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The Best and Worst Boss Fights in Pokemon
- Thread starter Yung Dramps
- Start date
At least Cynthia requires DIFFERENT Super effective moves. Lance's entire team crumbles to Rock, and most of it to Electric or Ice (dude's more of a Flying Specialist than Falkner is).
I admit part of it is probably down to Cynthia being more of a stat check with her higher level curve, but honestly every mon on her team is a pretty solid one for Gen 4's era of release (bearing in mind that Garchomp was the first non-Legendary Uber in Smogon history off its power, not simply collateral from Evasion Clause). It's basically what they were trying to achieve with RBY Blue except not constrained by half-finished level-up movesets.
In general, I think varied-type Champions are a better final challenge than type-specialists like Lance, Steven, or Wallace, and I'm glad they didn't continue trying to make that a thing after B2W2 Iris. The Elite Four are type specialists with differing focuses so your team requires variety to get past them (barring extreme overleveling), making a Mixed Champion more effective as a final exam than just "the biggest one-trick" in their League.
I disagree. Not because you’re wrong, but there aren’t that many Pokemon available with good ice and rock moves in their learnset, and tms were more limited in HGSS
Additionally, you had to have enough coverage that it could withstand 6 strong Pokemon. Lapras could only take out 2-3.
In Platinum, you had access to most good tms pre-postgame without having to spend hours grinding Voltorb Flip
That would make sense, but pre-fairy, Iris and Stephen presented the most challenge to me as Champions, because with Stephen I hadn’t had to fight many steel types during my run and lacked sufficient coverage, and again in B2/W2 I struggled because I hadn’t thought about the Champion, and didn’t have ice coverage on my team beyond Samurott, who was unable to sweep due to the power level.
Dragon makes for a good champion type because you were facing psuedos with the only SE coverage being Ice and Dragon, both of which were hard to come by.
Cynthia and Ghetsis/N weren’t as hard. When you only have 1-2 of a type, you naturally will have ways to hit their whole team for SE damage. However, when you only have 1-2 Pokemon who can do that, you have to find out of the box solutions for the other Pokemon you’re facing, especially when they have counters to your Pokemon with SE coverage
What the actual fuck is this garbage.
This is your third rival fight in X and Y. Their starter is fully evolved and only has two moves! And Greninja gets the most shafted here because it's working off its less impressive Attack stat with two moves that do no damage. Even if you turn of the EXP Share you'll have to deal with crap like this throughout the entire game.
Your rival doesn't even have full movesets on their postgame rematch team, btw.
This is your third rival fight in X and Y. Their starter is fully evolved and only has two moves! And Greninja gets the most shafted here because it's working off its less impressive Attack stat with two moves that do no damage. Even if you turn of the EXP Share you'll have to deal with crap like this throughout the entire game.
Your rival doesn't even have full movesets on their postgame rematch team, btw.
Bit of a tangent, but so much of the fun and tension of the final Team Flare segment evaporates because you're doing this series of Double Battles alongside your rival where their Meowstic struggles to do much besides spam Disarming Voice against all the Dark-types for pathetic damage.
Like, if you're not gonna give Meowstic a better tool for these opponents, just have the rival lead with their starter!
You should see Korrina's Gym team and a few of her initial Battle Chateau teams (Blue Writ has a notably funny oopsie, unless that's a mess up by Bulbapedia).
altaria didnt even have its mega yet wtf
What's really stupid is that their second partner team actually gives a movepool to their starter.
If you're referring to no-item Fling, that's just a symptom of a much bigger problem, where every single writ of challenge reverts any custom moveset back to level-up moves, leading to some truly atrocious sets (random example: in her Red Writ of Challenge battle, Diantha's Mega Gardevoir can only deal damage with Future Sight)
Damn straight. It’s one thing the early Trainers not bothering with TMs which is fine, but when even rivals and Gym Leaders doesn’t bother to use more than one TM, there is something wrong and makes a mockery on what are supposed to be tougher than average trainers who should have plenty of resources. It was fine back in Gen 1 where TMs are scarce, and Pokémon in-game isn’t meant to be difficult, but it just doesn’t work anymore sometimes later when even little timmies realize that Gym Leaders aren’t using TMs while the player protagonist do.
It also brings a plot hole regarding HMs prior to Gen 7 now that I think of it and given the discussion on HMs in Unpopular Opinions… if the player have to use HMs to make progress, then how comes the rival doesn’t have any HM move on their Pokémon and yet are already there or are catching up to the player?
I agree with this somewhat, but we need to take a step back and realize we are on a competitive Pokemon website discussing how difficult the game should be for 5 year olds.
Little Timmy can handle their Water Type taking Flamethrower rather than Ember
not if the water type is a lotad
Also, Altaria can learn Moonblast by level up. They deliberatedly ignored the stronger fairy move to teach it a weaker TM attack which it isn't even good coverage.
This game is for toddlers lmao
Doing Nuzlockes of Sword, and I'm not sure if this counts as a boss, but Hop's fight in Motostoke has to be the worst one in the game for the simple reason that he appears to have been, on this specific fight, programmed to intentionally throw the battle. If your Pokemon gets too low on health, Hop will just spam his stat-lowering moves and he will never go for attacking moves after a certain point unless you switch out to something with more health.
I'm sure this was probably done because he has a balanced team at levels on par with normally what the first Gym would be straight out of the tutorial and they didn't want kids wiping to him over and over, but I have never seen a major NPC in a Pokemon game just let the player win this blatantly.
I'm sure this was probably done because he has a balanced team at levels on par with normally what the first Gym would be straight out of the tutorial and they didn't want kids wiping to him over and over, but I have never seen a major NPC in a Pokemon game just let the player win this blatantly.
Idk why you would ever consider the forst battle of the game to be a boss battle
I mean, the initial rival battle in Pallet Town is a boss fight. You're allowed to lose, but you're clearly rewarded for winning.
Isn't it the bloody tutorial?
cant it be both?
This isn't necessarily the case here, but limiting movepool can technically shape the enemy AI by not clicking a random coverage fourth move for no reason, or trying to set up at 2%. It constrains the options in a way that only makes sense to the limited functionality of the computer; obviously a human is never clicking supereffective, say, Disarming Voice over neutral STAB Boomburst.
Extreme example that does not happen ingame, but if you fought an ingame trainer with a Dracovish, it would probably be a harder fight if it only had Fishious Rend as opposed to Fishious + 3 coverage/status moves.
I think I already mentioned in this thread that Faba's assistant in USUM has mons with only Snarl to force them into support duty, but this does sometimes show up on choiced mons in battle facilities as well. For example, there's this Serperior set in the Battle Tree:
yeah i never got the "loool this pokemon only has two moves" when usually spamming 1-2 stabs is much more effective than giving them coverage/status moves that can be easily exploited/need extra coding so they dont spam them and cause the fight to be easier. sometimes they can be useful, but unless they start applying more "cheating" methods can replicate human prediction/human decision making, the ai is going to struggle
It’s technically Rival3 and he has a Level 11 Wooloo, Level 12 Rookidee, and a Level 14 starter.