Making these top 25 lists turns out to be a five-week enterprise most of the time. There’s the prep work, the planning, the voting — and then after all that, we go through and comment on every single representative on our list. Even the awful ones.
Below our some of our panelists’ thoughts on how the whole thing went. As always, we welcome comments from you as well, or vote on the poll below.
GROUP THOUGHTS
Chris: These are a lot of fun for me. I enjoy putting them together, and even though it ends up being a pretty big chunk of work, I think it’s worth it.
My favorite part of the process is when most of the votes are in, and we can finally start seeing how the group list is going to look. All that information in the spreadsheet, just waiting to reveal itself.
This list had a couple advantages over our Best Games Ever list. For one, there was a finite amount of Pokemon to choose from, rather than every game ever made. But there were still plenty of options to choose from, enough that our list had a ton of representation across the board — generations, types, you name it. About the only weird consistency was four of our top five starting with the letter M. But what can you do.
A couple of my long-time favorites managed to place pretty well, including Piplup and Scizor. I also had our No. 1, Milotic, on my list (although pretty low). It’s tough to argue with the end result when seven of our 10 panelists voted for it. Your mileage may vary — and that’s one of the best parts of these lists, after all — but for what it’s worth, I think we did pretty well.
Shaun: Overall, I thought the list was great. There were some outliers, obviously (hello, Voltorb), but those kinds of strange picks are what make these lists fun, and provide some unique flavor to our selections.
But not only was I happy with the choices that made the top 25, I was pretty satisfied with their placement, as well. I didn’t feel compelled to write hate mail to the voters (aka myself) demanding certain Pokes be higher or lower, so I think, like with our Best Games Ever list, that we did a good job of being pretty spot on with our selections.
Milotic wasn’t my number one pick, but it’s hard to argue with a Pokemon who received the most well-balanced love from our panel. It will be fun to see what the community thinks about that pick, and our list in general.
Joseph: I am happy to see my first choice has made it on this list. Mew, even though you are in third place, that is still a bronze medal in my book. Why did I put Mew at number one? My top 25 list was based on the item Pokémon in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and Mew was more essential than any other. He, like other legendary Pokémon Celebi and Jirachi, would use the Fly attack. An attack, ladies and gentlemen, that did no damage to anybody. However, these three Pokémon would shower retrievable gifts upon the players. Celebi’s contribution was stickers and Jirachi dropped trophies. Mew? CDs. Arguably, the most wonderful facet of that game was the music, and Mew was the only Pokémon who helped give it to you. Despite his notable drop in usefulness after you obtain every wonderful track, Mew’s prior devotion to your musical satisfaction easily granted him first place on my list. And I am certain he would have given me more music if he could.
I can confidently say I know enough information about this list to question the presence of Voltorb and Butterfree. One’s sole purpose was to explode, which may have fainted the opponent if you were lucky, and the other used powders for everything. I owned Pokémon Blue, my brother owned Pokémon Red. In those days, I could catch a Caterpie where he would get a Weedle. One evolved into the aforementioned Bug/Flying type that gained no Bug-type attacks. The other evolved into Beedrill, which would, with the aid of Twineedle and Pin Missile, help you decimate the Saffron City Gym and catch Mewtwo (presuming you didn’t merely use your Master Ball). So it makes me wonder why they were included in the individual lists and of what were those Pokémon the top 25.
Conclusively, it is good to see Snorlax was able to make it in without needing to do a substantial amount of work.
Michaela: I’m pleased with the overall turn out of the list, mostly since I feel my picks were reasonably placed along with everyone else’s choices. I couldn’t ask for a better turnout with Milotic placing as the number 1 best Pokemon – Milotic and Metagross were vying for the spot throughout this entire process – but I respect Metagross coming in at a close second. Shaun killed me a ton with that Pokemon, so I can’t disagree with its placement since it showed me up all the time in our battles.
Objection Network 