamed “Looker” - without a fight, since Charon doesn't actually seem to own any Pokemon. I'm not even totally convinced your participation as a player is really necessary for this plot; it just... happens, and then it's over. In short... I don't think Platinum is worse than Diamond and Pearl, mainly because several people, especially Cyrus, do get a lot more characterization... but my gods they did some stupid things with the plot.

So anyway, Team Galactic in a nutshell. They look absolutely ridiculous, but I think once you accept that, let's be fair here, this entire universe is pretty campy, I think they're alright villains. The premise is similar to that of Teams Aqua and Magma, with the charismatic leader whose promises of a grand new world convince many followers of various stripes to join him and commit terrible crimes in order to bring about the fulfillment of their vision, but I think Diamond, Pearl and Platinum do it much better. It's easier to believe that people could be taken in by Cyrus's rhetoric than by Maxie's or Archie's - because his dialogue is just better-written. The issue with this plot is one that's been gradually creeping up on Pokemon since the beginning: scale. Mewtwo had phenomenal psychic power and could shred most other Pokemon in battle with ease. Lugia could cause hurricanes with a single flap of its wings and Ho-Oh could raise the dead. Kyogre and Groudon could alter the very structure of the earth's surface and Rayquaza was more powerful still. Dialga and Palkia take the cake, though, with the power to unmake the universe by dissolving space and time themselves. You fight these Pokemon and win. Then you stuff them into tiny little balls and make them do your bidding. I love Pokemon, but... this is getting ridiculous. That's not entirely Team Galactic's fault, though; as I said, I think they're better-done than their immediate predecessors and pretty good as Pokemon villains go. As for the new content in Platinum... throw out the whole Charon subplot because it's stupid and spend the time and money making the Distortion World a bigger part of the game. That is all.

I'm on the home stretch now... only one villainous team to go; the new kids on the block, so to speak: Black and White's Team Plasma.

Team Aqua and Team Magma

In Ruby and Sapphire, we say goodbye to Team Rocket and are instead confronted with not one but two villainous organizations vying for supremacy on the island of Hoenn: Team Aqua and Team Magma. Sapphire pits you against Team Aqua while Team Magma exists on the edge of the plot and doesn't really do anything, while the situation is reversed in Ruby. The more complicated plot of Emerald tosses you into confrontations with both teams, because really they're both pretty crazy. See, Team Aqua and Team Magma aren't simple criminals like Team Rocket and, theoretically anyway, they aren't in it for the money. Their plans revolve around the climate of Hoenn and of the rest of the world – specifically, how it might be improved. Team Aqua love the sea, because the sea is where life began, and want to deepen the world's oceans, while Team Magma love the land, because the land is where more diverse and complex life forms arose, and want to expand the world's landmass. Unfortunately, unlike the real world where such insanity would be beyond the realms of possibility anyway, in the Pokemon universe there really are ways in which one might go about doing this, and thus we have plot, so let's have a look at it. There are a lot of minor encounters with Team Aqua/Magma over the course of these games, so I'm going to gloss over most of them and just look at the important stuff, starting with their leaders.

Archie of Team Aqua and Maxie of Team Magma are practically carbon copies of each other, which is probably intentional. They both spout a lot of inane rhetoric about how they and their minions love the land/sea and how everything they do is for the good of everyone, if only those short-sighted fools could understand that – because obviously if there were more land/sea, there would be more space for people to live/more habitats for water Pokemon! The grunts seem to be a mixture of people who are influenced by this rhetoric and people who are involved mostly because they want to be part of a group like Team Rocket. In short, they're a little bit like a cult – a charismatic leader, his brainwashed pawns, and a few psychos who just don't care. I actually think this is kind of fun. The premise does seem a little silly, but I can see a few uneducated people being sucked in by Archie or Maxie's visions of a beautiful new world – although how the leaders themselves so completely failed to comprehend the dramatic ecological implications of their plans is beyond me. I think it might have been interesting to actually make these guys cultists, but then again I tend to think that everything would be better with cultists, so let's put that one aside for now...

Your first major fight with either Team Aqua (on Sapphire) or Team Magma (on Ruby and Emerald) is at Mount Chimney, a volcano in the centre of Hoenn, where you interfere in a battle between the two groups. This is... kind of screwy. See, both teams want to use a special meteorite to control the volcano (with SCIENCE!) but neither of their plans makes sense. On Ruby, Team Magma want to make the volcano erupt so the resulting lava flows will expand Hoenn's landmass. This is blatantly a plan which would kill hundreds if not thousands of people; there is a town on the slopes of this volcano – and this is Plan A. Apparently no-one in Team Magma thought to suggest that this might not be such a brilliant idea. On Sapphire, on the other hand, Team Aqua want to use the meteorite to render the volcano dormant so that the crater (currently filled with bubbling lava) will fill instead with rainwater, creating a new habitat for Water Pokemon, which... wait. That's their evil scheme? To pacify an active volcano and create a lake for Water Pokemon to live in? Can... can we just let them do that? 'Cause I'm totally okay with it. No? Well, fine, Game Freak, you fight Archie; I'mma go get some souvlaki. See... having recently studied geothermal ecosystems for an essay, I can think of reasons that this might cause a lot of problems further down the line, but it's not exactly obvious; it's the kind of thing that really needs to be explained or at least touched on, and even then we're really looking at a pros-and-cons type situation, because not having an active volcano in the middle of your island sounds pretty good to me. I honestly don't believe the writers even thought about any of this. In Emerald, thankfully, this sequence makes a lot more sense; you're fighting Team Magma here and Maxie isn't trying to make the volcano erupt; he's using the meteorite to awaken something sleeping inside Mount Chimney. You don't know what he's trying to do exactly, but you do get the impression it can't be good. Unfortunately, Emerald then has Maxie pull the same ridiculous stunt later on by attempting to steal a load of rocket fuel from the Mossdeep Space Centre. Yes, he wants to make the volcano erupt by dumping rocket fuel in it. What's more, this happens while the game is trying to portray Maxie as starting to doubt his own motives.

I don't know, just go with it.

You eventually learn that Archie and Maxie each want to resurrect an ancient legendary Pokemon with godlike powers in order to fulfil their goals: Kyogre, the embodiment of the ocean, or Groudon, the embodiment of the land. They achieve this by stealing one of two magical orbs, the inventively named Red Orb and Blue Orb, from the shrine on top of Mount Pyre, a Pokemon graveyard and one of the oldest holy places in Hoenn. On Ruby and Sapphire, one of the orbs is stolen and the other is given to you so you can bring them back together; on Emerald Maxie and Archie steal one each. The story behind these orbs is that Groudon and Kyogre fought each other in ancient times, the force of their attacks raising the continents and sinking the ocean basins, until the orbs appeared (from where, I couldn't tell you) and calmed them down. Maxie and Archie each assume that possession of the appropriate orb will allow them to control their respective legendary Pokemon. This assumption... proves false. Dramatically so. On Sapphire, Kyogre summons a torrential downpour that threatens to flood most of Hoenn, while on Ruby, Groudon causes the sunlight to intensify and slowly begin to parch the land, and you have to take your orb down to the bottom of the Cave of Origin in Sootopolis City, where the blasted thing has decided to make its lair, and deal with it. The orb apparently convinces Groudon/Kyogre to settle down long enough to have a proper battle and give you a chance to catch it (which suggests that maybe the real problem with Maxie's/Archie's plan was that they each stole the wrong damn orb, but I can't say for sure).

On Emerald, the situation is more complicated. Both Groudon and Kyogre are awakened and decide to have a massive brawl in the middle of Sootopolis City, throwing Hoenn's weather patterns into chaos in the process. Maxie and Archie realise their mistake and go there with their orbs to try and sort things out, but the two Pokemon are so engrossed in their duel that they just don't care anymore (note: one-on-one, Kyogre would almost certainly wipe the floor with Groudon in an actual battle because of the whole Water-beats-Ground thing, but again, just go with it). You have to go to find a third legendary Pokemon to settle things: the sky dragon Rayquaza, the embodiment of the upper atmosphere. Finding Rayquaza... is extremely easy and settles things immediately. You don't have to fight it, reaching it is much easier than finding the damn thing on Ruby and Sapphire, where it's not part of the plot, and its presence promptly cows Kyogre and Groudon into submission. There's a nice cutscene, the only one of its type in the whole game, which shows Rayquaza flying to Sootopolis and ending the battle, but Pokemon is, with good reason, not exactly renowned for its graphics; I really don't think this was the right thing to place at the climax of the game's main storyline because it is not – and, realistically, was never going to be – spectacular enough to carry it. The result is something of a let-down and leaves me preferring the Ruby/Sapphire version, which is sad because Emerald is an improvement over the original plot in so many other ways - fighting both teams in the one game is more interesting and more effectively drives home the point that they're really pretty similar despite being mortal enemies, and the sequence on Mount Chimney really makes a lot more sense (even if the game then proceeds to give us the same nonsense later). In both versions of the story, if you ever happen to return to Mount Pyre later on, you will see Maxie, Archie, or both returning the stolen orbs, having come to regret their mistakes. I like this; the games don't make a huge deal out of it, but it's there and it fits the characterisation that they're trying to give these men.

Summing-up time.  Team Magma and Team Aqua are kind of interesting ideas, but I think in many ways they're kind of overdone.  They're supposed to be misguided but (on some level, anyway) well-intentioned radicals, but a lot of the time they just come across as being completely insane, and the fact is, I'm not sure I understand why they would act as criminal groups in the style of Team Rocket except in order that the games could have criminal groups in the style of Team Rocket.  In short, I like them but they should have been entrusted to a... well, I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings but it's not like Game Freak reads this blog anyway... well, a halfway competent writing team.

See you next time, when I'll be talking about the maddest criminal faction yet: Diamond, Pearl and Platinum's Team Galactic.