Author: pokemaniacchris

Would you ever consider an article on how experience works? I’ve personally found it a bit wonky; I mean, it’s entirely possible to gain massive increases in strength- even potentially changing their entire body- just by defeating the same few Pokemon over and over again. Thoughts?

I don’t know if I want to do a whole thing on it, just because it’s not really a question about Pokémon at all – similar or identical systems are extremely common in RPGs and even appear in other genres.  It’s just one of the basic commonplaces of reducing combat to an abstraction that can be portrayed by a video game (some games actually do try to explain experience points in a way that makes sense in the context of the story, like the Star Wars RPG Knights of the Old Republic II, but it’s often more trouble than it’s worth for the writers).  The word “experience” seems to demonstrate that the basic assumption behind it is pretty simple: the more you do something – such as fighting – the better you get at it.  I think it’s highly unlikely that all the growth we associate with levelling is related to the Pokémon getting physically stronger, tougher or faster, although some of it probably is.  They’re learning to apply their strength more effectively, endure pain with greater focus, and move more precisely with better reaction times.  These are all things people can do too.

Evolution’s the weird part, and I’ve always thought that the way the anime portrays it is our best hope for making sense of that; it regularly seems to be a result of diffusing psychological blocks of one sort or another, of strong desire or desperation to overcome a specific obstacle, or of achieving some new sense of self-awareness (my further thoughts on this in some of my anime commentaries, particularly to The Problem With Paras).  Fighting often means using their powers often, and using their powers often means Pokémon better appreciate their applications and limits, and become more in touch with the forces that allow them to function.  I don’t believe we’re supposed to be able to figure out exactly how it works, particularly not biologically – I’m pretty sure on some level it’s basically magic – but I think we’re meant to see evolution as part of a Pokémon’s realisation of its potential, and battles and experience as one of the fastest ways to understand that potential.

I’m sure you have been asked about it before, but I’d love to see a list similar to “Top Ten Worst Pokemon Ever” in which you give your opinion of the best Pokemon ever, whether it be based upon flavor or actual battle usefulness (or both) is up to you. Presumably it would discount legendaries, because a top 10 best list of all legendaries would just be boring, especially if you’re basing this upon power alone… Anyways, just some food for thought when you’re coming up with future topic ideas.

I think I probably have been asked this before, but I don’t remember exactly.  The main reasons I’ve never tried to do it are because I don’t think I’d be able to narrow it down to ten, and even if I did, I don’t think I’d be able to put them in order.  I mean, really, choose a single “best Pokémon ever”?  Even my “worst Pokémon ever” was kind of a fake-out because I honestly do like a lot of things about the Unown; I just hate the way the games handle them.  The fact is, as much as I bitch about it, Pokémon has a lot more good designs than bad ones, and it helps that I was able to select my top ten worst ones from the relatively small subset of those who are also terrible at everything.  The other thing is that while I’m very sure that the weakest Pokémon contribute little to gameplay, I kind of believe that the very strongest ones are not necessarily a positive influence either – I love Kyogre as a Pokémon, but I would never have let players anywhere near something so powerful.  Even nerfing Drizzle only stops him from totally dominating all the other legendary Pokémon.  I’m not sure where I would draw my line, though – is it my contention that Blaziken is ‘good’?  What about Lucario, or Garchomp?  I’m not sure what the ideal balance point is.

Travel and Stuff

Just flew from Auckland to Cincinnati (total of 30-odd hours on planes and in airports).  Tomorrow I’m flying from Cincinnati to Rome, where I’m doing a three-week summer school course on the documentation and interpretation of architectural remains on archaeological sites.  I’m going to try and write up Aegislash as quickly as possible, since that’s the last Pokémon in the Central Kalos subregion and a good place to pause, but beyond that I make no promises for the speed or regularity of my posts over the next few weeks.

Scatterbug, Spewpa and Vivillon

Scatterbug.
Scatterbug.

I didn’t really intend to leave these Pokémon so late, but I kind of forgot about them for a while, and here we are, with only one other set left in the Central Kalos sub-region.  It’s not like I forgot they exist or anything like that; I think I just assumed I must have done them already.  By contrast, I regularly forget that Mothim exists.  It used to be an oversight, but now it’s become a matter of principle.  Butterfly and moth Pokémon are one of the stock design types like Normal Bird, Normal Vermin and Electric Rodent; at least one appears in every region aside from Johto, and the rapid caterpillar-cocoon-butterfly succession originally seen in Butterfree (and paralleled by her vicious opposite, Beedrill) was repeated by Beautifly, Dustox, and now Vivillon herself.  Years ago I declared Beautifly and Dustox the joint third-worst Pokémon of all time on a combined assessment of their nonexistent battle capabilities and the highly derivative character of their designs, which borrow a great deal from Butterfree and Venomoth.  Game Freak’s decision to come out with yet another of these things represents, to my warped psyche, something of an invitation to a grudge match.  Let’s get to it.

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I was just wondering, can you make sense of Graveler’s evolution? It’s a rock monster with six limbs and no visible biological features that suddenly becomes a four-limbed reptilian creature with a rock shell. Sure, there have been other strange evolutions, but at least Remoraid’s evolution is going from one living creature to another, how does one go from being mineral to animal? It just looks like Golem was intended for an entirely separate evolution line.

Hmm.  Faced with a weird evolutionary line in the first generation, my instinct is go to the hex numbers and see what patterns turn up (if anyone’s unfamiliar with what these are, they’re the numbers that represent the order in which Pokémon were originally programmed into Red and Blue, and probably the order in which they were created).  Of the three, Graveler comes first, followed by Golem ten places later.  Both are within the first 1/3 of the sequence, where there are relatively few intact evolutionary families – the only related Pokémon who appear close together this early are male Nidoran and Nidoking, female Nidoran and Nidoqueen, and Hitmonchan and Hitmonlee (who at this stage were ‘related’ but not by evolution).  Some of those designs may even predate the concept of Pokémon evolution, although that’s a very speculative suggestion.  Shortly after Golem, complete families start to occur more often.  Geodude turns up far later, among the final 30 designs, 10 of which didn’t even make it into Red and Blue.  It’s entirely possible, even likely, that Graveler and Golem were not originally conceived as related creatures, and were combined into a single lineage after the fact – something which may actually have happened at a relatively late stage of the games’ development, concurrently with Geodude’s introduction.

Swirlix and Slurpuff

Swirlix.
Swirlix.

Swirlix and Slurpuff are weird Pokémon, that’s for sure.  They are the inheritors of the tradition of Vanillite, Vanillish and Vanilluxe, the ice cream Pokémon of Black and White, who earned my ire so long ago.  I wasn’t upset with them for being ice cream Pokémon, you understand.  I was upset with them because the fact that they looked like ice cream cones was easily the most interesting thing about them.  Their powers were, for Ice-types, utterly standard and generic.  Nothing in their abilities, their behaviour, or the way they interact with humans relates in any way to the fact that they’re ice cream Pokémon, and I’m pretty sure their bodies are actually made of snow and only bear a visual resemblance to vanilla ice cream anyway.  This is why Swirlix and Slurpuff, fortunately, win that comparison easily; they’re just much less boring.  Unfortunately, this means I have no excuse to dismiss them and actually need to think about whether I’m okay with ‘food Pokémon’ as a thing.

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