Removing the Evil Teams

[Greninjaman]

How would the story of each main series game be affected if you remove the evil team? What would change?

 

[colours]

the main story would be boring, tbh.

i say this because if you remove the evil teams, there's still the "collect 8 badges and defeat the elite four" element of the games. considering that evil teams don't really hit their climax until late game (usually between the 7th and 8th gym), the player would then be stuck doing what they've been doing since early game with nothing to really shake things up near the mid-late game.

that said though, there are moments where evil teams have been done really well imo even with the "take over the world" aspect in mind. i'm thinking of pokemon colosseum and pokemon XD here, but in those games the opposite occurred - the usual central goal of "becoming champion" is scrapped and the game focuses nearly entirely on the evil teams and stopping them, allowing the teams to flesh out more and have more depth.

... now that i think about it, perhaps we do need more pokemon games with less of the "beat the gym leaders/e4/champion" thing. it'd be interesting.

 

[CuboneKing]

Yeah, without the evil team pretty much every game’s story just gets reduced to “kid travels around the country earning brownie points for making their pets beat up other pets.” SuMo and SwSh could lose Skull and Yell and not have too much change since they don’t drive their game’s respective climaxes, but that’s only if you don’t count Aether and Macro Cosmos as evil teams which they pretty much are.

 

[Greninjaman]

@colours @CuboneKing
Hmm...
Both of you have good points. Removing the evil team would reduce the game to just getting the 8 Badges and beating the league.

 

[Guzma]

i mean, if you cut team flare out of XY, the worst fucking characters in the game/series wouldn't be in the game anymore. it's a win-win.

 

[Silktree]

The real question if grunts are needed. Legends barely has trainer battles, but I assume that there is still a villain you battle in the climax (not just Arceus or another legendary). The alphas are basically evil admins of sorts?

 

[Jukain726]

To answer this, I would pretty much have to answer what the game is supposed to be about, and everyone has a different answer for that. All trainers provide conflict, so having an evil team is really unnecessary. Technically, the pokemon themselves also are a source of conflict, so not even trainers are that necessary. We now have the framework for pokemon based bosses without it being a legend, although I sort of wish it was like other RPGs in that it doesn't really need an explanation for why boss pokemon are stronger than what they are when you catch and train them yourself. It's at best accepted as gameplay and story segregation.

The only other thing I could think of is that it provides something that you have a more moral reason to fight against, although that doesn't exist for Team Plasma save for Ghetsis, and only the part of the Aether Foundation influenced by Lusamine could really be seen as socially unacceptable. Team Skull are bullies if anything, but their resistance to the arbitrary standards of the trial system is understandable.

That doesn't need to exist either since other forms of conflict exist. For those that enjoy mere exploration, none of this would matter, and for those that just want to collect monsters or just enjoy the monsters altogether, it still doesn't matter. It's just a tradition at this point, and I don't see it being altered for the traditional format either.