Anonymous asks:

So what do you think of the mystery dungeon games?

Well, I only ever played the first one and have incomplete secondhand knowledge of the plot of the subsequent titles, so anything I say here applies only to Mystery Dungeon Red/Blue and should be taken with a grain of salt. I like the feel of them a lot. It’s nice to have Pokémon games that are just about Pokémon, without any of those pesky humans to get in the way (even if the plot felt it was necessary to have humans exist… somewhere else… without ever really explaining their relation to the world we were actually playing in…). It’s just cool to have Pokémon working together to solve their problems and protect each other, although some more effort could have been spent on explaining why exactly their problems seemed primarily to be “other Pokémon” (“they’re really mad at everything because of the natural disasters, okay!”).

The gameplay was… flawed in a number of ways, though (and here I will remind you that I’m going purely off the first titles in the series; many or all of my complaints may actually have been addressed later, I don’t know). Adding new Pokémon to your team happens entirely at random, which is frustrating. The dungeons themselves very quickly start to feel like they’re all the same – you wander through a randomly generated maze hitting anything that gets in your way until you reach whatever it is that you’re there for. Tactical positioning doesn’t play nearly as much of a role as you’d think. Sometimes your companions’ AI just does incredibly stupid things, like running off down a long corridor in pursuit of… something… and not being able to find you again. Some moves are either crazy overpowered or completely useless: Silver Wind just damages everything on the screen (in addition to its side-effect of sometimes raising all the user’s stats), so sometimes you just die before you can even get close enough to attack whatever is using it, whereas your companions’ AI has no clue how to handle some support moves like Reflect, and will spam them every time you take a step until they run out of PP, which is not really helpful. Each Pokémon’s level-up move list seems to have been directly copied over from Ruby and Sapphire without any consideration for how the strengths and purposes of the different moves are changed by the radically different demands of the battle system – I can understand not wanting to review every Pokémon, but surely it would have made sense to tinker with the ones available as player characters (I played as Psyduck, whose level-up list is appalling compared to what most of the starter Pokémon get, with no real advantages to balance that). In short… there’s a lot of evidence in there of a general lack of effort in adapting the existing material of the Pokémon franchise to the game mechanics implied by the new concept. Maybe it got better; I don’t know. I hope so, because it was a very cool idea.

Anonymous asks:

Why do some people equate Ash with Michael vick? Is it because of superficial judgment or real reasons with merit?

People keep bringing up this Michael Vick dude and I have no idea what he did (I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen anyone compare him to Ash either – just people objecting to that comparison). I understand from what readers have told me that he was in the news a lot in the United States a few years back for something to do with animal abuse, so some of the stuff in my answer to this question might be of interest to you, but I just don’t know or care enough about this guy to say anything specific about him.

GrayGryphon asks:

Do you think there should have been a Fairy-type that got Illusion as an ability? Not necessarily an existing one, just as a concept in general.

Hrm. It makes sense, don’t get me wrong – fairies go well with illusion and deception – but I think the Illusion ability is something that it’s better to keep as Zoroark’s ‘thing,’ both for Zoroark’s sake (because, to be honest, it would probably not be difficult to come up with a Pokémon who gets more out of Illusion than Zoroark does) and to avoid the chaos that would be brought about by having both of them on the same team. That’s not to say we can’t try to think of something that draws on a similar idea of deception, though… fairies from different cultures and different stories can have control over a wide variety of elemental forces, so… maybe a Fairy-type who can have several different secondary types, which the opponent can’t immediately identify. It can be (say) Fairy/Fire, Fairy/Electric, Fairy/Water or Fairy/Grass, chosen at birth, and its appearance is the same for all four (maybe including elements from all four types), which means that the opponent has to fire off one or two “test” attacks to figure out what its weaknesses and resistances are. Undecided on whether to have moves that are unique to each form or just give all four a wide range of attacks. Could go either way there.

Anonymous asks:

Did you know that Chandelure’s Hidden Ability has been changed from Shadow Tag to Infiltrator? This opens up the possibility of other Pokémon to have one (or more) of their Abilities to be changed (at least, it sets a precedent)! Any specific Pokémon in mind whose Ability/(ies) you’d like to be changed?

Well, it’s worth pointing out that there has never been a Chandelure with Shadow Tag – Dream World Litwick were never released in generation V, and to my knowledge no AI opponent ever used one either, not even Ingo and Emmet, so they’re changing something that only ever existed in unused coding and our own fevered power fantasies anyway. I doubt this is an indication that they’re willing to start mucking around with existing abilities that are actually used in practice, and I wouldn’t call it a precedent for that. (EDIT: However, the fact that Scolipede’s was changed from Quick Feet to Speed Boost absolutely is. Derp. Doesn’t really change the rest of this answer anyway, though.) For the most part, abilities I’d want to see changed are the ones that are just insultingly bad, like Run Away, Keen Eye and Illuminate, and personally I would fix those by improving the ability itself (see e.g. Lightningrod and Storm Drain), not by changing which Pokémon received it. I can’t think of any off the top of my head that I would actually want to redistribute, though there are probably at least a couple out there.

Anonymous asks:

I was just playing Pokemon X, and my Bellossom’s Sleep Powder missed four times, which got me thinking: What if a low accuracy move’s accuracy goes higher (temporarily) when it misses? For example, I use Sleep Powder once, and it misses. It’s accuracy now goes from 75 to 85 (For Ex), so that it gives me (the user) a better chance at hitting, and gives missing something of a bonus. I mean, the Pokemon (Bellossom, in this case) should get the hang of it. Missing four times is kind of ridiculous.

Would you also implement the logical corollary – that moves become less accurate after a successful hit? After all, if you manage to hit three targets in a row with Focus Blast, your opponent is surely going to get the hang of dodging the damn things. In any luck-based system, things sometimes just don’t go our way, and that would still be the case with these revisions – your Bellossom could still miss three times in a row, and although it would happen much less often, that very fact would make it even more frustrating when it did. I don’t think it’d be a harmful change, but I’m not terribly enthused about it either.

Anonymous asks:

Just rereading your comments on Farfetch’d in the “worst pokemon” category, and I thought of how gen. VI boosted him somewhat with the changes to the critical hits mechanics, which makes him one of very few pokemon who can consistently deliver 100% critical hits all the time. Sure, he’s still far from being strong in any sense of the word, but do you think that this at least gave him a niche to excel in? Or is it merely a single step in the right direction, with many more to go?

Explanation for anyone behind on this: critical hits only do x1.5 damage in X and Y, not x2, but the critical hit rate scales more rapidly with bonuses like a Scope Lens or the Super Luck ability, to the point that many combinations will actually give you a 100% critical hit rate. For most Pokémon, using Focus Energy is the way to do this, but Farfetch’d has the distinction of being able to achieve 100% right out of the box, without having to buff himself first, by using his signature item (the Stick) and sticking to moves that already score a lot of critical hits, of which he has four – Slash, Night Slash, Leaf Blade and Air Cutter (the last of which is unfortunately special and therefore doesn’t work so well with the other three). Even his other attacks will still have a 50% critical hit rate.

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Anonymous asks:

I don’t know if you have answered this before but, do you have any theory about what happens to Pokémon once their trainer die?

Hmm. Tricky.

I feel like this must have happened in the anime before, but only three examples readily come to mind, all of which are unusual cases simply because of the nature of the Pokémon involved (please share any other examples, as I’m sure there are more I’m not thinking of):

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SkarmorySilver asks:

I see you liked my pitohui Pokemon, thanks! Which leads me to this question: I remember you said you were tired of bird Pokemon (among other generic templates) being repeated with each generation. That said, if you HAD to design a “common bird” (without any cop-outs like using a previous gen bird, for example), what would be the result? Would you have picked something different from a songbird, for example?

What have we had so far?

Pidgey isn’t so much a pigeon as a composite ‘generic bird,’ [EDIT: in fact it’s more probably a cedar waxwing, a medium-sized North American songbird] similarly Spearow is a composite ‘generic raptor’ and pretty clearly not a sparrow. Aside from those, we’ve had an owl, a swallow, a starling, an actual pigeon who eventually winds up as a pheasant, and a robin who winds up as a peregrine falcon. With the exception of Hoothoot and Noctowl, all fit into the same basic battle role as fast physical attackers (with… varying degrees of success). With the exception of Fletchinder and Talonflame, all are Normal/Flying. Now, if I understand the prompt you’re giving me, the requirement here is for an early-game Pokémon based on a bird without any particularly remarkable traits, initially Normal/Flying but not necessarily all the way?

I want a frickin’ ptarmigan.

Ptarmigans, for those unfamiliar with the name, are hardy little alpine- and tundra-adapted birds related to chickens, pheasants and quails. Probably their most interesting feature is that their feet and toes are covered in feathers, unusually for birds – part of their cold adaptation. Let’s play with that and have them evolve into Ice-types with ice crystal feathers on their feet, for performing a sort of ice-kick attack parallel to Blaze Kick (I’m sure some other Pokémon would love to share it). While real ptarmigans hibernate in burrows during the winter, these guys hibernate in summer and emerge when the weather starts to cool down again. They can fly, but aren’t great at it, and don’t generally like to travel long distances that way.

Wikipedia also informs me that the rock ptarmigan is known in Japan as the raichou – thunder bird (rai being the same word that appears in, e.g., Raichu and Raikou), which is a wonderful excuse to have it randomly learn a couple of Electric attacks as it levels and confuse everyone who isn’t in on the joke.

I kinda want the final form to be called Ptarmagnicant, but I’m worried that’s too long (2 letters longer than Fletchinder, who has the longest English name of any Pokémon), and I have no ideas on the smaller forms. Suggestions?