Team Flare, Team Skull, Team Yell, Team Star: The Organizations of the Recent Generations

The criminal team isn't what it used to be. Ever since Kalos, the series has methodically dismantled its own formula: a benefactor turned fanatic, a crew of rejects far less dangerous than the charitable foundation next door, leaderless hooligans, a billionaire chairman convinced he is saving the world, and finally teenagers nobody ever stood up for. Here are the organizations of the last four regions, and why not one of them really looks like Team Rocket.

Contents

• Four regions, four ways to break the formula
• Team Flare: beauty according to Lysandre
• The Ultimate Weapon, AZ and the end of Kalos
• Team Skull: Alola's rejects
• The Aether Foundation, Alola's real danger
• Galar: Team Yell is not a criminal organization
• Macro Cosmos and Rose, the chairman who wakes a cataclysm
• Paldea's Team Star: five squads and a Big Boss
• The twist: Team Star isn't a criminal organization
• What becomes of these organizations
• The organizations of the recent generations at a glance
• Frequently Asked Questions

Four regions, four ways to break the formula

For a long time the pattern never moved: a uniformed organization, a megalomaniac leader, a Legendary to awaken. Starting with Kalos, the games begin to play with that expectation instead of satisfying it, and every region offers a different variation on the villain theme.

Kalos takes the logic all the way with a leader who literally wants to erase humanity. Alola splits the problem in two, setting a harmless gang of thugs against a respectable foundation that is far more worrying. Galar does away with the criminal team altogether. And Paldea turns its villains into victims.

What these four stories have in common is that they move the danger. It no longer comes from a gang, but from an excess of conviction in respected people: an entrepreneur, a foundation president, a CEO adored by the public. The flashy uniforms are nothing but set dressing. Every one of these leaders is listed in our Pokémon character directory.

The result is a gallery of antagonists far more grown-up than the early ones, where the worst offense some of them commit is making noise in a hotel lobby. Here, region by region, is what these organizations really want — and what is left of them once the credits roll, in the history of the games.

Team Flare: beauty according to Lysandre

In Kalos, the organization is called Team Flare, and its crest is an F stylized in flames. Its leader, Lysandre, is the head of Lysandre Labs, a rich and famous inventor who gave the world the Holo Caster, and whose café in Lumiose City is red from top to bottom — his favorite color, the color of passion.

The character started out as a sincere philanthropist, always ready to help. He convinced himself that the people he helped were settling into dependency, that resources were limited and that a war over wealth was inevitable. Out of that grew a radical environmentalist for whom only the preemptive elimination of humans can give the world back its beauty.

His organization does of course keep a chosen few: himself and the ones he wants to keep at his side. It is built around two branches, the grunts supervised by admins, and a five-member scientific corps: Xerosic, the man in red glasses who never leaves the labs, and four women with brightly colored hair, Aliana, Bryony, Celosia and Mable.

The most famous admin is none other than Malva, a member of the Kalos Elite Four, which gives Team Flare a direct line to the top of the League. She still keeps a code of honor, though: she will even ask the hero for help in stopping Xerosic, some of whose projects she disapproves of.

The Ultimate Weapon, AZ and the end of Kalos

The instrument of the plan is a machine dating back 3,000 years, the Ultimate Weapon, designed by the ruler of the time to purge the region of its ugliness. Team Flare builds its hideout all around it, beneath the three central standing stones of Geosenge Town, while Lysandre tries to recruit the player over the Holo Caster.

The reveal comes after the seventh Badge: a message broadcast to the entire region announces his intention to "purify the world". In the Lumiose City labs, hidden behind a bookcase, the player finds a cell holding AZ, a giant who is none other than the former king of Kalos, the architect of the weapon and the keeper of its key.

To power the machine, Lysandre drains the energy of Xerneas in Pokémon X and of Yveltal in Pokémon Y, wired into the control room. The player unplugs the Legendary, beats the leader — who fights back with a Mega-Evolved Gyarados — and watches the blast fall back onto the weapon itself.

Lysandre vanishes in the explosion, leaving Team Flare leaderless. What follows is the truly unsettling part: several residents keep talking about him as a man full of kindness who helped them, and Professor Sycamore condemns only his methods, not his original goal.

Team Skull: Alola's rejects

The mood changes completely in Alola. Team Skull is a gang of hoodlums in black tracksuits, bandanas over their noses and chains around their necks, who steal Pokémon, wreck the trial sites and make life miserable for honest people. Their main hideout is the town of Po Town, on Ula'ula Island.

💀 The bandana over the nose and the chain around the neck remain the trademark of Po Town's grunts, but the black tracksuit fits right into your wardrobe without you having to trash a single trial site: head over to our Pokémon sweaters and hoodies.

The structure is bare-bones: one boss, Guzma, a single admin, Plumeria, and a rank and file of grunts. The Pokémon they field are mostly Poison-type, with Plumeria's Salandit and her Salazzle, while Guzma nurses a passion for Bug-types, from Pinsir to Golisopod.

Behind the posturing, the wound is plain to see. Guzma once failed to become a trial captain, and he still holds a stubborn grudge against Professor Kukui, who was after the same role back then. His grunts share the same bitterness of the left-behind: Team Skull is as much a refuge as it is a gang.

That is what makes it endearing all the same. Its ridiculous dance, its slang and its swagger have made it one of the organizations most popular with fans, widely featured on the T-shirts and merchandise of the seventh generation.

The Aether Foundation, Alola's real danger

Facing that street gang, Alola offers an organization beyond reproach: the Aether Foundation, based on an artificial island, Aether Paradise. Its stated mission is to care for injured Pokémon, give them a refuge and protect them from Team Skull. White coats, spotless labs, polished messaging.

🥼 White lab coats and spotless labs: that's the outfit that gives the Aether Foundation its squeaky-clean look. At home, spotless white is more something you wear stepping out of the shower, and the Pokémon bathrobes section is made just for that.

At its head is President Lusamine, backed by Branch Chief Faba and Assistant Branch Chief Wicke. The foundation studies the Ultra Beasts, those creatures from elsewhere that it assigns code names to, officially to protect the region from their power.

The second visit to Aether Paradise tears the mask off. The foundation is actually working with Team Skull, and its goal is to control the Ultra Beasts and then release them into Alola. A failed experiment meant to create a Pokémon able to defeat them is in fact what gave rise to Type: Null, which fled with Gladion.

The plan works: with the help of the Cosmog that Lillie had taken away, Lusamine tears open rifts across the whole region and disappears with Guzma into the world of the Ultra Beasts. Even Assistant Branch Chief Wicke is stunned: only a handful of employees knew about the real project.

Galar: Team Yell is not a criminal organization

Galar makes the most radical choice of all: there is quite simply no criminal team. In its place comes Team Yell, a band of hooligan-inspired supporters from Spikemuth, whose one and only obsession is seeing their idol Marnie win the Gym Challenge.

Their misdeeds match. They block hotel front desks, keep competitors from catching their rides, boo to break concentration, wave banners and steal a poor doctor's bike. They are the first enemy organization in the series with no leader — and the only one whose own idol scolds them like children.

Since they also stand in as the Trainers of the Spikemuth Gym, they naturally field Dark-type Pokémon: Galarian Zigzagoon and Linoone, Stunky, Pangoro or even Thievul. Nothing that threatens the region: at most the Gym Challenge standings.

The best part happens to them at the very end: when the heroes have to reach Rose Tower, it is the hooligans who save the day by finding the key. The only team in the series to end up as a rescue crew, without ever changing its convictions.

Macro Cosmos and Rose, the chairman who wakes a cataclysm

Galar's real antagonist wears a three-piece suit. Rose chairs Macro Cosmos, a conglomerate that controls most of the region's industries: the rail network, the banks, the stadiums, and even the Galar League itself, of which he is the chairman.

He is the one behind the Dynamax Bands and the tapping of the Power Spots that turned the Gyms into giant stadiums — in other words the whole spectacle of the Dynamax phenomenon. Always smiling, backed by his vice president Oleana, he is a figure the public genuinely loves.

His fixation is an energy crisis that would strike Galar a thousand years from now. To prevent it, he wants to release an infinite source of energy. Champion Leon refuses to help him, judging the risk out of all proportion for an event that far off: Rose then interrupts the Championship Match and goes ahead anyway.

The energy source turns out to be the Darkest Day, the Eternamax form of Eternatus, an alien Pokémon that had already devastated Galar 3,000 years earlier. It naturally slips out of all control, and it is the player, backed by Zacian and Zamazenta, who puts an end to the disaster.

Paldea's Team Star: five squads and a Big Boss

In Paldea, Team Star is made up of the Academy's most unruly students — Naranja Academy in Pokémon Scarlet, Uva Academy in Pokémon Violet. They skip class, stand up openly to authority and have a bad reputation across the whole region.

🧃 At Naranja Academy and Uva Academy alike, Team Star skips more classes than it attends; for your own school days, a Pokémon water bottle belongs in your bag.

The organization is split into five squads named after stars, each with its own boss, its favored type and its base: Segin and Dark for Giacomo, Schedar and Fire for Mela, Navi and Poison for Atticus, Ruchbah and Fairy for Ortega, Caph and Fighting for Eri.

The five bosses answer to a leader they have never met, who gives his orders through a Rotom Phone and whom they nickname the "Big Boss". The player, meanwhile, gets a call from a student calling herself Cassiopeia, who asks them to put an end to the team's activities.

Each assault plays out in two stages: a race against the clock through the camp, then a duel against the boss perched atop their Starmobile, a customized vehicle built from a Varoom and a Revavroom. The player gets quiet help from "Clive", an accomplice who is none other than Director Clavell in disguise.

The twist: Team Star isn't a criminal organization

Each victory reveals another piece of the truth, and it changes everything. Team Star is made up of students bullied at school who, in the face of the teachers' indifference, banded together to defend themselves and recruited others going through the same thing.

A year and a half before the game begins, they launched Operation Star: challenge their bullies to Pokémon battles, and build the Starmobiles to give themselves an intimidating look. When the day came, the tormentors backed down and left the school, putting an end to the bullying.

What follows is crueler. Rumors wreck their reputation, and the director at the time, Harrington, wants to expel them — until their leader Cassiopeia, who is none other than Penny, comes to him and tells him the whole story. He cancels the punishments, she agrees to step away for a while, and he resigns, eaten up by guilt.

The affair is hushed up, the new staff arrives knowing nothing and sees mere troublemakers. It is to avoid another expulsion that Penny sets up Operation Starfall with the player. In the end, Clavell works it all out, cancels the expulsion and hands down nothing more than community service: the former bases become training centers.

What becomes of these organizations

Alola offers the finest redemptions. Guzma returns in Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon as an ally of the player for the length of Episode RR. In Sun and Moon already, once the League had been beaten, he was taken under the wing of Hala, who recognized his talent after a rematch lost on the beach. Gladion, for his part, takes over the presidency of the Aether Foundation at the end of the adventure.

These same games bring together the fallen bosses of every region in Team Rainbow Rocket, where Lysandre rubs shoulders with Giovanni, Archie, Maxie, Cyrus and Ghetsis, summoned from parallel realities where their plans succeeded. It is the great tribute the series pays to its historic criminal organizations.

In Galar, Rose turns himself in to the authorities and confesses his crimes; stripped of the League chairmanship, he hands the role over to Leon. In Paldea, Team Star is kept alive by the director's decision. Two very different endings, but both of them refuse to simply banish the villain.

As for Kalos, Pokémon Legends: Z-A confirms that Team Flare really was disbanded and its members arrested. A few of them, gathered around a former grunt, founded Team Flare Nouveau, which operates undercover out of food trucks to restore the organization's honor. Lysandre, for his part, survived the explosion of his hideout.

The organizations of the recent generations at a glance

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is the criminal organization of Kalos?
  It is Team Flare, led by Lysandre, president of Lysandre Labs and inventor of the Holo Caster. It gathers grunts overseen by admins and five scientists: Xerosic, Aliana, Bryony, Celosia and Mable. Malva, a member of the Kalos Elite Four, is its best-known admin.
• What does Team Flare want?
  Lysandre wants to remake the world according to his idea of beauty, keeping only a handful of chosen people and wiping out every other human being, whom he holds responsible for the decay of the world. To do so, he plans to activate the Ultimate Weapon, a 3,000-year-old machine powered by the energy of Xerneas in Pokémon X and of Yveltal in Pokémon Y.
• What is the organization of Alola?
  Alola has two. Team Skull, led by Guzma with admin Plumeria out of their hideout in Po Town, is a gang of punks who steal Pokémon and trash the trial sites. The real threat is the Aether Foundation, headed by Lusamine, which presents itself as a shelter for injured Pokémon but in fact wants to control the Ultra Beasts and release them into the region.
• Is there a criminal team in Galar?
  No. Team Yell is a band of hooligan-inspired supporters from Spikemuth who sabotage the Gym Challenge to favor their idol Marnie; it is the first enemy organization in the series with no boss. The real antagonist is Rose, CEO of the Macro Cosmos conglomerate and chairman of the Galar League.
• Is Team Star really a criminal organization?
  No, and that is the whole twist of Paldea. Its members are Academy students who were bullied at school and banded together to defend themselves for lack of any support from their teachers. At the end of the plot, Director Clavell cancels their expulsion and hands them nothing more than community service.
• What becomes of these organizations after the games?
  Team Flare is disbanded and its members arrested, before a few of them found Team Flare Nouveau in Pokémon Legends: Z-A. Guzma returns as an ally of the player in Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, where Lysandre joins Team Rainbow Rocket, and Gladion takes over the presidency of the Aether Foundation. Rose turns himself in to the authorities and hands the League chairmanship over to Leon, while Team Star is allowed to go on existing.

In short

From Lysandre to Team Star, the last four regions tell the same story: danger no longer wears a uniform and no longer hides in a secret base. It holds a press conference, chairs a foundation, funds a league — or else it does not exist at all, and the so-called villains are only kids nobody ever listened to. That may well be the finest evolution in the whole series.