Anonymous asks:

Do you think there’s any relationship between Pokémon like the Magnemite line, the Beldum line, and the Klink line? If so, what might that be?

The ‘mechanical’ Pokémon, that is? Honestly I think it’s impossible to say, although Magearna might shed some light on all of that, once we learn more about her. Voltorb are supposed to have appeared suddenly around the time of the invention of mass-produced Pokéballs, and Professor Juniper discovers that Klink appeared in Chargestone Cave about a hundred years ago, so I wouldn’t rule out their creation having something to do with human influence. I doubt they were deliberately made by humans, because they mostly seem to be thought of as mysterious Pokémon and no one seems to know exactly where they came from, but they might be the result of human activity in much the same way as Grimer (i.e. the waste products of human technology, stimulated by “X-rays from the moon”).

Anonymous asks:

Reaction to Magiana?

Certainly very curious… presumably she’s the vanguard of generation VII, and of course that’s exciting, but the really interesting part is that this is a legendary Pokémon who was explicitly built by humans – and not thousands of years ago by mysterious forgotten magic like Golurk, nor genetically engineered from an existing template like Mewtwo, but in the 16th century with mechanics and clockwork, with the same kind of principles that modern engineering still functions on. I think there’s a lot Magearna might tell us about the history of Pokémon training, and how it changed at the dawn of the modern world. What really catches my eye is that she seems to have Pokéball emblems built into her design, and given that Pokéballs as we know them are supposed to be quite recent inventions, that makes me wonder what the connection is. Did the symbol mean something different five hundred years ago, or was the design of the first Pokéballs based on Magearna’s body?

Anonymous asks:

I agree completely with you! Grass types pokemon have many flaws. Grass was, Is and will always be my favorite. But now for the question, Have you noticed that almos all grass starters have a more passive role than the water and fire ones? They always get a narrower offensive movepool, worse offensive stats than the other ones (Sceptile and Torterra are exceptions and maybe Chesnaught) and have a lower stat total than the other starters? (Sceptile is an exception) Do you think it will change?

Well, I don’t know if you can say “almost all” when three out of the six are exceptions, and the stat totals don’t mean a whole lot (sure, Torterra, Venusaur and Meganium have the lowest base stat totals of any starter Pokémon, but they’re only ten points below Swampert, who’s the highest – it doesn’t actually matter). Venusaur, Serperior and Chesnaught are great Pokémon, and Grass may be the only starter type that hasn’t yet produced anything completely broken (I’m looking at you, Speed Boost Blaziken and Protean Greninja), but is that a bad thing? I think the main problem with the Grass starters is the same as the problem with all Grass Pokémon – that Game Freak have convinced themselves that most attack types are somehow not thematically appropriate for Grass Pokémon to have (i.e. Grass Pokémon Don’t Get Nice Things), and Grass itself is one of the weakest offensive types in the game. There’s also the broader problem that each new generation tends to give fewer tools to Pokémon with defence and support roles than to Pokémon with aggressive roles (except for II, when literally every Pokémon in the game started using Leftovers). So no, it’s never going to change; that would be way too much effort.

Anonymous asks:

Odd question, but do you have a favorite Fakemon, or one that you’re particularly fond of? If yes, what is it and why? Also for obvious reasons you’re not allowed to answer Scribis or Krakentoa :p

Tricky… I have a kinda awkward relationship with fakemon, in that there are clearly several really good ones out there, but there are also a lot of really rather dull ones, and I get bored sifting through to find the good ones… If I had to pick a favourite it’d probably be one of the ones from the BoltBeam project, since they had a good few that I thought were quite inspired… here’s a few that I was most fond of:

Capsikid and Pepricorn for being capsicum Pokémon that aren’t just humanoid chilli peppers, and being a very nice way of fusing two elements that are difficult to combine.
Wulverize for being just really bizarre and interesting.
Arthromemnon for being a very clean, nicely done fulfilment of a fairly simple concept.
Meipale, Pailock and Bakount for having such a cool ‘backstory.’
Niftea and Porslayne for combining a lot of weird design elements very elegantly.
Renownd for making Unown less pointless.
Sarkrend and Sarkrisis for being fossil Pokémon that aren’t just “hey, look at this extinct animal.”
Meurgot and Scaravera for doing something so cool with an interesting cultural phenomenon, and just ‘getting’ the Dark type so much better than a lot of fakemon do.

And honourable mentions to Kabllama and Alpacalypse for having the most awesome names ever.

Anonymous asks:

Theoretically speaking, what do you think Missingno would be like if it appeared in the Pokemon anime? Like, what would its origin story, nature, and powers be like to keep it as close to the game glitch as feasible?

You know how sometimes satellite TV gets all pixellated or cuts out entirely because the weather’s bad? It would look like that.

Okay, okay, serious answer. I think the obvious answer is that Missingno has to be an offshoot of the Porygon project, specifically of the technology that allows Porygon – a Pokémon composed entirely of data, of information – to manifest itself as a physical entity. Missingno can similarly convert data into physical reality… but not always smoothly. You can’t just plug in the code for the Pac-Man video game and have the character Pac-Man materialise in front of you, fully realised and functional; you need to have a program that was specifically written with this process in mind, like Porygon was. Any other form of data that goes into Missingno results in a garbled mess of matter and energy. What we “see” as Missingno’s body is actually Missingno’s best effort to interpret the countless radio waves and other signals that are constantly passing through it. If you just give Missingno a real, physical object, though, it can break that object down into a workable code with which it can create copies of that object. At some point shortly after its creation the thing crashed through a natural history museum somewhere, and as a result it “knows” how to create copies of several Pokémon fossils. It’s also possible to coax Missingno to spit out multiple copies of any small object you want (you can’t do this to living things or most larger objects because of safety features built into the core of the original program). Getting close enough to Missingno to do this isn’t always safe, though – if it picks up on your brain waves and tries to translate them into energy, the pseudo-physical nonsense it produces in response can often cause serious and lasting amnesia.

Anonymous asks:

A lot of pokemon seem not to get moves that would seem to fit them perfectly, because “they would be too good with them.” For example, snorlax doesn’t get slack off. Giratina, the god of the distortion world, doesn’t get trick room. Zekrom, who literally shakes the ground when sent out, can’t learn earthquake. And several explicitly evil pokemon, like chandelure, can’t learn nasty plot. There are several more, but these annoy me the most. But I understand the game needs to be balanced. Thoughts?

I don’t think that is the reason, to be honest. I mean, if preventing Pokémon from being “too good” was ever a matter of even the slightest concern for Game Freak, then making Giratina and Zekrom available to players in the first place was their mistake, not any specific item in their respective movepools. Even if they’d given Zekrom Earthquake, Reshiram would still have been even stronger because Dragon/Fire is just such a potent combination under 5th-generation rules (i.e. with no Fairy-types). I’m much more inclined to suspect some obscure flavour-related reason for these absences – like, Snorlax is literally always slacking off anyway, so he really shouldn’t expect to get any special bonus for doing so more than usual. Or perhaps they were simply oversights; it simply didn’t occur to the designers to stick Nasty Plot on Chandelure for some reason (I mean, when we think about this stuff we tend only to give any thought to the 5 or 10% of all moves that are useful at the competitive level; they presumably give consideration to the whole lot, so you can see how they might forget things that seem like obvious choices to us). Either way, eh. I have a saying: Pokémon should be good at the things they’re good at. If it makes sense, let them have it.

vikingboybilly asks:

I heard that farfetch’d was put in the game to teach players a ‘lesson’ about trading a spearow that could evolve into a fearow for something that will only have limited usefulness (because fearow is so godly, right?), just like magikarp is there to be a lesson. You know what I did with magikarp? I put it in the daycare until the end of the game. It was at level 31 by that time and evolved into gyarados with no effort. Isn’t that what everyone did? Their lesson was lost.

Everyone? I beg to differ. Personally I’ve never done anything of the kind. And I think the point is there all the same – you evolved your Magikarp with no effort, but waited until the end of the game for it to reach a high enough level on its own, so you certainly had to exercise patience. Even if you catch a Magikarp at level 19 and use a Rare Candy to evolve it immediately, Magikarp still expresses one of Pokémon’s central themes, that something small and weak can grow into something great and powerful with the right kind of care. I don’t think we have to interpret Magikarp in such a narrow way. The lesson is “lost” if you choose to ignore it, but that’s always been the case for everything.

As for Farfetch’d… well, yes and no. It makes sense with Farfetch’d’s… wait, that doesn’t look right. Farfetch’ds? Farfetchd’s? Farfetch’s’d?

Continue reading →

vikingboybilly asks:

I was reminded that things like Delibird, Wobuffet, and Girafarig looked weird when they were introduced, and that was just in generation 2. Then by the time the next generation comes, the ones that looked weird in the last gen are comparitively normal. The oddest thing about delibird was that the bag is actually its tail, and it’s hollow. Does anybody remember that?

Is it actually hollow? I sort of assumed that the tail was flat and broad, and Delibird kind of rolled it up into a bundle. Honestly I thought it was kind of a creative way of giving Delibird a sack when Pokémon aren’t really ‘supposed’ to use manufactured items.

Anonymous asks:

Do you think there are any similarities between the creations of Pokémon like Claydol and Golett, and Pokémon like Porygon? To me the former always seem to have been created by, I dunno, psychic Pokémagic and the latter via science/technology… but then Golett’s Pokédex entry states it was created by “ancient science” and, come to think of it, does magic even exist in the Pokémon world? And what about Castform? Do you think creating a Pokémon is a long-standing tradition in the Pokémon world?

Mmm, but what is technology and what is magic? If the forces we call ‘magic’ work according to rules that are observable and knowable, then magic can be approached scientifically, and one’s knowledge of how to use it is a form of technology, in exactly the same way as our knowledge of how to extract electrical energy from the wind and tides is “technology.” If ghosts, spirits, psychic powers and souls are real things in the Pokémon world, and can have tangible effects on the physical universe, then you can observe them, formulate scientific theories about them, and create technology that interacts with them. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” says Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum, or to put it another way, ‘magic’ is what we call technology we don’t understand, and I suspect the writers behind Pokémon would incline to a similar idea if you were to press them. “Ancient science” here perhaps means that the people who created Golett knew how to construct vessels that could contain a soul after death and allow it to interact more easily with the physical world, and to me that’s a sort of technology – just one that’s wholly beyond the Pokémon world’s modern civilisations. When they talk about creating Pokémon, they tend to see it as something new, experimental, something they’re just playing with in its earliest stages, but maybe some of those experiments were inspired by ancient stories, and pushed forward by scientists who had exactly this kind of opinion about ‘magic.’

Anonymous asks:

Good news, I found an explanation for Pawniard and Bisharp! Pawniard is an ashigaru, a japanese foot soldier that serves under a samurai characterized by their rounded helmets, while Bisharp is the samurai itself. It would explain why Bisharp are described as commanding armies of them. The chess puns in the English names are probably just an attempt to localize them, but it does make some sense since pawns can be promoted into bishops. What do you think?

Well, there is a chess pun in the Japanese too, because Pawniard’s Japanese name references the word for a game piece (koma), so it still seems likely to me that they were influenced by the appearance of pawns in European chess. But it does make a lot of sense – maybe someone at Game Freak thought that pawns in Shogi could be imagined as ashigaru, and then made a connection with the shape of European pawns?