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Future Villains: Organization or Individual?

Future Villains?

  • Team Villains!

    Votes: 17 47.2%
  • The One, The Only, Big Boss

    Votes: 10 27.8%
  • Other

    Votes: 9 25.0%

  • Total voters
    36
Joined
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Messages
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So far, we've had villains that work as an organization - Team Rocket, Aqua, Magma, Galactic, Plasma, Flare, Skull, and Aether Foundation.

How about in the future? Should the tradition continue with "Team Villains"? Or should there be a new type of villain that works alone (like Hunter J or Lawrence III)?

Team Villains are great for battle variety because from Grunts to the Boss, the villains have different teams of varying levels that indicate their ranks. They also prevent the villain battles from becoming repetitive. From a story perspective, they also provide a reason behind the organization being successful with so many people participating in the plan.

However, if there's only one Big Boss, I think the games could freshen things up. I'd like someone who started out nice at the beginning of the game, but turned evil. Or, perhaps, like several of the movie villains, rich villains who employ temporary henchmen who could turn on them depending on the situation.

What do you think?
 
If they can write well just one individual as a villain, why not? Changing the plot to more personal journey like the first two games instead of an apocalyptic event would work perfectly with just an individual as villain instead of an organization. I think a whole team is easier to write in the story because a group can have more impact in the region though
 
I would definitely like them not to use a legendary. BW made it make sense but the rest are just overly power hungry.

I would like to have a personal villain, like a mix between silver and N. And they could do something like N and change his team some each time. Maybe one Pokémon that represents him.

If they keep up with organizations, make them a bit more basic and stop using legendaries. I like the idea of simple non world ending plots.
 
the idea of a villianous team made of only pokemon controlled by a pokemon boss villian would be appealing.
Or humans under their control?

The same goes for a villian possesed by the ghost of the pokemon king.

We had something like that with Malamar but we would need better pokemon for that.
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a villianous team that want to re-create gyms and pokemon league for their own.
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a villianous team that steals energy from pokemon and trainers during battle for their main goal.
(use special items for that)
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a villianous team that uses megas and Z-moves, and very strong and diffrent pokemon from the start.
(and a witcher game mode that if you loose you dont need to win, but the story plot changes and you can get diffrent outcome of the game)
 
(oh boy, discussions on Pokemon villains are my favorite)

Given the choice between individual villain/villainous team, I'd pick individual just because we haven't gotten very many of them in the past, but there's honestly so much that could be done in the Pokemon world on either end.

Thoughts on how the Team trope has affected main series games
I feel like teams haven't been explored as much as they could be, because Team Rocket set the standard for a while. Team Rocket wasn't bad at all-honestly, even though everybody knows the twists now, having a missing gym leader be the leader and a hideout in the arcade were both brilliant twists. Team Rocket as a mafia-esque group was a fun foe to fight, and I think

But then "big group of people working towards a goal" was the template for other teams, and it just didn't work as well. It makes sense that Team Rocket has so many members-their goals are about getting power and money; everyone wants that. But are there really hundreds of people that hate the land so much they want to drown the world? Are there really hundreds of people that believe making Cyrus into a god is a great plan? I genuinely think Team Aqua, Team Magma, and Team Galactic would have been much more interesting had they been made up of just the admins and leaders. The grunts didn't add anything to the story nor to gameplay. (do you remember any grunt you battled?)

Team Plasma uses the team structure fantastically in some ways, and poorly in others. On the one hand, we have a breakaway from Grunt/Admin structure with new, interesting roles-head scientist, seven sages, Shadow Trio, the king, the king's father and foster sisters, etc. On the other hand, a lot of these characters didn't get much development. (The Seven Sages might as well be the same person copy+pasted seven times) On the one hand, grunts are actually people, and some have bits of story tied to them. On the other hand, they don't even get names.

Team Flare was just...bad. I'm sorry, I love Kalos, but Team Flare wasn't very interesting at all. I can never even remember the admins' names. They had potential-Malva as a member of Team Flare could have been very interesting (if they ever did anything with it), and the Looker quest was fun, but the main story felt really lackluster. I think it would have been far more interesting if Lysandre had been working more secretly-the man has the brains and funds to get most of this done on his own after all-or if AZ had played more of a role in things. (Perhaps he could have tried to reactivate the machine in hopes Floette would come back to stop it...)

The Aether Foundation and Team Skull also used the team structure really well, IMO. I still wish grunts were more like characters than generic trainers, but in both groups, there were clear and logical reasons why they joined, and their staff were interesting and well-written characters.
Thoughts on individual vs team in fan games (to explore how the concept has been used further)
Pokemon Sage seems to have taken the Team Rocket sort of route, but they do it well. It's logical that they have so many grunts-they're a treasure-hunting team, so they'll have a lot of takers. They've got a lot of thought put into their designs, too, it

Pokemon Uranium is one of the few fan games that has an individual villain instead of a team, and it works really well. For a large part of the game, it's not even clear that there is a villain behind the disasters, which makes the reveal more exciting to me. And though the villain's true identity wasn't that much of a twist (at least to me personally), it was certainly a great story.

I know Reborn tends to be considered edgy, and, for sure, I think a lot of the darkness in the plot is unnecessary. But I really enjoy the concepts of Team Meteor. Grunts will reappear later in the game (some even being promoted), admins tend to have unique personalities and backstories, and one of the rivals even joins later in the game. The brutalness of the group is quite over-the-top IMO, but I wouldn't mind seeing a team with characters fleshed out like this in future games.

For some reason that's all that come to mind now...I'm sure I'll think of some more later. (There's Insurgence, but I don't have a lot to say on that front. And Team Splicer of Xenogene, but that's an in-development game)

Thoughts on individual/team villains in the future
The writing style of evil teams tends to center on the admin, for obvious reasons. Because of this, I think it'd be quite easy for a game to include just one character as the villain instead of a whole team-the only change to the story would be finding out how they get the means to complete whatever their goals are. It'd certainly help flesh out their character more.

But at the same time, I do want to see teams explored more, because I think there's a lot of untapped potential there. (especially in non-legendary teams with unique motives) Even the organization itself could be interesting to learn more about. How do these teams get started? How do they recruit? How do grunts move up the ranks?

Also-whether individual or team, I really want to see them use more types other than Dark/Poison/Ghost. I know they're our default "mean" types, but c'mon. It's not interesting to see them all the time, and it makes battles against them easier when you already know the types of half their Pokemon.
 
For team leaders controllng other people, we came pretty close to Giovanni planning to control Lusamine as a servant in USUM. Not sure exactly how, but it's presumed he knocked her out with Nihilego... so I can see future villains try something like this again but be a little more successful the next go around. And to a lesser extent, Ghetsis almost successfully manipulated N and his followers without the use of any Pokemon powers, but only by him being very manipulative.
 
I chose individual, but what I really want is more personal stories and less world shattering stuff. Something like some kid gets hurt (or dies without using that word) and parents start getting nervous about children going out on Pokemon adventures. Parents start teaming up to keep children under control and it goes overboard, leading to a legendary Pokemon stepping in of their own accord, not being sought out or summoned. Parents end up in trouble and the kids have to save them and defeat the legendary Pokemon. They realize their children are capable so long as they have their Pokemon with them and everyone makes up. Your parent(s) are against the overprotection at first, but you get in danger and they change their mind. You both go through a lot until you understand each other. During the last story fight, you team up with your parent for an emotional battle and take out some person who doesn't want to give up the control they'd gained during all of this time.

Mainly, I just want a region to feel like it's connected and for a chance to get to know the people who live there. There's so much potential.
 
they could bring that Hunter from Diamond and Peral she was refreshing and un used.
Would make a good oponent for Ash in the League.
Liked howw in kalos our rival had ties with the evil corp. but what if we would get a possesed trainer that wants to become a pokemon master?
That would be scarry, remember that trainer with Darkrai? he would fit perfectly for that role and would allow Ash for redemption in his salvation. But he would need a team of 5 more regular pokes and not only legendaries.
 
I'm all for teams, mainly because they have represented aspects of reality that can be interesting.

Team Rocket was one of the best. They were obviously a mafia group that decided to theme things. My personal opinion is that the whole team theming was just to make it harder for police to prosecute them, since the reports the police get would look ridiculous at first. Combine that with their tendency for ingenius tactics and it's very easy to see how they took over Silph Co. without any opposition. No one even knew what they were up against with Rocket.

Teams Aqua and Magma both represent misguided activism. They both wanted to make the world a better place for Pokemon, but they didn't agree on how and ended up fighting. And, in pursuing their goal, they ultimately justified criminal and outright evil acts to themselves because they got so caught up in the mission. You see similar crop up in real life, like for example defacing the Nazca Lines.

Team Galactic is obviously a cult. I can't talk more about them because of the subject matter, but they brilliantly showed another dangerous side to humanity.

Team Plasma was also interesting, in that it showed a terrorist organization masquerading as an animal rights group. An ongoing real-world argument with a lot of questions raised about the line between the two. Notably, like Aqua and Magma, I really got the feeling the creators agreed they have a point, but are going about it the wrong way and losing sight of the mission in the process. Which is why one fragment went pure terrorist later on, after things fell apart.

Team Flare is a personality cult. Highlighting how getting caught up in someone's vision just because of their charisma can lead you down dark paths. Think about how often that's been a problem in real life.

And Team Skull is just a youth gang. But one that represents how easily young people can be led astray when they feel they have no where else to turn. I honestly wanted to see them continue.

But... For the next team, I want to see the player leading them. Making choices about their uniforms, what goals they back, what actions they take, the location and decor of the base... I want to explore it from the player side, and see how many players will play the role of villain simply because of the benefits. And who will turn their team into heroes.
 
The anime has shown that pokémon themselves can be evil and even have enough charisma to act as "admins". The Malamar being prime evidence of that.

I'd like to see a team that is either led by an malevolent pokémon (or composed entirely of them). Hell, we could go further and have a seemingly normal team whose real leader is a pokémon. And the Human "admin" seen is merely a figurehead or decoy.
 
I'd like to see something where an individual is part of a villain team, but has his own agenda and ends up double crossing the villain team.

Well Ghetsis kind of did that in BW, but that was less of a double cross and more of him not sharing his true motives. But I'd be all for something like Sly 2's story, that's a better example of that kind of plot twist. For those who haven't played, the storyline involves the first game's villain, Clockwerk, having his robotic body split into pieces and stolen by a villainous group of thieves called the Klaww Gang and you fight members of the Klaww Gang throughout the game. But then in the end,

the leader of the Klaww Gang, Arpeggio, gathered all of the Clockwerk parts along with Neyla, a constable assisting Carmelita trying to track down the people that stole the Clockwerk Parts (which Carmelita first thought was Sly's gang but Neyla pointed out it wasn't their MO and suggested that it was the Klaww Gang's doing). Arpeggio then tried to take control of Clockwerk's body but Neyla backstabbed him, took control of Clockwerk herself, and then killed him. Neyla in general made such a great villain because you probably never would've guessed she was the main antagonist in the game and then she just betrays every faction in the game at one point or another until she becomes the story's biggest threat.

Wouldn't mind seeing a Pokemon villain like that, where someone you probably wouldn't have expected that maybe has a smaller role in the beginning of the game suddenly becomes the game's main antagonist and you start to learn a lot more about their motivations.
 
Wouldn't mind seeing a Pokemon villain like that, where someone you probably wouldn't have expected that maybe has a smaller role in the beginning of the game suddenly becomes the game's main antagonist and you start to learn a lot more about their motivations.

That kinda reminds me of Es Cade/Evice from Colosseum. I thought that was pretty good and I've been wanting a similar situation in the main series games for a long time. To me it was kinda disappointing that we rightly guessed that the Aether Foundation wasn't completely made of good guys if you know what I mean.
 
That kinda reminds me of Es Cade/Evice from Colosseum. I thought that was pretty good and I've been wanting a similar situation in the main series games for a long time. To me it was kinda disappointing that we rightly guessed that the Aether Foundation wasn't completely made of good guys if you know what I mean.

Well Escade wasn't really a betrayal though. He was just the secret leader. Sly 2 is a different scenario because the actual leader of the villains was betrayed by another character who ended up being the true final boss.
 
I doubt they will make an individual villain someday because a) We already have single-character development in our rival and b) The grunts and the headquarters make for interesting dungeons and puzzles within the story, it's usually a point of the game where things feel very challenging because you have a ton of NPCs who are against you.

However, as said above, there are a ton of plot twists they could do with the team narrative. I think SM was a step in the right direction, as instead of nazis/ecoterrorists we got organizations that exist in the real world, and that are lead by people who influence and were influenced by other characters (Guzma by Kukui, Lusamine by her children and her dad) to take that role. I would like to see a team who has many leaders, where the power divisions aren't clear, and maybe with only a few grunts.
 
I totally agree with most of your points, but
a) We already have single-character development in our rival
Can't a good story be made up of multiple characters developing? Or am I misunderstanding what you mean by single-character development?
 
I like the idea of one guy spreading anarchy with a team of ridiculously overpowered Pokemon, making him formidable. Maybe an old Champion who maxed out his Pokemon's levels, lost his marbles, and decided to spread a little chaos.
 
I like the idea of one guy spreading anarchy with a team of ridiculously overpowered Pokemon, making him formidable. Maybe an old Champion who maxed out his Pokemon's levels, lost his marbles, and decided to spread a little chaos.

So something along the lines of "only the strong" will survive? And this guy is trying to select for the strongest trainers and weeding out the weak?
 
So something along the lines of "only the strong" will survive? And this guy is trying to select for the strongest trainers and weeding out the weak?

Not even. Just some bored guy wanting to watch the world burn.
 
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