Champions of the Pokemon League, Part 4: Wallace

I suppose some people just aren’t cut out for the life of a League Champion. Like Red before him, Steven decides he has better things to do than defend his title in Ever Grande City and vanishes into the mountains so he can spend more time with his rocks, who miss him dreadfully while he’s training. In Emerald version, the job is, again, taken by someone more suited to a life in the spotlight: Hoenn’s most powerful Gym Leader, Wallace, a Water Pokémon master from Sootopolis City.

A flamboyant trainer who describes himself as an artist, Wallace is interested not just in winning but in doing so with style. He regards Pokémon battles as a form of artistic expression, promising you “a performance of illusions in water” before your gym battle in Ruby and Sapphire, and commending you first of all on your elegance when you defeat him in Emerald. He also has a tendency to prefer poetic descriptions over more mundane turns of phrase. He wears a beret and, in Emerald, extends his outfit with a long, flowing cape, evidently taking his fashion advice from Lance. In short, like Lance, Wallace is in many ways a little bit over-the-top… and, like Lance, that’s what makes him fun. Sadly Wallace doesn’t have nearly as much screen-time as Steven – he’s introduced in Sootopolis City at the game’s climax, later than any other Champion – but he does at least get an extra scene or two in Emerald that don’t appear in Ruby and Sapphire, where his entire function, story-wise, is to use his authority as Gym Leader of Sootopolis City to get you into the Cave of Origin, where Groudon (on Ruby) or Kyogre (on Sapphire) has set up its den and is preparing to take over the world, or something (I don’t know; I wasn’t really paying attention). The Cave of Origin is a weird place. It’s a deep, dark cavern in the middle of Sootopolis City, festooned with red and blue crystals, which appears to serve no function whatsoever. The mouth of the cave is guarded and it’s normally forbidden to enter, except for the Gym Leaders (and former Gym Leaders) of Sootopolis City, who seem to have some kind of ceremonial role as the cave’s protectors. According to legend, the Cave of Origin is opposite to Mount Pyre, the mountain where (apparently) everyone in Hoenn goes to bury their dead Pokémon; Mount Pyre is where life ends, while the Cave of Origin is where life begins. I think they believe that Pokémon (and humans?) are reincarnated there – but, of course, Pokémon of every species don’t constantly spill out of the Cave of Origin, so maybe it’s supposed to be where their souls return to the world of the living? Alternatively, maybe ‘Origin’ is to be taken literally, and it’s the place where life on Earth began? That might explain why Groudon and Kyogre are attracted there.

Anyway, the Cave of Origin is where Wallace presides over what is probably the most bizarre scene in the entire game. On Emerald, Groudon and Kyogre aren’t in the Cave of Origin; they’re busy settling their old grudges with a competition to see who can level the most of Sootopolis City in the shortest time. Instead, Wallace is down there meditating. He’s trying to figure out how to stop the two legendary Pokémon in the city above, and he thinks he knows how – summon a third, even stronger one, Rayquaza, who’s supposed to have calmed them down the last time they fought. The trouble is that he has no clue where Rayquaza is… so he does the logical thing and questions the first poor bastard to disturb him, which happens to be you. You have no idea where the blasted thing is either, but Wallace will keep asking even if you admit your ignorance, and you can give one of three answers. If you say “Rayquaza’s at Mount Pyre,” Wallace responds “no, that doesn’t make any sense; if it lived there, the old people would know about it,” and, okay, I guess a bloody great sky dragon would probably get their attention. If you try “um, wait, no, it’s inside the Cave of Origin!” he says something like “of course it isn’t, you nincompoop; that’s where we are now!” All right, maybe he doesn’t say ‘nincompoop’ but he’s thinking it. Eventually, you throw your arms up in exasperation and say “all right; it’s at the top of the damn Sky Pillar!” Now, at this point in the game, you have never been to the Sky Pillar. You have probably never heard of the Sky Pillar and don’t know where it is. You almost certainly have no reason to think that Rayquaza might be there (your rival would have told you in a phone call earlier that he/she saw a large green Flying Pokémon near Pacifidlog Town, a place you could have visited but probably didn’t, but since you don’t know that Rayquaza is a large green Flying Pokémon, that doesn’t help). Despite all of this, the words ‘Sky Pillar’ immediately make a light-bulb start flashing in Wallace’s head and he shouts “of course! It’s so obvious! Quickly, to the Wallacemobile!” and bolts out of the Cave of Origin with unreasonable haste, leaving you wondering “…where the hell did I just tell him to go?” Then, when you actually find the Sky Pillar and Wallace is there waiting, he immediately turns around and leaves because the crazy weather caused by Groudon and Kyogre is getting worse and he wants to protect Sootopolis. It’s nice that he has such a strong sense of responsibility, I guess, but either he has much less confidence in Rayquaza than he seems to, or he really needs to give some serious thought to his priorities.

This watercolour by Boolsajo shows Wallace in his (far more sensible) Ruby/Sapphire outfit and accompanied by his Milotic. If you like it, take a look at http://boolsajo.deviantart.com/.

…and that’s just about all Wallace does until you meet him again in Ever Grande City and battle him for the Championship. As a master Water Pokémon trainer, Wallace does his best to exploit the enormous variety of Water-types in the game and thus protect himself from the Grass and Electric attacks that plague Water specialists, using a Tentacruel to frighten away Grass Pokémon with its Sludge Bomb and a Whiscash to neutralise Electric attacks and make short work of the Pokémon behind them. If there’s a unifying characteristic to Wallace’s team (other than element, of course), it’s that they’re difficult to squash, taking the age-old ‘bulky water’ stereotype and running with it. Wailord, his opener, has ludicrous HP but does tend to burn through it rather quickly with lacklustre defences and Double Edge. His job isn’t really to stick around, though; it’s to set up Rain Dance for the others and get out of the way. Tentacruel can shrug off most special attacks fairly easily, Whiscash has only one weakness and likes to pump up his special defence with Amnesia, Gyarados also has excellent special defence and can Intimidate opponents to weaken their physical moves, and Ludicolo is just plain annoying, healing himself constantly with Leech Seed and Giga Drain while dodging attacks with the most obnoxious move in the game, Double Team. Wallace’s signature Pokémon, fittingly enough, is Milotic, a powerful and beautiful serpentine Water Pokémon that actually evolves by feeling pretty. She appears on his team as both Gym Leader and Champion, and she is the worst of the lot, thanks to her ability to Recover. As a pure Water-type, she’s only weak to Grass and Electric attacks, and since those elements had no physical attacks back in the day, Milotic’s absurd special defence allows her to sit there and Recover off even super-effective damage, unless it comes from something with really crazily powerful attacks like a Magneton. All in all, Wallace is everything a Water Pokémon master ought to be: elegant, sophisticated, and absolutely, utterly infuriating. Not to mention, I have to give him bonus points for actually daring to use Luvdisc in his Gym Leader incarnation, and managing to use his only (miniscule) good points – speed and natural access to Attract and Sweet Kiss – to make him, if not exactly useful, at least horribly annoying.

Wallace suffers a lot from being given much less time in the spotlight than any other Champion. I maintain that he still manages to be more interesting than Steven despite having only half as long to make his case though. It’d be nice to have seen more of him, but that would have required actually thinking of something for him to do earlier in the game, and that was plainly too much effort. Nonetheless, Wallace makes a fine showing as Hoenn’s ‘other’ Champion. Even if that scene in the Cave of Origin is unbelievably stupid.

Champions of the Pokémon League, Part 3: Steven

Steven, Steven, Steven. What is there to say about Steven?

Well… he likes rocks.

In Ruby and Sapphire, Steven is the Champion of Ever Grande City in Hoenn and the son of Mr. Stone, president of the Rustboro-based Devon Corporation, but lives in Mossdeep City, on an island in Hoenn’s northeast. He wears neat, formal clothing, enjoys talking to other Pokémon trainers about their training style, and likes rocks. Honestly, that’s pretty much it. In comparison to the other Champions, Steven is really quite bland. He seems to be a fairly quiet, analytical sort of person, and he often comes across as rather distant, particularly when he shows up near the end of Heart Gold and Soul Silver. He’s plainly quite adventurous, but he travels alone and doesn’t seem to spend much time around people. In fact, he steps down from his position at some point, so that Wallace becomes the Champion instead in Emerald version, possibly because he dislikes the attention and would prefer to spend his time looking for interesting rocks. This is all absolutely fine in its own way, and there’s something appealing about the idea of an unassuming Champion – you can see Lance coming a mile off, whereas this guy isn’t nearly as blatant. You’re not exactly surprised when you walk into the Champion’s room and find Steven there, since he was involved with saving the world during the game’s climax (albeit in an extremely vague advisory capacity); it’s more that there’s a moment of “oh, hey, it’s this guy! Um… what was his name again?” …which is the problem, of course. Steven is an incredibly forgettable character. Heck, I barely remember him and this is my schtick. His involvement in the story in Ruby and Sapphire is minimal. You first meet him when you bring him a letter from his father while he’s in the Granite Cave on Dewford Island looking for cool rocks. At one point you run into him on the road and exchange small talk before he wanders off. When you reach Mossdeep City, you have another dull and pointless conversation and he gives you an item that you just happen to need to continue the story (not because he knows you need it; he just… kinda has one lying around that he doesn’t want). Finally, when Groudon/Kyogre is awakened and begins playing havoc with Hoenn’s climate, he… talks for a while, tells you some things you knew already, and introduces you to Wallace, who actually matters. If Ghetsis, the principal villain of Black and White, has unwittingly stumbled into Pokémon from a high fantasy story, then Steven has wandered over from an informative but ultimately rather tedious geology textbook.

Again, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the character Game Freak seem to have been trying to build with Steven. However, the thing about quiet, aloof, intellectual loners is that, in real life, they’re not usually the most memorable people in a room unless you spend a bit of time with them, and this holds true here as well. You have to be careful with your characterisation if you want to portray someone like this as anything other than hopelessly dull and, let’s face it, deep characterisation is not Pokémon’s strength (larger-than-life characters who can make a big impression in a short space of time, like Alder from Black and White, tend to fare better). Ideally, for Steven to make a proper impact and not be boring and forgettable, we would need to work with him on something important to him, or see him become emotional about something (or, alternatively, not become emotional about something we’d expect him to), or at the very least get some dialogue out of him that isn’t the hopelessly generic “so, since we’re both trainers, why don’t you tell me what you like about Pokémon?” drivel he produces when you meet him on the road. One of the little extra bits you get in Emerald that Ruby and Sapphire don’t have is a battle with Team Magma in the Mossdeep Space Centre, in which Steven fights at your side; you’d think the extra screen time would help, and… well, I guess it does reinforce that he’s not a big talker; considering how much dialogue the Team Magma leader, Maxie, has in that scene, Steven says remarkably little in response. Honestly, the impression I get is that such a trivial thing as the plot is of relatively little significance to him, and he’s just annoyed that it’s happening on his island (come to think of it, since Mossdeep would’ve been one of the first places to be hit by the weather disturbances caused by Groudon and Kyogre during the climactic sequence, that could easily be his motivation for everything plot-related he ever does). Left to his own devices… well, in Emerald, he just wanders off to the top of Meteor Falls to look for more rocks after the story’s over, where he becomes a ‘bonus boss’ along the lines of Red from Gold, Silver and Crystal. His words to you when you speak to him? “Do you maybe… think of me as just a rock maniac?”

Yes, Steven. Yes, we do.

In this piece of fanart by Wildragon, Steven, his hair a little ruffled but his clothing immaculate as always, takes a break from rock-hunting in Meteor Falls with his strongest Pokémon, the steel behemoth Metagross, at his side. If you like what you see, check out Wildragon's DeviantArt page, http://wildragon.deviantart.com/.

Contrary to what his obsession with rare stones might lead you to expect, Steven is not actually a Rock Pokémon trainer; he describes himself as a Steel-type specialist, although only three of his six Pokémon are Steel-types: Skarmory, Aggron, and his signature Pokémon, Metagross (who hits like a truck and, if you’ve never seen one before, has weaknesses that aren’t all that easy to figure out). With Forretress, Steelix and Scizor unavailable in Ruby and Sapphire, there aren’t actually enough Steel Pokémon to assemble a full team of them. He could conceivably have used Magneton, and a second Aggron wouldn’t have been too big a stretch, but the only other Steel-type around at this point is Mawile, and I think on some level Game Freak recognised that Mawile is not a Pokémon anyone should be forced to use, ever. The composition of the rest of his team, therefore, comes down to what I was saying last time about choosing Pokémon that are ‘thematically appropriate,’ even if they aren’t necessarily from the right element. Armaldo and Cradily are Rock-types, of course, but even among Rock Pokémon they are peculiarly suited to Steven since, as extinct Fossil Pokémon, Steven’s Cradily and Armaldo would have been resurrected for him from rocks – one imagines he found their fossils on one of his geological excursions and brought them to the scientist who studies that very technology for his father’s company. Claydol is harder to place (Lunatone or Solrock might have been a better fit given their association with meteorites; on the other hand they’re much weaker than Claydol and perhaps not appropriate for a Champion) but again has shades of something he could conceivably have simply collected while exploring – Claydol and its juvenile form, Baltoy, are ancient ceramic figurines brought to life by mysterious forces; a dormant Baltoy is just the sort of thing Steven might decide to pick up whether he recognized it as a Pokémon or not. The practical result of all this is that Steven has a team that not only makes sense for him personally but is far more diverse than anything his subordinate Elite Four have managed to put together – each of them has not one but two weaknesses shared by their entire teams (with the exception of the Kingdra Drake uses on Emerald, who has only one weakness, and Phoebe’s Sableye, who has no… well, no specific weaknesses). You’d be hard-pressed to find such a magic bullet for Steven, which, in part, is testament to how difficult it is to inflict meaningful harm on Steel-types anyway, but still a point in favour of his team composition.

I always talk, quite deliberately, about two sides to everything: on the one hand, you have design, portrayal, character and story, and on the other, you have abilities, strengths and weaknesses, and how something is put together in terms of game mechanics. With Steven, I think Game Freak have done a fairly depressing job on the former, and a surprisingly good one on the latter (his Aggron notwithstanding – I mean, yes, I know it looks cool, but you just don’t teach Dragon Claw, Thunder and Solarbeam to a Pokémon with a special attack stat normally reserved for root vegetables). Despite my deep-seated conviction that he’s frightfully boring as he stands, having given Steven a closer look in the course of writing this entry, I’ve come to believe that he would be a very interesting character in a game that was actually character-driven, but, as I said, Pokémon tends to do a better job with eccentric, over-the-top people… who return in force when Wallace becomes Champion in Emerald…

Champions of the Pokémon League, Part 2: Lance

At some point after Blue loses the title of Champion to Red, the player character of the original games, Red buggers off to spend the next few years sitting at the top of a godforsaken mountain in the middle of nowhere gazing into the distance as the snow gradually piles up around his ankles. Blue has evidently lost interest in the Championship by this point, which leaves the top spot open. Eventually – whether this happens by election, or contest, or promotion is unclear – the position falls to the most senior member of the Pokémon League’s peerless death squad, the Elite Four: an eccentric dragon master from Johto by the name of Lance.

Never without his trademark cape (of which, rumour has it, he owns several), Lance is a proud, confident young man with absolute faith in his Pokémon – and justly so, since his “virtually indestructible” Dragon-types are among the most powerful Pokémon in the world. In Red and Blue, where Lance appears as the leader of the Elite Four, that’s pretty much all we learn about him, but he gets more characterisation along with his more important role in Gold and Silver, and extra titbits of information pop up in the remakes of both sets of games. The cape isn’t just an affectation; Lance is basically the closest thing in Johto to a superhero, flying around the region on his Dragonite, investigating suspect activity, righting wrongs, fighting for justice and being a general all-around good guy, if a somewhat overly dramatic one. When Team Rocket shows up in Mahogany Town and causes trouble by forcing all the Magikarp in the nearby Lake of Rage to evolve into Gyarados, Lance follows along to sort them out, revealing the entrance to their hideout for you and figuring out what they’re up to. Once he’s conscripted you as his partner in the investigation he gets surprisingly lazy about everything and leaves you to do most of the fighting, in spite of his vastly greater power and experience, although he comes through for you in the end when you’re attacked by the hideout’s commanders. Based on what he has to say on the subject, this could be out of a desire either to test your potential or to let you have your share of the glory. Alternatively he might have snuck back to the Lake of Rage while you weren’t looking to see whether there was another red Gyarados in the area. You know he totally wanted it for himself. After his intervention in Mahogany Town, it’s striking that Lance doesn’t make an appearance in the far more dramatic crisis of Team Rocket’s later takeover of Goldenrod City. In fact, it’s striking that no-one at all bothers to do anything when they put the entire city under lockdown and start broadcasting their plans on national radio. I can understand the local police being overwhelmed, and the Goldenrod Gym seems to have been barricaded with the Gym Leader, Whitney, and all her minions inside, but I would have thought that the repeated and insistent public radio announcements might draw a little attention from outside the city. Did Lance really have better things to do that evening than liberate a city from a villainous organization planning to take over the whole damn country? Was he ironing his cape? Dyeing his hair? Doing naked bloody cartwheels in the flipping moonlight for a pagan fertility ceremony?

Sorry. I’m allergic to plot holes; they set off my cerebral haemorrhaging.

Anyway. Lance.

Various characters across various games can tell us a few more things about Lance. He’s a member of the ancient family of Dragon Pokémon trainers who rule Blackthorn City, and the cousin of the Gym Leader, Clair (who has all of Lance’s pride and elitism with none of his compassion or honour). He apparently commands a great deal of respect there and seems to be by far the strongest trainer his clan has produced in a generation; the very suggestion of his displeasure is enough to shut Clair up when she refuses to hand over the Rising Badge after being defeated. Lance’s clan regard Dragon Pokémon as sacred, treating them with reverence because of their boundless life energy, and only allow their members to train dragons once they have proven themselves “worthy.” Given this background, Lance’s utter conviction in the supremacy of Dragon-types makes a great deal of sense. The dragon-user characters of Blackthorn City are an interesting bunch, and one of the many things in this world I’d rather like to see developed more – where did their beliefs originally come from, and what is it that makes Dragon Pokémon so special?

A scene from the Pokémon Adventures manga, with colour and additional details by Djinnjo (http://djinnjo.deviantart.com/). Lance is here accompanied by his team from Red and Blue, and appears markedly more youthful than in his later incarnations.

Those of you who’ve fought Lance in Gold, Silver or Crystal (or the remakes) probably remember one thing about him more clearly than anything else: Lance is a cheating bastard. As any truly dedicated Pokémaniac knows, Lance’s signature Pokémon, Dragonite, evolves from Dragonair at level 55. Lance’s strongest Pokémon in those games is only level 50, yet he has not one but three of the damn things, two of them as low as level 47. You could probably handwave this by saying that Lance’s heritage and upbringing give him special insight into training Dragon Pokémon, but I prefer to say that he’s a cheating bastard. Fudging the numbers like that really was necessary, though – by this point, you’ve already fought Clair, who uses a trio of Dragonair (two Dragonair and a Gyarados on Heart Gold and Soul Silver), so more of them would get repetitive, not to mention a bit easy, since Dragonair starts to get quite lacklustre in the high 40s and early 50s compared to the other Pokémon that have reached their final forms already. Funnily enough, however, this is not the only reason Lance is a cheating bastard, just the most obvious. He also has a history of teaching his Pokémon attacks that they can’t actually learn. In Gold, Silver and Crystal, Lance’s Aerodactyl knows Rock Slide, which Aerodactyl doesn’t get in those games (he can learn it from Ruby and Sapphire onward, but in Red and Blue this made him profoundly useless because he had no decent attacks from his own types). There’s absolutely no reason, thematically speaking, that Aerodactyl shouldn’t learn Rock Slide, and I think what happened is that the designers thought he could learn it and didn’t bother to check, which just goes to show that some of Game Freak’s decisions regarding which Pokémon should learn which attacks make so little sense that even they don’t understand them (see also: Aerial Ace). In this case, Lance’s cheating bastardry is merely correcting an unfortunate oversight anyway. In the case of his Dragonite from Red and Blue inexplicably knowing Barrier, which has never been a TM, which Dragonite has never been able to learn by any means, and which isn’t a markedly appropriate move for Dragonite to have anyway, especially considering that Dragonite, compared to Aerodactyl, has a vast movepool… yeah, I’ve got nothing on that one.

The vaguely interesting thing about Lance’s line-up is that, for a Dragon master, he doesn’t actually use all that many Dragon-types – principally because there weren’t all that many in Gold and Silver. Other than Dratini, Dragonair and Dragonite, the only true Dragon available was Kingdra – and Kingdra is already Clair’s signature Pokémon, so Lance can’t easily get away with using her. As a result, Lance fills out his team with Pokémon that aren’t really Dragons but look like they should be: Gyarados, Aerodactyl, and Charizard. Oddly enough, I like this – choosing Pokémon that are thematically appropriate to a given trainer rather than necessarily being restricted to ones of that character’s favoured element – because it adds a bit of depth to team composition and makes trainers a bit more interesting, but it’s something that Game Freak generally avoid, and they seem to have gotten worse at it lately. Compensating for the small number of Dark-types in Gold and Silver by giving Karen a Vileplume and a Gengar, two Pokémon strongly associated with night, made sense. Compensating for the miniscule number of Fire-types in Diamond and Pearl by giving Flint a Steelix, a Drifblim and a Lopunny, three Pokémon that… randomly happen to learn one Fire attack each… didn’t. I really think Game Freak would have benefitted from taking a close look at some of the line-ups used by trainers from the first two sets of games (Lance is just one example) and giving some serious thought to which choices made sense and which ones didn’t, because often the most obvious answer isn’t the only one.

That’s all I think there is for me to say about Lance, really. He’s the first ‘sitting’ Champion we get to see, and therefore our first introduction to the responsibilities of the position, a theme that comes up a fair bit in Black and White. Together with Clair, he also did a lot of the work of defining what the Dragon type means in the world of Pokémon, which is kind of important, given how vague a type it really is, when you think about it. And… okay, I guess I have to admit it, even the cape does grow on you after a while. He’s a bit over-the-top, but that’s what makes him fun… in stark contrast to the next Champion in the series…