That poll down there is going to stay open for another couple of days, so if you haven’t voted yet, please do so. I’m going to do a second poll between the top three or four choices, since it’s looking pretty close. At the moment the top two choices are Bug/Ice and Ghost/Steel, although Normal/Ghost and Ice/Poison are very close behind. I’m still holding out hope for my personal favourite, Water/Fire, but since it’s looking pretty likely that we’re going to be making either an Ice-type or a Ghost-type, I’m going to jump the gun a little and talk a bit about those two types first.
Boring strategy stuff first.
Ghost is really useful defensively because it’s the only type that comes with two immunities (Normal and Fighting) and its two weaknesses are to types that are, themselves, relatively weak offensively. Ghost Pokémon are, therefore, relatively difficult to damage. Their attacks are lacklustre, partly because Ghost moves are only strong against two elements (Ghost and Psychic), and partly because there simply are no very high-powered Ghost attacks aside from Giratina’s Shadow Force. I mean, yes, okay, Shadow Ball, but when you’re trying to stack up nonsense like Choice Specs and EVs and a nature boost and what have you, something that’s 15% weaker than Thunderbolt or Ice Beam is less than inspiring as your primary attack, put it that way. If you’re a Ghost-type physical attacker like poor Golurk, you can forget it.
Ice is just the opposite. Ice is a wonderful attacking type, getting bonus damage against four elements: Grass, Ground, Flying and Dragon (this last being particularly valuable since Dragons are relatively difficult to harm by other means). Ice Beam is also among the select cluster of attacks that form the gold standard for power and accuracy in Pokémon. Being an Ice-type grants you a 50% power bonus on attacks from this delightful element, which is wonderful news. However, being an Ice-type also confers upon you four weaknesses, including three of the most powerful (and therefore widely used) offensive elements in the game – Fire, Rock and Fighting – and only one resistance, to Ice itself, which is useful, but isn’t going to salvage anything on its own. I quietly suspect that the reason Ice is so bad, defensively, is because Game Freak never actually had to deal with a pure Ice-type before Ruby and Sapphire, by which time the type chart was pretty well set in stone, and so were never confronted with just how appalling its weaknesses were.
Right, now that that’s out of the way, let’s look at what makes these guys tick.
Ghost is a particularly fascinating type for me because of my shameless obsession with the vague and obliquely described culture of the Pokémon universe. Although many of them aren’t actually ‘ghosts’ in the strictest sense of the word, Ghost Pokémon are intimately connected with the spirit world, death, and the souls of the dead, and have powers to match. This means you can use them to look at how people in the Pokémon universe view death, the soul and, in some cases, morality. These are some of my favourite things! They’re also integral parts of any culture, since death is something all civilisations have to deal with in one way or another. This, in turn, means you have a vast selection of inspirations to draw upon from a zillion different mythologies. They’re also, incidentally, much more closely linked with darkness, shadow and night than ‘Dark’ Pokémon are (Dark-types being associated mainly with concepts like malice and trickery) – another list of evocative ideas you can draw your inspiration from. In the end, you can turn out designs as different and as uniquely fascinating as the playful but misunderstood Sableye, the enigmatic and sinister Dusclops, the broken and tormented Yamask, and the adorably evil Litwick.
Ice is interesting for entirely different reasons. Ice, of course, is solid water, and is therefore connected with a number of the same ideas as water is. The cold can be as powerful and dangerous as any ocean, but at the same time, licking at a block of ice will sustain you just as surely as catching rain in your mouth, and glistening crystals of ice can be just as beautiful as a tranquil stream. Just as rivers and waves seem to have no immediate impact on the land, but wear it away over the decades, so glaciers seem totally immobile, but will carve enormous valleys through a landscape over hundreds or thousands of years. Ice, obviously, also means cold, and winter – which, again, can destroy quickly, in a howling storm, or slowly, in a long cold night. Two prominent Ice-type trainers in the games – Pryce and Candice – focus on this latter aspect, consciously building their training styles around endurance, dragging their opponents through all the harshness of a long, chilling winter while buckling down and ignoring it all themselves. Ice Pokémon, like Pryce and Candice, are survivors. They don’t just live through the cold; they thrive in it, and anyone who wants to fight them has to thrive in it with them.
Discuss.
Pokémaniacal 