Next time on Pokémaniacal: The Top Ten Worst Pokémon Ever

All right, let’s lay some ground rules here.  Like I always did when I was working through the Unova Pokédex, I’ll do my best to examine all aspects of a Pokémon before assigning it a place in the Top Ten: I’m not putting anything on this list unless it is both a terrible concept and irredeemably pathetic – which automatically disqualifies pretty much everything from Black and White, because even though some of them were shockers, all of them, except for maybe Watchog, are an order of magnitude more useful than everything on this list.  Think about that for a moment.  Think back to some of my most vitriolic entries – Unfezant, Maractus, Emolga, Garbodor, for goodness’ sake – and let that sink in.  In terms of blinding stupidity, many of them rival or even surpass some of the wastes of oxygen on my list, but none of them are anywhere near as blitheringly incompetent.  Let that sink in.  Conversely, a few legitimately terrible Pokémon have escaped inclusion on this list by being more quirky and interesting than the ones I’ll be covering over the next month; they are the Pokémon that belong on my wish list for future evolutions, while the ones you’ll find here just need to die in a fire.

My other big rule is that anything that evolves doesn’t count.  I could spend an entry wittering about how useless Magikarp is, but the fact is, one day that Magikarp might evolve into Gyarados and come after me for revenge, and I don’t want that to happen.  More to the point, the suckiness that is Magikarp was deliberately intended as a counterweight to the awesomeness that is Gyarados, so it’s not even as if Magikarp is weak because of incompetence on the designers’ part; that was done on purpose, and there was a valid reason for it.  A few Pokémon would once have been absolute shoe-ins for this list until Game Freak, apparently realising the sins they had committed against the poor things, granted them evolutions in later generations.  Nosepass gets an honourable mention here for taunting me by evolving into Probopass in Diamond and Pearl, becoming far too strong for me to consider him seriously for the Top Ten while at the same time becoming the stupidest Pokémon of the generation for two generations running, which I hadn’t even thought possible.

Why am I doing this?  Well, as I’ve explained in the past, I consider myself to be on Game Freak’s side in that I want Pokémon to keep getting better and still genuinely believe that they’re the best people for the job... more or less.  The fact is, though, writing about stuff I like gets repetitive after a while, and writing about stuff that’s merely average is boring from the start... but being able to work up a really good bit of bile against something is far more interesting.

I think it’s time for a good old-fashioned holy war...