I liked this "evil" team. Pokemon hasn't really done a team that looks evil on the outside but is secretly good. I think the closest that they've ever come is Team Skull, who are just a bunch of hooligans looking out for each other and working for the real bad guys. Personally, the only thing that I would add is, maybe the player can see some positive outcomes of Team Eco, but the rival or other important NPC tries to play it off as a fluke of a good outcome from a bad motive. This would, in theory, start to sow some seeds of doubt that Team Eco is what people say it is, and potentially have the player think critically about them before the team leader reveals his "evil" plan.
Excellent work, per usual. I mean, an actual story choice in a Pokemon game? Revolutionary. Shouldn't be, but it is. Such an often overlooked truth of "villains" is that everyone is the hero of their own story, everyone wants to think of themselves as an essentially good person, and everyone has relatable (or at least believable) core motivations. Villains work as heroes who got it wrong. Team Eco displays all of that wonderfully.
I like the twist it’s interesting. I think a good idea is one simple thought. Like for example what if the evil team leader was a Pokémon and you write how that will work.
I think a great way to make the main villain feel like a threat the player wants to beat is to do what a lot of good action games do, take a page from Devil may cry 3 In DMC 3 the player character Dante faces off against his rival and twin brother Vergil three times splitting the game into three distinct acts Act 1. Dante fights Vergil and does well until Vergil starts trying, at the end Dante is defeated, his half of the perfect amulet is taken, and Vergil is left disappointed with how weak his brother was Act 2. Dante and Vergil fight again with Dante having gotten stronger and Vergil fighting with Beowulf, a new weapon he is clearly unfamiliar with making the two about even, the fight is inconclusive due to being interrupted by Arkham and Lady Act 3. Dante and Vergil have one final showdown in the demon world with both giving it their absolute best, and ultimately Dante is the one who emerges victorious finally defeating his brother in battle after having come so far from their first clash I feel this is a pretty good structure to apply to either a rival or a villain with the first encounter giving the player motivation to keep getting better until they are finally able to surpass the opponent that had given them so much trouble
Team Eco strikes me as trying to fix a problem that didn't need intervention in the first place. The pokemon will tell the humans that something is wrong should there truly be an issue and money really isn't a thing in a world that has long since mastered complete energy to matter conversion. It is also incredibly strange that they did not contact the Ranger association or the professors, especially since you proposed the idea of an international research hub that all the professors have access to, to relay their concerns. They are soo sure of themselves and this perceived issue that they outright ignore the pokemon who are them that this isn't an issue and never was, that precautions and countermeasures are already in place because the pokemon actually talk with each other particularly in the presence of berry trees because food is no longer an issue which is why pokemon tend to gather around berry trees. Usually pokemon respond to such situations with moves such as heal bell and safeguard with the poison and steel types eating up or clearing the excess toxins, water ground types dilute and turn it into fertilizer, and the fairy and grass types restore vegetation and finalizes the conversion with many pokemon species taking up multiple roles in this task. Eventually the pokemon are going to be fed up with Team Eco's interference and it is easy to see an event in this story where a powerful Venusaur cancels out their misery song with round, echo voice and its connection with plant life and then proceeds to kick them out of the forest or the area it is rejuvenating. The majority of the region may understand this but Team Eco has isolated themselves within their own world and within their own egos. The conflict just never created a mess big enough for one of the legendarys to intervene. The lesson here becomes "No help is better than bad help", "Do not force yourself as a solution when you are not needed", and "Do not isolate yourself in your own world, pay attention and listen to the world you live in". As a side berry trees seem to be the base of many ecosystems. All pokemon and people can eat the berries and the trees grow really fast to accommodate. This allows pokemon of different species to more often hang and play around as food is no longer a pressing concern. So if there is an issue it is probably because Team Eco forced themselves into a situation where they didn't belong or need to be, basically modern day environmentalists who really don't have a clue which is shown to be quite negative when placed in a world where the people are very close to nature and pokemon.
I had a similar issue with this team, which was literally boiled down to "ok but why not tell the professors?". These are trusted pillars of the community before the whole team thing, they can have some tact and keep things quiet while the professors use their land for experiments. It would also be really obvious that they're fighting the swarms as there's no way to be subtle about that
Like yea, the whole point of the lesson is to trust others, but their level of distrust is to such an extreme that it becomes a fundamental character problem
@@KatyaExster that is indeed what makes this group cartoony villains rather than semi-reasonable people that grew up in the pokemon world. Rather than simply listening to the pokemon and contacting the two readily accessible organizations that has the means to investigate this potential problem they instead impose their solution in the most tyrannical way possible and made it into an issue. To everyone in that world it would seem that they were mysteriously hit with a simple bomb because they were acting moronic. For that world the idea not simply asking your pokemon is too stupid to conceive so it made them look like the dumb, uneducated ones from a different reality while everyone else stayed true to the simple facts of their world.
Sorry for the late reply but I have some thoughts on this, thank you for the feedback! Mostly I have a few counter points but you have brought up a really great idea as well! Before I start, I will note that I didn’t take the ‘Pokemon University’ into account intentionally. This is because for new people watching it makes the story more approachable and this was just an exercise in designing a villain team for Pokemon using design criteria, not to expand my own lore. And another note, the money of this world is something I’ll talk about next episode but basically, if money is not a thing then why does everything we see cost money? Let's just put this issue aside for another day. But getting into it, the first thing you bring up is Pokemon communicating with each other and people, which is absolutely something I should have talked about. However, keep in mind that the Pokemon of this region are used to Grobbul creating sludge every now and then and in the past, they could indeed use their abilities to more than handle it. This time however they are outnumbered 10 to 1. Steel types are rarer and are being outnumbered closer to 100 to 1. Even for the Pokemon that can heal and protect, how well can they do that when suddenly *all of them* are poisoned? This is the very first time that the toxins have ever gotten this bad and it is happening over just a few days/weeks. That is a very big problem that happened over a very short period of time. Pokemon won’t know why this crisis is happening because it has never actually caused harm before. It’s like the difference between an unusually high tide and a tsunami. This is a situation created from humans changing the local ecosystem on a large scale (turning forests and fields into farmlands over time) and the unintended consequences born from that. Team Eco might not want to tell the world that this disaster is *their fault*. To be clear, if nothing was done to prevent this disaster, even if just Pokemon worked together, there would be a lot of casualties! It is not a “perceived problem” it is a very real problem caused by humans not respecting the ecosystem long term. However, getting to the great ideas you mentioned. A Venusaur getting angry and shutting down a misery signal sounds like a great story event to take place. You are absolutely right that Team Eco were being dumb and absolutely should have told the Professors about it. The fact that they were trying to solve this the “human way” was wrong, they should have tried getting all the Pokemon involved! And that is what the player character would show them. I would love to see the player being able to make friends with a group of wild grass and fairy Pokemon to get them to heal Pokemon and plants and fix the soil. A lot of great game-play and story moments here. Again, thank you for the incredible feedback! I love it!
@@RadioactiveMagicGames no problem but allow me to answer the money quandary first. The money system is there so that there is something for people to do. They have a monetary system just to have one and can be dropped at any time if necessary hence why the prices are all out of wack and collector items such as bottle caps and rare fungi are treated as acceptable currency at times. None of it really means anything it is just there so that people won't go crazy with boredom. Back to the actual main topic, I doubt the pokemon would be caught unawares as they are typically observant when the humans are not and the same goes in reverse. So they likely would already be taking precautions and amassing the necessary resources meaning that the closer you get to the climax the more likely you are going to run into grass, poison, steel, ground, water, and fairy types that know moves such as safeguard and heal bell while the others become much more rare. I find it highly unlikely that pokemon would be caught so unaware, that includes the toxic crickets themselves. Still Team Eco should have told the wild pokemon that they are expecting some major disaster but that goes back to what you said with Team Eco trying to do things the "human way". Both working together is needed to squash this would be disaster just as it has always been and always will be. I am glad that you liked my ideas.
I thought this was excellent! "The well-meaning experts work on rather than with the common people" is both a narrative that rings true to life and plays well with the elements of science and technology that are pervasive in the world of Pokémon. Plus, I appreciate that you were able to incorporate the theme of balanced ecosystems that you really appreciate, and which Pokémon gestures to by the focus on indexing wildlife.
Some great ideas are presented in this video, but I do have certain concerns. First and foremost is that this is a narrative written to be a narrative, rather than the narrative of a game. Fundamentally, the pokemon franchise works off of exploration of a region, and encountering it's many secrets and pokemon. Here, the narrative is very localized (what with assuming that the whole region is farm based), and doesn't lend itself well to, well, 90% of any game it may be part of (as pokemon games love intra-regional biome diversity). I can't think of one off the top of my head, but there are certainly ways to make this narrative more region spanning, and when such edits are made, I think this problem is pretty much solved. Second is that this population boom of wild Grobbul just doesn't seem like a particularly realistic outcome, as insects tend to have extremely fast metabolisms, and one might reasonably expect the Grobbul to reflect that (ik that they aren't bug types, but the designs of Grobbul and Gleebul do seem quite insectoid). There is also no particular reason for Grobbul to group up now, as opposed to how spread out they purportedly were previously, if the competition to eat their favored berries is too high, they will stay spread out, and obviously if they stay confined to the "Berry only plots" then there is no cause for concern, as they will cause no damage, only boons for the berry trees. Finally, if the farmers had been exterminating them anyways this whole time, how did their population get so large in the first place, as a large distribution only means that individual farmers would have an easier time dealing with smaller numbers of Grobbul, and it seems to be in their best interest to get them away from the general crops, and towards the berry trees anyways. I should also mention that these points could make the moral stronger, as you could have it that team Eco is misguided by their incorrect assumptions about the Grobbul menace, and that they are doing no good, even though they intended nothing but the best, leading to a lesson about confronting your own misconceptions etc. However, this was not brought up in the video, so I don't feel I can justifiably use it as an argument. Still though, a great video, with a story that kept me intrigued the whole way through. Definitely seems like a good starting point for Nintendo in the future (assuming they even see this video).
Good work on the writing people should look to Pokémon not Temtem for creature collecting writing. (Even though Crema games do corporate sabatoge against Pokémon)
I don't get it. How did their population exploded, if they were previously chased away from the fields that aren't berries and now every other field is not a berry field? Yes, Team Eco's fields are all berry fields, but everyone else keeps beating Grubble on all their fields. You seem to have made a leap in logic at [10:15] when you forgot to say something like _"they were allowed to breed excessively at Eco's fields"_ and jumped straight from "everyone else were beating Grubble" over _"Eco didn't see any reason to complain and let them breed"_ into "and now Grubble are spread everywhere". The result that you got is "everyone was beating Grubble and now Grubble are spread everywhere". Sure, I figured what you meant after some time thinking over it (by _headcanoning_ some logic into your words), but the way you presented it would really confuse people otherwise. Also that just means that Team Eco are still at fault at what's happening, since they're the reason Grubble are a problem. (Otherwise your words around the timecode don't make any sense)
@@umwha It was a joke (or at least a non-serious suggestion,) but I don't see what would be wrong if it wasn't a joke. did I accidentally say something transphobic? (or NB-phobic or whatever it's called?)
@@davidturner1595 Its not transphobic dont worry. You are saying all the words you've been taught to say and espousing the politically correct views. I hope that relieves you.
I liked this "evil" team. Pokemon hasn't really done a team that looks evil on the outside but is secretly good. I think the closest that they've ever come is Team Skull, who are just a bunch of hooligans looking out for each other and working for the real bad guys. Personally, the only thing that I would add is, maybe the player can see some positive outcomes of Team Eco, but the rival or other important NPC tries to play it off as a fluke of a good outcome from a bad motive. This would, in theory, start to sow some seeds of doubt that Team Eco is what people say it is, and potentially have the player think critically about them before the team leader reveals his "evil" plan.
Excellent work, per usual. I mean, an actual story choice in a Pokemon game? Revolutionary. Shouldn't be, but it is. Such an often overlooked truth of "villains" is that everyone is the hero of their own story, everyone wants to think of themselves as an essentially good person, and everyone has relatable (or at least believable) core motivations. Villains work as heroes who got it wrong. Team Eco displays all of that wonderfully.
Thank you!
Honestly solid concept and I wish the devs would take notes from this
I like the twist it’s interesting. I think a good idea is one simple thought. Like for example what if the evil team leader was a Pokémon and you write how that will work.
This is a great concept!! I love the new pokemon you made for it too!!!
Demeter: so, will you help us, or stop us?
me: nah, ima do my own thing
Dewpider-Man: Across the Pokéverse
Why is your channel so underrated? This is very good content. Here is a sub.
I think a great way to make the main villain feel like a threat the player wants to beat is to do what a lot of good action games do, take a page from Devil may cry 3
In DMC 3 the player character Dante faces off against his rival and twin brother Vergil three times splitting the game into three distinct acts
Act 1. Dante fights Vergil and does well until Vergil starts trying, at the end Dante is defeated, his half of the perfect amulet is taken, and Vergil is left disappointed with how weak his brother was
Act 2. Dante and Vergil fight again with Dante having gotten stronger and Vergil fighting with Beowulf, a new weapon he is clearly unfamiliar with making the two about even, the fight is inconclusive due to being interrupted by Arkham and Lady
Act 3. Dante and Vergil have one final showdown in the demon world with both giving it their absolute best, and ultimately Dante is the one who emerges victorious finally defeating his brother in battle after having come so far from their first clash
I feel this is a pretty good structure to apply to either a rival or a villain with the first encounter giving the player motivation to keep getting better until they are finally able to surpass the opponent that had given them so much trouble
Team Eco strikes me as trying to fix a problem that didn't need intervention in the first place. The pokemon will tell the humans that something is wrong should there truly be an issue and money really isn't a thing in a world that has long since mastered complete energy to matter conversion. It is also incredibly strange that they did not contact the Ranger association or the professors, especially since you proposed the idea of an international research hub that all the professors have access to, to relay their concerns. They are soo sure of themselves and this perceived issue that they outright ignore the pokemon who are them that this isn't an issue and never was, that precautions and countermeasures are already in place because the pokemon actually talk with each other particularly in the presence of berry trees because food is no longer an issue which is why pokemon tend to gather around berry trees. Usually pokemon respond to such situations with moves such as heal bell and safeguard with the poison and steel types eating up or clearing the excess toxins, water ground types dilute and turn it into fertilizer, and the fairy and grass types restore vegetation and finalizes the conversion with many pokemon species taking up multiple roles in this task. Eventually the pokemon are going to be fed up with Team Eco's interference and it is easy to see an event in this story where a powerful Venusaur cancels out their misery song with round, echo voice and its connection with plant life and then proceeds to kick them out of the forest or the area it is rejuvenating. The majority of the region may understand this but Team Eco has isolated themselves within their own world and within their own egos. The conflict just never created a mess big enough for one of the legendarys to intervene. The lesson here becomes "No help is better than bad help", "Do not force yourself as a solution when you are not needed", and "Do not isolate yourself in your own world, pay attention and listen to the world you live in".
As a side berry trees seem to be the base of many ecosystems. All pokemon and people can eat the berries and the trees grow really fast to accommodate. This allows pokemon of different species to more often hang and play around as food is no longer a pressing concern. So if there is an issue it is probably because Team Eco forced themselves into a situation where they didn't belong or need to be, basically modern day environmentalists who really don't have a clue which is shown to be quite negative when placed in a world where the people are very close to nature and pokemon.
I had a similar issue with this team, which was literally boiled down to "ok but why not tell the professors?". These are trusted pillars of the community before the whole team thing, they can have some tact and keep things quiet while the professors use their land for experiments. It would also be really obvious that they're fighting the swarms as there's no way to be subtle about that
Like yea, the whole point of the lesson is to trust others, but their level of distrust is to such an extreme that it becomes a fundamental character problem
@@KatyaExster that is indeed what makes this group cartoony villains rather than semi-reasonable people that grew up in the pokemon world. Rather than simply listening to the pokemon and contacting the two readily accessible organizations that has the means to investigate this potential problem they instead impose their solution in the most tyrannical way possible and made it into an issue. To everyone in that world it would seem that they were mysteriously hit with a simple bomb because they were acting moronic. For that world the idea not simply asking your pokemon is too stupid to conceive so it made them look like the dumb, uneducated ones from a different reality while everyone else stayed true to the simple facts of their world.
Sorry for the late reply but I have some thoughts on this, thank you for the feedback! Mostly I have a few counter points but you have brought up a really great idea as well!
Before I start, I will note that I didn’t take the ‘Pokemon University’ into account intentionally. This is because for new people watching it makes the story more approachable and this was just an exercise in designing a villain team for Pokemon using design criteria, not to expand my own lore. And another note, the money of this world is something I’ll talk about next episode but basically, if money is not a thing then why does everything we see cost money? Let's just put this issue aside for another day.
But getting into it, the first thing you bring up is Pokemon communicating with each other and people, which is absolutely something I should have talked about. However, keep in mind that the Pokemon of this region are used to Grobbul creating sludge every now and then and in the past, they could indeed use their abilities to more than handle it. This time however they are outnumbered 10 to 1. Steel types are rarer and are being outnumbered closer to 100 to 1. Even for the Pokemon that can heal and protect, how well can they do that when suddenly *all of them* are poisoned?
This is the very first time that the toxins have ever gotten this bad and it is happening over just a few days/weeks. That is a very big problem that happened over a very short period of time. Pokemon won’t know why this crisis is happening because it has never actually caused harm before. It’s like the difference between an unusually high tide and a tsunami.
This is a situation created from humans changing the local ecosystem on a large scale (turning forests and fields into farmlands over time) and the unintended consequences born from that. Team Eco might not want to tell the world that this disaster is *their fault*.
To be clear, if nothing was done to prevent this disaster, even if just Pokemon worked together, there would be a lot of casualties! It is not a “perceived problem” it is a very real problem caused by humans not respecting the ecosystem long term.
However, getting to the great ideas you mentioned. A Venusaur getting angry and shutting down a misery signal sounds like a great story event to take place. You are absolutely right that Team Eco were being dumb and absolutely should have told the Professors about it. The fact that they were trying to solve this the “human way” was wrong, they should have tried getting all the Pokemon involved! And that is what the player character would show them.
I would love to see the player being able to make friends with a group of wild grass and fairy Pokemon to get them to heal Pokemon and plants and fix the soil. A lot of great game-play and story moments here.
Again, thank you for the incredible feedback! I love it!
@@RadioactiveMagicGames no problem but allow me to answer the money quandary first. The money system is there so that there is something for people to do. They have a monetary system just to have one and can be dropped at any time if necessary hence why the prices are all out of wack and collector items such as bottle caps and rare fungi are treated as acceptable currency at times. None of it really means anything it is just there so that people won't go crazy with boredom.
Back to the actual main topic, I doubt the pokemon would be caught unawares as they are typically observant when the humans are not and the same goes in reverse. So they likely would already be taking precautions and amassing the necessary resources meaning that the closer you get to the climax the more likely you are going to run into grass, poison, steel, ground, water, and fairy types that know moves such as safeguard and heal bell while the others become much more rare. I find it highly unlikely that pokemon would be caught so unaware, that includes the toxic crickets themselves. Still Team Eco should have told the wild pokemon that they are expecting some major disaster but that goes back to what you said with Team Eco trying to do things the "human way". Both working together is needed to squash this would be disaster just as it has always been and always will be.
I am glad that you liked my ideas.
binging this series and i love team eco
I thought this was excellent! "The well-meaning experts work on rather than with the common people" is both a narrative that rings true to life and plays well with the elements of science and technology that are pervasive in the world of Pokémon. Plus, I appreciate that you were able to incorporate the theme of balanced ecosystems that you really appreciate, and which Pokémon gestures to by the focus on indexing wildlife.
Some great ideas are presented in this video, but I do have certain concerns.
First and foremost is that this is a narrative written to be a narrative, rather than the narrative of a game. Fundamentally, the pokemon franchise works off of exploration of a region, and encountering it's many secrets and pokemon. Here, the narrative is very localized (what with assuming that the whole region is farm based), and doesn't lend itself well to, well, 90% of any game it may be part of (as pokemon games love intra-regional biome diversity). I can't think of one off the top of my head, but there are certainly ways to make this narrative more region spanning, and when such edits are made, I think this problem is pretty much solved.
Second is that this population boom of wild Grobbul just doesn't seem like a particularly realistic outcome, as insects tend to have extremely fast metabolisms, and one might reasonably expect the Grobbul to reflect that (ik that they aren't bug types, but the designs of Grobbul and Gleebul do seem quite insectoid). There is also no particular reason for Grobbul to group up now, as opposed to how spread out they purportedly were previously, if the competition to eat their favored berries is too high, they will stay spread out, and obviously if they stay confined to the "Berry only plots" then there is no cause for concern, as they will cause no damage, only boons for the berry trees. Finally, if the farmers had been exterminating them anyways this whole time, how did their population get so large in the first place, as a large distribution only means that individual farmers would have an easier time dealing with smaller numbers of Grobbul, and it seems to be in their best interest to get them away from the general crops, and towards the berry trees anyways. I should also mention that these points could make the moral stronger, as you could have it that team Eco is misguided by their incorrect assumptions about the Grobbul menace, and that they are doing no good, even though they intended nothing but the best, leading to a lesson about confronting your own misconceptions etc. However, this was not brought up in the video, so I don't feel I can justifiably use it as an argument.
Still though, a great video, with a story that kept me intrigued the whole way through. Definitely seems like a good starting point for Nintendo in the future (assuming they even see this video).
I liked them do more
Super awesome. It vibes with Team Green from my PTU worldbuilding. I might nab the plot for a campaign, if you don't mind
Yeah go for it! Show your appreciation by telling people about my channel ;)
@@RadioactiveMagicGames absolutely. Are you in the Pokemon Tabletop discord?
I’m sold!
loved these villains. this is great!
Good work on the writing people should look to Pokémon not Temtem for creature collecting writing. (Even though Crema games do corporate sabatoge against Pokémon)
I don't get it. How did their population exploded, if they were previously chased away from the fields that aren't berries and now every other field is not a berry field? Yes, Team Eco's fields are all berry fields, but everyone else keeps beating Grubble on all their fields. You seem to have made a leap in logic at [10:15] when you forgot to say something like _"they were allowed to breed excessively at Eco's fields"_ and jumped straight from "everyone else were beating Grubble" over _"Eco didn't see any reason to complain and let them breed"_ into "and now Grubble are spread everywhere". The result that you got is "everyone was beating Grubble and now Grubble are spread everywhere".
Sure, I figured what you meant after some time thinking over it (by _headcanoning_ some logic into your words), but the way you presented it would really confuse people otherwise.
Also that just means that Team Eco are still at fault at what's happening, since they're the reason Grubble are a problem. (Otherwise your words around the timecode don't make any sense)
All these gimmicks are going to lead to either really sad or funny shiny fails
Sad and funny are not mutually exclusive.
It poisons the soil and air so badly that all Pokémon are immediately poisoned and it’s not a poison type.
What would be cover legendary for this game?
This isn't a game pitch, I'm pretty sure, It's just a writing exercise about any hypothetical pokemon game.
So they didn’t tell anyone because they didn’t want to cause a panic. And what’s the reason behind the name ‘project misery’.
Why call Demeter ‘they’? Demeter is a mother goddess.
maybe demeter's an afab non-binary person who kept their birth name after transitioning.
@@davidturner1595 please let this be a joke
@@umwha It was a joke (or at least a non-serious suggestion,) but I don't see what would be wrong if it wasn't a joke. did I accidentally say something transphobic? (or NB-phobic or whatever it's called?)
@@davidturner1595 Its not transphobic dont worry. You are saying all the words you've been taught to say and espousing the politically correct views. I hope that relieves you.