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Here’s an ask I’ve thought of after re-reading some of your past Pokemon reviews… If you had to design an evolved form for one single-stage Pokemon (not counting the ones for whom you’ve already discussed ideas for evolutions, e.g. Pachirisu in your Top 10 Worst Pokemon list), which one would you choose and how would you pull it off in a meaningful fashion? Conversely, which single-stage would you give a PRE-evolution?

Hmm… well, outside of the ones I already talked about in that series, the one I most want to see evolved is easily Dunsparce; the problem is that Dunsparce is such a weird and unique creature that it’s difficult to know what to do with him, stylistically.  I feel like he should have the head of a Chinese dragon with the whiskers and antler-like horns, a feathery body, still small wings but multiple pairs (which he uses to ‘swim’ through the ground; yes I know that doesn’t make sense), a larger, more vicious-looking drill, and his existing yellow/black/white colour scheme.  Normal/Dragon type, Levitate in place of Run Away, keeping Serene Grace.  It’s said that if you catch a wild one with your bare hands and hold onto it while it tunnels through the earth to escape, this Pokémon will grant you a wish.

I often have difficulty with pre-evolutions; I don’t always see the point of them.  Manktyke I get, because I like how the unique evolution method ties him to Remoraid.  Tyrogue I get because they wanted to link Himonchan and Hitmonlee.  Munchlax I get because he actually makes an interesting contrast with Snorlax’s inactivity.  In many cases, though, they’re just smaller, cuter versions of Pokémon that were small and cute to begin with; I don’t see why that’s necessary.  I guess if I had to do one, I’d go with a baby form of Druddigon – soft and cute on the outside, but just as bad-tempered on the inside, with a conniving streak that it uses to trick prey into its cave.

Delays

A bit busy this week because we’ve got our potential new PhD students for the next academic year visiting us, everything is chaos, and I foolishly volunteered to bake delicious treats for 50-odd people for an afternoon tea.  Apologies for tardiness in producing new Pokémon-related madness.

So, I’m not site if you’ve discussed this yet or not, but: If these criminal organizations wanted to take over the world, why are their Pokémon all shite? I mean really. They’re like the shittiest Pokémon ever.

I’m not sure whether I’ve discussed it yet or not either.  It sounds like the sort of thing I might talk about.  Could have come up in passing.

I think the obvious answer is that, in keeping with the franchise’s normal stance on what it takes to be a good trainer, most of the grunts for the various evil Teams are just not very nice people.  The more happy and fulfilled your Pokémon are, the more dedicated, energetic and creative they can be.  Most members of Team Aqua, Team Magma and Team Galactic are little more than thugs and may not be giving them the kind of emotional stimulation they need; Team Rocket certainly don’t.  Some members of Team Plasma are genuinely decent people, but most of them are also avowedly distant from their Pokémon because they intend to release them and don’t want to get attached.  Team Flare may have a similar rationale, if they’re aware that Lysandre’s plan for a new world involves the extermination of Pokémon as well as other humans.

Actually, I think the more interesting question is why the Pokémon belonging to the leaders of these groups are not shite.  In many cases it probably has something to do with the genuine charisma of these figures – Giovanni, Maxie, Archie, Cyrus, Ghetsis and Lysandre all have very strong personalities and a great capacity to lead (on top of which, Maxie, Archie and especially Lysandre have legitimately noble personality traits as well – although one must wonder whether Lysandre’s Pokémon know the full extent of what he has in mind).  Their Pokémon may admire them every bit as much as their human followers, to the extent that they can ignore any deficiencies in the affection they receive – and might, through that admiration, come to emulate their trainers’ moral and ethical leanings, in much the same way as Pikachu emulates Ash’s…

Have you ever heard of a hack called Pokemon Vega? It’s gained a bit of notoriety around the forums I’m familiar with due to its insane difficulty and also the fact that it’s in, y’know, JAPANESE (except attacks, items, natures and abilities in a certain patch), but it also has very good-looking Fakemon and is, in my opinion, very fun to play. Any chance you’ll try it out?

Sorry, but no; there is no chance of that.  I don’t really play hacks often anyway, I’m already very busy between work and my regular writing, and I don’t particularly want to add to that by playing a game I can’t even understand (I know, like, ten words of Japanese on a good day and I can’t read Japanese script).

Hey, I was introduced to your blog recently, and I just want to say that your posts are fantastic, especially the storyline ones about Kalos. I have a question: do you have any perspective, each generation, on why the Elite Four is so inactive in helping fight against the evil Team?

Thanks. 🙂  Now, the Elite Four… Hmm.  To some extent I think the fact that they just don’t know what’s going on might play into it; Team Rocket, for example, keep their takeover of Silph Company very quiet until the protagonist bursts in and starts making a mess of everything, while Team Galactic, Team Plasma and even Team Flare to an extent do make some effort to appear legitimate.  That can only get us so far, though; at some point in every game from Gold and Silver onward the s#!t hits the fan in a pretty spectacular fashion.  I think the reason has to be something to do with the differences between the roles of the Elite Four and the Champion, because the Champion normally does get involved in some capacity.  The Elite Four, as far as we can discern, are somehow selected or appointed; they are chosen to represent the Pokémon League and they have very clear-cut responsibilities: they’re supposed to spend most of their time at the League headquarters, ready to accept challenges, and training for challenges when they’re not doing that.  Since they’re always there, they may also have other duties related to the day-to-day running of the Pokémon League – appointing referees and adjudicating rules disputes, co-ordinating public works, overseeing Gym Leaders and Professors, just generally getting stuff done (also, some of them may genuinely not give a rat’s @$$ about whatever’s going on – it’s hard to imagine the self-centred, callous Agatha taking the time to sort out Team Rocket on her own initiative, even if she knew what they were up to – although other cases are less easily explained away; it’s strange, for instance, that Phoebe, whose grandparents are the shrine guardians of Mount Pyre, doesn’t take a personal interest in the Hoenn crisis).  The Champion, by contrast, attains his or her position through a sort of direct meritocracy, by defeating the previous Champion.  Changeovers don’t happen often, but they can happen without warning, and you have no idea ahead of time who the next Champion is going to be.  This is probably not the person you want to be in charge of quotidian affairs.  The Champion is a figurehead; he or she describes vague, long-term “visions” or “missions” for where the Pokémon League should be and what it should look like one year or five years from now, and then the underlings run around and make it so.  The position comes with few actual responsibilities other than “maintain the good standing and reputation of the League,” and the Champion probably doesn’t need to stay at the headquarters because there should be plenty of warning if a challenger looks likely to get past the Elite Four.  As a result, the Champion has a lot more freedom to go on adventures at random and indulge personal whims, including being a Big Damn Hero.  Basically: the Elite Four have s#!t to do.  They’re employees of the Pokémon League with clearly defined responsibilities, which generally do not include dealing with crazy apocalypse scenarios.  Crazy is the Champion’s department.

I don’t know how crazy you are about random game theories, but if you’re interested, I found a video that revolves around the notion that people are pokemon. I know this sounds ridiculous, but the two guys who made the video–albeit a bit goofy–make some solid arguments based on numerous in-game facts. If you have time, I’d be curious to know what you make of this theory. The video is on Youtube and it’s called Game Theory–Humans are Pokemon by The Game Theorists.

(Here’s the link)

Well, I gotta say, I sympathise with the guest host’s angry rant two minutes in.  Incidentally, I’ve encountered Game Theory before, and while the host’s exuberance has a tendency to get on my nerves the ideas themselves are very interesting.

Anyway.  I don’t think it sounds “random” or “ridiculous” at all.  In fact, I myself have wondered more than once what, if anything, really makes Pokémon different from humans.  In terms of evolutionary biology, as the video points out, it’s really quite clear cut: in the same way as all birds are dinosaurs, humans are Pokémon, although we don’t think of them that way.  I don’t see any other creatures in the Pokémon world that might be relatives of humans, and Pokémon pretty much run the gamut of eukaryotic life forms, so actually I think you’d need to make some pretty strange assumptions in order to argue that humans aren’t Pokémon.  I can think of two (EDIT: THREE) possible scenarios:

1) Humans are the last surviving descendants of a completely separate ‘kingdom’ of life, with fundamentally different cellular biology – the Pokémon world’s equivalent to the Archaea, basically – once as diverse and widespread as Pokémon are today (this would actually be really interesting to run with, and might help provide an explanation for why humans can’t be captured in Pokéballs, or why Pokémon react to things like evolutionary stones while humans don’t, but I don’t see any strong evidence for it).

2) Humans are actually from another planet or an alternate reality and were transplanted into the Pokémon world relatively recently in evolutionary terms (sounds mad, but I have seen commentators and fan fiction authors use this in background).

3) Pokémon themselves are from another world, and were introduced to Pokéarth long ago enough that they have out-competed all other animals and driven them the lot of them to extinction, with humans managing to survive (this seems highly unlikely given the evidence for fossil Pokémon hundreds of millions of years old – I doubt humans have been around all that time).  

The rest is trivia – some I agree with, some I don’t; in particular, I would dispute the statement that “the ‘dex ain’t no Wikipedia,” because although I love my Pokémadex, as primary sources go it can be a bit mad – tell me again how Magcargo’s body is hotter than the surface of the sun?  The myth stuff, I’m neither here nor there on – the myth about Pokémon shedding their skins to become humans, for example, has a very clear real-word antecedent in the myth of the selkie, so I’m hesitant to ascribe a Pokéverse-specific interpretation to it.  Similarly, the notion of a forgotten age when humans, animals and supernatural beings mingled more freely than in the present is common enough in the real world that I believe a similar story could exist in the Pokémon world whether or not it’s actually true.  Still, the cumulative effect of these and other myths seems to be that Game Freak want to suggest to us that something is going on.  The idea that death itself is a form of evolution (in the Pokémon sense) I find fascinating; something like that would be worth pursuing through fan fiction, because it would have profound implications for how the whole cosmology of the Pokémon universe is put together, and it has a solid grounding in the backstories of Pokémon like Yamask and Spiritomb (assuming we believe them).  Lastly, I feel compelled to point out three important faulty assumptions in their biological line of argument: 1) that being a Psychic-type necessarily means a Pokémon is highly intelligent (they come to this conclusion by looking at just one species – Alakazam – when looking at another, like, say, Slowpoke, might prompt the opposite reaction), 2) that, if humans evolved from Pokémon, the most intelligent Pokémon should be the ones that most resemble humans (at best a very self-centred approach to the question), and 3) that the “body style” to which a Pokemon is assigned by the Pokédex is a reliable indicator of evolutionary kinship (which, to be blunt, is simply wrong; juvenile and adult Pokémon very often have different body styles – for instance, Chingling and Venonat both belong to the bipedal-tailless group, which should make them among humanity’s closest relatives… closer, in fact, than Primeape…).  Egg group, though, which they also discuss, I am much more willing to buy.

Yes, I did just write a substantial paragraph attacking the logic of a very eloquent expression of a position I actually agree with.  Because I’m me; don’t argue.

So was playing a non-pokemon game just a one time thing, or are you planning to play other games in the future? If so (and if you have a WiiU at the time) may I suggest Earthbound(Mother 2 in Japan) for the SNES virtual console? Its developers, Ape Inc.(who later became Creatures Inc.), worked on it before working on the original Pokemon Red and Green, and it may be interesting to check out just to see how it may have influenced the Pokemon series.

Well, Final Fantasy VII was sort of a special case, partly because I didn’t have any other pressing projects in the lead-up to X and Y, partly because it was a request from Jim the Editor, who has best friend privileges.  I don’t want to say that I definitely won’t do it again, but I don’t plan to; certainly not in the near future.

I was wondering if you had heard about the “Twitch Plays Pokemon” thing? It’s pretty equally entertaining as it is frustrating to watch? If you haven’t heard about it yet, a guy modded a Pokemon Red emulator in order for multiple people to be able to play a single Pokemon game file at once. Essentially it has turned into 40-50,000 people playing one game and keying in commands at the same time…. you can see where things can get complicated and frustrating for everyone involved!

…you know, I was just thinking about posting something on this.

Here it is for those who haven’t seen it: http://www.twitch.tv/twitchplayspokemon

One player has aptly described the exercise as follows: “This isn’t a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters. It’s twenty thousand monkeys at a single typewriter, and half those monkeys are screaming and desperately trying to progress while the other half throw shit everywhere. It’s wonderful.”  They have managed to flail and stumble their way as far as the Celadon Game Corner over the course of four and a half days, and have even evolved their Eevee into a Flareon (I had the good fortune to actually be watching at this glorious moment) and raised a powerful Pidgeot.  On the other hand, they have released their Charmeleon, thrown away a nugget and a Moon Stone, and spent a good hour stuck behind the tree outside Erica’s Gym.  The guy running this mess has said that he might hack the Surf HM into their inventory, since realistically there’s no way they’re going to get through the Safari Zone in 500 steps or less, but he wants to let them try first.  Personally I’m not sure even that will help, because they’ll still need to either teach Pidgeot Fly and successfully target Pallet Town or make it through the Seafoam Islands… then again, they’ve gotten this far.

EDIT: …aaand they just stuck Pidgeot in the PC.  They’re in trouble now.

After seeing you play and compare Pokemon to Final Fantasy, I recommend taking a look at either of a pair of games, whenever you have time. Person 3 FES for PS2 or Persona 4 the golden for Vita. They’re also RPGs and their mechanics have similarities with Pokemon and I feel like Pokemon would work nicely with the combat engine… elemental advantages, fluid combat, 8-slot moveset, and enemies, minus bosses, have HP and damage numbers similar to your characters.

I don’t actually own either of those consoles.  I played Final Fantasy VII on my computer when it was released on Steam recently.  Maybe if someone can recommend a good emulator and I have time I’ll take a look, but I certainly couldn’t promise a review; I have quite enough to do this year what with all the sixth-generation Pokémon to look at.