>>46108640>Nothing established Ghetsis as a threat prior to his battle.It might've been a while since you've played the game but Ghetsis did actually have moments of build-up to the reveal that he was actually a selfish vile bastard the whole time. Aside from the schism of grunts with those who beat the shit out of Pokemon they kidnap and those who earnestly think they're helping them, Ghetsis sometimes says "I-I mean, Team Plasma!-" when talking about the world they intend to bring. On a first run it could easily be taken as him just repeating himself to account for the whole team but once you know his true motives it becomes clear that it's actually Ghetsis slipping up on his real intentions and quickly correcting his mistake. Aside from sending out the Shadow Triad, Ghetsis also confronts you personally a couple of times, with the final time being on Tubeline Bridge where he attempts to intimidate you into giving up hope before you get any further.
The reason Ghetsis is so strong is because Ghetsis was planning on killing N the literal moment he outlived his usefulness to him: Ghetsis's entire team is quite literally built to completely counter every single Pokemon N has, including the Legendary Dragon. It makes sense that he'd have trained for quite a while to ensure he'd be able to actually pull it off, and his AI is even intelligent enough to do more advanced strategies than just "spam attack" like his Toxic-Stalling Cofagrigus, which goes hand-in-hand with his mastermind nature while also cementing him as a skilled fighter.
I do get that your point is that if you never fought Ghetsis then he'd just kinda be "there" as the non-action guy but my point is that Ghetsis WAS built up prior to his fight as the real main antagonist of the game over N.
