Author: pokemaniacchris

Anonymous asks:

Even though I believe on your argument on the whole Beartic x Dragonite question, I don’t really think that the thing about levels is possible. Principaly because the levels don’t seem to make a very big influence on the anime. One example is one of the starting episodes of the Unova series where Pikachu loses to Trip’s Snivy. (His name’s Trip right? Right) The Snivy was recently catched and I can’t really believe Pikachu would be something lower than 50 and it surely didn’t just “reset”

I agree with you in principle, but that’s a bad example.  The whole context of that battle is that Pikachu’s just had his powers drained by Zekrom.  He is operating at vastly diminished capacity compared to practically every other time we ever see him fight, and the games offer us no guidelines on how to simulate that.

Anonymous asks:

What do you think of Detective Pikachu for 3ds?

…I am so confused.

It’s actually kinda neat in a lot of ways, though.  Like, if I have this straight, the deal with the kid is that he and the Pikachu can understand each other for reasons that are currently mysterious, and as a result they can work as a team to operate just as effectively among humans and among Pokémon.  That puts them in a very unique position that could be exploited in all kinds of ways by a shrewd and discreet investigator.  And that is a really interesting premise; it’s just a shame this is a fairly low-budget game and won’t have the space or the ambition to explore it fully.

…and yes, I have signed the change.org petition to get Nintendo of America to hire Danny de Vito as the English language voice actor for Detective Pikachu.

Update: No Danny de Vito ='(

Anime Time: Episodes 66 and 67

The Evolution Solution – The Pi-Kahuna

Professor Oak did you really just spend all morning making this crappy Powerpoint of a Slowbro with question marks all over it?
Professor Oak did you really just spend all morning making this crappy Powerpoint of a Slowbro with question marks all over it?

These two episodes cover a brief (?) excursion to tropical Seafoam Island, where Delia and a group of her friends from Pallet Town are enjoying a relaxing holiday (it’s a very different place from the Seafoam Islands in the games).  Misty and Brock are both invited to join their group, but Ash – who is theoretically supposed to be training for the Pokémon League – is left behind, until he manages to con Professor Oak into giving him an excuse to go anyway.  The Evolution Solution, upon watching it again, is not as interesting an episode as I had hoped it would be, and The Pi-Kahuna has themes that are pretty standard for the Pokémon anime.  However, the former gives me an excuse to ramble at length about Shellder and Slowbro, while the latter… let’s just say its themes are open to creative reinterpretation.  Anyway – without further ado, let’s jump right in.

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Anonymous asks:

I really dislike the anime, but principally because MANY of the battles are completely inaccurate. This gets to my frustration point principally on the Unova series. I don’t remember exactly, But i THINK it was on chapter 752 that happened the biggest bullshit I’ve ever seen. (The start of the Junior cup) First of all, a Serperior beats a Darmanitan with a single solar beam (This isn’t the worst part) but THEN Iris’s dragonite just survives two ice beams from a Beartic! What do you think?

Okay, so, I think “inaccurate” is an interesting choice of words here, because it implies that battles in the anime are supposed to be a representation of something else, and that we can judge them by the closeness of that representation.  Presumably you think they’re supposed to be representations of battles in the games, which I don’t believe is now the case or ever has been; I think the games and anime both represent, in different ways, the same abstract fantasy.  Really, it makes just as much sense to say that the games are “inaccurate” for failing to allow for the level of tactical variety or the influence of individual personality and relationships that we see in the anime.  Furthermore if this is the “biggest bullshit you’ve ever seen” then clearly you haven’t watched Solid as a Solrock; personally I expect bullshit of a much higher calibre from the Pokémon anime.  But let’s run some of these numbers.

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Anonymous asks:

Reaction to Magiana?

Certainly very curious… presumably she’s the vanguard of generation VII, and of course that’s exciting, but the really interesting part is that this is a legendary Pokémon who was explicitly built by humans – and not thousands of years ago by mysterious forgotten magic like Golurk, nor genetically engineered from an existing template like Mewtwo, but in the 16th century with mechanics and clockwork, with the same kind of principles that modern engineering still functions on.  I think there’s a lot Magearna might tell us about the history of Pokémon training, and how it changed at the dawn of the modern world.  What really catches my eye is that she seems to have Pokéball emblems built into her design, and given that Pokéballs as we know them are supposed to be quite recent inventions, that makes me wonder what the connection is.  Did the symbol mean something different five hundred years ago, or was the design of the first Pokéballs based on Magearna’s body?

Anonymous asks:

What do you make of the weight of various Pokemon. For example, why does something like Beautifly weigh as much as a young child, while giants such as Primal Groudon weigh only about a ton. (Primal Groudon seems especially weird in that its almost fifty percent larger than its normal form, but only weighs about one hundred pounds more. Primal Kyogre is even more bizarre.). This seems to be a trend among Pokemon, with small species being super dense, while big ones are ultra light, like Wailord.

This has always bothered me, but upon looking into it, I think many of them actually hold up quite well.  In some cases part of the difficulty is that it’s not always clear what a Pokémon’s listed “height” actually means – like, if Beautifly’s body is one metre long from head to toe (does… does Beautifly have toes…? Bah; whatever) then I could easily see her weighing 28kg; if 1m is, say, from the tips of her antennae to the ‘tails’ of her wings, or maybe even a 1m wingspan, then it becomes a lot harder to swallow.  In general I’m mostly fine with the weights of small Pokémon.  

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