I’m back from Italy and on the home stretch, with only three more Pokémon to go, so let’s check out today’s, the second of three Pokémon that still don’t officially exist according to Nintendo (and therefore have no official art; the pictures I’m using here are by Xous54 and are closely based on the in-game sprites): the enigmatic Meloetta.
Meloetta is a dainty humanoid Pokémon with powers related to music. Her arms and hands, as well as part of her headdress, are shaped like musical notes, and her wavy hair is reminiscent of a musical score. She can influence the emotions of people with her song, helping them to achieve the right state of mind for composing music, and could well be based on the Muses, the ancient Greek goddesses of inspiration, or possibly on less ancient interpretations of the same concept. There were traditionally supposed to be nine Muses, but Meloetta has only two forms (I’m not particularly bothered by this, incidentally; nine forms would be interesting but it would have been difficult to achieve enough differentiation between them to make it worthwhile), which are related to the two main ways humans can participate in music: song and dance. In her “Aria” form, Meloetta’s hair is green and flows out behind her, while in her “Pirouette” form, her orange hair is wrapped up around the top of her head like a turban and her skirt blows up around her like a ballerina’s tutu. Meloetta can switch from her Aria form, in which she is a Normal/Psychic dual-type, to her Pirouette form, in which she is a Normal/Fighting dual-type, by using an attack called Relic Song, a technique she forgot long ago but which she can remember with the help of a musician in Castelia City who will also tell you Meloetta’s story. Continue reading “Meloetta”
Today’s Pokémon comes straight from Roswell, New Mexico, where they don’t know what to do with him either. Meet Elgyem, the… well, the LGM (Little Green Man) Pokémon.
…now, don’t get me wrong. These three don’t even hold a candle to Trubbish and Garbodor, who are my new empirical standard for awfulness; I now measure everything bad in my life in terms of how much less appalling it is than Trubbish and Garbodor, and the effect on my morale has been nothing short of miraculous. However, the fact that Gothita, Gothorita and Gothitelle even exist tells me something very disturbing about Game Freak’s creature design department. It tells me that one day, during the development of Black and White, one of the creature design guys stood up and said to his friends, in all seriousness,
Today I get a tantalising glimpse of something I really wish the Pokémon games would spend more time on: the history of the Pokémon universe. There are a fair number of ancient ruins in the Pokémon world left behind by some now-defunct civilisation and there’s not a whole lot we know about them – personally I put this down to the fact that the archaeologists of this world are (speaking as an archaeology student) even more frighteningly incompetent, if that’s possible, than their zoologists. What we can figure out for ourselves, however, is that Pokémon were quite as important in the past as they are in the present, and a few in particular – such as this bizarre-looking creature, Sigilyph. Sigilyph’s curious appearance has a vaguely Native American feel to me but I don’t know a lot about American archaeology – I think a friend of mine said she looks sort of Hopi? The text of her Pokédex entries doesn’t draw on Native American themes so an alternative possibility is that they just started drawing and kept going until they got something that looked entirely spooky and alien – and either way, it worked. 
For reasons I’ll get to later, this one’s a bit of an odd duck (I mean this figuratively, of course, in contrast to Psyduck, who actually is an odd duck). Allow me to introduce the Zen Charm Pokémon, Darumaka, and his evolved form Darmanitan… two Pokémon that I personally find tremendously annoying, because if you fail to deal with them promptly they can and will leave huge smoking holes in your team. Most Fire Pokémon are very active but these guys are turned up to eleven, their internal fires producing enormous quantities of energy that they will burn up by any means necessary – and I do mean any; they even use their droppings as a way of offloading excess heat; I know this because the Pokédex tells us that people used to carry Darumaka droppings in their pockets to keep themselves warm (Pokémon: it’s kind of like that). Heaven help you if you get into a fight with a Darumaka while it’s fired up, so to speak – but, that said, they’re not by nature aggressive Pokémon, just overwhelmingly energetic. 
Does everyone remember Zubat? The blood-sucking, supersonic-screaming, night-flying hell-beasts that used to fill your face whenever you set foot inside a cave in any Pokémon game ever? You all remember how annoying those things were?
Does everyone remember Dumbo? Y’know; the Disney movie about the baby elephant who could fly by flapping his stupidly large ears? Remember that one scene where he gets wasted and hallucinates about a parade of pink elephants?
Pokémaniacal 