Best Villain??

Team Magma and Aqua are just wild. attempting to drain away water and replace water with land could make it challenging to drink water. attempting to flood water can "eliminate" people. These guys were pretty much doing Lysandre.

Jessie James and Meowth

i don't feel like I have to explain that

I feel like one of my favorite villains is Lusamine. She's just insane with some sort of reasoning as to how she got to that point but that still doesn't justify her actions. Full-on villain there!

But if we are considering the anime, it's of course going to be the Team Rocket trio. They are just too perfect!

I feel like one of my favorite villains is Lusamine. She's just insane with some sort of reasoning to how she got to that point but that still doesn't justify her actions. Full on villain there!

But if we are considering the anime, its of course going to be the Team Rocket trio. They are just too perfect!

Pokémon villains in general tend to be kind of simplistic, sometimes to their own detriment, though for what is ostensibly a children's game they can also become very twisted and dark in their backstories and motivations.

I think Team Rocket and Giovanni were quite effective for their simplicity, which is what they needed to be in a Game Boy game and the foundational games in the franchise. They were the Pokémon Yakuza or mafia. Stealing Pokémon for profit and power. Easily understood motivations in such a world.

I understand the real world inspiration for Magma and Aqua, but in the games themselves their motivations are hyperbolic, self-destructive and make no sense. Especially Aqua. For all of the problems a lack of water would cause if Magma's plans worked, humans live on the land. Where would they live if Aqua won?

Galactic are so much nothing among their lower ranks. Do the grunts even know Cyrus' plan? Cyrus himself hints at something interesting but the games themselves do not explore it enough, though Platinum helped by expanding on it.

Plasma would have been so much better if their real leaders had actually believed in the plan to liberate Pokémon, and even in defeating them there had been some moral ambiguity. Sucks that in the end they were evil and trying for World Domination™ all along.

Team Flare feels like a repeat of Team Galactic. French Ganondorf (I legitimately forget his name) hints at interesting ideas and motivations, but they are not explored and by the end of the game become nonsensical. Do the most of the grunts even understand the plan?

Lusamine was interesting and had a decent arc, but it is a shame that was all thrown away for Rainbow Rocket in USUM and she gets off scot-free.

The villains in Sword and Shield are a joke. Team Yell are just annoying and surely count as criminal mischief at best. And they are unrelated to Rose, who's plan is the most illogical. They try to explain it as extreme altruism justifying villainy, but as far as I can tell he was so afraid of a disaster happening in 1000 years that he made it happen today instead? How is that better? Actively doing nothing his entire life would have led to a better outcome closer to his goals.

Does Scarlet and Violet even have a villain? The professor AI is shown to be virtuous all along (as far as the game and its narrative writers are concerned anyway) so who is supposed to be the bad guy? The school system itself, but not the teachers and administrators working within it?

So all this considered, I suppose I would say Team Rocket, because they are too simple to screw up, or Team Plasma because they are least suggest interesting initial motivations and moral quandary, even if it falls through by the end.