Do you think Team Plasma was handled correctly in the Anime?

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PokeDot517

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I don't why but to me Team Plasma in the anime doesn't seem as sinister & developed as in the games Black & White 2. Also things like

1. Shadow Triad was never shown.

2. Where is Plasma's flying boat?

3. The Seven Sages wasn't there.

4. Neither was Zinzolin.

5. No Black Kyurem or White Kyurem

I understand that Team Plasma had improper introduction (Team Rocket vs Team Plasma that never aired) But I think the writers could have done better though they were probably putting most of their effort in the XY anime.

But I'm not sure. =]
 
I agree. I was like, "No Plasma Frigate???? What?! You freakin' kiddin' me!"
 
it was handled like a FEDEX guy with a TV when he came to a fence... From the 2parter that was banned to N stopping the battle that would have been the Mother-in-law of all battles... It was bad, just bad :(
 
As much as I really wanted to see first pair of games' plots faithfully adapted on the silver screen, I wouldn't say there's a "correct" way to do things. Regardless, I didn't really like how Team Plasma was handled.

My answer got kinda long, so I put it in a spoiler. Brevity is not my strong suit.
First off, Pokémon Liberation. This is one of the biggest parts of Team Plasma, and what I found most intriguing, and to see it completely absent in the anime is kind of disheartening. Even before the seismic disaster, it looks like the writers had no intentions of adapting the liberation plotline. :(

I didn't find anime Team Plasma all that interesting. Their goal is to control Pokémon and use them to conquer. What about that stands out? If you took everything Team Plasma does in Episode N and had Team Rocket do it instead, how would it be any different or any less fitting?

Another thing I liked about game!Plasma was their interactions with N. Unlike the games, nobody in Team Plasma barring Ghetsis really interacts with N or feels strongly about him any way or the other. He is pretty much a leader gone AWOL, right? Also, in BW117, Team Plasma's secondary goal is to capture N. He's conveniently unconscious and heavily injured, and they just retreat? Um, what?

The storytelling I also found a little dissatisfying. The flashback episode really steps all over "Show, don't tell" in my opinion. We're given bits of backstory there and in other episodes that was also in the games (e.g. N being an ex-Plasma member, N and his sisters being misled by Ghetsis, N meeting lots of trainers and Pokémon along his journey, causing him to change his views) but I wish we would have actually seen this stuff like in the games instead of being crammed into flashbacks or exposition.

I feel like some things are unclear. For example, what exactly are Concordia and Anthea doing for Team Plasma? Are we to assume they're taking care of N like in the games? Granted, a lot of things character-wise with Team Plasma in the games is pretty unclear too, so I guess I can't really fault the anime writers for this. I thought the home in a magic fog dimension was kinda silly, but we've seen mystical elements before.

The Sages. What happened to them? Were they all burned alive by Reshiram in the flashback or something, and that's why they don't appear or are even mentioned at all outside of it? N does mention that he was "spared", but what does that mean, especially given that Ghetsis is A-OK after the whole ordeal? I guess the whole ceremony was supposed to be a nod to the games, but it just leaves me puzzled. Did Ghetsis fire them all or something? The writers had no problem not including the Shadow Triad, so I guess it's kinda weird that they included the Sages in what's basically a glorified cameo. They could have shown the Sages supervising operations or something like in the games. But I guess then they would have to actually design them instead of having them all look the same... [although the sages have unique designs in the games, so it shouldn't be a problem.]

I've mentioned this a few times already, but N acts like the Reshiram seen in that flashback and the one revived from the Light Stone are one and the same, which is a little impossible, so what's up with that?

Ghetsis bothers me. He doesn't really do anything before the finale. He just sits on his throne, talking with the underlings. He wants N re-captured for some reason. N doesn't further his plan, much unlike the games. When he summons Reshiram, he even talks about how he doesn't need N anymore. So why does he want N brought back to him? Also, none of the good guys bar N even talk to Ghetsis. Not one word!

For what he is, Colress is OK. I don't like how he's so one-note in that he focuses pretty much just on controlling Pokémon. What happens to his interest in many different potential methods of drawing out a Pokémon's power, like the bond between trainers and Pokémon?

Ahh, the finale episode. I didn't really like it. There are several points during the episode where Colress and Ghetsis just stand around doing nothing while Ash, N, Team Rocket and co. converse. That's probably my biggest flaw. That's just not how good villains work. You don't stand around and not use your unstoppable army so that the main characters can do stuff. I think that episode is poorly structured. Having control of Reshiram plus the army should have made Team Plasma completely unstoppable but the heroes won somehow. It's hard to get involved. It's like I'm watching two incoherent different conflicts: Ash vs. Colress and N vs. Ghetsis, and Ash is only there because he's the main character. Well, more like 1 and a half conflicts, since N doesn't really do anything besides talk to Reshiram. Ghetsis doesn't do much after he summons Reshiram, so, uh, one conflict? Hilda/Hilbert was one of the legendary heroes, so they had an important part in the conflict.

I guess this doesn't have to do with Team Plasma, but the absence of Zekrom is pretty noticeable too. Reshiram and Zekrom probably have the greatest connection of all legendary duos, but it's only explored in Movie 14. The TV series doesn't touch on it one bit.
I feel like the sequence we saw in Black and White was far more logical, meaningful, engaging, and climatic then what we got here. As for Black and White 2, I liked Team Plasma's role there less, but they were still pretty solid. Isn't it ironic how Team Plasma's presence probably has the greatest scope of all the villainous teams in the games, but their anime run doesn't reflect that at all?

I think Team Galactic had the best run of all the anime villainous teams. Why do I think that?
Well, it helps that the anime didn't discard their major shtick. It doesn't hurt that every major character was worked into the story. A lot of aspects of Team Plasma are altered from the games [e.g. Cyrus' background, where's he a construction mogul instead of a robotics guy] and some are outright ignored [like Team Plasma's facade of looking for alternative energy, or their stealing Pokémon] but I feel all the changes work. Needing the Adamant and Lustrous Orbs to summon Dialga/Palkia? It makes sense, and gives them a purpose. Hiring Hunter J to capture the Lake Guardians? A great way to work her in.

You know what I really loved? How Cyrus actually did something. Besides Giovanni dealing with Mewtwo, he's really the only villainous boss to do anything of note before the big finale. [and then Giovanni's battling was off-screen in the Mewtwo special!]

In the Team Galactic finale, making Ash and friends connected to the Lake Guardians is really nice because it makes them an important part of the confrontation. Like I said, during the Team Plasma finale, I felt like I was watching two different fights! Ash vs. Colress and N vs. Ghetsis. Ash's interaction with Ghetsis is basically non-existant. Even though they didn't do much in the end, I definitely appreciated the attempt to make Dawn and Brock relevant! They and Cynthia definitely did more than Cilan and Juniper.

In fact, I'm kind of scratching my head wondering how Reshiram didn't instantly defeat all of the good guys. With Dialga and Palkia, the three Lake Guardians plus Cynthia's Godchomp were there to make sure Ash and co. didn't get turned to roadkill. During the Team Plasma finale, there's almost nothing stopping Reshiram from running over Ash and friends except the fact that the show would be over if it did. In addition, Cyrus and his underlings were focused on the creation of their new world, so it's pretty sensible that they wouldn't focus too much on the protagonists. A lot more justified than Colress and Ghetsis standing around doing nothing while Ash plots with N and Team Rocket.

I would have liked to see a proper battle between the Ash and friends and the Team Galactic Commanders, and I do wonder how the writers might have worked in the Distortion World like in Platinum if not for Movie 11, but I still found the finale to be pretty solid.
Don't worry, this isn't that long!
 
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I thought that Team Plasma wasn't handled that well in the anime. Everything that made the group interesting and my favorite evil team, such as the Pokemon liberation in B/W and the two groups of Team Plasma fighting with each other in B2/W2, was absent in the anime. Instead, they were just generically evil with wanting Pokemon to conquer, which doesn't make them much different from Team Rocket in that regard, and that's far less compelling. It would have been great to see more elements beyond the characters' outfits and Corless from B2/W2 appear in Episode N, but to be fair, a lot of the more interesting/engaging moments against Neo Team Plasma in the sequel games related back to events from B/W, so their hands were tied. Even if the Team Plasma two parter hadn't been skipped, Team Plasma wasn't going to be a major focus of the series, or at the very least it looked seriously unlikely that they would appear frequently like with other evil teams, so there wasn't much they could do with Team Plasma's storyline as a result, which is rather unfortunate.

N's development is mostly off-screen, which is also a big disappointment. His personality was handled fine in general, but it would have been a lot more meaningful if we saw more of his change throughout the series, instead of just having him appear with all of that development taking place before running into Ash. His change in his attitude regarding Pokemon rescuers in that Harbor Patrol episode was pretty good and something like that throughout the whole journey through Unova would have been nice. Concordia and Anthea were just kind of there and didn't really do much, but that's also how they were in the games too. Ghetsis was just a boring villain standing on the sidelines and even in the finale, he didn't really do much once he controlled Reshiram. Colress was okay for the most part in regards to his characterization, but he also suffered from not doing anything in the finale aside from standing.

As a whole, I'd say that the way the anime handled Team Plasma was lackluster. All of the interesting elements about the team were eliminated and N's growth was primarily off-screen. In their defense, there wasn't a lot from B2/W2 that they could capture well into the anime at that point when they didn't cover anything of B/W Team Plasma. If they had used them throughout the series, instead of cramming them into one arc, they might have been handled better.
 
No, they looked like jokes especially since they wouldn't even take down TRio, and when your evil team gets flack from stooges who can never even beat a 10 year old you know something is wrong with you. Plus Ghetsis never even used his awesome as all heck hydreigon.
 
Even when I look at Team Plasma without comparing it to the games, I still dislike it. One big arch didn't help, as 'all the development' felt rushed. I never actually got that 'team feeling' from them, they seemed more like a small group of 10 people. It felt like there's was no point to their association besides summing Reshiram, which had absolutely no point to it. So they could take over Unova I guess? But why Reshiram?

I want to keep critiquing it more, but there's nothing for me to critique... They just weren't handled very well, and I ascribe that mainly due to it being arched.
 
It was terrible. It's pretty funny how they had so much material from the games to put a bunch of great stuff, emotion and development in the anime, yet we're here, with the worst handled series so far.
 
Ok, I think. Even if all these "Colress controlling pokemon" episodes became a bit boring. And then I agree about what other posts said.
 
Team Galatic, IMHO still remains the best handled team in the anime. I still think that team plasma would have still be shafted even if the 2 skipped episodes aired, IMHO, a few, prob 3 or 4 more episodes (since da!/adventures in unova and beyond is pretty useless as heck of a arc to me) of episode N would have fixed some of it too me.
 
I wouldn't say they were handled the absolute best (Team Galactic gets that honor), but, to be honest, I think they were handled pretty well (the main members, at least). Reason being, I actually understood what they were about.

Just playing the games, I really just couldn't get what exactly Colress was trying to do. Seeing him physically using a machine to bring out the hidden potential in Pokemon made me understand his idea much better than just hearing him talk and talk and talk in Black 2.

Not to mention, I just prefer the personalities of Colress, N, and Ghetsis more in the Anime than in the games. They seem much more villainous (heroic for N). Maybe that means they were handled incorrectly (N, for instance seemed fine with certain things that he would not have approved of in the games), but it made them better characters, in my opinion.

As for the rest of the "team", they were sort of just pushed on having a rivalry with Jessie, James, and Meowth. I do believe that could have been done better; it just felt like filler to the rest of the plot.

And while I did like Ghetsis' personality more, he just did a whole lot of nothing until his debut. During which...he still did a whole lot of nothing. I found myself questioning what the purpose of whatever he was trying to do was. It's like: he's looking for N, but when he finds him, he says he doesn't need him. He wants Reshiram, but when he gets it, he stands around and basically lets Ash stop him.

So basically: I think they did well with portraying the more important members, but didn't do well when it came the their execution.
 
Team Galactc was okay but even they weren't handled all that great in the anime.

The Team Plasma arc was great but it should had been done a lot more better, 6 episodes weren't too bad but that just wasn't enough.
 
They ought to have stuck with the original plan of TP tricking trainers into releasing their pokemon so Ghetsis could rule the world, not this half assed mind control Reshiram bullshit.
 
I'm rather satisfied with it.

Oh, they could've been handled MUCH better. But it was IMPOSSIBLE for them to have been done right anyway, so I'll take what I can get.

For starters, their (initial) goal of liberation just did NOT work in the Show. While the Games and Mangas make freeing Pokémon work, the Show practically goes out of its way to make Pokémon perfectly happy being someone's' pet/companion/slave. Heck, just look at how members of Ash-tachi, some rivals, and even the TRio befriend their Pokémon way more often than actually weakening them before a capture. As some have pointed out, the producers likely wouldn't used the liberation angle in the first darn place because that just wouldn't go with the shiny, friendly, happy near-paradise they'd spent almost 15 years making.
The sad thing is that they could've found a loophole by having Isshu filled with trainers who weren't so damn buddy-buddy with their pokes, which would've been refreshing :-(. (We need a few more Pauls and a few less Ashes). The fact that several bad guys & jerks popped up certainly could've supported such a move. But no, almost everyone in Isshu still treated Pokémon like family :dead:
Heck, the fact that liberation was all a ruse could've worked out really well :-(

Another problem is that TP was in TWO storylines, separated by a time-skip no less. Melding the two stories together sounds like a challenge in the first place (though possible), but it was even harder since time-skips don't exist in the Show.

And, of course, the Seismic Disaster banning the TP vs. TR two parter. Just exactly how much this really affected Best Wishes & the creative staff's plans for TP, we may never know. For all we know, TP might've ended up being screwed over like how poor Aqua & Magma were. But it's hard to deny that having them show up (a lot) sooner could've helped, even if just a little.

And well...the producers just know HOW to make good use of Villains most of the time! They'd rather have Ash-tachi and friends have inconsequential misadventures that put a certain Pokémon in the spotlight (whether it deserves it or not) that are light & fluffy as an American cartoon than tell an actual story, let alone a good one. Episode N being so short in favor of moving on to DA almost feels like evidence...

Those are my thoughts
 
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Team Gaara said:
Not to mention, I just prefer the personalities of Colress, N, and Ghetsis more in the Anime than in the games. They seem much more villainous (heroic for N). Maybe that means they were handled incorrectly (N, for instance seemed fine with certain things that he would not have approved of in the games), but it made them better characters, in my opinion.
Click to expand...

Ghetsis is very villainous in the games. He's very charismatic and uses his charisma to manipulate people and get them to believe what he wants (e.g. the speeches he gives on why people should release their Pokémon). As part of his manipulation, in the sequels he intentionally has N come to the Giant Chasm just to fuse N's dragon into Kyurem as part of his goal to conquer. The climax of the original games shows wonderfully how he was manipulating N the whole time; N was nothing but a pawn to him. The anime shows this a bit as well, but nowhere as well in my opinion, no thanks to it being crammed between a flashback and exposition. Game-wise, He's also very cruel, calling N a freak without a human heart. In the sequels he's cruel to Kyurem as well; N comes to the Giant Chasm primarily because his dragon tells him that Kyurem is in pain. Not to mention, Ghetsis loves seeing people break down and lose all hope.

Colress isn't really all that evil. He's more of a neutral figure. He's just trying to bring out the latent power of Pokémon (which is admittedly, pretty vague), and he doesn't really care whether his methods are moral or not. It just so happens that he happens to end up on a villainous team in pursuit of that goal. When Rosa/Nate shows him the power of kindness, and the bond between Pokémon and trainers, he yields to them. When Ghetsis is defeated, he stops Team Plasma's evil. In the post-game, he also says that he always detested Ghetsis.

N is supposed to be kind of antagonistic is first. His seeing the righteous of bonds between trainers and Pokémon and stepping away from Ghetsis shows how he grows as a person and sees how the world really is. More-or-less. In the anime, we don't really get to see much of this. He tells us when he first appears that he used to be part of Team Plasma and tells us that his worldview changed as he traveled when he's trapped underground with Ash. Would have been nice to see this. :/

Pikacuh said:
Team Galactc was okay but even they weren't handled all that great in the anime.
Click to expand...

I suppose this is off-topic, but why do you feel this way?

SammyW27 said:
Another problem is that TP was in TWO storylines, separated by a time-skip no less. Melding the two stories together sounds like a challenge in the first place (though possible), but it was even harder since time-skips don't exist in the Anime.
Click to expand...

I would have the plot of the first games climax in the Pokémon League, and then have all the Black and White 2 stuff be a post-league arc, just like how Episode N itself is a post-league arc. But that's just me. Episode N is like this weird mix of Team Plasma from both games, to me.
 
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I'm pretty sure that the anime's TP grunts have more personality than show!Ghetsis.
 
Ambipom666 said:
Ghetsis is very villainous in the games. He's very charismatic and uses his charisma to manipulate people and get them to believe what he wants (e.g. the speeches he gives on why people should release their Pokémon). As part of his manipulation, in the sequels he intentionally has N come to the Giant Chasm just to fuse N's dragon into Kyurem as part of his goal to conquer. The climax of the original games shows wonderfully how he was manipulating N the whole time; N was nothing but a pawn to him. The anime shows this a bit as well, but nowhere as well in my opinion, no thanks to it being crammed between a flashback and exposition. Game-wise, He's also very cruel, calling N a freak without a human heart. In the sequels he's cruel to Kyurem as well; N comes to the Giant Chasm primarily because his dragon tells him that Kyurem is in pain. Not to mention, Ghetsis loves seeing people break down and lose all hope.

Colress isn't really all that evil. He's more of a neutral figure. He's just trying to bring out the latent power of Pokémon (which is admittedly, pretty vague), and he doesn't really care whether his methods are moral or not. It just so happens that he happens to end up on a villainous team in pursuit of that goal. When Rosa/Nate shows him the power of kindness, and the bond between Pokémon and trainers, he yields to them. When Ghetsis is defeated, he stops Team Plasma's evil. In the post-game, he also says that he always detested Ghetsis.

N is supposed to be kind of antagonistic is first. His seeing the righteous of bonds between trainers and Pokémon and stepping away from Ghetsis shows how he grows as a person and sees how the world really is. More-or-less. In the anime, we don't really get to see much of this. He tells us when he first appears that he used to be part of Team Plasma and tells us that his worldview changed as he traveled when he's trapped underground with Ash. Would have been nice to see this. :/

Pikacuh said:
Team Galactc was okay but even they weren't handled all that great in the anime.
Click to expand...

I suppose this is off-topic, but why do you feel this way?

SammyW27 said:
Another problem is that TP was in TWO storylines, separated by a time-skip no less. Melding the two stories together sounds like a challenge in the first place (though possible), but it was even harder since time-skips don't exist in the Anime.
Click to expand...

I would have the plot of the first games climax in the Pokémon League, and then have all the Black and White 2 stuff be a post-league arc, just like how Episode N itself is a post-league arc. But that's just me. Episode N is like this weird mix of Team Plasma from both games, to me.
Click to expand...

Team Galactic didn't really have that much of a personality and their finale arc could of been done a lot more better.

Team Plasma had good personalities but they did overrush their arc a little bit and the writers should have took their time with doing the Team Plasma arc.
 
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