Who’s the best champion

@puplover1118 That's usually me. To be fair, I am an English teacher. I can tolerate poor writing skills on the internet, but punctuation tends to cause the most problems, making longer posts unintelligible when absent.

Read your post back to yourself out loud, people. If you find yourself running out of breath, chuck in a full stop, or at least a comma. I don't trust you with a semi-colon.

Anyway...

This is actually a difficult question to answer.

I think Cynthia is probably the best implementation of a concept that started with Steven: Introducing the champion part way through the game and peppering interactions with them throughout the story. It gives them much more identity and helps them stick in your mind, rather than being some nobody boss you face off with at the end.

But I didn't really like Cynthia. I don't hate her. Her champion fight is great, probably one of the last real challenges in the series, and her interest in myths and history is compelling enough. I just found her a bit dull.

Your rival in the first games arguably is also a version of this concept, but much more antagonistic. I really like Green, as I have said in other threads. He is entertaining and satisfying to beat time and time again.

As an aside, where does the name "Trace" come from? I have heard Blue or Gary for English speakers and Green or Shigeru for Japanese speakers, but Trace is new. Is it from a manga?

Lance I considered more of a gen 1 cameo of sorts (until it was revealed that Johto shared a border and a league with Kanto). He's pretty cool.

I didn't like gen 3, and Steven I found similarly boring. Not unlikeable. Just uninteresting.

Alder is an interesting case. I think he is very compelling as a character with a lot of relevant things to say with relation to the game's themes and narrative, particularly to Cheren.

But as a champion he comes across as very weak. In the story he immediately loses to N and you finish the game without ever actually beating him. It wasn't until years later that I loaded up my old save and realised that I never went back and beat the league proper, because I didn't have a Hall of Fame entry. I got distracted with other things (admittedly I was busy with my degree at the time) and BW2 came out soon afterwards.

I like Alder as a character, but not as a champion, if that makes sense.

Iris is another interesting case. I love dragons and I like her well enough in BW, for the brief times she appears. But in BW2 her being the champion feels kind of random.

They didn't want to make the player character the champion and the Elite Four in earlier games sadly lack a lot of identity. You usually only meet them at the end for the league. They hinted at her having some kind of "potential", so whatever... Iris is champion now. You remember Iris... She's back! In champion form.

XY I consider a forgettable non-game, and Diantha is just another part of it. Boring.

Hau became the champion in USUM, right? That was one of the few changes I actually liked to SM's main story. It made him seem more like a real rival than an annoying charity case you are forced to drag along.

I hate Sword and Shield. I think Leon was kind of annoying and arrogant in that story, and so many events in the game were hand waved away with "Leon handled it". He's hardly any worse than the rest of the cast though, given that the population of the Pokémon British Isles seemed to have been subjected to mandatory lobotomies before the outset of the game.

Geeta is terrible. Her team is terrible. I guess she is meant to be an administrator who judges trainers qualifying for "Champion Rank" rather than an actual champion, but the rest of the Elite Four are far more likable and entertaining than her. Nemona insists that she is great, but she seems to be the only one who sees it.

So, yes, this is a difficult question for which to pick a single answer. My shortlist is probably Blue, Lance, Cynthia or Alder, but there are reasons I would also not pick each one.

I may come back and vote in this poll at a later date. I cannot choose for now.

Let's Go PEE is supposed to be a sequel to RGBY, right? It is not actually a remake?

I wasn't too interested in Go beyond its initial launch, so the Switch games didn't appeal to me.