He’s bright, energetic, all too willing to explain everything to you and always loses.
To me, Hau is the epitome of the boring friendly rival trope that now plagues the franchise. I never found any battle with them to be much of a challenge, and once again, I got that feeling they were always lagging behind me, not growing alongside me. In terms of their teams, there’s a lot more interest to be had, and they certainly feel like a more well-rounded trainer on that front. Most of what they say is just there to move the plot along, but they at least say it in a slightly more interesting way than in X & Y. When you actually look into their personality, there isn’t very much there. As such, a lot of what they had to say felt fresh, and the friendly atmosphere was a nice change of pace from the antagonistic rivals of the first two generations. While the friendly rival thing has been done to death by this point in the franchise, Brendan & May were the first time it happened in a major way in the series. These two suffer from the same problem that Calem & Serena do, only they’re a bit better because they have at least a little bit of character. As I said, the idea of having a big group to journey with is a great one, and I hope they try it again, but this was an absolute failure of an attempt. Running into them feels like an interruption to your journey rather than a part of it, and that’s a bad sign. For one thing, you very rarely battle them, and when you do, they’re absolutely no challenge. Encountering them is never anything interesting either, they’ll all say a line or two, maybe you’ll battle one of them, and that’ll be that. Shauna is “girly”, Trevor is clever and Tierno…likes to dance? Characters who only have one trait aren’t interesting at the best of times, but it’s made so much worse when the traits are stupid and generic like those ones. Since there are so many characters, and they all have limited screen-time, the writers went to the tried and tested trope of boiling their personalities down to a single trait. Unfortunately, the characters that are on that journey aren’t anyone interesting. It created a real sense of fun on the journey with so many people journeying with you. The general idea of travelling together in a big group was one I liked. These three are technically all distinct characters, but they’re so tightly linked to one another that I’m lumping them all into one entry. I’m so disappointed that THIS was the rival that got an Absol as their strongest Pokemon because…Absol deserves so much better. Their team is ALWAYS lagging behind yours in terms of levels, and they just don’t have very interesting Pokemon. X & Y as a whole often get derided for being too easy, even by Pokemon’s standards, and Calem & Serena are one of the clearest examples of this. Most importantly, they’re an awful rival. They just copy/pasted the base template they’ve always used for the rival and didn’t change anything. No attempt went into giving them any kind of character arch. Even exposition tends to be given to the other characters around them. Running into them is an absolute chore because they never have anything interesting to say. Everything they say is stupidly generic and just pointless prattle about becoming stronger and growing as a person. Of course, the easy solution would’ve just been to create two different personalities, but that’s beside the point.Ĭalem & Serena are by far the worst when it comes to these situations because they’re SO boring. The problem is that because their identity is entirely dependant on which gender the player is, they had to create a personality that would fit both characters. Serena may be a great character in the anime, but her game counterpart is the world’s blandest human.Īs you’ll see in just a few entries, the rivals that are the gender-swap of the player character tend to be the worst. They’ve come in many different flavours over the years, but be they friendly, antagonistic or…just kinda…there, they stand to challenge you throughout your journey and hopefully bond with someone as you grow as trainers together.Įach game has its own versions, and they have widely varying personalities, so which ones left the biggest impact on me? Let’s rank ’em. As such, every game since the very first has had you share your journey with a rival who is exploring, growing and battling just the same as you. As you journey across the regions of the Pokemon world, it would be pretty lonely if you didn’t have anyone to share your journey with.