All right; let’s get this dreadful misadventure on the road…

Is there any plausible logical relationship between a Pokemon’s name and its apparent inability to produce any sounds besides it? (Okay, so Onix can growl and Staryu does his “hya” thing, but you know what I mean.) Historically, did humans just name Pokemon based on the only sounds they ever heard them make? Or is it the other way around: once Pokemon were discovered and named, the Pokemon themselves adopted their new identity and, in accordance, adapted linguistically? Or something else?

What I’ve always thought is that, in the Pokémon universe, a lot of human words are derived from the sounds Pokémon made – so, originally, humans called something “gloomy” because it reminded them in some way of the Pokémon that makes the sound “gloom”, or name a substance “magma” because it’s where the Pokémon that makes the sound “magmar” lives. I quite like this idea because it ties in nicely with the implication that the alphabet is originally based on the Unown, and continues to emphasise what a huge cultural debt humans have to Pokémon in that universe… although I have no doubt that certain specific words and Pokémon would still be difficult to interpret according to this model.

Which game had your favourite soundtrack, and what is your all time favourite piece of music from the games?

Now, as any of my friends will tell you, I’m not really a musical person. In fact, it’s been suggested more than once that I have somehow managed to completely miss what music actually is on some conceptual level. This being the case, you should probably take what I have to say about it with a grain of salt.

Having said that, I always felt that Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald had the best music. In my opinion, the music was one of the two greatest strengths of the third generation, along with the inexplicably superior creative thought that went into writing the Pokédex (it’s just about the only generation, as far as I can tell, where anyone put any significant effort into writing new things about old Pokémon). I mean, obviously the sound quality has continued to improve since then as the games’ technology has improved, but somehow the music of Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald is the only music that’s ever had me just sitting there listening to it. My favourite track is probably the one that plays on the long forest road between Lilycove City and Fortree City… let’s see if I can find it… yes, here it is; this one.

Boltbeam and your Glaceon article got me thinking and I wanted your opinion on a concept. So this Pokemon is based off of a Tardigrade, a miniscule creature that frequents snowy hotsprings. The typing is Bug/Ice, but there’s an interesting catch: Because of hotspring environment and the need to repel predators, it developed the ability to use fire type attacks. Not only that, but it’s ability is Flash Fire, giving it a way to boost those attacks without STAB and covers the x2 weakness. Thoughts?

Hmm. Well, the idea is cool, but the thing is, I kinda think there’s already a tardigrade Pokémon. I first learned about the little buggers earlier this year (anyone who isn’t familiar with them should look them up, because they are awesome) – and my first thought was

“Oh, so THAT’S what Reuniclus is!”

It makes sense when you realise that one of the trivial names for tardigrades is ‘water-bears’, which finally explains Reuniclus’ teddy bear-like appearance. It’s why one of Reuniclus’ abilities is Overcoat, which grants immunity to all damage from weather effects, it’s why an important part of Solosis’ flavour is its incredible resilience to a wide variety of environmental conditions, and it’s why the damn things ARE SO IMPOSSIBLE TO KILL.

In short, although it’s not a bad idea, tardigrades have actually been done. Not to say you couldn’t try coming at Bug/Ice + Fire powers from a slightly different angle, because that is also an interesting starting point…

Let’s Make a Pokémon

Okay, so. Here’s the thing. I’ve been detecting some enthusiasm lately for the idea of holding some kind of… great big Pokémon-designing shenanigan-fest, whereby the readers (that’s you ungrateful sods) would submit ideas for new Pokémon and I would rip them to shreds in my usual inimitable fashion. Now, while I do love criticising people’s work loudly and venomously, it sounds like a lot of effort – and, potentially, a lot of drama as well if people don’t like what I have to say. So I’m not doing that. Yet.

I’m going to try starting with something small first.

Let’s make a Pokémon. Just one, for now, as an experiment, to see if I can properly coordinate a community effort to create something that isn’t unbelievably sucky. We’ll start by deciding what type we’re going to go for, and work from there. Doesn’t have to be anything unique, now; it could even be a single type. I’d like to do something unique with it, but I reckon there’s potential to break new ground with just about any type or combination of types if it’s done right. Here’s the rules: in two days I will create a poll, open to all, which will decide the element of this godawful thing. You have until then to tell me what should be on the poll, because I’m sure as hell not including options for all one hundred and fifty three possibilities. You can do that using the Disqus comments, or by leaving a message in my Tumblr ask box (I won’t respond to all of these, but I will keep track of them). Any type or type combination that is suggested in either way during the next two days will be an option on the poll.

If you already have a Pokémon in mind that you’d like to make, try and set it aside. Assuming this goes well, you’ll get your chance later. For now, just try to go with the experiment and pick a type that you think would result in something interesting.

Go.

Ive been thinking this for a while now. When they designed reshiram and zekrom. I honetly feel it wouldve made MUCH more sence for zekrom to be fighting/dragon. I mean, a few shifts would have to be made, like signature moves and stuff. And there isnt a status ailement thats fighting based (confusion maybe?). But fighting is very much an “justified, honour” based time which contrasts with reshirams “sleek, passionate” fire (yes, thats what im going with, sue me). In combat it is also… (Cont.)

This question continues: “…in combat it would also be equal, if not ABOVE dragon/fire as it hits steel types hard. It fits a physical attacker very well. And c’mon. Fighting/dragon would be eeepppiiiccc. (Also that tacked on truth vs ideas thing, it fits that a bit better, probably)”

Hmm.

You know, when you put it like that, Dragon/Fighting makes a lot more sense than Dragon/Electric. Bear in mind that the whole ‘honour and glory’ thing is as much my interpretation of the Fighting type as anything official, but of course I think it makes sense, and it fits very well with Zekrom’s ‘ideals’ thing. I’ve probably mentioned before that I would have written Black and White very differently, allowing the player to choose between Reshiram and Zekrom, and having the story unfold differently depending on the choice, emphasising the differences between their ‘truth’ and ‘ideals’ instead of whitewashing them, and I think if you were going to go that way, Dragon/Fighting is a combination you could do rather a lot with. Naturally, you’re right that it’s also a very potent combination offensively, and a much nearer match for Dragon/Fire (Zekrom wouldn’t miss Earthquake so much, and wouldn’t have to suffer the gross indignity of being totally walled by Steelix, of all things).

The flip side to that is this quote from Ken Sugimori:
“The tails on both Pokemon are the central points of their respective designs — they’re based off of those electric turbines you see, and they give the impression that they’re these great big generators of fire or electric energy.”
Clearly the designers regarded energy as being a very important part of what they were doing here, and changing Zekrom’s type to Dragon/Fighting would require significantly reworking his art to account for the loss of that particular resonance. Reshiram would need to be changed as well.

In short, I like the idea lot, but I feel I should point out that there’s rather more work in it than you may have realised.

Go Follow This. I Command It.

The BoltBeam project is a new blog by two crazy people who want to create Pokémon to fill all of the unused type combinations. They only officially started today, and there is only one Pokémon so far, but I know one of the creators from an unrelated project of his and I am pretty confident that this will not be one of those flash-in-a-pan things that dies after one week. They’re planning to come up with new stuff every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Now go, minions. Do my bidding.

boltbeam:

Day 1: Normal/Fire

Accumand -> Jerimand

Alright, here is our first set of pokémon. A little rough around the edges perhaps, but I like it.

Normal type is always a little tricky to pair other types with, since you have to figure out a way to make it apparent that it isn’t just a straight example of the other type. With this one, I decided to do that by creating a pokémon that lives around hot climates, but initially has no innate fire powers of it’s own, instead simply borrowing from its environment to get the job done.

Accumand here is based on a mix of a skink and a mythological salamander (with some lava lamp thrown in.) Instead of storing fat in its tail, it stores thermal energy. Perhaps it doesn’t truly eat at all, but instead just goes around sticking its tail in volcanoes or thermal vents for sustenance. By the time it evolves into Jerimand, the tail falls off, so instead he goes around swallowing enormous amounts of lava, which is visible in that big lava lamp-tummy of his.

In terms of ability, I think Flame Body and Thick Fat are both sensible options. Any other ideas?

I am very confused on the Poison Type… I like Nidoran for example, a mammal with poisonous hairs for protection… It makes sense. I don’t like Muk or Weezing because they’re built off waste, which isn’t poisonous, it’s just unhealthy. Why are Bulbasaur and Bellsprout part poison? What’s poisonous about them? Why would Zubat want to be poisonous when he thrives on leeching the blood off living hosts? I understand Steel resisting an Arbok’s bite, but why resist Acid? What IS the Poison Type?

Few of these things are as problematic as you seem to be suggesting.

Go go gadget Oxford English Dictionary.

Poisonous, adjective. (Of a substance or plant) causing or capable of causing death or illness if taken into the body. (Of an animal) producing poison as a means of attacking enemies or prey; venomous.

Waste can, in fact, be poisonous. Many kinds of waste are conducive to the spread of disease as well as being poisonous, but they are still quite poisonous on their own – that is, the chemical properties of the substance itself are damaging to health, irrespective of the presence of any disease-causing organisms. Bulbasaur and Bellsprout (and Oddish) are Poison-types because they, too, are poisonous, as many real plants are. If you eat them, you will get sick and possibly die. Zubat can happily use poison because most animals (and plants) are immune to their own poisons (incidentally, vampire bats are actually poisonous/venomous – their saliva stops blood from congealing in the same way as a mosquito’s bite; this is technically a venomous effect). Snakes, likewise, can pump an animal full of venom and then suffer no ill effects when they eat it afterwards.

Acid, on the other hand, is a problem. Many acids are in fact poisons as well, but it seems clear that the attack, Acid, causes damage by virtue of being an acid – that is, the substance your Pokémon is producing has corrosive properties because it is, chemically speaking, what’s called a ‘proton donor.’ Metals, generally speaking, do not like acids. Most metals, when exposed to a strong acid, will react to form salts. Salts, as the name might suggest, are very much less robust than metals. Unless they’re all plated with a very inert metal like gold, Steel-types should not like Acid any more than other Pokémon do.

Honestly, I think this is just because the designers didn’t think it through in this much detail. If it were up to me, I would say that Acid should be a Water attack with a chance to cause a burn, but unfortunately that’s what Scald does. I guess the only reasonable in-universe explanation is that Steel-types have all developed extremely high resistance to corrosion, maybe by including a very thin layer of something like chromium in their skins, which is why they don’t rust either.

I’m probably a generic question asker (seeing as my previous question asked of you is something you’ve been asked hundreds of times apparently :P). But anyways, since everyone is always like “OMG Generation I iz teh besttt, evryting elz sux!” is there any Pokemon (singular or plural) of the First Generation that you “deny the right to exist?” You don’t have to go into huge detail about it or whatever, but if you can think of a few I’d be interested to hear you opinion!

Hmm. Which one were you…?

Oh, right; you were the one who asked what I thought of the 5th generation Pokémon, right? Yeah, it’s not that lots of people have asked me about it, it’s that it was originally the whole purpose of this blog. That’s why I started writing, and that’s what the whole of last year was about.

Anyway, this question.

This question is tricky, not so much because there are no first generation Pokémon that are badly designed – there are – but because, counterintuitive as it seems, I don’t think you can hold them to the same standard. They were created in a very different context. First of all, there was nothing to compare them to. This is particularly important when you consider that one of the biggest problems I had with many fifth-generation Pokémon was “well, this is just [Pokémon X] with a new paint job and a haircut.” There’s no way you can reasonably make that complaint about Red and Blue (well, not without attributing some mystical foresight to Game Freak). Second, the designers themselves weren’t that experienced. Game Freak was only founded in 1989; it wasn’t that old when Pokémon was first released and they’d only ever made one or two other games for Nintendo, which never achieved any great notoriety. Black and White were released when Game Freak had been designing Pokémon for over fifteen years, and I am sometimes startled at how little they appear to have learned in that time (not that they don’t still produce some good stuff – they do – but that was true of the first generation as well). Third, no-one ever anticipated that Pokémon would become the global phenomenon it has. There was no guarantee that Red and Green would even be released outside of Japan. Even when the games were remade into the Red and Blue that we played, you can see how low standards were for fixing problems in the code. Today, Pokémon games are guaranteed an international release, and Pokémon is the second most profitable video game franchise on the planet, behind Mario (which, incidentally, means a much bigger budget).

What I am by slow degrees trying to say here is that mistakes were made in Red and Blue, and I’m okay with that. I’m not okay with the exact same mistakes being made, repeatedly and often quite insistently, in Black and White. The phrasing “I deny this Pokémon’s right to exist” was deliberately over-the-top, and meant to convey that if I had been on the design team, I would have scrapped the Pokémon in question. I would never use it of any Pokémon from an older iteration of the franchise, and in fact I probably wouldn’t use it of a fifth generation Pokémon either, if I redid all of those reviews now – we’ve got them, and we may as well work with them.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE QUESTIONS GONE

If you’re looking at the front page of this blog, you’ll see that all the question-and-answer entries have disappeared. WHAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED?

I haven’t deleted them or anything. They still exist. You just can’t see them on the front page anymore. Because I am an incredible egotist and want my own entries to appear more prominently without getting swamped by questions, I have decided to create an entirely separate section of the blog to store the questions people send me and the answers I give. You can see it up there at the top, labelled “questions,” right next to the Ask button. If you’re following me on Tumblr, you’ll still see these posts on your dashboard; they just won’t appear on the main blog page itself.

An annoying side effect of this is that, since questions still count towards the limit of 15 posts that can appear on the front page at a time, even though we can’t see them, only a few entries at a time will appear if you’re moving backward through my past work. Still, I’m fairly happy with the system.

I’d like to thank my website designer friend, Nick, for once again doing an amazing job of bludgeoning Tumblr into behaving the way I want it to. Everyone say “thank you, Nick!”