One lunatic's love-hate relationship with the Pokémon franchise, and his addled musings on its rights, wrongs, ins and outs. Come one, come all, and indulge my delusions of grandeur as I inflict my opinions on anyone within shouting distance.
Why do you think Hurricane’s a Flying attack but Twister a Dragon attack?
I suppose probably because Twister is in some sense a “magical” attack, in a similar way to Fairy Wind, while Hurricane is notionally about wind created purely by the force of one’s wings. Why does that matter? I suspect there’s probably not a satisfying answer.
Update: this.
How do Pokemon use Milk Drink on themselves?
You know those beer hats that lazy people use for drinking while watching sports? It’s similar but the straws are hooked up differently.
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.
How does Dwebble “melt holes in hard rocks with a liquid secreted from its mouth” without any acid based attacks?
…huh.
Y’know, that…
…huh.
Okay, well, I suppose my stance has to be that, If I Were In Charge, Dwebble would get Acid because it makes sense and there’s no compelling game balance reason for him not to, but given that he doesn’t… Upon closer inspection, the Pokédex never actually says “acid” or “acidic,” it just mentions a secretion from Dwebble’s mouth – so maybe it’s not an acidic solution at all, but a special enzyme in Dwebble’s saliva, designed to break down certain kinds of rock? It’s slow-acting, ineffective against all other materials, and therefore utterly useless in combat, but important for Dwebble’s way of life. I think that makes sense.
What would you say to wonder guard gaining an additional magic guard effect?
Well, it might make Shedinja suck less, and I’d be in favour of that… but the thing about Shedinja and Wonder Guard is that, because it’s so all-or-nothing, it’s almost impossible to balance. If your opponents can consistently damage it, it’s completely worthless. If your opponents can’t consistently damage it, it’s horrendously overpowered, until people wise up and start building their teams so that they can. There’s no middle ground. I don’t think changing the list of things that can insta-kill Shedinja actually helps much. Maybe if Wonder Guard worked differently – like if, in addition to its existing effect, it reduced all damage Shedinja does take to 1, and then Shedinja could be given more than one hit point (something like 3 or 5)… I feel like, at that point, you have more variables involved and more capacity to fine-tune the ability (by giving Shedinja a different number of hit points). But that’s just me brainstorming.
Why can’t persian relearn Pay Day after it’s evolved? Why does drowzee/hypno have Assist as an egg move? (the japanese name for the move is a cat-related idiom, isn’t it?)
1) I suppose because Pay Day is so closely associated in the designers’ minds with Meowth’s habit of collecting coins and other shiny objects (which Persian doesn’t share), and also with the basis of Meowth’s design in those little waving cat statuettes you see in Japanese shops sometimes (again, a feature Persian doesn’t share), which are supposed to bring luck and prosperity. Discounting the existence of a first-generation TM, it’s actually one of the most exclusive moves in the game – the only other Pokémon who can learn it is Purrloin (and even then only as an egg move, which means that she can’t relearn it either, whether before or after evolving [EDIT: WRONG; as of X and Y you actually can re-learn egg moves]). Contrasting that with Game Freak’s willingness to splash around other things that were originally signature moves, like Leaf Blade and Waterfall, it seems like Pay Day’s ability to generate wealth must be specific to the design of Meowth and Meowth alone. Apparently this is really important to them.
2) They’re hardly the only non-cat Pokémon who learn it that way – so do Sneasel, Chimchar, Sentret, and Spinda. To me it makes perfect sense that a manipulative Pokémon like Drowzee would be able to learn a skill that makes use of allies’ powers in place of his own.
Gamefreak have tried before to design insanely powerful pokemon with a shockingly bad ability (Regigigas, Slaking, Archeops) and they’ve generally failed or at least turned out pretty shakily. Do you think it would be possible to ever do this and make a consistently usable pokemon?
Hrrm. Tricky.
I feel like it has to be possible, because we have items that give their users severe disadvantages, and those get used all the time. If you imagine for a moment a Pokémon with really high attack and special attack scores, maxing out somewhere in the 550-600 region, and decent stats elsewhere, whose ability locks it into using only one attack until it switches… people would almost certainly use that, right? Because people use Choice Band and Choice Specs, and that’s basically what I’ve just described, in ability form. Obviously this particular example is impossible because if a Pokémon like that existed, people would stack choice items on top of its existing advantages for no extra cost, and all hell would break loose, but the point is that some disadvantages are clearly worth it. The trouble is that I’m pretty sure the competitive multiplayer environment is not really on Game Freak’s minds when they playtest these things, and that’s the only way you’re ever going to draw the line between broken-because-good and broken-because-bad, both of which will be serious possibilities whenever you create a Pokémon like this. I mean, Archeops is fine in single-player; I used him in my first playthrough of Black and he was fantastic. Slaking has the potential to be ridiculous in the right hands because the AI doesn’t know how to exploit his weakness. So the designers are kind of firing shots in the dark here, I think. That makes it unlikely that they’re ever going to get it exactly right, but sooner or later they’re bound to get something that falls on the overpowered rather than the underpowered side if they keep trying.
What do you think abilities are? I have a grumpig whose signature move is Skill Swap and his ability is Thick Fat. So when he swaps his ability, does that mean he loses his body fat and the other pokemon gets overweight? What if the other pokemon had flame body, does Grumpig suddenly burst into flames (let’s say the other was rapidash; it’s just a plain unicorn now)? What about steel types? They suddenly get biological fat on top of their alloy? Why can they only have one ability?
Well… abilities cover such a wide range of concepts that it’s sort of difficult to talk about them as a group – what can you possibly say about a category that encompasses physical traits like Thick Fat and Flame Body, psychological traits like Oblivious and Rivalry, skills like Technician and Sniper, magical properties like Levitate and Wonder Guard, and whatever the hell Mold Breaker is? Looking at stuff that interacts with abilities, like Skill Swap, might be more productive than trying to deal with abilities themselves, but let’s see… Continue reading “Vikingboybilly 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.
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.
Pokémaniacal 