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:” →

Anonymous asks:

Why do you think there haven’t been any Gym Leaders who specialize in the Dark-type, despite there being multiple Elite Four Dark-type specialists?

Difficult to say.  In Gold and Silver it was likely because there were so few Dark Pokémon and all of them except for Umbreon were very late-game, but that excuse is really gone by the third generation.  I suppose you could suggest that, because Dark is the ‘evil’ type and Dark techniques focus on, basically, fighting dirty, while Gym Leaders are supposed to be educators and pillars of the community, they just don’t want Gym Leaders who focus on Dark-types; they want trainers to have more experience before they start playing around with that stuff.  But that’s just me making stuff up; I don’t have any particular support for that interpretation.

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.