The Best and Worst Boss Fights in Pokemon

[shinquickman]

Platinum Fantina is absolutely stupid, there are like the Shinx line, Floatzel, and Vespiquen with Toxic and that's it for counters. Vespiquen is a legit counter, look at how little damage Shadow Ball does:

View attachment 296252
So you just spam Heal Order after you Toxic it to victory.

But yes this fight is stupid hard and my least favorite boss in Pokemon history. Yes, even more than HGSS Lance.

I would totally use a Vespiquen for a Platinum playthrough... if I could get one! It's bad enough that female Combees are only 1/8 chance to find. Factor in the infernal Honey Trees, and it could take days just to find one of those suckers. Here's hoping that Honey Trees remain banished in the Shadow Realm if/when a Diamond/Pearl remake comes along. Also, today I learned that Vespiquen learns Toxic naturally. Interesting.

I do agree that Fantina is one tough cookie in Platinum, particularly her Mismagius. Platinum in general has a fairly steep difficulty level for Pokemon standards. I remember Crasher Wake, Admin fights, and certain Rival battles being pretty tough as well.

 

[DrumstickGaming]

I would totally use a Vespiquen for a Platinum playthrough... if I could get one! It's bad enough that female Combees are only 1/8 chance to find. Factor in the infernal Honey Trees, and it could take days just to find one of those suckers. Here's hoping that Honey Trees remain banished in the Shadow Realm if/when a Diamond/Pearl remake comes along. Also, today I learned that Vespiquen learns Toxic naturally. Interesting.

I do agree that Fantina is one tough cookie in Platinum, particularly her Mismagius. Platinum in general has a fairly steep difficulty level for Pokemon standards. I remember Crasher Wake, Admin fights, and certain Rival battles being pretty tough as well.

Actually, gender and level can be soft reset for on Honey Trees. Little known fact, but I don’t blame you for not knowing.

 

[Choice Specs Heracross]

I doubt you’d even have Luxray at that point. Now that you mention it, I think I beat her with Vespiquen too when I did a Bug Monotype, using a similar strategy.

Don’t get me started on Lance, easily the worst Champion. He completely invalidates 2/3 of the starters. The level scaling is notoriously bad in the Johto games but then they have the cheek to raise most of his Pokémon’s levels. If you can survive that stupidly powerful Outrage you’re probably getting roasted by Fire Blast. Where are your Badge Boosts when you need them most? Plus the AI is generally better and those thunder waves won’t fail 1/4 time. At least there’s Specs and Scarf. I remember using Natural Gift Technician Scizor once lol.

 

[Antihaxxer]

I don't remember any run where Fantina was a trouble, maybe because I love to fight all the trainers and I just outpowers her ?

 

[Volt-Ikazuchi]

I don't remember any run where Fantina was a trouble, maybe because I love to fight all the trainers and I just outpowers her ?

Even then, you're not gonna be too ahead of her, if at all, depending on how many mons you're running.

And the biggest thing really is that there's no easy counter to Mismagius, you gotta scrap.

 

[Antihaxxer]

Grotle, Luxio have Bite (and Gible in Pt has also Bite)
Floatle and Bibarel have Crunch
Monferno and Prinple can do a lot of damage and Staravia is also immune to STAB.

I'm sure Gyarados and Golbat can also do a lot of damage but I didn't do a run with them ...

 

[Volt-Ikazuchi]

Grotle, Luxio have Bite (and Gible in Pt has also Bite)
Floatle and Bibarel have Crunch
Monferno and Prinple can do a lot of damage and Staravia is also immune to STAB.

I'm sure Gyarados and Golbat can also do a lot of damage but I didn't do a run with them ...

Exactly. You have a lot of options, but they tend to be neutral matchups and Mismagius hits fairly hard, which is why Plat Fantina is considered challenging.

I absolutely love that battle because you don't get her in say, a Korrina situation, but apparently, a lot of people ain't built to deal with that kinda battle...

 

[Choice Specs Heracross]

On my current file, I ended up fighting her with Monferno, Psyduck and Buneary all around level 26. I only beat her because of Buneary’s foresight lol. Those levels are from fighting every trainer and no grinding. Unstabed Bites from middle stage Pokemon just don’t really hit hard enough. I suppose Luxray is achievable if you only have 2 Pokemon in your team.

 

[charzard14]

Grotle, Luxio have Bite (and Gible in Pt has also Bite)
Floatle and Bibarel have Crunch
Monferno and Prinple can do a lot of damage and Staravia is also immune to STAB.

I'm sure Gyarados and Golbat can also do a lot of damage but I didn't do a run with them ...

Gyarados, Crobat and Lopunny all do really well. I'm surprised no one has mentioned Wormadam Trash or Staravia.

 

[R_N]

No one has ever used wormadam, to be fair

 

[charzard14]

No one has ever used wormadam, to be fair

Wormadam Trash is probably the single best pokemon to use against Fantina.

 

[Volt-Ikazuchi]

Gyarados, Crobat and Lopunny all do really well. I'm surprised no one has mentioned Wormadam Trash or Staravia.

I probably mentioned it the 2nd time or so Fantina came up. lmao

Confuse Ray is hella annoying, but Staravia can pretty much go toe-to-toe with it. Especially with Pluck.

 

[shinquickman]

Gyarados, Crobat and Lopunny all do really well. I'm surprised no one has mentioned Wormadam Trash or Staravia.

Lopunny by the Third Gym? You have to go waaaay out of your way to do that. Bunneary is tied with Legendary Pokemon for lowest starting friendship value. With a Soothe Bell, my Bunneary usually evolves by her early 40s in a regular playthrough at best. I can maybe see speeding up the process by buying a couple dozen X-items and durdling around Magikarps, but that's a lot of time and resource.

 

[Bakugames]

I don't remember having many troubles with fantina, but I never had any problems with platinum fights as they were really easy to abuse tbh.
Then again after playing it I just decided that the base game was bad and only use it for randomizers so it's been a while since i fought her

 

[charzard14]

Lopunny by the Third Gym? You have to go waaaay out of your way to do that. Bunneary is tied with Legendary Pokemon for lowest starting friendship value. With a Soothe Bell, my Bunneary usually evolves by her early 40s in a regular playthrough at best. I can maybe see speeding up the process by buying a couple dozen X-items and durdling around Magikarps, but that's a lot of time and resource.

Its annoying, but cycling road happiness grinding isn't too bad, especially if you grab eevee and are also looking for espeon/umbreon.

 

[Hugin]

No one has ever used wormadam, to be fair

I used Wormadam-Steel in an X playthrough once. Fairly fun. Worthless against route trainers and wilds, but you could absolutely toxic-stall various bosses with minimal effort while underleveled. I would still recommend any other solution to the problem, the time investment was significant.

 

[Choice Specs Heracross]

My Buneary evolved at Level 38. If you’re gonna grind happiness what’s to stop you from just grinding your Pokemon to a comfortable level. Wormadam Trash (Yay self-aware joke) crossed my mind funnily enough, but what does that actually do back to Maggie?

 

[charzard14]

My Buneary evolved at Level 38. If you’re gonna grind happiness what’s to stop you from just grinding your Pokemon to a comfortable level. Wormadam Trash (Yay self-aware joke) crossed my mind funnily enough, but what does that actually do back to Maggie?

I typically play with level caps and no healing in battle, so I can't be higher than 26 for Fantina.

Also, you might want Buneary to evolve early enough to learn Return without burning a TM.

 

[Choice Specs Heracross]

In the past I’ve purposely done laps on cycling road to grind happiness, I decided against it this time. I also try to win without healing items, although I had to use the odd one to beat Fantina this time.

 

[The Mind Electric]

I'm extremely late, but seeing people talk about Platinum Fantina like she's a massive wall is really weird for me, because I beat her first try on my recent playthrough and I barely remember what I did. I knew she was coming up, and I thought I could be clever and set up Double Team on her Duskull with Staravia, but Mismagius nuked it in a couple turns anyway. After that, I think I just threw my team at it until it went down, and that was that. My memory is foggy, but I don't think I had to cheese her with healing items, and I wasn't overleveled either.

While I'm talking about Platinum, Flint was the only fight in the game that I found disappointing. He's the third E4 member, so you'd think he would put up a real fight, but I swept him completely by spamming Earthquake, and he couldn't even get a hit in. He went down as easily as Gardenia, and I picked Chimchar, so that really says something. In an otherwise fairly challenging League, Flint stands out as being a complete joke, and it sucks because he's the only E4 member with actual buildup with the meeting in Sunyshore.

 

[ScraftyIsTheBest]

I'm also a big fan of Cynthia and Leon if only because of how well-rounded their teams are. The Cynthia fight, in particular, is good because of how her movesets are designed to be navigable but not exploitable, meaning you can overcome her while under-levelled without her feeling like a slouch. The Leon fight was unfortunately undercut by Dynamax being fucking ridiculous, but I liked his team which I guess is something.

Honestly Leon is one of my favorite Champion battles out there. While most of the other Gym Leaders in Sword and Shield were pretty easy (barring Kabu and Raihan), Leon actually put up a really great battle when I battled him. His team is, as you said, very well rounded, and he was honestly a really good Champion. His Pokemon have legit great movesets, and even his G-Max Charizard was a threat: even Rock and Water-types don't fully stand a chance against him because Max Overgrowth will likely obliterate them in an instant. One time it even defeated my G-Max Blastoise when I attempted to use it against him. His team has a lot of great coverage, combined with strong Pokemon like Aegislash, Haxorus, Dragapult, you name it. Between his Inteleon, Dragapult, and Charizard he was very tough to defeat, especially since the former two are incredibly fast and have great coverage (man did they give me a lot of trouble), while his Haxorus and Aegislash either have raw power in the former's case and King's Shield shenanigans in the latter's case. You're also very likely to be a bit underleveled for him because there's a decently big level jump from Raihan to him, which is all the better.

I honestly always hold off on the Dynamax until he sends out his G-Max Charizard, and I went through the rest of his team without using it at all before then, which helped make the battle all the more challenging and fun to me. To me, I feel like Dynamax is best used when the opponent does so with their ace Pokemon which they always send out last, so that me and Marnie/Hop/Leon whoever have a grand showdown between two giant-sized Pokemon using Max Moves to get the crowd running wild. Using Dynamax at all in the battle before they send out their ace defeats the appeal of Dynamax in the first place imho, since I feel the big draw to it is the showdown between to D-Maxed Pokemon, giant-sized in the stadium, having a battle that gets the crowds hyped up.

 

[The Mind Electric]

I immediately went through all of HG after beating Platinum, so I guess I'll talk about my favorite/least favorite fights from that game.

For favorite, I'm gonna go with Blue, because he provided a decent challenge for me without feeling unfair. His team is balanced, which makes it feel satisfying to take them down, and on top of that he's actually the perfect level for when you fight him in my experience. I found that beating all the trainers around Kanto before going to Viridian left me at just the right level where Blue was hard without being too overwhelmingly strong, which was a relief. A lot of other major fights in HG would be cool, but they're ruined by the awful level curve. Speaking of which...

My least favorite, to the surprise of probably nobody, is Lance. Specifically the first fight, because while the rematch is a horrible level spike you at least have more resources to train up. For the first fight, the best source of experience is committing genocide on Miltank outside the Safari Zone, which takes ages. Speaking of the level spike, it's infamous for a reason. Usually, in Pokémon games, you can actually overcome the disadvantage you'll probably be at when fighting Lance. Hell, I beat Cynthia in Platinum at a bigger level disadvantage. The problem is that half of Lance's team is the same pseudo-legendary Dragon Pokémon, and a ten level disadvantage is actually quite hard to deal with when you're up against that many pseudo-legendaries. Cynthia only gets one, and while it is hard to take down, it's still manageable because there aren't two clones of it waiting to make you regret your life choices after the first one bites it. Being adequately prepared to fight Lance's three inappropriately-leveled Dragonites is such a pain that I eventually conceded and surrendered my dignity to cheese him with healing item abuse. Had to do the same thing to Red too, but at least Red has a decently-balanced and interesting team.

Also, the Garchomp is the hardest part of the Lance rematch. I had to revive my Ampharos over and over until Static kicked in, because it was just too much for me handle without crippling its Speed.

 

[The Mind Electric]

Nearly a month later, and I've beaten every boss I want to fight in White, so here we go again.

Favorites:

The Unova League Challenge is by far my favorite out of the ones I've done, and Shauntal stands out as the best trainer in that league to me. Her team has great type/move diversity with many of my personal favorite Ghost types, and she's just the right amount of challenge for me. The entire Unova E4 is immaculately designed, but Shauntal in particular is really great.

Here's where I have to admit my bias: I don't think Alder's fight is super awesome, but I'm inclined to like him anyway because he uses Volcarona, probably my favorite Pokémon ever. That alone gives him a huge boost in my book, but the rest of his team isn't that bad either. Yes, Emboar eats three of the six Pokémon here for breakfast (four if you outspeed the Bouffalant), and Volcarona ironically has a really easy time setting up and sweeping, but you can still be in danger if you get careless. Plus, I like that his team embodies the carefree approach he has to battling and being Champion. The fight reflects the character really well, which I appreciate. Overall, not the best battle ever, but still a great Champion who didn't deserve the hate he got for not being as cool or hard as Cynthia. Speaking of which...

Least Favorites:

Cynthia's kinda lame in this game. Yes, there's the iconic moment where you enter a seemingly-normal house in Undella Town and find that your trousers are suddenly full of bricks, but the actual fight just isn't that hard. The game gives you a level 70 Volcarona that can set up on Spiritomb and sweep her entire team for free, which really kills the challenge. Without the difficulty or story presence of her previous incarnations, she's basically just a speed bump in black clothing.

Fight's okay, but I'm still mad about the Hydreigon. Cheating bastard.

 

[Celeb]

Archie and Maxie are both pretty terrible boss battles in the original games. The Magma and Aqua organisations use 3 Pokemon each in their teams - Poochyena, Zubat and Numel/Carvanha. Leaders have evolved formes of those and nothing else. What's worse, Mightyena, Crobat and Archie's Sharpedo have terrible movesets which rely on RNG.
Glacia is also pretty bad for using only 2 Pokemon lines. Even Agatha and Lance in RBY are not this pathetic.
I was never fond of Kahili. Alola is memorable for its common encounters with important NPCs but she comes out of nowhere. A mere mention from an optional NPC is not enough.

I like DP's Flint for his use of different types of Pokemon while still maintaing a certain theme. It makes his team memorable.
Cilan, Chilli, Cress are also cool. They add some variety and show how tutorials can be fun.
Half of the bosses in Mystery Dungeon Rescue Team have great build-up. I can never get enough of the common trope of some strong dudes failing to beat some threat which you will have to face. Zapdos, Groudon and Mewtwo come to mind from these games. Having to go through 98 floors of enemies in some cases benefit the atmosphere as well.

 

[Siggu]

Glacia is also pretty bad for using only 2 Pokemon lines. Even Agatha and Lance in RBY are not this pathetic.

To be fair, there are only two Ice-type Pokémon lines in Hoenn, not counting Snowy Castform and Regice.