Category: Pokémon Design Questions

Anonymous asks:

Do you like regular exeggutor or alolan exeggutor? Also, why do you think alolan exeggutor is part dragon but the other is psychic?

Well, the Pokédex says “as it grew taller and taller, it outgrew its reliance on psychic powers, while within it awakened the power of the sleeping dragon,” which is clearly meant to sound like it’s explained something without actually telling us anything.  Alolan Exeggutor doesn’t learn any traditional Dragon-type moves, and there’s nothing especially dragon-ish about his Dragon Hammer attack.  I always used to think that Dragon Pokémon were defined by their connection to the Pokémon world’s abstract “life force,” but that doesn’t really help much either (except insofar as it suggests that Grass/Dragon should probably be a more common combination than it is).

BUT the good news is, there is a kind of palm tree called the Dragon Tree, Dracaena marginata, which is native to Madagascar and not Hawai’i, but is at least suitably tropical.  So… I guess maybe that counts?

RandomAccess asks:

Do you think it’d be fun if, for some reason, they remade the gen 1 and 2 games again and they made regional variants for some of the new Pokémon? Or even a regional variant for some new Pokémon that got retyped to fairy as their original typing? Maybe a fairy/normal Clefairy that even has the original light pink color scheme way different from the much more vivid pink clefairy we have today.

I’m not sure what you mean by the “original light pink colour scheme” – Clefairy in generations VI and VII is a noticeably paler shade of pink than in II through IV (especially II, where the sprites would, I think, be best described as “shocking pink”).  But as a general principle, I guess sure?  I’m decidedly unconvinced by the idea of re-remaking generations I and II, but if you were going to do it, details like that would give the exercise some point.

Anonymous asks:

I was wondering what you thought of the pokedex entries on Mega Glalie from Sun and Moon – “The excess energy from Mega Evolution spilled over from its mouth, breaking its jaw. It spews endless blizzards” and “It envelops prey in its mouth, freezing them instantly. But its jaw is dislocated, so it’s unable to eat them.” This seems like pretty direct evidence that Mega Evolution is harmful, and known to be such, by the people who put the dex together. Why are the professors pushing this?

I don’t know how harmful it can possibly be, seeing as mega evolution never lasts more than a few minutes and all the changes are instantly reversed.  I think lines like this stress that mega evolved forms are not actually viable organisms and aren’t supposed to be; they’re ridiculous super-overpowered battle modes that exaggerate everything about the base Pokémon to the point that it becomes self-defeating in non-combat situations.

Anonymous asks:

Do you think it’s possible that GF don’t actually WANT to make Pikachu clones every gen, but they’re forced to by, I dunno, Nintendo or some such for marketing’s sake? A bit of Executive Meddling, if you will. Maybe Mimikyu hints at this by poking fun at the needless (and desperate?) attempt to capture Pikachu’s appeal and popularity?

I think if there were a top-down policy on that, we’d probably see more of them in promotional materials than we do, likely at Pikachu’s expense.  That, and… well, I don’t know how Nintendo manages its creative teams, but I would have hoped Game Freak had earned a bit of independence by now.  I think they do it specifically to annoy me.  Having said that, this is an interesting way of looking at Mimikyu; I’ll have to talk about it in my review.

It’s Showtime Synergy asks:

Yungoos and Gumshoos have a “detective” theme because Rattata and Raticate have a “thief” theme! Notice the little moustache that Rattata has(like Froakie)it’s kind of a Japanese way to communicate “thief” because cartoonish burglars carry their bags over their heads and a cute moustache-looking knot under their noses. I think the idea is that Gumshoos is the detective who prowls for its prey at the wrong time of day,while Raticate is the fat mob boss whose underlings sneakily steal food for it.

Hmm; this works.  My approval of Gumshoos has risen!

Anonymous asks:

So according to Bulbapedia, Blaziken may have various cultural allusions, ranging from the bird-headed sun deities Horus and Ra from Egyptian mythology, to the phoenix, to fire-breathing chickens and bird-headed humanoids of Japanese folklore. Do you think there’s any credibility to this? Personally I think Horus/Ra might be reaching but they might be on to something with the basan/karura.

Well, I’m super vague on some of those things, but I don’t think Blaziken needs to be all of them.  I think if there’s a fire chicken in Japanese folklore, and if we know that cockfighting is a real thing that makes the additional Fighting type appropriate, well, you’ve sort of got the whole design there; there’s not really any more mystery to what Blaziken is and does that we need to find explanations for.  Like, you can say “well, on top of all that it’s similar to Horus” but I think if the designers meant it, there would be some more specific call-out for us to pick up.

Anonymous asks:

Oddish is based on the mandrake plant, which is cool, but none of its evolutions seem to retain this cultural influence. Now I KNOW you like Vileplume, but suppose you were given a chance to redesign Oddish’s evolutions so that they keep to their mandrake influence, how would you do it?

Honestly, for a while I kind of thought Oddish wasn’t actually based on mandrakes at all, but just had some coincidental similarities, because other than being a plant that looks like it has legs underground, there’s not really anything there.  I did then run over this line from the Yellow version Pokédex though: “If you try to yank it out of the ground, it shrieks horribly.”  That hasn’t ever been repeated, and to be honest the Yellow Pokédex has a lot of weird $#!t in it, so I kinda would still be happy to think that Oddish is independent from mandrakes, and that someone noticed the similarities during production on Yellow.  I sort of want to just say “give it Perish Song”; I think that’s enough of a nod.