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.

Team Rocket (part 2)

Let's recap: Team Rocket disbands following the events of Red and Blue, squirming from the embarrassment of having their criminal empire taken down by what amounts to an angry, homeless, ten-year-old amateur toreador. Where police, private security companies and government agencies failed, your character succeeds – I will leave it to you to decide whether this is a reflection on the awesomeness of the average Japanese ten-year-old or the uselessness of the average Japanese law enforcer. Let's not poke holes in the plot though; it's shaky enough as it is and probably can't take much more. Let's look instead at what happens three years after Giovanni dissolves his organization, when Team Rocket returns in force, this time in the western province of Johto.

Unlike in Red and Blue, where everything Team Rocket does is more or less “because we're evil, damnit,” your two major encounters with them in Gold and Silver are both part of the same long-term plan to restore their organization and call Giovanni out of hiding, although your first, less significant meeting with them is just strange... Team Rocket first resurface in Azalea Town, where they are – for no purpose I can readily identify – cutting the tails off Slowpoke and selling them as nutritious snacks at ridiculously inflated prices. I mean, presumably this is a moneymaking scheme like most of what these idiots do but realistically I don't see how this could ever seem like a sensible idea. I get the impression that Slowpoke tails grow back, but they couldn't possibly grow back fast enough to work as a get-rich-quick scheme unless you had a heck of a lot of them, or people were gullible enough to spend truly obscene amounts of money on them. Slowpoke aren't all that common, even in Azalea's Slowpoke Well, and Azalea is kind of a hick town so I don't see there being a lot of big spenders around, so neither of those ideas holds water. Anyway, you promptly deal with this bizarre and pointless example of animal cruelty and move on.

You next encounter Team Rocket in Mahogany Town, which is where things get interesting.  Mahogany Town is in uproar over the appearance of a bright red Gyarados in the nearby Lake of Rage, which is of note for two reasons: first, Gyarados are normally blue, and second, Gyarados are highly destructive killing machines that are always angry and can lay waste to entire cities when provoked.  Investigation reveals that an unusually large number of Magikarp in the lake are evolving into Gyarados, and furthermore that suspicious black-clad men have taken over the gatehouse north of Mahogany Town and demanding a toll from anyone coming through to see the spectacle. At the lake, you encounter a master Dragon Pokemon trainer named Lance, who is also there to investigate.  He leads you back to Mahogany Town and joins you in storming Team Rocket's underground hideout.  It transpires that Team Rocket's scientists have created a special radio-frequency signal that can compel Pokemon to evolve, and perhaps even control them. They've been testing this signal on the Magikarp in the lake, while simultaneously reaping the benefits of the surge in tourism this creates for Mahogany Town. They are apparently so confident in the general ineptitude of Johto's law enforcement that they haven't considered the possibility of attracting attention from unwanted sources – and honestly, that's fair enough, since the Johto police seem to know nothing. As we all know, however, in the Pokemon world the law is in the hands of Pokemon trainers like you and Lance, whose responsibility it is to hand out vigilante justice. This you do, destroying their transmitter and defeating the Rocket executives, thus ending the crisis at the Lake of Rage.

Destroying the Mahogany Town hideout doesn't stop Team Rocket though; their plan all along was to take over the Goldenrod City radio tower, hijack its transmitter, and use it to broadcast their signal all around the country (along with a message to Giovanni, imploring him to return from his exile and join them).  This they do in due course, disguising one of their executives as the radio tower's director to try for a degree of compliance from the staff. The real director is in the bowels of Goldenrod's underground, where you must go to rescue him after defeating the false director. This, incidentally, leads you into what is easily the most aggravating puzzle sequence these games have ever featured – and if you ever played Gold or Silver, you will remember what I'm talking about. One of the rooms in the underground contains a series of many heavy doors, controlled by three switches. Which switch is responsible for which doors is up for debate, and seems to change every time you press one. I have never known anyone who ever figured out how you were supposed to solve this puzzle; as far as I can tell the only appropriate response is trial and error, and it is far and away the most evil thing Team Rocket ever inflicted upon anyone. Getting through this godawful mess will allow you to rescue the director at last, who gives you an access card that allows you to reach the last executives of Team Rocket and give them what-for one final time. The new leader then gives in and disbands Team Rocket for good.

In terms of plot, Gold and Silver are a step up from Red and Blue in that you're dealing with a coherent evil scheme, though Team Rocket themselves are still pretty generic villains – and actually, there's really only one recurring Team Rocket character, the female executive who attacks you in the Mahogany hideout and again in the Radio Tower, and she doesn't get a whole lot of characterisation, so the games still had a long way to go in that regard.  The recent remakes, Heart Gold and Soul Silver, tried to remedy this by creating a few distinct executive characters with names and vague personalities, but I can't say I'm really happy with the effort. The first you meet is Proton, who is the ringleader of the operation at the Slowpoke Well and then turns up again in the Radio Tower, and he seems to be two completely separate Team Rocket members from Gold and Silver combined into one, with a few extra lines of dialogue added to emphasise that even by Team Rocket's standards he's pretty nasty and very self-centred. The second executive, Petrel, is interesting; he's the one who impersonates the director of the radio tower and is introduced earlier in the Mahogany hideout. Again, in Gold and Silver these fights seem to be with two separate characters, but the remakes added a nice touch to him – Petrel is disguised as Giovanni when you first meet him. Thus, when you see Petrel again pretending to be the director, it's already established that disguise is his thing. Little details like this are all I ask for; the others could really have used them. The third recurring character is the female executive, Ariana. Other than giving her a name, nothing has really been done with Ariana, which is a little disappointing, but she was already the only real “character” from the original version of Team Rocket; my real problem is with the new leader, Archer. Archer should by all rights be the main villain of the story, but he appears only once and, like Ariana, I don't think he has any new dialogue. He comes completely out of nowhere, explains a bunch of stuff about what Team Rocket is doing that you probably know already, loses, and then disappears never to be seen again. Heart Gold and Soul Silver make a character out of this nameless executive, but don't actually do anything with him, which seems to me like such a cop-out that I almost wonder why they bother. Furthermore, Archer's total lack of development is something of a wasted opportunity to expand on the weird cult of personality that Team Rocket seems to have begun around Giovanni – because, make no mistake, this is what he's set up; there's no reason they should need Giovanni back since the four executives seem to run things just as efficiently as he did, and a criminal group clearly has no need of a figurehead, but getting the old boss back in charge seems to be their central objective throughout the game. In what little dialogue he gets, Archer seems to idolise his erstwhile leader – and I want to know about that! The remakes add a lot of lovely little improvements to the original games, sure, but with so much of the game's skeleton in place from the very beginning, that's sort of my baseline expectation, and there's so much more that could have been done with Team Rocket in particular.

Time for my final thoughts on these goons. They are, no two ways about it, an integral part of what one might call “Pokemon Classic” and it would not surprise me to learn that a lot of people want them back. In keeping with my usual “less is more” stance on bunging more junk into this franchise, I can empathise with that position and want them back, but I like the new villains too. As I said last time, though, continuing to cast Team Rocket as the main antagonists would not gel with the kind of plot that Game Freak have been coming up with lately. I could easily see them as minor antagonists, but I think it could be even more interesting to bring them in as uneasy allies in an “Enemy Mine”-type situation, or as the centre of a darker, grittier plot (not that that's ever going to happen).

Bottom line: Team Rocket are really fun to mess with; let's have more of them in the future!

Team Rocket (part 1)

So, the wireless internet here in Greece totally doesn't suck that much, so I'm going to start a five-part special (code: four-week period in which I write as much in seven days as I usually do in three) on the human villains of the Pokemon series – and where could I possibly start but with Team Rocket?

Team Rocket, as everyone with even a passing familiarity with Pokemon knows, are the series' main villains, showing up in Red/Blue/Yellow, Gold/Silver/Crystal, and the more recent remakes of those games, Fire Red/Leaf Green and Heart Gold/Soul Silver. They are also the regular antagonists of the TV show, in the form of the bungling Jessie and James and their long-suffering Pokemon companion Meowth. I'm not going to talk about Jessie and James, a goldmine of comic relief though they may be, because this is really supposed to be about the games and they only show up in Yellow, which is based on the TV show to some extent.  They are also a great deal less competent than the games' version of Team Rocket, who are apparently a highly organized criminal syndicate.  Unlike the villains of the series' later installments, who have slightly more complicated (and, in some cases, blatantly insane) motivations, Team Rocket are just in it for the money.  Basically, they are the result of humans actually recognizing the kind of power wielded by even a moderately skilled Pokemon trainer and acting accordingly.  They focus on stealing Pokemon, but they do it because of the undeniable applications of Pokemon in stealing other things – or just taking them by force.  It's not a terribly interesting concept, but it does stand to reason that people like this would exist.

When we first meet Team Rocket in Red and Blue, they are crawling around Mount Moon, looking to “steal” Pokemon fossils, since they are aware that the advanced technology of the setting they live in allows extinct Pokemon to be resurrected from them.  I say “steal” in quotation marks because I'm not convinced that they're actually doing anything wrong with reference to the game's internal logic, since “archaeologists” in the Pokemon series are basically looters (this is something of a sore spot with me since I'm an archaeology student). After defeating Team Rocket, you encounter another trainer who has also “stolen” two fossils, but upon beating him your character does not attempt to return the fossils to a museum or other appropriate institute – no, you let him off scott free once he offers to share his loot with you.  Given that there is apparently nothing wrong with taking unclaimed fossils from Mount Moon, it seems that the only reason you're fighting Team Rocket here is because they attack you on sight... y'know, just like every other trainer in the Pokemon universe.  A little later, in Cerulean City, a trainer attempts to recruit you to Team Rocket and challenges you when you refuse – (you have no choice in this matter, of course; your character refuses automatically).  Soon after that, you trounce a lone Team Rocket member who has just robbed a house.  Things don't get serious, however, until you reach Celadon City.

Celadon City has a Game Corner – that's the official Game Freak euphemism for “casino” - which appears innocent on the face of it, but there are also a fair number of Team Rocket members scuttling around town who, being morons, will drop less-than-subtle hints that they are the ones running the casino and that the rare Pokemon offered as prizes there are stolen.  Sure enough, investigating the casino reveals a sprawling hideout in its basement, where you will confront and defeat Team Rocket's head honcho, Giovanni, a Ground-type specialist who uses an Onix, a Rhyhorn and a Kangaskhan.  This doesn't cause the casino to be shut down or to stop offering stolen rare Pokemon as prizes or anything, because that would prevent players from ever getting a Porygon, and the object of the game is still, in theory, to finish the blasted Pokedex.

Gameplay/story segregation for the win.

You next encounter these knaves in Lavender Town's Pokemon Tower, a high-rise pet cemetery inhabited by a cult of criminally insane priestesses.  Team Rocket has thrown the spirits of the tower into uproar by killing the mother Marowak who used to protect the place (to my knowledge, this is the only mention in the main series of a Pokemon being killed by humans prior to Diamond and Pearl).  Not only that, they've kidnapped local philanthropist Mr. Fuji... who actually seems totally fine with it when you rescue him; he was just trying to talk them down, though he does thank you for defeating Team Rocket and the spirit of the dead Marowak and allowing her to pass on.  Team Rocket show up once more in Saffron City, and this time they mean business.  They've taken over the office block that houses Silph Co., a company that produces various Pokemon-related goods such as Pokeballs.  Their objective is the prototype of Silph's newest invention: the Master Ball, which will capture any Pokemon without fail, even powerful legendary Pokemon.  This would be bad.  In the course of liberating Silph Co., Giovanni challenges you once again, this time having ditched his Onix and picked up a Nidorino and a Nidoqueen.  When you defeat him, the grateful president of Silph gives the prototype Master Ball to you as a reward, having decided – I suppose – that the invention's commercial potential wasn't worth what it could do in the wrong hands.  Giovanni turns up once more, unexpectedly turning out to by the Gym Leader of Viridian City and your final hurdle before challenging the Elite Four.  This time he uses an extra Rhyhorn, a Dugtrio, and his now-fully evolved Nidoking, Nidoqueen and Rhydon, and is so disheartened by this final loss that he elects to disband Team Rocket and vanishes without a trace.

When Nintendo remade Red and Blue a little while back as Fire Red and Leaf Green, they added a bunch of new areas – an island chain south of the main region of Kanto, called the Sevii Islands (and before you ask, yes; there are seven of them, which are actually called One Island, Two Island, and so on ad nauseam). A trip to these islands provides the occasion for another run-in with Team Rocket – specifically, with a comparatively small unit who seem to be unaware thus far that their organization has disbanded. Somehow. In Sevii, you team up with Lorelei, the Ice Pokemon master of the Kanto Elite Four and a native of Four Island, to deal with the Team Rocket members in the area. They don't appear to have any specific evil plan going; their Sevii operation is really just business as usual for them – poaching wild Pokemon and stealing trained ones either for sale on the black market or for general nefarious purposes. You later gain a more specific grievance against them when a scientist named Gideon snatches a special sapphire that you're looking for right from under your nose with the intention of selling it to them. This is clearly far more important than whatever lame schemes they're planning with stolen Pokemon, so you march up to their warehouse, curb-stomp their pathetic mid-level asses, and explain to them slowly and clearly that Team Rocket has disbanded. This seems to get the point across.

So here's what I think of Team Rocket in Red and Blue. They're very uncomplicated antagonists that are easy to hate and don't have a lot of room for moral ambiguity, which is good for a simple plot. There's very little characterisation involved; you get the impression that most of them are just in it for the delinquency and Giovanni has little personality beyond his massive ego. This fits the plot of Red and Blue, which is really just an excuse for you to travel around the country while you gather more minions, but for a more complicated plot you need more complicated antagonists, hence the new villainous teams of the later games. I think you could make a complex plot with Team Rocket as the antagonists, but I also think it would involve a departure from the “grand adventure” style of story that Game Freak are so fond of and get much grittier, since these guys are basically the Pokemon Mafia – and while I don't believe that's necessarily a bad thing, it doesn't really belong in the main series. What I really want to see out of Pokemon is a more open, non-linear storyline, and for something like that, Team Rocket would make great antagonists for early-game sequences or side-plots – stuff like the Sevii episode from the remakes. I'm going to talk more about these guys in a few days, since they appear in Gold and Silver as well, but until then, geia sas!

Basculin

All right, so there’s these two fish, and they hate each other.  Okay, Game Freak, I like where you’re going with this.  What else?

Oh, you mean that’s it?  All right, well, what do the two fish evolve into?

...nothing?  That’s... err... nice.  So, uh, what differences are there between the two fish?

...there’s a red one and a blue one.

*facepalm*

Today on Pokémaniacal I have the dubious pleasure of discussing Basculin.  There are red Basculin and blue Basculin, and they hate each other.  That’s really all there is to it, and to be honest even that seems to be open to interpretation; the Pokédex entry for Basculin on Black version says that red and blue ones will start fighting the instant they meet, but the entry on White version contends that Basculin sometimes do mingle with schools of the opposite colour, despite normally hating each other.  So, to make this clear... the only vaguely amusing thing about these Pokémon is that they hate each other... and they don’t even hate each other all that much!  We don’t know why they hate each other – well, actually, they seem to hate just about everything, but we don’t know why they hate each other particularly – nor do we have any reason to care since there’s nothing else interesting about them.  The idea of Pokémon with a everlasting blood feud against each other isn’t even a totally new one; this is exactly what Seviper and Zangoose did back in Ruby and Sapphire.  Those two hate each other because Seviper is a snake and Zangoose is – you guessed it – a mongoose.  The real-world relationship between snakes and mongooses has a lot of popular appeal, which these two Pokémon can draw on, and it also conveys that they have evolved and adapted to be good at killing each other, specifically, and will never pass up an opportunity to do just that.  What’s more, that’s backed up by one of Zangoose’s in-game abilities – immunity to poison, one of Seviper’s primary modes of attack.  Basculin... well, Basculin are just big, angry, pointy bass, and once you accept that it’s hard not to compare them to Carvanha and Sharpedo, who are just so much more badass that it’s not even funny.  They’re neither unique, nor interesting, which is not a good start...

...and to make matters worse, Basculin aren’t anything special in battle either.  As Water-types, they belong to the element that was already the most common in the game, and they bring little to the table that makes them stand out from the hundred-odd other Water-types out there other than a strong Dark attack in Crunch, and if that’s really so important to you then you’d be better off with Sharpedo or Crawdaunt, since they’re actually Dark-types, while Basculin can only fake it.  The presence of a strong Normal-type attack in Double Edge is actually quite nice; Normal attacks are ordinarily pretty bad, but they do combo well with Water so Double Edge, recoil damage or no recoil damage, is a strong choice for Basculin.  In the grand scheme of things, though, almost everything can learn Return if you desperately need a strong Normal attack, so I’m hesitant to look upon Double Edge as a major selling point.  Other than that, well... Taunt is, as always, useful for shutting down defensive and support Pokémon, but Basculin’s defences are so horrid that I would seriously question the wisdom of forcing opponents to attack him directly, and Agility is nice, I guess, but speed is Basculin’s greatest strength already (not that that’s saying much).  Basculin does have a Fighting-type attack, Revenge, which is not something all Water-types can boast of, but using this attack is a seriously bad idea since it forces Basculin to wait for its opponent to move first and only does a good amount of damage if he takes a hit while he’s waiting, two things Basculin really cannot afford to do.  Yeah, it’s not looking good.

Of course, this being Pokémon, there’s bound to be something weird and quirky for Basculin to use, and having found it I suppose it isn’t that bad.  One of Basculin’s choices of passive ability is Adaptability.  All Pokémon naturally benefit from a 50% damage bonus when using attacks of their own element (referred to amongst hard core Pokémon Masters like myself as STAB – same-type attack bonus), but Basculin instead gets a 100% damage bonus for his Water attacks.  Now, Basculin’s attack stat isn’t brilliant, but with Adaptability figured in, his Waterfalls and Aqua Jets can deliver some pretty serious damage.  His other attacks remain lacklustre, of course, but the wonderful thing about Water is that not a whole lot resists it, so if you’re going to rely on a single element, it’s one of the better choices.  The bad news for Basculin is that, considering this is his one big trick, it’s not all that wonderful.  Gyarados and Kingdra can still crank their damage outputs even higher by using Dragon Dance, Azumarill is slower, but just as strong, gets equal force on all of her attacks, and can actually take hits, Kabutops blows Basculin’s attack power out of the water with Swords Dance, Gastrodon just comes in and laughs in his face because she’s immune to Water attacks, and to top it all off, Crawdaunt now gets Adaptability through the Dream World, can apply it to both Water and Dark attacks because he’s a dual-type, has a vastly better movepool featuring Rock Slide, X-Scissor and Superpower, and can even outrun Basculin if you really need him to by learning Dragon Dance.  And yes, Basculin, you heard me; I just put friggin’ Azumarill on the list of things that are more badass than you.  Go home.

In the course of my research for this entry, I learned that, apparently, Game Freak created Basculin at the last minute because they suddenly realised there weren’t enough fish Pokémon in Unova.  Maybe this is just me, but I feel there is something deeply wrong with the phrase “not enough fish Pokémon.”  There are plenty of the damn things!  Sure, they aren’t all new and shiny, but there’s certainly no shortage!  What, I ask you, would be so horrible about encountering Goldeen in the pristine new region?  Or Barboach?  What about Feebas, Chinchou, Remoraid, Qwilfish, Carvanha or Lumineon?  Magikarp, for heaven’s sake!  I would rather catch and train any one of these Pokémon than Basculin... well, okay, maybe not Lumineon; I love her to bits but she sure is useless.  To be totally frank, I’m not even against the idea of new fish Pokémon per se; but when you have twenty-five thousand species of fish to work with, why would you pick something as hopelessly generic as the striped bass?  And why, having done that, would you not at least give it something interesting to do?  I can’t talk about this any longer...

I hereby deny this Pokémon’s right to exist!  Batter it, fry it, and serve it with chips and a wedge of lemon for all I care!

In real-world news, I’m off to Greece for a month; I don’t know what my internet access will be like and I certainly won’t have as much time as I normally do to complain about Pokémon.  I might find a moment for a couple of entries, but they won’t be to my usual three-day schedule and they won’t be part of my ongoing quest of judgement either.  In the event I don’t have any time at all, keep your Pokémon healthy, and I’ll be back in a month!

Venipede, Whirlipede and Scolipede

After having Sewaddle, Swadloon and Leavanny show the Bug/Grass dual-types of yester-year how it’s done, it’s time to try pushing our luck and seeing whether we can do the same for the half-dozen assorted worthless Bug/Poison Pokémon.  Here’s the latest addition to this already overfull type combination: Venipede.  To be honest, I don’t have a whole lot to say about Venipede or his evolved form, Whirlipede.  Their main defining feature is that they’re extraordinarily ill-tempered.  Beedrill were ill-tempered too, of course, but that was something they grew into – Weedle are perfectly sweet, if disturbingly pointy – and it was mainly about defending their nests from predators anyway.  Venipede, on the other hand, have deep personal grudges against just about everything, which they express by repeatedly and insistently poisoning you.  Whirlipede continues to hold these grudges, and expresses them by rolling into a ball and trying to run you over.  Then he evolves into Scolipede and everything gets a whole lot worse for everyone.  Scolipede is not only still foul-tempered, he’s also two and a half meters long and made of pure awesome.  Scolipede is another of those Pokémon that makes you wonder what exactly the parents of the Pokémon universe must be smoking that they would willingly allow their children to wander the wilderness alone.  This is an apex predator, found in temperate forests, that is probably willing and almost certainly able to kill and eat humans.  I mean it; there are South American centipedes that can kill and eat bats, in flight no less, and those are “only” thirty centimetres long, so don’t tell me Scolipede is probably harmless to humans.  There’s not really a whole lot more to Scolipede than that; he’s enormous and angry and enjoys poisoning things altogether too much.  It’s not a very deep concept, yet somehow... I’m okay with that.  “Giant centipede” has a certain amount of innate appeal, and Scolipede himself is nicely done; simple but awesome.

So, how does Scolipede rate in battle?  Well, Bug/Poison is not exactly a winning combination; compared to Leavanny’s Bug/Grass, its weaknesses are not nearly as crippling but its resistances are also far less useful, so it’s hard to say which is worse, and, like Bug/Grass, it’s been represented in the past by Pokémon that are just as terrible – namely, Ariados and Beedrill.  Scolipede is basically Beedrill on crystal meth.  He doesn’t get U-Turn and his special defence is weaker, but in just about every other respect I can think of, he’s significantly better.  However, there is a third existing Bug/Poison Pokémon who, while he has a lot of problems, is far from unusable: Venomoth.  Game Freak just keeps being nicer and nicer to Venomoth.  Diamond and Pearl gave him the Tinted Lens ability, which causes all his resisted attacks to do double damage – basically, resistances just aren’t, unless they’re double-resistances or immunities.  Black and White then added Quiver Dance to Venomoth’s movepool, the lovely new technique that boosts special attack, special defence and speed all at once.  Even with Tinted Lens and Quiver Dance, Venomoth’s main attacks are still easy enough to resist that making him work as a sweeper is... tricky.  Venomoth can actually use Baton Pass to give those boosts to something else more dangerous, though, so he has a viable niche.  Scolipede can use Baton Pass as well, but he doesn’t have the craziness that is Quiver Dance to go with it.  Still, Swords Dance for power and Agility for speed are nothing to sniff at.  What’s more, Scolipede is very fast, fast enough to use Swords Dance and then get out before trouble finds him – a useful trait in a Baton Passer.  Also, although he doesn’t have Leavanny’s ability to protect the rest of his team with Reflect or Light Screen, he has an infinitely better attack spread in Megahorn, Earthquake and Rock Slide, so he can very easily turn around and start disembowelling people if Baton Pass isn’t your thing – and that works too, because Scolipede is naturally fast and has a decent attack stat, although I don’t think I would advise trying it without Swords Dance.  He can, in theory, use Spikes and Toxic Spikes, throwing down layers of nasty pointy things to damage or poison your opponents on every switch, but trying to do this with Scolipede seems like a bad idea, if you ask me, since it takes several turns to do properly and he just doesn’t have the defensive capabilities to sit around for that long.  Realistically, you could probably get more out of Venomoth, whichever sort of Pokémon you need, but Scolipede isn’t a terrible choice.  I don’t know that he’s necessarily a good choice either, but he could be made to work.

When it comes right down to it, there’s not a whole lot to be said in Scolipede’s favour other than that he looks ludicrously badass.  His flavour is, sadly, pretty one-dimensional, while his powers leave a lot to be desired – even Beedrill on crystal meth is still just Beedrill once the drug-induced euphoria wears off.  His stats would be perfectly respectable attached to almost any other type combination, but Bug/Poison is a really hard one to live down... and to be honest, there’s not really all that much Scolipede can do.  He has basically two workable movesets: [Swords Dance – Megahorn – Earthquake – Rock Slide] and [Baton Pass – Megahorn – Earthquake – Swords Dance/Agility].  His design is, as I’ve said, pretty shallow: it’s a bad idea to get him mad, but unfortunately he’s almost certainly mad already, so you should probably just run.  That’s hardly anything new.  Honestly, I don’t think Game Freak should have bothered with Venipede or Whirlipede since they didn’t really do anything interesting with them; Scolipede would have worked absolutely fine as a stand-alone Pokémon and this little quest of mine is all about trimming the fat.  However, there is still room in later games to expand on Scolipede’s design with additional Pokédex entries, and on his skills with move tutors and such, and he does present a solid base to build on – as he is now, he can’t compete at the highest levels, but it’s hard to avoid the comparison to Beedrill, who is so woefully incompetent that almost anything looks good next to him.  What’s more, it really would be a shame to waste such an awesome Pokémon.  I’m letting Game Freak off with a warning on this one, but Scolipede could have been done better and I am a little disappointed.

I hereby affirm this Pokémon’s right to exist!

Sewaddle, Swadloon and Leavanny

I knew it was coming.  When Game Freak put together Black and White, they decided to abandon all existing Pokémon in favour of new ones, which meant it was once again time to get out their sheets of formulae on how to design standard, comfortable everyday Pokémon, and one of these old standards is the caterpillar Pokémon.  So it is that we come to meet the obligatory caterpillar, Sewaddle, the obligatory cocoon, Swadloon, and the obligatory butterfly, Leava-

Wait.  That’s not a butterfly.  That’s a leaf insect.

Praise the gods, they did something different!

It’s another caterpillar, sure, and it evolves into another cocoon, sure, but from what I can see Game Freak actually put some thought into this one (certainly a hell of a lot more than they put into Wurmple and its evolved forms in Ruby and Sapphire).  The theme of this family is nurturing; Sewaddle are given their leafy wrappings at birth by Leavanny, who stitch them together from leaves and silk, using their bladed arms to cut the leaves into shape.  In fact, Leavanny are just so nice that they make clothes for any other small Pokémon they come across too, which I think is a cute little bit of flavour.  Maybe it’s my academic background, but I’m also interested to hear about the degree of effort that a Pokémon puts into its offspring, since that’s so important for many real world species (including humans).  The Pokédex entries also fit Swadloon into her ecosystem by noting that she improves soil fertility by composting fallen leaves, which Leavanny in turn uses to keep her eggs warm.  Details like this help us think about Pokémon as part of a world, not just isolated species that we can capture and train.  They give us context, which is something a lot of Pokémon could use more of.  I’m not sure why Swadloon looks so grumpy when Sewaddle and Leavanny are clearly going for the cute angle, but thanks to a Pokédex entry noting that Swadloon move around a lot (in contrast to, say, Metapod) I have this wonderful mental image of Swadloon shuffling around the forest floor, eyes fixed on the ground, grumbling to herself constantly and trying to avoid having to talk to anyone else, which has a strange appeal of its own for me (but, as they say, there’s no accounting for taste).

I think Leavanny is nicely designed, but unfortunately there aren’t really any type combinations she could be given that would fit that design better than Bug/Grass, which is what she’s got.  Bug/Grass is horrible.  It was horrible when Parasect did it in Red and Blue, it was still horrible when Game Freak tried again with Wormadam in Diamond and Pearl and it will continue to be horrible no matter what you do with it.  Defensively Bug/Grass is pretty bad because, although it comes with five resistances, most of them to strong attacking types, it also has six weaknesses, two of which are double-weaknesses.  Most Pokémon would count themselves unlucky to be cursed with just one; two (especially when one of them is Fire) is very difficult to live with.  Offensively the combination is somehow even worse; Bug and Grass are two of the worst attacking types in the game, resisted by six and seven other elements, respectively.  What’s more, they have no synergy at all because they have four of those elements in common (Fire, Flying, Poison and Steel).  A Bug/Grass Pokémon needs something really special to make it do anything other than suck.  Parasect had Spore, the only 100% accurate sleep-inducing technique in the game, and was still just barely usable.  Wormadam had nothing of any real interest and was therefore absolutely terrible.  Leavanny is going to need either awesome stats or a really cool movepool to succeed, so let’s see... She’s pretty fast and has very strong physical attacks, and her defences are okay for a sweeper-type, which is what Leavanny seems to be, but certainly not good.  Nothing spectacular, but a Pokémon can succeed with worse.  What does she have to back up that attack stat?  Well... very little.  Leaf Blade and X-Scissor are good, solid options to represent her own types, but as mentioned Bug/Grass is a horrible combination and she needs more.  Poison Jab is practically redundant with X-Scissor in terms of type coverage, Aerial Ace is depressingly weak but might be the best option, Shadow Claw is, again, a bit weak but would let her hit a few things that resist her primary attacks and hurt Ghost-types, and I guess there’s also Slash, but when you’re seriously considering a Normal-type attack on anything other than a Normal or Water Pokémon, you’re in trouble, trust me.  It’s great that Leavanny gets Swords Dance, but all the attack boosts in the world won’t change the fact that many Steel-types resist every last attack she learns, and Fire-, Flying- and Poison-types resist both her primary attacks.

If you ask me, actually trying to fight should really be Leavanny’s last resort.  It’s possible to breed Baton Pass onto a Sewaddle, as well as Agility, and we’ve seen she gets Swords Dance.  Since Leavanny can’t go two turns without meeting something that resists half of her movepool, it might be a better use of her time to try passing one or the other of those boosts to something that can really make use of it.  There are probably Pokémon who would do a better job of this than Leavanny, but she’s not as obviously incompetent at it as she is at sweeping.  While she’s at it, she can set up Reflect or Light Screen for you to protect the rest of your team from physical or special attacks, respectively, if that’s what you need.  If you really want to confuse people, she even learns Calm Mind, so she could use that to pass special attack and special defence boosts.  In fact, now that I think about it, Leavanny has a wonderful movepool for Baton Passing; it’s just a shame her defences are so mediocre or she might actually have a niche there.  As she is, you have better options.

I am of the school of thought that believes Grass-types need more love, and Bug/Grass in particular could do with a stronger representative.  Leavanny isn’t there yet; she doesn’t have anything game-changing enough to make up for the fact that she just has a horrendous type combination.  One of the merits of this latest generation of Pokémon, however, is that few, if any, of them are truly unusable.  Leavanny’s bad, yes, but she’s still a huge improvement.  Unfortunately, she also suggests to me that after all this time Game Freak still don’t quite get that some elements need more help than others.  As a Pokémon Trainer, I’m on the fence about Leavanny, but as a Pokémaniac, I’m going to have to let her pass.  I actually think Parasect’s design is more interesting but Leavanny is well done, makes sense, and isn’t derivative, which makes her okay in my book. 

I hereby affirm this Pokémon’s right to exist!