I mean… Flooding the world? Really?

It’s always been rather funny to me how the villain teams in Pokémon games seem to have plans that wildly vary in actual scope. Some of them want to essentially do things that would reshape the entire cosmos, while others are just carrying out petty theft. This got me thinking – a lot of people have done rankings based on how effective the evil team is, and how much damage their plan would actually do, and I don’t want to do something like that. Instead, I want to work out which of the evil team plans would be the most annoying to me as a person, assuming it was successful.

Team Star – Pokémon Scarlet and Violet

Team Star is straight up a bunch of bullies. And I’m not talking in the sense that Team Rocket are bullies; I’m talking about school bullies. That is their entire plan: to bully school children. Now, if it were twenty years ago, maybe these guys would be higher on my list. Maybe they’d be number one! But I’m 26 years old. If a kid bullies me with their little animal mates, then I’ll just kick them in the shins. I’ll pick them up and throw them over a fence. I’ll fully re-enact the scene from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia where Mac and Charlie body a bunch of teenagers. It wouldn’t be a competition. 

Team Yell – Pokémon Sword and Shield

I could honestly see myself hanging out with Team Yell. They literally just want to make their hometown better after the government of the Galar region ignored it, and the only real way they can do this is by making their finest trainer, Marnie, into the champion of the region so she can divert resources back to their hometown (this raises some obvious questions about how the economy of a Pokémon world actually works, but I’m not getting into that here, that’s a separate discussion). They’re pretty pure of heart, and they mean well. Side note: can anybody else see the nuclear explosion coming from the Energy Plant?

Team Rocket – Pokémon Gold, Silver and Crystal

Team Rocket’s plan in Pokémon Gold, Silver and Crystal is lower than their plan in the first games because it’s just pathetic. After their first plan failed miserably, their leader, Giovanni, just disappeared. Nobody has any idea where he is, and Team Rocket is absolutely fumbling the bag. Their entire plan here is a series of gambits that may not even work, just to find Giovanni. They want to take over a radio tower just to figure out where Giovanni is, and that might not work – what if he doesn’t reply to the radio signal? This wouldn’t be annoying; it would be sad.

Team Skull – Pokémon Sun and Moon

I’ll be totally real – I had to Google what Team Skull’s plan actually was because I couldn’t remember; it was a pretty bad one. And looking at it here, I understand why. The plan here is to just be annoying (which is why they rank above Team Rocket, Team Yell and Team Star), which, to be fair, would probably cause a lot of issues. But they’re also failing consistently in comedic fashion, which balances it all out – how am I supposed to take them seriously at all? It’s a bunch of seemingly menacing street punks who always fail; they’re essentially Bulk and Skull from Power Rangers.

Team Rocket – Pokémon Red, Green, Blue and Yellow

While Team Rocket aren’t exactly the most effective team in the franchise, it would be pretty annoying to have a straight-up illegal black market that couldn’t be stopped in my country. Combine that with the fact that Giovanni clearly wants to get Mewtwo so he can use his psychic powers to force everybody to give up their Pokémon, and it becomes morally awful as well as annoying. I mean, imagine being mind-controlled to hand over your cat to Tony Soprano.

Team Plasma – Pokémon Black and White 1 and 2

Team Plasma’s plan in Pokémon Black and White is pretty annoying. In fact, the only reason it’s not number one is that it would at least not kill me. While the “plan” that Team Plasma says it has is to liberate all Pokémon from people and essentially make them their own class (which is a decent goal, all things considered), that’s not their actual plan. Team Plasma leader Ghestis wants to become the dictator of the Unova region, and he’s aware that the only way people could stop him is with their Pokémon, so he wants them all separated before Team Plasma takes over. Now, ignoring that guns exist, something which we cannot stop to think about, this is an extremely annoying plan. It’s also basically the same plan as he has in Pokémon Black and White 2, with the difference that he’s at the very least not pretending to be a nice person in that game.

Team Aqua/Team Magma – Pokémon Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald

I’m grouping these two because they have essentially the same plan. Team Aqua wants to flood the world with water; Team Magma wants to do it with lava. Both of these would be EXTREMELY annoying to me – I can’t swim very well, for starters, so if Team Aqua wins, then I’m just going to drown trying to swim to a Lidl, probably within days of the flooding, and that’s assuming I survive the initial wave. Team Magma wants to do a massive game of The Floor Is Lava so I’m dead immediately; I’m simply not surviving a wave of molten rock hitting my house, regardless of any measures that I might take. I live in the UK; we melt at the slightest hint of hot weather. I am not surviving a lava wave.

Team Galactic – Pokémon Diamond, Pearl and Platinum

I just know for a fact that my atoms would be absolutely fuming at being deleted from the universe. Team Galactic and Cyrus want to create a world without conflict, which would be great if they left it there. But he also wants to get rid of emotion and spirit, and he wants to take control of the new universe. So first of all, I’d simply cease to exist in my current form. That’d be annoying. But then having my new form obey some guy with hair that looks like he’s stuck a fork in a plug? I wouldn’t be best pleased.

Team Flare – Pokémon X and Y

Team Flare wants to basically drown the world in fire and cleanse it of anything that isn’t a member of their team – and that’s just one of the conditions for survival. You also need to either pay a huge amount of money or prove that you are worth saving. Firstly, imagine how annoying it would be for some arsehole to tell you that, sorry, you’re not actually going to have a place in the new world. Secondly, people KNOW about the weapon that they’re going to use; it’s historically documented, so the authorities have had thousands of years to figure out a way to protect from it. Also, the guy who built it is still alive as a direct consequence of using it to end the ancient Pokémon war. Sure, he’s ‘hiding’, but I refuse to believe that nobody will recognise a 12ft tall man as a bit weird. I’d be in the afterlife, furious, trying to figure out how the hell they missed all the signs.

So, that’s every evil plan in a mainline Pokémon game ranked by how much they’d annoy me personally. I hope you had as much reading it as I did writing it. Yes, I am aware this is a bit of a downgrade from the previous articles in this series, but it’s been a weird month, okay?

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