Pokémon: The Series Needs More Rivals Like Gold & Silver’s

The Pokémon franchise has tons of rivals, but it needs more like Silver, the rival and antagonist of Pokémon Gold and Silver.

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Every game in the Pokémon franchise has a rival character — sometimes more than one. In Pokémon Sun and Moon, the player is rivals to both Hau, a colorful and loving friend who loves to eat, and Gladion, an edgy loner with ties to the main antagonist of the game. In both cases, Hau and Gladion are good people doing the right thing, but many fans responded very positively to Gladion because, unlike many of the recent rivals and his counterpart Hau, he wasn’t a friendly supportive rival.

In contrast Blue and Silver were downright unfriendly and cruel in Pokémon Gold and Silver. In hindsight, both rivals stand out. Sure, Blue is an antagonist who undergoes a positive character arc, but Silver is really just a bad guy. He isn’t your friend, he isn’t kind-hearted. He’s basically just as bad as the Team Rocket remnant faction you fight in Pokémon Gold and Silver. This is something the franchise sorely needs.

The Friendly Rival

In Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, you have two core rivalries: the distaff counterpart to your character — either Brendan or May — and Wally. Both stood apart at the time because your previous rivals, Blue and Silver, were just so cruel. Perhaps kids at the time responded positively to the warmth these characters demonstrated, because future games would prioritize friendly rivals over antagonistic ones.

It’s telling that Gladion, the rebellious son of Sun and Moon’s real antagonist Lusamine, is the closest thing to an unfriendly rival in Pokémon in recent memory. Gladion fights with Team Skull, who at first appears to be the main enemy in the game before the player realizes that they’re essentially a bunch of goofballs and that the real antagonist is the Aether Foundation. However, before then, Gladion serves as a genuine antagonist to the player, even if his motivations are ultimately pure.

The rivals in these newer games are not people you really want to stop, but people you want to grow alongside. The player never is given a sense of animosity or anger towards these characters. Seeing them is like seeing a friend you’re competing against, which just is not the same vibe rivals gave in the first two generations.

You Want to Beat Silver

Later rivals are people you want to be friends with and support. In Pokémon Gold and Silver, however, you wanted to beat Silver. Your first introduction to Silver isn’t him receiving his first Pokémon, but stealing it. From this introduction, we don’t what Silver Silver wants or what he’s gonna do — and that’s brilliant.

With Pokémon Red and Blue, we knew Blue would be one step ahead of us the whole way. With the later rivals, we know the fights are coming and we know it won’t really tie into the plot. The exception, again, really is Gladion, who draws the most heavily from Silver in that he appears to be an antagonist. The idea that we as players don’t know if Silver is a villain or just a punk leaves the player to want to face and confront him. There are times, such as when Silver rips off the player’s disguise in a Team Rocket base, where he genuinely helps the game’s villains.

However, as established by the later remake Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver, Silver has one more element to his persona that really adds a level of dimension to his character. Silver is the son of Giovanni, the founder of Team Rocket. In this sense, there is a sense of legacy to Silver, as he chases after his father in a time travel sequence. He has never known any other way than to be a villain and abuser of Pokémon, which led him down this path to gain power on the only terms he knew.

Silver’s arc comes to a satisfying, cathartic end as well. In the original games, Silver’s arc ends with him beginning to realize, following a humiliating defeat against Elite Four Champion Lance, that he does not treat Pokémon with love and respect. He ends those games trying to be a better person. In the reboot, his arc culminates in a tag-team fight with the player, facing off against Lance and Claire in a double-team battle at the Dragon’s Den, where he went to train and learn to be a better person. What sets Silver apart is that he starts off as a true villain only to make genuine strides to redeem himself after multiple failures.

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