Category: Pokémon Design Questions

vikingboybilly asks:

Do you find it odd that Carnivine, a venus flytrap, is poorly matched against bug type pokemon? What would you do to fix that (besides ignoring it)?

Hmm.  It hadn’t occurred to me, but yes, that is unfortunate.  Well, I’ve talked before about improving Carnivine by changing its type to Grass/Poison, among other things, which would help, but looking at it from this particular perspective… at the moment Carnivine has an ability, Levitate, which is great but actually not particularly helpful to a Grass-type.  You could replace that with a unique ability – “Flytrap,” “Flycatcher,” something like that – which absorbs Bug attacks for healing (in the manner of Water Absorb) or an attack boost (in the manner of Sap Sipper).  I think that would get the point across nicely.

Anonymous asks:

What are your feelings in the whole Pika close thing? Like that fact that they keep making them, and do any of them really stick out to you?

Urrrrrrrgh.  Eh.  I don’t know.  Like, it used to really annoy me, because I’ve been sick of them essentially reusing the same concept since generation III, but I’ve kinda moved past that now, not because I’ve come to think it’s any less dumb, more because I can’t be bothered getting annoyed about it anymore.  Clearly they’re going to keep doing it, so maybe it’s a more productive use of my time trying to figure out why on earth it’s so bloody important to them that every generation have a small cute rodent or lagomorph with electrical powers, and try to look at them in isolation with a view to what is neat about each of them.  I liked that they tried to do something different with Emolga, I suppose, by going with a flying squirrel.  That was somewhat redemptive.  I think they must do it, more than anything else, because they want someone to “carry the torch,” as it were, to say “no matter how much things change, this is still Pokémon.”  And this is hardly the only or best way they have of doing that, but clearly it matters to them a great deal.

Anonymous asks:

Long time reader of the blog, I went back and reread some of your black and white reviews and noticed something. In your Genesect review, you showed the picture of a lot of robotic pokemon and said in the picture that all of them, bar Magnezone, are done better than Genesect. Which leads me to what I wanted to ask, are you not a fan of Magnezone? If so, why is that? Is it purely from a design standpoint, or is it something mechanical, or just personal hatred that I’m not getting?

You know, I honestly don’t remember what exactly was going through my mind when I wrote that particular caption.  It was some years ago, after all.  I do prefer Magneton’s design to Magnezone’s by quite a lot, not even so much because Magnezone is awful, but because Magneton is sort of fine without it.  Magnemite evolving to Magneton makes sense and is kind of neat; they’re magnets, they attract each other, so they evolve by moving together and coordinating.  And then… they turn into a flying saucer?  Why?  I mean, it’s not even a horrible idea, and Magneton was already associated with cosmic phenomena, albeit loosely, but… why?

Also I was a great deal snarkier back then.

Anonymous asks:

Do you consider bronzong to step on claydol’s toes?

Hmm.  Interesting question.  

They’re definitely very similar aesthetically, as artefact Pokémon with mystical powers that move by levitating and are pretty much inscrutable.  I think there are some important differences, though, particularly Claydol being vaguely humanoid, and Bronzong having a very particular cultural inspiration (Japanese Iron Age ritual bells that were used, among other things, to pray for rain – this is why Bronzong can remember Rain Dance and Sunny Day via Heart Scales).  They’re both very closely tied up with the ancient civilisations of the Pokémon world, but in different ways; Bronzong was actually worshipped for its specific powers, whereas it’s sort of unclear whether Claydol were ever actually alive in ancient times, or just came to life somehow afterwards (perhaps even relatively recently).  You can do very different things with them, I think.

Anonymous asks:

Couldn’t gamefreak have simply taken volbeat/ilumise and plusle/minun and mashed them into a single pair of designs? They would have then had a pair of firefly pokemon with a relatively exclusive type combination, unique breeding mechanics, and a whole teamwork thing going on, backed up by the plus/minus thing. This would have been objectively interesting, and also not have ripped off pikachu.

And make ‘em Bug/Electric, you mean?  Hmm.  Yeah, I think quite like that, actually.  The cliché that “opposites attract” would tie Volbeat and Illumise’s romance theme together with their new Electricity powers quite nicely.  I think the problem is that Game Freak considered ripping off Pikachu to be a virtue of Plusle and Minun rather than a fault.  Which… y’know, is not really a position I can understand, but clearly it’s important to them since they keep bloody doing it.

vikingboybilly asks:

So there’s debate over what makes a pokémon a dragon type, or a fairy type, or even a normal type, but I’m wondering what GameFreak thinks constitutes a bug-type. At first it seems obvious, but there are anomalous outliers like anorith being bug while kabuto, krabby and corphish are not. Shuckle is a worm; I don’t think of a worm as being a bug. Skorupi loses it’s bug typing for Dark, and if a bug has a secondary typing and grows wings when it evolves, it won’t be a FLYING type.

Well, Shuckle’s not a worm; it’s labelled the “mould Pokémon” so I think it’s probably meant to be more like a slime mould, but that’s hardly a “bug” either.  I’m not sure that I have a good answer for this one.  I think probably their ideas of what “Bug-type” means are more aesthetic than biological.  Crustaceans aren’t Bug-types because they more clearly “belong” in Water.  Anorith not being Water is really odd, because the way Armaldo is portrayed, as one of the first living things to move onto land, seems like it should give a good reason for Anorith to change from Rock/Water to Rock/Bug when it evolves; I think they may have wanted to avoid Rock/Water for the second set of fossil Pokémon, though, since Kabuto and Omanyte had both been Rock/Water.  So I suppose what it seems to be, to me, is “arthropods that don’t obviously belong somewhere else,” with one or two odd extras like Shuckle, who certainly doesn’t seem to belong elsewhere either… Grass, maybe?

vikingboybilly asks:

So… ghost types. It’s pretty well implied that ghost pokémon are spirits of the deceased, but you can breed them… and hatch ghost pokémon from eggs. Does something have to die somewhere for the egg to be laid? Or do they just… procreate new spirits, who may eventually incarnate a living being? (you can breed yamask, btw) Shedinja is handled well; it’s a shed skin with sentience. Froslass, though… fact: Gengar is white on the original red/blue box art.

…is it?  I mean, very clearly they have an affinity for death, the dead, and places of spiritual power, but if anything I’d say that they are implied to be very much not what everyone thinks they are.  

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Anonymous asks:

On your entry about Goodra you got a comment from someone who (rather crudely) claimed that male Goodra were worthless. I first looked at this comment and thought it was rather stupid… but it isn’t. A female doesn’t need a male of the same species to reproduce. In Goodra’s case any Dragon egg group Pokemon will work. Surely this puts the species with a larger percentage of females at a massive advantage? And for that matter how do you think male species like Tauros can exist at all?

Just so that no one is in any danger of taking it seriously, I will quote here the comment that we are currently referring to:
“Goodra is a girl. She cannot be male.It’s nice to see you agree. There’s a place called 4chan who is in denial about it. They constantly say that Goodra can be male, but it’s obvious she can’t. As for me, I’ll keep reminding them that she is indeed of the female gender only. I hate male Goodra to the point where I spam on 4chan about how horrible it is. I hate it with a fiery passion that nobody could ever match. As for the female, It’s just that in reverse. I love her with an angelic passion that nobody could ever match. Nobody likes male ones. They’re treated like pigs because that’s really what they are. Whatever you do, never refer to Goodra with anything other than female pronouns. OP, you focused very heavily on using femnouns and I salute you for it.”

…quite.

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