Hottest Pokemon take?

Zinnia was the best gen 3 rival, while Wally barely qualifies as one. Wally's theme also feels disappointing and repetitive compared to Zinnia's despite both being new music tracks not from the original games. Now maybe I'm being a bit harsh on Wally, since he isn't supposed to be a huge part of the plot, rather being a passing trainer that you occasionally see, as opposed to your standard Rival, but hey, he could have a bit more story tied to him than what was given imo. Anyways, without further ado...

Spoilers for ORAS

My reasoning for this is that Wally has 3 encounters total. The Catch Tutorial, the Mauville gym fight with just Ralts, and then his actual team at the end of victory road. While he has a few extra appearances at the Battle Resort, he doesn't do much besides 1 last fight after a 50 win streak at the battle maison. Even with that final fight in ORAS, Wally ends up being uninteresting and forgettable at best.

Compare this to your standard Rival May or Brendan, which like other rivals, battles you at the beginning, and then around 2 badges in. While it's questionable why you Battle your rival right before the 6th gym, and then fight for a second time 1 town away, with almost no story in between, ORAS fixed the random disappearance of your rival by giving you a proper battle after the league.

Now, with Zinnia in ORAS, she watches your actions throughout the entire game, and uses Team Aqua/Magma to bring destruction, all in the hopes of luring rayquaza down from the sky, in premonition of the impending meteor impact. She then steals various Key Stones, tests you with half of her team, confirms the existence of alternate timelines, drops the Ancient Lore dump on you at Sky Pillar, summons rayquaza but fails to make it Mega evolve, and then fights you for a second time with a team that might actually be genuinely menacing if not for the fact that you caught Mega Rayquaza moments before the fight. Despite that, at least you can dragon dance sweep her while an amazing theme plays. You then get to hear the finale of her story after destroying the meteor, and then she disappears.

Even without a difficult battle, she carries the Delta Episode and makes a bigger impact on the overarching story than just about any character in ORAS. Despite not properly meeting her until the postgame, she is ultimately serving as a lategame rival that completely puts Wally to shame.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

This one's gonna be a doozie, but Gen 5 praise is too late for anything to change. Like... I believe we deserve the recent releases. Let's see...

Gen 5 was panned constantly back in the day, and while a lot of it hasn't aged well... It gave us this false perception that Gen 5 is underrated to this day. We never realized how great BW/B2W2 were until very later. I think it was because of Gen 5's hate is the reason why Gamefreak and Pokemon as a whole started to change in ways that many fans don't agree with. Ultimately I believe it's worthless to even say Gen 5 is underrated now, since it only proves we're stuck in 2011 rather than looking at the bigger picture of what we done.

With XY beyond now a thing? I think that is a consequence of us not knowing what we want. While I enjoy some parts of the newer games, I can't help but think of the timeline we could've been in if Gen 5 was loved from the beginning, causing Pokemon to go to new heights.

Oh, and some part of me would love to see the Gen 5 remakes look mediocre only for those people to get absolutely mad. I guess watching the Fandom burn once again would be a fun experience, eh?

Vaporeon. Did you that vaporeon is the...

From a competitive singles point of view, Zacian is the single most overrated Pokémon in the entire history of the franchise.

Zinnia isn't from Gen 3 though, she's from Gen 6.