I need to be up-front with you about this one. I really like Tirtouga and Carracosta. These turtle Pokémon are two of the fossil species of Black and White (the other two are Archen and Archeops, whom I talked about ages ago and allowed to live – perhaps a little generously) and the latest in a long line of prehistoric Pokémon resurrected by the miracle of SCIENCE. I think the artistic designs for Tirtouga and Carracosta are superb; Tirtouga is cute but also clearly strong enough to take care of himself, and Carracosta practically dares you to try attacking him. Both channel the “ancient” quality fossil Pokémon are supposed to possess exceptionally well. As well as having typical sea turtle qualities, like being able to safely dive to tremendous depths, they seem to be part-way through evolution into terrestrial turtles and can hunt prey on land as well. Continue reading “Tirtouga and Carracosta”
Category: Unova Pokédex
Bouffalant
I think it started as an April Fools’ joke, to be honest. One day, someone at Game Freak went down to the pit where they keep the creature design guys, lined them all up, and said to them, apparently with a straight face,
“Tauros, but with ridiculous hair. Make it happen.”
When one of them emerged a week later with the stack of designs they were hoping to exchange for bread and water, this thing was in the pile. No-one remembered that it had been a joke because the guy who thought of it had been killed for a trivial offense the day before, so they decided to run with it, the creature design department got a dozen extra tofu bars and Bouffalant made it into the final game.
I may have embellished the details slightly but I’m pretty sure that’s approximately how it happened. Continue reading “Bouffalant”
Yamask and Cofagrigus
I’ve probably mentioned before that I quite like slightly darker takes on Pokémon, primarily because I think the setting and many of the creatures have a lot of potential for that kind of plot (witness, for instance, some of the spinoff games like Colosseum on the GameCube). A startling number of Pokémon already have some surprisingly dark designs and flavour text; even in the original games Cubone wore the skulls of their dead parents as helmets, which is pretty strong for a kids’ game when you think about it. The Pokédex also reports a couple of disturbing urban legends – like a Hypno abducting a child, and a boy with telekinetic abilities waking up one morning mysteriously transformed into a Kadabra. Gyarados, meanwhile, is famed for levelling cities and Mewtwo is, if anything, more destructive still. Ghost Pokémon, of course, take the cake; for instance, Ruby and Sapphire’s Shedinja, a mysterious Pokémon that seems to possess the shell shed by Nincada when it evolves into Ninjask, supposedly steals the soul of anyone who looks into the crack in its back. I could go on about this for days, you understand, but what I mean to do here is give you a little context for when I start talking about today’s Pokémon, the Ghost-types Yamask and Cofagrigus, because Yamask’s design… in some ways is not nearly as troubling as some of what we’ve seen in the past, but in other ways is so much worse. Continue reading “Yamask and Cofagrigus”
Vanillite, Vanillish and Vanilluxe
Today’s Pokémon is…
…look, Game Freak, I can’t do this. It’s food; you can’t make me review a food Pokémon. From here it’s a hop, skip and a jump to “oh my god, Soylent Green is PIKACHU; what have you done!?” Don’t you have another Pokémon I could look at today? Like, a better one?
…no, Klingklang does not count.
Fine. Have it your way.
Today’s Pokémon is Vanillite, the… the vanilla ice cream Pokémon. No, for the last time, I am not making this up. It’s not actually made of vanilla ice cream, of course, which would be too far even for Game Freak. You’d have kids slurping up their Pokémon left, right and centre chasing after sugar highs and before you knew it the poor things would be extinct in the wild and bred as a new form of livestock on special farms. In fact, other than being Ice-types, I’m not sure that any aspects of Vanillite, Vanillish and Vanilluxe’s behaviour or powers have anything to do with the ice cream thing. Their schtick is that they create snowstorms. Continue reading “Vanillite, Vanillish and Vanilluxe”
Oshawott, Dewott and Samurott
The time has come at last, my friends, to fill that nagging gap I’ve left behind me: time to talk about the third Unova starter, Oshawott. Now, I saw Oshawott for the first time back when Nintendo revealed the Unova starters last year (at the time, he had the fan nickname Wotter), and my first thought was that he’d pretty clearly been dropped on his head as a child. Tepig and Snivy are so much more expressive in the official art; Tepig is happy-go-lucky and cute, while Snivy is a smug bastard, but Oshawott just looks vacant. Personally I think someone dropped the ball on Oshawott’s official art and in-game sprite (which looks the same); in the show you can see Oshawott with actual facial expressions, making him look cute, proud, even devious – here, by contrast, he looks like a lobotomy outpatient. This is a shame because it made a lot of people, including me, dismiss Oshawott without serious consideration – and, moreover, before meeting his awesome evolved forms, Dewott and Samurott. The concept behind this line is that they’re samurai Pokémon. Continue reading “Oshawott, Dewott and Samurott”
Scraggy and Scrafty
There’s gross… and then there’s gross.
By which I mean, some things are disgusting and others are just nasty.
On the one hand, you have Pokémon like Muk, who is literally made of toxic waste, Weezing, who can cause lung cancer at fifty paces, Gloom, who is constantly surrounded by the stench of rotting meat, and Lickitung, who… well, I think we can all agree; the less said about Lickitung, the better.
On the other hand, you have Pokémon that wear their own cast-off skin as trousers and hoodies.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet Scraggy and Scrafty. Continue reading “Scraggy and Scrafty”
Deerling and Sawsbuck
Excuse me for a moment. I need to do the cutesy baby-talk thing.
Aw, who’s a cute little deer? You are! Yes you are! Yeshyouare!
You saw nothing; you heard nothing.
Today I’m looking at the Pokémon incarnations of Bambi and his dad: Deerling and Sawsbuck. Deerling are shy, retreating creatures, much like real deer, but because they’re Grass Pokémon they’re even better at blending into their environments, thanks to their mossy fur. Surprisingly robust and adaptive, Deerling are the subject of a great deal of research in Unova because of an unusual property they possess, chosen to emphasise one of the new mechanics of Black and White: seasonality. The Pokémon games have had a concept of day and night since Gold and Silver but only now has Game Freak added in the four seasons, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, which the games cycle through over the course of four months. A few Pokémon vary in rarity and in range with the seasons – Cubchoo, for instance, can be found further south in Winter than at other times – but only one or two disappear entirely at certain times of year (from memory, I think Druddigon hibernate in Winter, but that’s about it). Continue reading “Deerling and Sawsbuck”
Dwebble and Crustle
Just out of curiosity, does anyone remember which Pokémon from Red and Blue was referred to in the Pokédex as the “Hermitcrab Pokémon”? That’s right: it was… Slowbro?
…huh?
No, I don’t know either. I guess Slowbro could be said to take inspiration from hermit crabs in that he uses another creature’s shell as his own, except that in his case the other creature is still living in it too and the shell is obviously too small to fit anything more than his tail inside it anyway… so yeah; I’m not sure what they were smoking when they came up with that one (but Slowbro is still awesome). I only bring up Slowbro because today’s Pokémon, some thirteen years later, actually is a hermit crab.
Took ya long enough! Continue reading “Dwebble and Crustle”
Gothita, Gothorita and Gothitelle
I’ve just realised something: I’ve hit the halfway point! I’ve done entries on seventy-seven Pokémon from the Black and White Pokédex now, and that leaves seventy-eight to go, and by the end of this entry it’ll be eighty down and seventy-five to go! And you know what else? I did Trubbish and Garbodor last week, so the worst is over already, because there’s no way anything Game Freak could possibly throw at me now could be as bad as that! It’s all uphill from here, baby!
So, let’s see what today has in store for- oh Christ, it’s Gothitelle.
…now, don’t get me wrong. These three don’t even hold a candle to Trubbish and Garbodor, who are my new empirical standard for awfulness; I now measure everything bad in my life in terms of how much less appalling it is than Trubbish and Garbodor, and the effect on my morale has been nothing short of miraculous. However, the fact that Gothita, Gothorita and Gothitelle even exist tells me something very disturbing about Game Freak’s creature design department. It tells me that one day, during the development of Black and White, one of the creature design guys stood up and said to his friends, in all seriousness,
“Hey guys, you know what this game really needs? A creepy Goth chick Pokémon.” Continue reading “Gothita, Gothorita and Gothitelle”
Sigilyph
Today I get a tantalising glimpse of something I really wish the Pokémon games would spend more time on: the history of the Pokémon universe. There are a fair number of ancient ruins in the Pokémon world left behind by some now-defunct civilisation and there’s not a whole lot we know about them – personally I put this down to the fact that the archaeologists of this world are (speaking as an archaeology student) even more frighteningly incompetent, if that’s possible, than their zoologists. What we can figure out for ourselves, however, is that Pokémon were quite as important in the past as they are in the present, and a few in particular – such as this bizarre-looking creature, Sigilyph. Sigilyph’s curious appearance has a vaguely Native American feel to me but I don’t know a lot about American archaeology – I think a friend of mine said she looks sort of Hopi? The text of her Pokédex entries doesn’t draw on Native American themes so an alternative possibility is that they just started drawing and kept going until they got something that looked entirely spooky and alien – and either way, it worked. Continue reading “Sigilyph”
Pokémaniacal 