In recent years I have been growing repeatedly annoying by all the little additions they've been adding to the Pokemon games. Specifically how horrifically linear they are making the games these days, but another big annoyance factor for me are the "rivals." Or friends. Or whatever.
In the first three generations, you almost never ran into your rival unless there was a battle to fight. You ran into your rival in G/S/C like, once, and didn't battle him. That was it. Your rival in R/S USUALLY didn't show up somewhere unless you fought him/her, too--although there were a few places where you could find him/her standing around doing nothing. And they liked to show up after you beat the champion, but whatever. And Wally, who some might argue was the true rival, actually completely disappears after a certain point in the game, only showing up later at the end of victory road.
However, from fourth gen onward, certain NPC's have been given more prominent roles--there's Lucas or Dawn, depending on your gender, but you don't see them very often. Then there was Lyra and whatever the male equivalent was, who proceeded to annoy you with their existence for the first quarter of the game.
Then we had Bianca and Cheren, and from that point on, it's been pretty much a consistent thing that your friends/rivals pretty much end up everywhere you are. This wasn't bad, and their characters were actually pretty well-written...
Then X/Y came along. Now you have five "friends," all of which end up in the same places as you. All of them stop you for stupid things. One such thing just so happens to be calling you to come to the route you were JUST about to enter. Another is pulling you aside to listen to some stupid, fake ghost story. One even drags you aside to watch the lumoise tower light up, which is the most mediocre thing ever. And for the entire duration of the game, none of them have any development. Except maybe your REAL rival, the one that changes according to gender.
OR/AS follows suit by giving your rival more appearances. Except...most of these appearances are unneeded. Do we REALLY need our rival to tell us where we need to go next? Was his/her involvement in the Dr. Cosmo sub-plot REALLY necessary? (Especially when his/her Pokemon are a dead-weight in that battle and actually only serve to make the battle HARDER.)
The answer is no. We don't really need them. We didn't need them in the first three gens. All they really serve to do is give the game more of a "plot"--if you can call it that--and make you feel more immersed. Which I guess is fine, if you don't mind getting stopped by an NPC every 5 minutes for some stupid, pointless and/or annoying reason.
Now, mind you, I like stories in my video games. But the rivals in Pokemon do not truly count as "story." They are characters who appear repeatedly to break up segments of the game with their antics, only to get in your way when you're doing a solo run challenge and actually do not want to pay attention to "story."
And so, I hereby coin the term "SPAR" -- Stupid, Pointless and Annoying Rivals.
Now I am done with my rant and shall hereby flee the incoming flames~