Pokémon Black and White: Elesa

Elesa highlights how much you can challenge a prospective Pokémon champion just by subverting expectations. She’s an electric-type trainer, and even after two decades, the type only has one weakness: ground-type moves. Naturally, a player’s first instinct would be to bring ground-type attacks to the fight. But it turns out, those don’t affect most of her team. Black and White’s Pikachu knockoff is a flying squirrel called Emolga, and while it has the signature electric patches on its cheeks that mark it as an electric-type, it differs from the iconic mouse because it’s also a flying-type. Ground moves don’t affect it at all, so its weaknesses are ice and rock moves, rather than what you probably came ready to use.

Elesa has two Emolgas, so you spend most of the’s fight dealing with these flying little shits before getting to an electric-type Pokémon you can hit with an Earthquake. Then she sends out her ace, a Zebstrika, which knows Flame Charge for some reason. So if you were trying to use a grass-type Pokémon to tank through the electric moves, it will simply tackle you while engulfed in flames, growing ever faster with each subsequent bashing of its body into your Pokémon’s.