One lunatic's love-hate relationship with the Pokémon franchise, and his addled musings on its rights, wrongs, ins and outs. Come one, come all, and indulge my delusions of grandeur as I inflict my opinions on anyone within shouting distance.
What do you think of the theory that the Rowlet line will be grass/steel, the Litten line fire/poison, and the Popplio line water/fairy, to tie into potential themes of knife-thrower, fire-breather, and clown/entertainer-seal?
Pretty much the same thing as I think of most of these predictions that people like to make in the run-up to a new generation: “It could be right; it’s probably wrong; there’s too little evidence to make a good assessment; I don’t really care.”
What’s your explanation for how the move Trick-or-Treat works?
Hmm. Well, when you go Trick-or-Treat-ing, you “become” a ghost, or monster, or whatever, for a little while. You take a little journey into the spirit world, and gain new perspectives on the natural and the supernatural. Pumpkaboo is a Jack-o’-lantern, a light that guides souls through the spirit world, so it makes sense it would be able to get other Pokémon to follow it on that sort of escapade. Once you go along with that, you have some of the properties of a spirit yourself, including immunities and vulnerabilities.
Timburr should learn wood hammer.
Should he, though? By the time Timburr reaches a level where a move as powerful as Wood Hammer becomes remotely reasonable, he’s not Timburr anymore. It makes sense for Timburr, sure, but in practice what we’re actually saying is “let’s give Conkeldurr Wood Hammer,” and… I don’t think there’s any good reason for that?
EDIT: Pansexualkiba adds: There are some Pokemon who have access to moves in their base form that their evolutions can’t get, though! Like, for example, Riolu and Force Palm or Nidorina and Poison Fang.
To which I would answer: absolutely true, but so what? Those are moves that still make perfect sense for Lucario and Nidoqueen.
Conkeldurr getting Wood Hammer would hardly be the stupidest thing we’ve ever seen in terms of move compatibility, but I think that not giving it to him is perfectly understandable.
Obviously, any regular reader knows that you’re a champion of the Grass type. One thing that occurred to me recently – any thoughts on why is there only a single Grass/Ground type? Wouldn’t that seem an obvious combination to be exploited? Roots would presumably feature heavily. It seems that flavour wise, at least, this one would seem natural.
I think maybe the fact that it seems so natural is actually part of the reason. Ground is, let’s face it, a poorly thought out mess of a type. Pokémon can be assigned to the Ground type because they have powers related to earth and soil, or because they happen to live on the ground, or sometimes, it seems, just because they’re generally tough and resilient. It’s a really vague set of traits, most of which also apply to pure Grass-types. If most of the things that define Ground are also essentially inherent to Grass anyway, there’s never any need to add Ground to a Grass Pokémon, unless you come up against something like Torterra who’s associated with the earth in a much more elemental sense than most Ground Pokémon.
House Stoutland: First in Loyalty
House Watchog: We Watch the Watchers
House Samurott: Blades to Part the Seas
House Emboar: Endure Any Flame
Hi dear pokemaniacal, what do you think about a new “Cosmic” type added to the game? A type that would´t bother much the current metagame, given to very little pokemon in form of Megas to don´t mess too with the current types (like Solrock/Lunatone, Clefable, Sigilyph, Deoxis and the likes or few forgotten ones as Xatu) or just only to the new legendaries to add more mysticism and exclusivity to them. Anyway, what pokemon would you give this type? Match-ups? Would this type have right to exist?
I pretty much have to refer you to this recent question and answer, which is kinda my default reply to anything involving adding more types. I just don’t think it adds anything worthwhile at this point – is the fact that we don’t have a whole type dedicated to Pokémon associated with celestial phenomena really a significant limitation on design? If we want something we can give to legendary Pokémon to make them more powerful, well, sure – we’ve pretty much thrown game balance out the window with them long ago anyway, and there are good aesthetic reasons for wanting them to stand head-and-shoulders above other Pokémon. But personally I’d rather overhaul the way we interact with legendary Pokémon in the games completely.
