Team Skull: perfect balance of villainy and endearment

[DarcyOnTheLine]

Ok i will fully admit my love of team skull partly comes from pokemon moon being my first ever pokemon game almost a decade ago. However after going back and playing most of the mainline games up until this point i can safely say that team skull has struck a balance that no team has been able to reach since. all of the evil teams up to generation 7 were big bad evil organizations backed by money and power. team rocket was essentially the mafia. team magma and aqua were feuding to reshape the world. team galactic wanted to create a new world. team plasma wanted to rule the world. team flare wanted to nuke the world. all of these antagonistic teams didn't exactly operate on a small scale. this absolutely made team skull stick out like a sore thumb. while yes they did partake in some villainy, it was far smaller scale. instead of tailored suits and vast underground networks, team skull is made up of angry kids rebelling against the traditions of alola. they're incompetent and a public nuisance, but they look out for each other. there's this genuine awe that the grunts of the team feel towards guzma; believing in him and his abilities. this sense of community can even be seen in the grunts' choice of poke balls. the nest ball specifically works better on pokemon at lower levels. this means that the grunts farther in the game specifically caught they're pokemon early on and trained them up. this kinda thing isn't exactly something you would associate with the big bad evil organization. i'm sure game freak changed their usual formula of evil teams this go around to create the red herring of the true evil team being the aether foundation. This was never a surprising plot twist (them shown chasing down lillie in the opening cutscene), but it helps to fill the void of an actually threatening antagonist. after gen 7 came out and game freak realized how popular team skull was, they tried to do it again in galar. team yell is a half rate team skull. their personality is barely there, their theme is forgettable, and their impact on the plot is nonexistent. they tried the whole red herring good organization is actually evil twist again with macro cosmos but it felt incredibly half baked. i know pokemon plots have never been the deepest but they've always had personality. gen 9 tried the whole public nuisance team again with team star. team star is an objective improvement over yell in every department. the character designs (specifically the 5 bosses) are very interesting, their relevance to the plot is well done albeit a bit disconnected on account of the way scar/vi structures its game, and their music is some of the best in the whole series. however i still don't feel that it reaches the heights of team skull. i feel like it's more an issue on the open world structure of paldea than the team itself, but they feel really disconnected from the world. outside of the specific starfall missions team star is almost nonexistent. game freak has been chasing the highs of team skull since their inception, and in all honesty i don't think they will ever be able to reach them again. i am cautiously optimistic about winds and waves and i hope that if nothing else they make the evil team interesting instead of a half rate imitation of what game before. or they could just bring back team skull and my dumbass would be all over it. anyway what do you think. agree? disagree? think this is the most lukewarm take imaginable?