Category: Pokémon Design Questions

Godzillakiryu91 asks:

I don’t know if anyone’s asked you this, but how do you think the Dragon Type works, and why does it have the weaknesses it does?

Ehhhhhh… well, the thing is, I used to go by the description given by one of the trainers in the Blackthorn City Gym way back in Gold and Silver (‘cause, y’know, you’d expect Dragon Pokémon trainers to have some idea how Dragon-types work), and what they said was that Dragon Pokémon are “Pokémon that overflow with life energy,” or something like that.  Dratini’s assorted Pokédex entries have some similar lines.  So if you’re okay with some abstract “life force” being a real thing in the Pokémon world (which seems more or less fine), then we could understand Dragon-types as Pokémon who have access to a sort of internal “wellspring” of that power, granting them perks like long life and rapid healing.  This sort of fits generally with the holy status of dragons in East Asian mythology, the large number of legendary Dragon Pokémon with load-bearing positions in the Pokémon world’s cosmology, and whatever the hell the Dragon Force in the Victini and Reshiram/Zekrom movie is supposed to be.  Dragon-types’ attacks are strong against each other because Dragon attacks are among the only things that can directly attack that energy source and overwhelm it.  Steel-types resist Dragon attacks because, being partly mechanical, they are less reliant on life force than most other living things.  Ice attacks… honestly I’m unclear on this, but in the real world a lot of processes that are essential to life are slowed down by cold, so maybe in the Pokémon world life force itself can be slowed and congested by extreme cold?

The reason this suddenly becomes more complicated is that, as of X and Y, we now have Fairy-types, and Xerneas gives us fairly concrete reason to believe that it’s Fairy Pokémon who are most closely associated with life force, not Dragon Pokémon.  And you can maybe make some vague hand-wavey suggestions that get around that, like saying that Fairy Pokémon can manipulate and master life force while Dragon Pokémon can only tap into it by instinct, so that Fairy-types can block Dragon attacks effortlessly while also damaging the Dragons’ connection to the source of their power.  When I start to do that, though, I become worried that I’m just defending my own existing ideas rather than looking for the best possible explanation, and it also seems like Game Freak’s own ideas about what the Dragon type is have evolved since Gold and Silver – I mean, it’s hard to imagine Druddigon as holy, or having a special connection to some abstract life force.  So I don’t quite know.

batabid asks:

Could you talk a bit about Evolutionary Stones, particularly the more mysterious ones like the Dawn Stone (maybe relating it to your Pokémon Gender/Breeding theory?) and why the Nidos evolve with the Moon Stone

You know, I think I’ve been asked this before, ages ago; hold on a bit…

Yes, here it is; the second half of this question.

…wait, hang on.

That was YOU!  YOU’VE asked me this before!

Ah, whatever; it was nearly four years ago, I’m sure I have different and even more wildly speculative things to say about it now.

Continue reading “batabid asks:” →

Rockcutter64 asks:

If you could give any three pokémon mega evolutions, which would you choose?

I suppose ones who need it.  The main benefit to mega evolution is the huge pile of stat bonuses that gets heaped on top of you, so ideally you want to be giving them to a Pokémon who a) mainly suffers from a low base stat total, and b) is an unlikely candidate to ever receive a conventional evolution.  So, for instance, Klinklang is a poor choice because Klinklang’s problem is having a minuscule skill set, not lacking the raw power to use that skill set, while Dunsparce is a poor choice because, as a one-stage Pokémon with lower base stats than Sneasel, Gligar and Tangela, there is still plenty of room to just evolve him.  There are better answers than mega evolution to their problems.  

So which ones do I think would be the best choices…?  Hmm… Scanning down the list of Pokémon in the same general area as Beedrill (the Pokémon with the lowest base stat total to be given a mega evolution so far)… well, I think Ledian, with her interesting and diverse offence/support movepool and total lack of the kind of power necessary to back it up, is a natural choice; Bibarel has a unique type combination and interesting abilities, but they just don’t compensate for the fact that Bibarel sucks all around; and… let’s say Delcatty; Delcatty has a ridiculous movepool that she’s incapable of using, and we have a built-in excuse to rework Normalise into something actually decent while we’re there.   I’m also going to break all of my rules and offer Plusle and Minun, because there you could do something interesting with their teamwork theme by allowing them both to mega evolve off of a single mega stone if you use them together in a double battle (I mean, let’s be honest, they’ll probably still suck but at least it’s interesting).

Anonymous asks:

The thing about the pika-clones is that Gamefreak has stopped trying to use them to recapture pikachu’s popularity and seems to now be making them just for the sake of tradition, just like the generic birds and rodents. But at least diggersby and talonflame have had multi-dimensional designs, cool new elements, and awesome hidden abilities to make up for their low stats. So if Gen 7 has a new electric rodent, do you think gamefreak could do the same and make it actually interesting and useful?

Okay well first of all I don’t think VII having a new Electric rodent is an “if.”  And certainly they could, and I hope they will.  I agree that Diggersby and Talonflame (and I suppose to a lesser extent even Vivillon, I will grudgingly admit) prove that there’s scope for cleverness even within the “templates.”  Emolga, I thought, was a good start, though Dedenne was a rather depressing return to form.  And I suppose one could argue that Se Jun Park’s famously creative use of Pachirisu in the 2014 world championship gives them some justification for continuing to include Pokémon that demand a very… unconventional strategic approach, though not much (I believe we are still waiting on such championship-level breakthroughs for Farfetch’d, Delibird, Kricketune, Phione, Girafarig… you know, I’m just not going to list them).  They may by this point actually regard competitive uselessness as an essential part of the template.  So of course they could; that doesn’t mean they will.

Anonymous asks:

What do you think of the theory that the Rowlet line will be grass/steel, the Litten line fire/poison, and the Popplio line water/fairy, to tie into potential themes of knife-thrower, fire-breather, and clown/entertainer-seal?

Pretty much the same thing as I think of most of these predictions that people like to make in the run-up to a new generation: “It could be right; it’s probably wrong; there’s too little evidence to make a good assessment; I don’t really care.”

Anonymous asks:

Obviously, any regular reader knows that you’re a champion of the Grass type. One thing that occurred to me recently – any thoughts on why is there only a single Grass/Ground type? Wouldn’t that seem an obvious combination to be exploited? Roots would presumably feature heavily. It seems that flavour wise, at least, this one would seem natural.

I think maybe the fact that it seems so natural is actually part of the reason.  Ground is, let’s face it, a poorly thought out mess of a type.  Pokémon can be assigned to the Ground type because they have powers related to earth and soil, or because they happen to live on the ground, or sometimes, it seems, just because they’re generally tough and resilient.  It’s a really vague set of traits, most of which also apply to pure Grass-types.  If most of the things that define Ground are also essentially inherent to Grass anyway, there’s never any need to add Ground to a Grass Pokémon, unless you come up against something like Torterra who’s associated with the earth in a much more elemental sense than most Ground Pokémon.

Anonymous asks:

I realize now that my previous question may have been misleading. When I said “weird” I wasn’t referring to the grass/fighting type combination itself, as that’s been done several times, but to the idea of a mysterious owl suddenly evolving into an aggressive grass/fighting bird.

Imagine, though. Rowlet turns into a badass fighting or dragon type, litten into a large, chubby, lovable cat, and popplio into a grotesque mammoth/walrus-like thing. Nobody will be satisfied.

The previous question alluded to here: “Watch rowlet lose its flying type upon evolving and become a grass/fighting type or something even weirder. That would certainly be interesting”

See, I don’t think that sort of thing is likely, purely because the starters are the one place where, more than any other (except maybe the mascot legendaries), they want mass appeal, and while that doesn’t exactly rule out weird and quirky designs for the evolved forms, I believe it makes Game Freak more likely to incline towards safe choices.  Looking back at past starters… they really just don’t tend to “do” major reversals in aesthetics and design as they evolve.  I suspect there’s kind of an expectation that, when you choose your starter, you should pretty much know what you’re getting.  It’s supposed to be your partner, so if it evolves into something radically different and you don’t like it anymore, the design has kinda failed, in that particular respect.

Frezgle asks:

Re: Litten, it might only be black because of its fur being so oily as it says on the official website, and not the typical ‘black=dark’ thing. If they’re going with the bomb/explosion motif, and if the marking on its head really is based on the symbol for brimstone and not just random stripes, we could see something totally weird like Fire/Steel or even Fire/Rock.

Eh, I think they’re likely to stay away from “totally weird” on the starters; they want starters to have broad appeal, rather than be quirky and niche.  But sure, rule nothing out.  As always, I am the very soul of apathy as far as predicting things about upcoming games.

vikingboybilly asks:

The canned idea of a BIRD type is starting to grow on me. It would have been GameFreak’s way of differentiating the wind element from all the NORMAL birds in the game, and they wouldn’t have had the NORMAL type on them. This also got me thinking that maybe FISH types would be cool to round out the BIRD and BUG types. Some other ideas: EARTH, SNOW, WOOD, FOSSIL, MAGIC, MUSIC, and of course, LIGHT. I’ve also seen COSMIC on youtube. Feel free to praise or criticize any of my choices.

Well, that’s the thing, I have more of an inclination (unpopular, I think, in the Pokémon community) to reduce the type chart down rather than add more to it.  So I would reject all of those, as well as probably several of the existing types, including Ground, Bug, Flying and Dragon.  I recently thought through this, for no particular reason, and I think you could reasonably cut it down to as few as seven.  So yeah.  I think we’re just coming at this whole thing from opposite directions entirely.

EDIT: The inevitable follow-up question.