Author: pokemaniacchris

If I Were In Charge: A heart so true, our courage will pull us through

Damn, this one was hard to write…

Who among us has never once felt a little cheated by our inability to respond “yes” to the Team Rocket recruiter’s offer in Cerulean City on Red and Blue?  One of the more persistent demands fans make of Pokémon is the possibility of being able to ‘swap sides’ as it were – play for the bad guys once in a while.  Many RPGs allow this; some even focus on it, so it’s hardly without precedent, but Pokémon games do not do this.  Even outside the core series, there are (to my knowledge) no games where playing as a villain is an option.  Surely this is somewhere that offers a lot of potential for future developments?

Well, yes and no.  The fact is, I think that Game Freak’s reticence to explore those paths is, in many ways, entirely justified.  So before talking about how I’d do this, let’s first think about whether I even would.

Continue reading “If I Were In Charge: A heart so true, our courage will pull us through” →

You keep mentioning that you’re into Classical mythology but don’t know much about Japanese mythology, so I was wondering if there any other mythologies you’re interested in?

Well, classics is sort of my job (or the closest thing I have to one, anyway – I’m a graduate student, but I have a fellowship, so the university pays me for it, rather than the other way round), and knowing the mythology is an important part of the background, so I’ve actually studied a lot of the major texts, like Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Homeric epics (and, for that matter, some of the texts that are important to our understanding of ancient reception of myth, like Plato’s Republic), at an academic level.  I’m also a TA on a classical myth course at the moment.  Nothing else really comes close to that.  Having said that, when I hear a mythical story I tend to remember it; I guess I know quite a bit about Norse myth (I bought a copy of the poetic Edda the other day; it’s just a matter of finding time to read the damn thing), and probably more than most people about Maori myth (I’m guessing those stories don’t get a lot of exposure outside New Zealand).

Perhaps something along the lines of telescoping generations in aphids? Some species reproduce asexually as well as sexually- females are born pregnant with a genetically identical daughter, and that unborn daughter is already developing a daughter of her own. When mating with males, they lay eggs which can hatch into either males or females. Maybe each newly hatched Kangaskid is already parthenogenically pregnant and gives birth when she becomes Kangaskhan offscreen.

Well, that seems to be more or less what happens, except that there are no male Kangaskhan, which would mean that actual Kangaskhan eggs are a weird anomaly that only ever happen with hybrids, and most of them just clone themselves ad infinitum.  They’re just… kind of a strange species.

I have a theory about why Kangaskhan has a baby in its pouch as soon as it’s born. When a Kangaskhan egg hatches, the baby inside replaces the one in the Kangaskhan’s pouch, while the one previously in the pouch instantly matures into an adult Kangaskhan, complete with baby in pouch. Baby Kangaskhans themselves are simply multicellular versions of egg cells and get genetic information from the father through the mother Kangaskhan’s milk. Thus all Kangaskhan are perpetual mothers. Your thoughts?

So… what you’re saying is that the egg doesn’t actually hatch into a Kangaskhan at all; it hatches into a ‘Kangaskid’ or whatever you want to call it, and that prompts an existing Kangaskid to leave its mother’s pouch and ‘evolve’ (offscreen, as it were) into an adult Kangaskhan, producing another Kangaskid in the process?

It’s… an interesting idea; the trouble is that, in the games, there doesn’t actually need to be another Kangaskhan present in order for an egg to hatch.  You can be wandering around with nothing in your party but a Kangaskhan egg and, say, a Magcargo, and when the egg hatches, you’ll still get a complete set of Kangaskhan + baby (in the anime, on the other hand, there’s nothing all that unusual about seeing a Kangaskhan without a baby, so there’s nothing that needs to be explained anyway).

Do you think the pokemon breeding mechanics should be retconned into producing the lowest evolutionary form of either parent instead of just the mother’s, or are they satisfactory to you as of now?

I’m good with them as they are now.  If you imagine Pokémon breeding as being biologically analogous to real-world animal reproduction (which, of course, is not a given, but let’s assume for the sake of argument), then the young will likely develop inside the body of the female – even if they’re in eggs, it still makes sense that they will follow the basic form of the female parent.  In terms of game mechanics, too, there is a good reason – at present, there is a division between male and female of the things the child receives from its parents: species and (if applicable) Dream World ability from the mother, egg moves from the father.  If you make species inheritable from the father, then that’s another dimension of things you have to watch out for when trying to breed egg moves onto a Pokémon – not only do you have to get the nature and ability you want, preferably with solid stats, the children might not even be the right species!

Anonymous asks:

I’ve recently noticed that the way GameFreak hands out moves is often… skewed. They will deprive a Pokemon of a move that fits its flavour perfectly, while giving another move to another Pokemon because HEY, WHY NOT? For example contrast Blissey learning Stealth Rock(WTF?) to Ninjask not learning ExtremeSpeed(His speed is all they talk about in the dex; I would have thought giving him a mlve that requires, y’know, SPEED would be a no- brainer). Thoughts?

Ninjask lacking Extremespeed is actually something I can get behind, since all Extremespeed really does is allow a Pokémon to move first – something Ninjask can almost always do on his own anyway.  In general, though… Here’s an old rant which might amuse you. Continue reading “Anonymous asks:” →

Do you think it’d be interesting to see items like repels have use in battle? Like, repels could lower the accuracy of physical moves.

Apologies to whoever asked this question (and the other two I’m about to answer) which I received about a month ago, just before I stopped posting… Anyway.

Well… to be honest, I’m not sure what it would add.  Using items in battle isn’t a new thing (potions, X attack, etc.), so it’s not really adding a new dimension to the game, and repels are useful anyway.  Also, apart from repels and escape ropes, I can’t really think of anything you could expend on an in-battle effect that wouldn’t be much more valuable out of battle: Heart Scales and shards are too important for learning moves; stones and fossils are too rare to waste; held items like Leftovers or Choice Specs will be far more useful in the long run if you keep them for your Pokémon to use – you get the idea.  All in all, it just seems like a fairly inconsequential change.

If I Were In Charge: Arm in arm, we’ll win the fight; it’s always been our dream

Right.  I’m in America.  I have an apartment.  With a bed.   And food.  Good.  I have just over a month until X and Y are released, promptly making this entire series quite obsolete, and three planned articles left.  That seems like a perfectly reasonable timeline.  On with the show!

Now, where was I?

Red and Blue.  Gold and Silver.  Ruby and Sapphire.  Diamond and Pearl.  Black and White.  Pokémon games, as a matter of tradition, come in pairs.  The games’ storylines are broadly very similar; the essential difference is in the Pokémon that are available in each one – generally, each game will have perhaps five or six Pokémon of the current generation that are missing from the other.  The obvious purpose is to encourage trading; it’s impossible to complete the Pokédex on a single game, so one must enlist the help of friends (this is, of course, the intention; for the purposes of this discussion we will leave firmly aside the stereotype of the lonely Pokémon trainer who buys two consoles and both versions to trade with him or herself).  These days, with so many legacy Pokémon scattered across so many different games, one questions whether this is actually necessary; it is almost impossible by this point to complete the entire national Pokédex even with three or four different games at one’s disposal (the handful of deliberately omitted Pokémon seeming but a minor speed bump in comparison) completing the regional Pokédex only requires one to see all of the local species anyway, plenty of Pokémon still need to be traded to evolve, and there are no shortage of other multiplayer functions to reward playing with friends, which will doubtless continue to proliferate.  I would go so far as to suggest that the concept of paired games, as originally intended, is obsolete.  However, the games have been evolving.  Pairs of Pokémon games aren’t just about trading so you can get a Bellsprout anymore – the tradition of pairing has almost become a part of the medium, something that later games have been using to make a point.  Can this concept continue to be relevant and beneficial even when its original purpose has become almost meaningless?

Continue reading “If I Were In Charge: Arm in arm, we’ll win the fight; it’s always been our dream” →