The Pokémon series, at least in mainline titles, has always been one known for consistency. With each title, there are a few things to expect, particularly in the narrative. The player will catch Pokémon and become stronger, challenging strong opponents to make progress. Along the way, they’ll make new friends, discover new locations, and topple a villainous organization for fun.
The villains in the Pokémon franchise aren’t always that deep. Some are better than others, but rarely do they have morally grey motives. One of the closest, ironically, was Black and White’s Team Plasma. However, just because a villain is fairly binary doesn’t mean they can’t also be fun characters. This list will serve to document which villains have the most evil within them, and which villains actually have the best intentions.
10 Giovanni: Neutral Evil
Team Rocket’s leader, Giovanni, comes from a simpler time. There isn’t much good or evil to his plans; he’s just a crime boss. His goal is to capture the strongest Pokémon from trainers and use them for some nebulous goal of global domination. However, as shown based on the way he sees his own grunts, he’s mostly just in it to generate his own power. The reason he created Mewtwo was to have a powerful Pokémon by his side, after all. He’s not one for rules, but isn’t entirely chaotic. In this way, he’s a very simple evil to understand, and that’s what makes him work in Red and Blue.
9 Archie/Maxie: Chaotic Good
This may be a bit of a surprise, but it’s hard to define Archie and Maxie both as a form of evil. In fact, it’s clear that (at least they believe) they’re doing a good deed. Both teams want to use a legendary Pokemon to expand either the sea or the land. Regardless of how logically dumb these plans are, they’re based around doing a good deed for Pokémon. In the Pokémon world, helping out Pokémon is on the same level as saving a life. Their plans may go against the rules and norms, and are colossally dangerous, but at least in their hearts they have noble intentions.
8 Cyrus: Lawful Evil
Cyrus, the leader of Team Galactic, is one for long speeches about the morality of the world. He believes that people cannot be trusted to help themselves or the world. In his mind, he’s completely lost hope. However, he also wants to become powerful, so his goals are muddied somewhat.
He wants to create a new reality and rule over it, a plan so insane no other leader has tried it aside from him. Still, he respects the rules of the Pokémon world and will abide by them, as everyone else does. He has his honor along with his hunger for power, and that makes him lawfully evil.
7 N: Neutral Good
It can be argued that N isn’t a villain, more of a rival. However, he serves as one of the two main antagonists of Black and White, regardless of his heel-face turn. While he could be considered an entirely neutral party as far and humanity is concerned, he mostly cares about Pokémon. It’s through his relationship with the protagonist that he starts to care about people as well. N is such a beloved character because he’s noble at heart. At the end of the day his noble intentions are corrupted by an evil force behind him: Ghetsis
6 Ghetsis: Chaotic Evil
In the first game, Ghetsis was more lawfully evil, wanting to rule over the world in a similar manner to Cyrus. However, as the madness sets in and his plans continued to be foiled by teenagers, he becomes more unhinged. He nearly outright kills the player during the events of Black 2/White 2, being stopped before he can finish the job. Without his morality, he becomes more of a cult leader than a diplomat, ruling through sheer power. His madness compliments the calculated personality of the researcher, Colress.
5 Colress: Chaotic Neutral
Colress is a hard villain to pin down. His intentions are to draw out the power of Pokémon by any means necessary. If this means the world has to be destroyed to do so, he sees it as a necessary sacrifice. As his intentions are neither good nor evil, he remains neutral. However, he’s unpredictable into who he’ll trust and work with. He works with Team Plasma despite how much he despises Ghetsis as a person, as they are a means to his own end. He joins the player’s side when he releases they are the one who will help him the most. He’s a very popular villain, so its no surprise they brought him back in Sun and Moon.
4 Lysandre: Lawful Good
When evaluating alignment of these characters, their intentions and actions both have to be weighed. This makes it hard to evaluate Lysandre, leader of Team Flare. His grunts seem to be from an entirely different planet, in it only for the aesthetics. Lysandre, is equally well-dressed and likeable, but is also menacing.
Lysandre wants to use an ancient weapon (a legendary Pokemon) to annihilate humanity. To him, humans are inherently selfish and greedy and are irredeemable. However, he also understands that his weapon will destroy the Pokémon as well. This exchange is one he considers to be fair. Lysandre is a good example of a lawful good character who takes his good intentions too far.
3 Guzma: Chaotic Neutral
Team Skull are hardly dangerous villains, mostly just punks. Guzma himself is working for a greater authority. However, Guzma is still considered a villain and opposes the protagonist as one. Guzma is the definition of a free spirit, beating up and beating down wherever his heart takes him. He still has some consistency into who he is helping or who he’s destroying, but he most is just in it for fun. If he had more noble intentions, he would be a good fit for chaotic good, but he really just fits well as a neutral party.
2 Lusamine: Lawful Evil
Lusamine sees herself as the ultimate authority. She is the one who decides how to protect Pokémon, along with who deserves to work with her. While this could be seen as helping Pokémon, it’s clear that her idea of “protection” is wildly distorted from reality. To her, keeping Pokémon in a stasis is a form of eternal life, likely because she’s a big fan of Final Fantasy XIII. In the end, what matters most to Lusamine is control and domination, at least until she is either defeated or learns her lesson and turns over a new leaf.
1 Chairman Rose: Lawful Good
Rose is a similar case to Lysandre in attitude and intentions. While Lysandre was focused on destroying humanity to save it, Rose sees a different strategy. Rose wishes to save humanity from an inevitable energy crisis through what he sees as necessary measures. The necessary measures are, of course, to awaken an elder god and use it as a big battery. When the plan obviously backfires, Rose understands just how wrong he was, and turns himself for his crimes. This actually creates a few unanswered questions the game doesn’t explore. Rose, in the end, was just a billionaire who wanted to fund an impractical solution to a problem, even if he was a good person at heart.
NEXT: Pokémon: The D&D Alignments Of Galar Gym Leaders
