Anonymous asks:

I know Pokémon’s weaknesses, resistances, and immunities don’t always make sense, but what do you think is the deal with 1) Normal being immune to Ghost but Fighting isn’t, and 2) Steel being immune to Poison and Rock and/or Ground aren’t?

I think the Normal immunity to Ghost attacks comes from a sort of obliviousness to the paranormal. Ghosts and spirits have no hold over you if you don’t believe they can harm you, and Normal Pokémon are just too normal, too mundane, too out of touch with the supernatural, to know that they should even be scared. Steel and Poison… well, Rock and Ground do resist Poison attacks, despite not actually being immune to Poison attacks or the poison status, so I think we probably shouldn’t read too much into it. However, I suppose I would say that what I think they’re implying here is that Steel-types are more divorced from normal Pokémon biology than Rock-types are; Rock Pokémon have layers of anatomy that are in some sense “normal” underneath their silica-based shells, but the bodies of Steel Pokémon are radically different through-and-through at the level of their biochemistry, which makes them invulnerable to ordinary poisons.

Anonymous asks:

Trend is a bit too strong a word, but I’ve noticed in your reviews of new Pokemon, specifically version-exclusive Pokemon, you tend to prefer one over the other. Cf Cottonee/Petilil, Solosis/Gothita, Clauncher/Skrelp. Would you care to talk about the implications of version exclusivity at all? (I mean, beyond the natural selling point of forcing people either to make new friends or buy two versions of the same game.)

Well, I talked a little about this here, and honestly I tried to think of some point to it beyond driving more sales, but didn’t come up with anything. In gameplay terms I think that particular aspect of the paired-game concept is obsolete, because version-exclusive Pokémon are among the smallest obstacles to finishing a Pokédex today. So is there anything else to it? I suppose it would be something if you could argue that the sets of version-exclusive Pokémon say something about the character of the games they appear on – like if you could say, for instance, that Ekans, Vileplume, Primeape, Arcanine, Scyther and Electabuzz somehow thematically “go with” Red/Fire/Charizard in a way that Sandslash, Victreebel, Persian, Ninetales, Pinsir and Magmar do not. And I think maybe you can almost say that for the Ruby and Sapphire sets, but you really have to stretch some of them to make it fit. Or perhaps you could conjecture that the different versions represent different seasons, or something along those lines, so that Red version represents the experience of a trainer who started a journey in winter rather than summer (that doesn’t work for generation V, of course, which actually has a season mechanic), or something else along those lines. In the end I really don’t think there’s much you can draw out of it.

vikingboybilly asks:

If diamond is harder than steel, shouldn’t the rock and steel weakness/resistance to each other be reversed?

I see no compelling reason for it, unless we believe a) that Rock Pokémon are made of diamonds or something equally hard, b) that Steel Pokémon are made of ordinary carbon steel and not some kind of bizarre bio-alloy, and c) that Mohs’ hardness is a good indicator of how a Pokémon’s body holds up under the diverse stresses of battle. On the other hand, I see no compelling reason for the way that relationship works currently either, and Steel-types have too many damn resistances anyway, so sure, go nuts.

Anonymous asks:

How do you think “fainting” came about in the Pokemon universe and what is its purpose? I might be stretching things, but it seems to be some sort of specific process that’s different from being knocked unconscious, due to the way ALL Pokemon, even ones that are totally different – dragons, starfish, floating magnets – faint in the same way, and faint in the same way in response to a wide variety of totally different attacks.

Do they?

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Anonymous asks:

More than once, I’ve seen you complain about how gen 4 didn’t simply switch Sceptile’s physical and special attack stats. Are there any other pokemon who you think should be fixed simply by having some of their base stats changed or switched? That was never a solution you brought up in your Top 10 Worst Pokemon, and while I know it’s a bit of an uncreative solution, for several pokemon it’s the only plausible solution.

Hmm. Well, I think the Pokémon on that list need a good deal more than that – most of them do actually have attack stats that match their movepools reasonably well, if memory serves; the problem is that both are awful. I’m not sure I’ve every really thought that about any other Pokémon. Sceptile is sort of a special case because there’s a flavour/aesthetic component to it. Sceptile looks and feels like he should be a physical attacker, but he isn’t because the designers loaded him up with moves that push the limits of what makes sense in generation III mechanics – moves that, like Sceptile, look and feel physical but were actually special at the time because of their type, like Leaf Blade and Dragon Claw. I don’t know if there’s any other Pokémon that had quite the same experience of that transition; the vast majority of them came out better off. Sceptile is just weird because it seems like they deliberately statted him up to work with the quirks of the pre-generation IV mechanics that Pokémon like Absol, Feraligatr and Sneasel were stuck trying to work against.

vikingboybilly asks:

I think the problem with hail is that it gives benefits ONLY to ice types, whereas the other weathers splash around benefits to electric, grass, ground and steel types. Any ideas to give other types advantages in hail?

It doesn’t even benefit Ice-types, really, so much as not disadvantage them… that is, unless they have Blizzard, Ice Body or Snow Cloak. I sort of think it would make sense to add something analogous to Sandstorm’s bonus for Rock-types and say that Hail gives Ice-types +50% physical defence. It’s hard to think of anything that makes thematic sense with Hail as a benefit for types other than Ice, though, which is probably why Game Freak has never done it. You might be able to come up with something that makes sense for Water-types, I suppose, but they already have bonuses from rain, so screw them. You could, however, make the penalties more severe for some types in particular – defence penalties for Rock and Steel, for instance, on the grounds that rapid cooling makes materials more brittle, which would add more to Hail’s ability to wear opponents down. Or perhaps Hail could do more damage to Pokémon that are weak to Ice attacks, which gives a bit more variance to how teams with different compositions are affected by it. At the moment the only real way to build a Hail team is to put several Ice-types on it, but if there are some Pokémon who are weakened significantly more than most by Hail, there will be others who are in a position to take advantage of that.

Anonymous asks:

Attack and Sp Attack are not great stats. A special attacker doesn’t use physical attacks, so why do they need any points in Attack? Mixed attackers are generally less efficient at doing their job without speed or bulk to protect them. Do you think there could be more added to these stats to make them more useful so that a Pokemon like Absol and Cacturne don’t have massive dead weight stats that they aren’t using.

Hrrrmm. Well, I do see your point. Mixed attackers have kinda been on a downward slide for the last couple of generations thanks to the gradually increasing options for getting overwhelming power in a single attack stat (particularly now that we have mega evolution). Flexibility is great, but that’s what your teammates are for. And because Game Freak seem to use a Pokémon’s base stat total as a rough guide for how powerful they want it to be, a Pokémon like, for instance, Arbok is wasting a limited number of notional ‘points’ by having 65 base special attack instead of 15; Arbok isn’t going to use special attacks anyway. The trouble is that this is, in theory, a way of helping Pokémon who, like Absol, have moderate scores in attack stats that they will never use… but what could you possibly add to special attack that wouldn’t be just as helpful to Alakazam? My instinct here is that, whatever you try, odds are good you’ll wind up with exactly the same situation as we have now – strongly preferring one stat is still better, just for slightly different reasons. You probably wind up nerfing all defensive Pokémon, but I don’t think this is your intent. The best I can come up with to address this would be such a radical change I’m not even sure I’d want to do it – namely, replace the strict division of physical and special with a spectrum, so that you can have 100% special attacks like Psychic at one end, 100% physical attacks like Close Combat at the other, and a bunch of mixed ones like Thunderpunch being 40% special or Flare Blitz being 20% special. Like I said though, that changes the game so radically as to make it unrecognisable.

I think it’s also worth noting that, if you’re not in a competitive online setting – that is, if you’re just playing through your game, and not paying all that much attention to EV training – then the flexibility of mixed physical/special sets is a significantly bigger deal. Sometimes the difference between a Pokémon who flat out cannot do something and a Pokémon who is merely not very good at it can be much greater than it is on the competitive scene.

brick3621 asks:

Are there any particular features from previous Pokémon games (like walking Pokémon or mid-battle dialogue) that aren’t in Gen VI that you miss?

Well, to be perfectly honest, I have trouble thinking of any features like that at all – which I suppose means that I don’t miss them, whatever they are. It would be nice to bring back the walking Pokémon from Heart Gold and Soul Silver, now that you mention it; they were a nice touch. I can imagine it being a bit of a drain on the graphic designers’ time and energy in the 3D world of generation VI, though. The hilarious glitches from Red and Blue give the games a certain je ne sais quoi…

brick3621 asks:

I just got a shamelessly hacked Eevee (shiny with perfect IVs; hatched on Kalos Route 7 but has a Sinnoh Champion Ribbon) via Wonder Trade and face either the prospect of breeding it for semi-legit Pokémon or just releasing it and never looking back. Either way, I feel like my very game cartridge has been irreversibly tainted by some plague, because I’m of the opinion that the ability to simply obtain whatever Pokémon you want on a whim spoils a significant part of the game and mocks the efforts of honest breeders and trainers who spend hours achieving objectively less impressive results using only the in-game methods that Game Freak provide them, methods that have been made easier over the generations in part, I believe, to discourage would-be hackers.
Do you think that Game Freak should spend more effort cracking down on illegitimate Pokémon and penalize players for using and distributing them? Do you have any idea if they even have the means to do this?

Well, in answer to the last question, no, I haven’t the faintest idea.

I don’t have particularly strong opinions on this, maybe because I’ve never been willing to devote the necessary time to the kind of repetitive tasks involved in breeding for perfect IVs. I suppose my default would be a sort of laissez faire attitude, though I suspect my reasons for that will provoke… disagreement.

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vikingboybilly asks:

Do you think the pseudo-legendaries could be nerfed? I think it’s weird that dragonite’s BST is higher than the legendary birds.

I think it’s very unlikely. Game Freak almost never directly nerfs Pokémon, and the base stat totals of those particular classes of Pokémon have been regularised for so long that it’s pretty obvious they don’t think it’s weird.