Ranking All 151 Original Pokémon From Worst To Best

2. Pikachu

I'm going to level with you here. You've stuck with me for some 7600 words at this point so I owe it to you to keep it 100. In all the initial drafts of this list I had Pikachu at number 1...

Ok so here's the thing. Harking back to my three points of criteria as set out in the introduction, we're scoring here on in-game usefulness, unquantifiable cool factor, and impact on the wider franchise/world. On the first two of those, Pikachu scores virtually nothing because it's a second stage evolution (first stage in Gen 1) and you'd never seriously use one, but the latter is different.

Without Pikachu, there is no Pokémon. No games, no animes, no comics, no card games, no decade-spanning cultural phenomenon, nothing. Without the face of the franchise being as popular as Pikachu is, the whole series would never ever have enjoyed the success it has. On that basis alone it is indisputable that Pikachu is the single most important Pokémon that was ever devised and, like it or not, if you're a fan of any element of the franchise you owe that to the little yellow mouse.

So why has it missed out on top spot? Well, because the key adjective in the title here is not Most Important, it's Greatest, and the difference between the two is subtle enough to give #1 to the following...