Tag: Originally posted on pokemaniacal.blogspot.co.nz

The Top Ten Worst Pokémon Ever, #4: Kricketune

Well, in any list of the dumbest Pokémon of all time, the bugs were bound to put forward a representative sooner or later.  Today I’ll be looking at the musical cricket Pokémon, Kricketune, and his significantly less irritating younger sibling, Kricketot.  I have always had a soft spot for Kricketot, ever since I caught one shortly after starting Diamond version for the first time.  Kricketot is a tiny, brightly-coloured beetle who communicates by knocking his antennae together to make sounds like the chimes of a xylophone.  His physical appearance is suggestive of a rotund little man in a neat waistcoat and shiny shoes (he’s supposed to remind you of a conductor), while at the same time including no aspects that are actually out-of-place on a beetle Pokémon.  Kricketot isn’t an especially clever design and there’s not much to say about him, but he’s cute and reasonably well done.  He’s also very difficult to train since (on Diamond and Pearl anyway) he knows no attacks other than Growl and Bide, and can only damage other Pokémon by waiting for them to hit him first.  You won’t have to put up with this for long though; like many Bug Pokémon, Kricketot evolves very rapidly… into Kricketune.  I always hoped he would evolve again, but he never did, the little jerk.  I kept him around for a while because I needed a Pokémon who could use Cut, and eventually ditched him for a Parasect when I got far enough in the game to receive Pokémon from Leaf Green.  So… why do I hate Kricketune so much, anyway?

I can think of only one word to describe Kricketune’s artwork: obnoxious.  It’s difficult to articulate why Kricketune’s artwork is so offensive to me; maybe on some level my mind rebels against the idea of an insect with facial hair.  I honestly don’t know how the designers managed to make Kricketune’s moustache look as pasted-on as it does; I would have thought you’d have to try to make something fit the rest of the Pokémon that badly.   The fact that his distended belly reminds me of a starving third-world orphan doesn’t help his case.  I understand that it’s not that easy to convey “this Pokémon is based on a violinist,” and making his body physically resemble a lute wasn’t a bad idea in principle, but I have to wonder about the quality control that was involved in the execution.  His flavour isn’t actually terrible; the idea of a violinist Pokémon isn’t much of a stretch when you start from a cricket, but they’ve chosen to run with it and make Kricketune a musical genius capable of composing new tunes on the fly.  Apparently there’s even a village that holds contests of music for Kricketune, which is actually kind of interesting.  Again, the idea of a violin-like body, complete with internal sounding chambers, isn’t a problem in and of itself; it’s a fun way of expanding on the fact that a cricket’s own body is literally his instrument.  It’s more that I’m just a tiny bit FLABBERGASTED that no-one ever spent a few moments just looking at Kricketune and thinking “…maybe this isn’t working quite how we planned.”

I am prepared to accept that someone at Game Freak once believed Spinda and Delcatty had the potential to be decent Pokémon.  I am prepared to accept that they may have dramatically miscalculated the importance of a Pokémon’s movepool in comparison to its raw stats.  I am prepared to accept, in other words, that the positions they currently hold in the ranks of the most mind-blowingly incompetent Pokémon in the game are the result of a terrible, terrible mistake.

I am prepared to accept no such thing with regards to Kricketune.

Kricketune has it all.  Lacklustre attacks, mediocre speed, cardboard defences, unhelpful abilities, and a grand total of perhaps nine or ten genuinely useful techniques.  This Pokémon is not here for us to use.  He is here for us to laugh at, poke, step on, and ultimately set on fire.  In theory, Kricketune is a Swords Dancer (that is to say, this is the role at which he fails least horribly), setting him up to be compared with the other Bug-type Swords Dancers who came before him: the infinitely superior Scyther and Scizor.  Kricketune’s physical movepool isn’t actually much worse than Scyther’s; they can both choose from X-Scissor, Brick Break, Night Slash and Aerial Ace, which is pretty solid in terms of type coverage but leaves them relying on some comparatively weak attacks, holding them back from being really effective top-tier Swords Dancers.  The difference between Kricketune and Scyther (well, besides the fact that Scyther is better at everything because of his higher stats) is that Scyther has a bunch of useful support moves and can keep his opponents guessing.  Kricketune… has Taunt, I guess, so he can stop big defensive Pokémon from weakening or disabling him, but that just draws attention to his massive vulnerability to… y’know… attacks.  He can slap away another Pokémon’s item with Knock Off.  Lots of other Pokémon can do that too, but I guess it’s fun.  He can use Perish Song to… fail to achieve anything whatsoever, since he has no way of trapping opponents in play long enough for the song to kill them, and he’ll eventually be forced to switch out too (assuming you don’t want Kricketune to die, which, I will grant you, is something of a stretch).  Finally, he can use Sing to be slightly less ineffective and put things to sleep, or alternatively, to spend a couple of turns failing to put things to sleep because Sing is dreadful.  Finally, to make sure there was absolutely no doubt that Kricketune was an inferior version of Scyther, Game Freak went and gave him exactly the same abilities. Once Kricketune has been badly injured, he will almost certainly die too quickly to notice that his Swarm ability has amped up his Bug attacks, like X-Scissor.  If that doesn’t appeal, Kricketune’s Dream World ability is Technician.  This is actually a really awesome ability and, together with Bullet Punch, is a pretty big contributing factor to the massive popularity of Scizor.  Technician powers up several weak attacks, which are often the ones with the best secondary effects (like Bullet Punch, which always hits first).  Kricketune has precisely two moves worth using that benefit from Technician: Bug Bite (this basically becomes a slightly better replacement for X-Scissor) and Aerial Ace (which does help Kricketune with his type coverage… I guess).

An exhaustive list of the reasons Kricketune sucks would fill an entire entry on its own, but those are the highlights.  Now, as usual, it’s time for me to prove my worth and explain what I would do with him if I ever had the chance.  Besides brutally murder him and decorate my home with his entrails.

I’ve had trouble coming up with a good way to improve on Kricketune’s flavour, because most of my hatred against him is directed at his art and I find myself having to admit I probably couldn’t do better.  Getting rid of the moustache, or at the very least making it more wiry to better suit an insect body, seems like a no-brainer.  I’m tempted to suggest exaggerating the violin shape of his body and making the whole thing more stylistic, because the attempt to compromise between a naturalistic design and the instrument concept is what’s created this unearthly teardrop-shaped body, which just doesn’t work at all.  Also, change the eyes.  Kricketot’s eyes have black irises and white pupils.  Kricketune’s eyes have black irises and blacker pupils.  Kricketot’s look bright and Kricketune’s look dead.  I know it’s small, but it bothers me.

There is astonishingly little fanart of Kricketune on the internet, which I am tentatively taking as evidence that I'm not the only one who thinks he looks unbelievably stupid. Instead, here's Naoyo Kimura's illustration of Kricketune from the Next Destinies expansion of the Pokémon TCG.

One of the odd little things that bug me about Kricketune (no pun intended) is that his evolution from Kricketot involves a shift in inspiration from a xylophone (a percussion instrument) to a violin (a string instrument).  As I tend to do when I run into something about a design that I don’t quite get, I’m just going to go with it.  Kricketune needs to evolve, as everyone in the Top Ten does, but why stop at one evolution?  Let’s split his evolutionary path into an entire damn orchestra!  I want a huge grasshopper with a wooden exoskeleton.  He makes his music when wind blows through a long hollow tube that passes into his thorax and out through his abdomen.  His wooden body is filled with holes like a flute or clarinet, and he uses his six legs to ‘play’ himself like one while he uses his wings to keep aloft.  This one is a Bug/Grass-type, but can also use wind attacks like Air Slash, Hurricane and Whirlwind, as well as Earth Power (I’m tempted to let him have Quiver Dance as well to make up for Bug/Grass sucking so badly).  I want a big, bulky goliath beetle-type thing, who can rear up on his hind legs and beat his carapace like a drum with his front legs; I think Bug/Ground would work with this one, with lots of powerful physical attacks like Earthquake, as well as – of course – Belly Drum.  As long as I have the opportunity to play around with type combinations, I want a Bug/Water type, since that’s unique (well, unless you count Surskit) – a swimming beetle, with long oar-like arms like a water-boatman’s, the pipes of a water organ lying flat along his back (these double as water-cannons, of course), and a manic grin on his face.  I’m thinking of him as a mixed attacker, with powerful physical and special options (Bug Buzz, X-Scissor, Surf and Waterfall, of course; then maybe Ice Beam and Cross Chop), plus possibly Agility.  Finally, I want a conductor for the orchestra; a Bug/Psychic-type similar in appearance to Kricketune (bearing in mind the changes I wanted to make earlier), but with brightly-coloured butterfly or moth wings, and maybe hands positioned part-way down his scythes (a little like Gallade’s).  He is the rarest of the group, and although he still has Kricketune’s violin-type music, his main role is to direct communities of the others in battle, performance, and day-to-day life, focussing on support techniques like Reflect, Baton Pass, Wish and Encore.
 
I may have gone slightly overboard there.  The multiple evolutions were probably not, strictly speaking, necessary and getting them to make sense was, I admit, something of a stretch.  I think it’s best that we all agree to blame Kricketune and move on together.  I’ve only got three entries left now, and the end – my horrible, gibbering end – is in sight.

The Top Ten Worst Pokémon Ever, #5: Delcatty

We’re really getting into the dregs now, folks.  See… most Pokémon are good at something.  It’s often something bizarrely specific that would barely make sense to most people, like how Linoone is the only Belly Drummer who’ll eat a Salac berry at 50% HP instead of 25%, or the way Smeargle can pull off really weird sets with stuff like Endeavour and Dragon Rage or Spore and Transform thanks to his ability to learn every move in the game.  It’s very rare that you get a Pokémon who isn’t good at anything at all… but it does happen.  One of them is Delcatty.
 
Delcatty and her juvenile form Skitty are cats.  If you’ve ever owned a cat (which I have) then you pretty much know everything about them already.  They’re cute, they like to chase things and make themselves pretty, they’re popular with female trainers, and they are completely indifferent to everything beyond their own whims.  They’re different from Persian in that Persian embraces the cruel side that cats have; if you screw with Persian, the claws are coming out and your face is going to start looking a lot less pretty a few seconds from now.  If you screw with Delcatty, she’s much more likely to say “eh, whatever,” and wander off.  Delcatty doesn’t have a nest like most Pokémon do because she would never feel invested enough to bother defending it, doesn’t eat or sleep according to any schedule because she would never pay enough attention to bother keeping track of one (this comes from Ruby version but, incidentally, Emerald contradicts this, saying that Delcatty are nocturnal), and never fights if she can avoid it because that’s clearly too much effort.  She reminds me of nothing so much as The Cat Who Walked By Himself, from Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories (you can find the story here http://boop.org/jan/justso/cat.htm, among other places), a fable that tells how the Cat, rather than being tamed like all the other wild creatures, instead tricked the Woman into a bargain with him so that he could do as he pleased for all time.  The Cat’s catchphrase is “I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me,” which pretty much sums him up.  I doubt Delcatty was directly inspired by this particular story but she’s a product of the same age-old stereotype that cats are aloof, and only ever do exactly what suits them (including being ‘tamed’ by humans).  Pokémon doesn’t really do anything with the idea other than say that this is what Delcatty is like, and it only makes things worse that someone seems to have at least had this perception of cats in the back of his mind when Persian was created, even though it’s not the focus for Persian.  There’s only so much variation you can squeeze out of a lithe, elegant domestic cat when you’re committed to making it a Normal-type; Delcatty’s clearly not the same as Persian since she looks more overtly pampered, even dressed-up, but I find myself asking what this design achieved that Meowth and Persian didn’t.
                                                                                                                                                                            
Although it has nothing to do with my analysis here, I would be remiss if I did not mention the internet phenomenon that is Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action, since it is easily the most interesting thing about these Pokémon, as well as one of the most egregious examples of Pokémon’s propensity to rape the science of biology on every level imaginable simultaneously.  Due to the somewhat simplistic way in which Pokémon games determine reproductive compatibility, a Skitty – a two foot tall kitten – and a Wailord – a fifteen metre long whale – are capable of having children together, and presumably… y’know… doing all of the things one needs to do in order to have children.  This being the internet, hilarity ensues.  Perhaps fortunately, this is one mystery of the Pokémon world that Professor Oak is unlikely ever to solve… after all, the sheer logistics alone are beyond comprehension.
 
Like Spinda, Delcatty is afflicted with uniformly dreadful stats and, as a Normal-type, has few weaknesses but no clear strengths.  Again like Spinda, she also enjoys the traditional great blessing of the Normal type: a vast movepool.  Theoretically, Baton Pass allows her to bestow the benefits of Calm Mind, Work Up or Charge Beam upon her allies, Wish and Heal Bell provide her with means of keeping her team healthy, and Thunder Wave, Charm and Fake Tears offer a variety of ways to incapacitate her enemies.  Of course, since Delcatty is neither fast nor tough, it’s likely she’ll have no more than one turn to do any of this.  She has access to the famously effective combination of Thunderbolt and Ice Beam, and could use Calm Mind alongside those to buff herself into some kind of special tank.  This won’t work either because special attack and special defence are among the weakest of her many weak points.  Double-Edge, Zen Headbutt, Wild Charge and Sucker Punch present a reasonable spread of physical attacks, and with Sucker Punch she doesn’t even have to worry about her lacklustre speed so much, but at this point you’re bailing out the Titanic with a thimble.  Delcatty’s signature move, Assist, is fascinating but ultimately unhelpful; it allows her to use any move known by any Pokémon on her team, chosen at random, which is a little like asking your four-year-old sister to run through the Battle Tower a couple of times for you.  The crowning insult is Delcatty’s unique ability, Normalise.  As far as I know, Normalise is the only ability in the game which is so poorly thought-out as to be actively detrimental to a Pokémon that possesses it (discounting those specifically designed to be, like Truant).  It’s an interesting idea: all of Delcatty’s moves are treated as Normal-typed, and therefore get a damage bonus for being used by a Pokémon of the same element (the ‘same-type attack bonus,’ or STAB).  The trouble is that Normalise makes it impossible for Delcatty to hit anything super-effective, since Normal isn’t strong against anything, and that’s just about the only way she can possibly hurt anything.  Normalise does allow Delcatty to hit Ground-types with Thunder Wave and pick up STAB on a couple of moves with useful side-effects (Sucker Punch is the only one that jumps out at me, though).  I would say that it’s unlikely to be worth it but, let’s face it, Delcatty’s offensive effectiveness is not a huge sacrifice to make.  If you don’t like Normalise, her Dream World ability, Wonder Skin, is quite neat – it gives her a 50% chance to ignore most attacks that don’t cause direct damage – but the thing about Delcatty is that most Pokémon won’t need techniques like that to beat her anyway; it’s much easier just to squash her and move on.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find interesting fan art of Delcatty? I put it down to the fact that Delcatty herself just isn't a very interesting Pokémon at all. LucLightning (http://luclightning.deviantart.com/) has done a pretty good job, though.

Skitty’s evolution to Delcatty is triggered by a Moon Stone, which makes it unlikely that Game Freak will ever evolve Delcatty further – so, if possible, I need to think of a way to make Delcatty useful without evolving her.  I would love to work with Assist, but Assist is problematic because a number of Pokémon besides Delcatty can get it as a hereditary move (including Weavile and Infernape, who would gleefully take anything powerful enough to make Delcatty effective and use it to break the game forever).  Instead I’m going to start by making Normalise more effective.  Normalise, if you ask me, does exactly what it should, but is the wrong way around: instead of making Delcatty treat all her own attacks as Normal, it should make her treat all attacks that hit her as Normal.  This will cause the vast majority of Pokémon to lose their STAB against Delcatty, making it much less easy to steamroll her with one solid attack.  That’s extremely useful, but it’s not enough, so I’m going to turn to Delcatty’s flavour and hope that what I come up with there will inform me further.  Delcatty doesn’t fight for anything; she’ll abandon resources and territory without a second thought.  A Pokémon like this would never survive unless it could afford to abandon these things so lightly, which implies that Delcatty is resilient, adaptable and capable of surviving pretty much anywhere (which, incidentally, fits quite nicely with my version of Normalise) – she is the Cat who walks by herself, and all places are alike to her.  She can tolerate thirst, hunger and extremes of temperature, identify nutritious plants by instinct having never seen them before, and move unseen and unheard by predators.  All cat Pokémon are said to have nine lives, but the superstition is thought to have begun with Delcatty’s proverbial ability to miraculously come out of anything smelling of roses.  In fact-
 
Wait.
 
Nine lives.
 
That’s it!  Nine is clearly too many, but that could actually work.
 
Okay, bear with me here.  What I have in mind would probably make more sense as an ability, but it synergises well with either Wonder Skin or Normalise and I don’t want to lose that, so it’ll have to be a custom item that only works for Skitty and Delcatty instead: a silver collar called a Life Band.  When Skitty and Delcatty are in a very relaxed state, especially while they are grooming, they give off excess life energy, which is stored in their collars until they need it.  In a battle, a Life Band will release its energy to cure any status ailment (poison, sleep, and so on) that affects Delcatty, heal her by 25% of her health if she ever drops below 50%, restore the PP of any of her attacks if she runs out so she can keep using them, or negate any stat penalties she takes from moves like Growl.  The collar can only produce one effect per turn and will only work a certain number of times (like I said, nine is probably too many… then again, this is Delcatty we’re dealing with; the ability to deny STAB will do a lot for her, but her defences are still awful).  It recharges whenever the Pokémon wearing it rests at a Pokémon Centre, or whenever she gets time to chill, if she’s wild – so it’s in Delcatty’s best interests to spend as much time relaxing and preening as possible!
 
I’d like to do more with Delcatty.  I’m acutely conscious that I’ve made a wild Pokémon rather reliant on an item which sounds like it should be man-made, and that the item itself is rather more fiddly than any effect that currently exists, as well as extremely powerful.  Assuming evolution is off the table, though, providing Delcatty with the support she needs necessitates… a fair bit of creativity, to say the least, because few Pokémon indeed are as impossibly bad as Delcatty.

The Top Ten Worst Pokemon Ever, #6: Plusle, Minun and Pachirisu

This isn’t fair.
 
I already did these ones.  I did them while I was talking about Emolga.  It isn’t FAIR, damnit!
 
…ladies and gentlemen; Plusle, Minun and Pachirisu.
 
Just for clarification, these three aren’t part of an evolutionary family.  Plusle and Minun seem to be different forms of one species, and Pachirisu is completely separate and wasn’t even introduced in the same game.  Plusle and Minun probably deserve to be a bit lower on the list and Pachirisu probably deserves to be a bit higher, but I’ve lumped them together because I hate all of them for the same reasons, namely: a) they’re increasingly annoying rehashes of Pikachu, and b) they suck.
 
What, you need more?
 
image
Pikachu’s pudgy yellow face is the emblem of the absurdly successful Pokémon franchise and is widely recognised even by people who barely know what a Pokémon is.  He has almost certainly made Nintendo more money than any other single Pokémon, and he can be summed up as “cute rodent with electrical cheek pouches,” so the obvious thing to do was make more cute rodents with electrical cheek pouches, right?  So obvious, in fact, that Plusle and Minun barely seem to be a different species from Pikachu at all.  I think they’re supposed to be based on rabbits, while Pikachu is traditionally described as a mouse, but all three are depicted so stylistically that that they ‘meet in the middle,’ so to speak.  Plusle and Minun are distinct from Pikachu in that they are frightfully unsuited to combat; instead they dedicate themselves to encouraging their partners (Plusle and Minun were released in Ruby and Sapphire, the generation that introduced the concept of double battles, and are shamelessly dedicated to promoting the new battle format).  There’s no word on how this would work outside of the context of a team of Pokémon under the command of a trainer – what do Plusle and Minun do in the wild when they’re attacked?  Pair up and cheer for each other?  In fact this is exactly what happens when you face pairs of trainers with Plusle and Minun in Ruby and Sapphire – they stand there and cast Helping Hand on each other, but neither of them actually does anything.  As for Pachirisu… her squirrel design, I think, represents at least an effort to distance her from the older Pokémon, and her habit of gathering loose fur into electrically-charged balls and keeping them amongst the berries she stores in her nest (presumably as a deterrent to thieves like Rattata) is, admittedly, a clever way of linking the squirrel concept to her Electric element.  As admirable as the attempt is, though, it’s missing the point; Pachirisu still isn’t a new idea, but an old one that they’ve dressed up.
image
As far as battle goes, Plusle and Minun can be treated as exactly the same Pokémon.  Minun is slightly tougher and Plusle slightly more powerful, but the differences are small and their movepools are almost identical.  You can actually attack with Plusle and Minun, using the decent coverage provided by Electric attacks alongside Grass Knot and the power boost offered by Nasty Plot, but they’re so comprehensively outclassed by Raichu, who has Focus Blast and superior stats in every area, that it just stops being funny.  What Raichu can’t do is use Baton Pass.  Plusle and Minun can’t make very effective use of Nasty Plot (or, for that matter, Agility) but I’m sure there’s another Pokémon on your team that would love to have one of those effects passed to it.  Again, if you really want to set up another Pokémon in this way, it’s hard to understand why you wouldn’t use a Pokémon that’s independently competent, like Ambipom or Mr. Mime (yes, I just called Mr. Mime “competent;” that’s what happens when you spend a couple of weeks thinking about the worst Pokémon in the game).  Their passive abilities, Plus and Minus, are just painful.  Pokémon with Plus and Minus give each other special attack bonuses in double battles, which was incredibly awkward when Plusle and Minun were the only Pokémon who had them.  In Black and White, many additional Pokémon gain these abilities through the Dream World and you can get the bonuses by using two Pokémon with the same ability; it no longer has to be one of each.  However, all of them are weak to Earthquake, which is popular in double battles because it can hit both opponents at once.  Any doubles strategy that relies on using two Pokémon together who are both weak to Ground attacks is… inadvisable.
 
Plusle and Minun are bad, but Pachirisu is a whole new level of stupidity.  She’s quite fast and has decent special defence, but the good news ends there.  Although Pachirisu does, strictly speaking, learn attacks, you are likely to do more damage by simply picking her up and throwing her, so I would not advise actually using them, with two exceptions.  The first is Super Fang, which slices a Pokémon’s remaining HP in half, no questions asked, and was once exclusive to Raticate, Pachirisu and Bibarel.  Watching Pachirisu go for an unsuspecting Pokémon’s throat with Super Fang was amusing until Heart Gold and Soul Silver handed out the attack to all and sundry via a move tutor.  Now it’s just sad, but she should keep using it anyway because it’s the best she’s got.  The other exception is Volt Switch, and you should use that not because Pachirisu is likely to hurt anything with it but because it will let her switch out after doing damage.  With careful use of this technique, you may be able to get through a match without Pachirisu suffering a horrendously painful death, and that, let’s be fair here, is the best you can hope for.  The other moves Pachirisu should use are Thunder Wave and Light Screen.  These moves are not particularly useful to her, but they are comparatively unlikely to get her killed.

Avanii's (http://avanii.deviantart.com/) less stylistic depiction of Plusle and Minun looked odd to me at first - they're almost catlike, don't you think? - but I'm beginning to like it more and more.


The main problem I face in trying to ‘fix’ these three Pokémon is that I don’t honestly believe they should be fixed.  Their entire concepts are flawed from the ground up and making them worthwhile seems an insurmountable task.
 
Challenge accepted.
 
To start with, I’m declaring that Plusle and Minun survive in the wild by forming symbiotic relationships with larger, tougher Pokémon.  They typically pair up with Pokémon that are strong physically but cannot jump or climb, often ones with poor eyesight, and use their agility and keener senses to help the larger Pokémon find food and avoid danger.  In fights, they cast showers of sparks at enemies to slow them down, disrupt their attacks and make them easier to target.  Plusle seek out slow, bulky partners like Sudowoodo or Donphan and use their superior senses and quick, accurate Thunderbolts to thin out groups of small predators, while Minun prefer more aggressive partners such as Breloom or Absol and focus on creating electric fields to protect them from strong attacks.  When a Plusle and a Minun meet in the wild, they often encourage their partners to become friends as well, which can lead to some… unusual groups of companions.  Older Plusle and Minun whose partners have no offspring often ‘adopt’ young, weak Pokémon of other species, so that they will one day grow into strong partners for their own offspring.  I bring this up out of a vague terror that I have no choice to evolve these two, and in my desperation for an idea that will avoid turning them into Raichu 2.0, I am tempted to ditch the electric mouse thing (or rabbit, or whatever generic rodent they’re supposed to be) and evolve them into electric kangaroos with a nurturing, maternal streak; as long as we keep our focus on the partnership theme and make sure they stay light and agile, we should be able to avoid stepping on Kangaskhan’s toes too much.  They probably need a few extra goodies in their movepools… let’s see, Minun deserves Reflect and maybe Amnesia so he can buff your defences more effectively; Plusle can have Work Up so she can help your mixed attackers shine and… let’s say Taunt so she can lock down support Pokémon.  To finish off, Plus and Minus need to be… y’know, useful.  In a double battle, Plus adds about 10% of Plusle’s special attack and speed to her partner’s, while Minus does the same for Minun’s defence and special defence (note to self: make sure Minun’s evolution has a physical defence score that doesn’t suck).  What’s more, those same bonuses are added to any Pokémon Plusle or Minun Baton Passes to, absolutely free!  They can buff their allies with Baton Pass even if they don’t have a spare turn to use Nasty Plot or something, and your team will love them for it.
 
There!  I did it!  I-
 
…oh, gods, Pachirisu’s still there, isn’t she?
 
Hmm.

Okay, even I have to admit that Fusiana's (http://fusiana.deviantart.com/) Pachirisu is pretty badass.We know she’s a hoarder; that normally implies a good memory and possibly intelligence (likewise my theory that those balls of charged fur are a trap for Pokémon trying to nick her stuff).  Going with that idea, I think I want Pachirisu to evolve into a kleptomaniac squirrel, maybe an Electric/Dark dual-type: change her colour scheme, but maybe keep the general ‘cute’ aesthetic because I imagine her gazing up at you adorably when you catch her stealing things.  These Pokémon have lived around humans for centuries, and although they are notorious as spies and pickpockets their presence is tolerated because they make useful errand-runners, and are highly proficient cleaners thanks to their bushy tails (historically they were best-known as chimneysweeps – I’m looking for an “1800’s English street urchin” feel, but trying to avoid being too blatant about it).  They mainly steal food but have also developed a liking in modern times for portable electronics and batteries, which they hide in nests scattered all around their territory.  It’s normally impossible to find all of one’s hiding places without capturing her and getting her to lead you to them.  Super Fang already makes Pachirisu a nightmare for defensive Pokémon, so we may as well play to that and give her Taunt.  How useful Torment, Snatch and Switcheroo would be for her is debateable, but let’s toss them in anyway (and, of course, she’ll need Thief for thematic reasons).  Also, for some reason Pachirisu doesn’t get Wish; she’s heavily defence-oriented and needs to be able to heal herself, and there’s no reason she shouldn’t have it, so let’s add that.  Lastly, her current abilities, Run Away and Pickup, actually have no in-battle effects at all.  I can’t think of anything to do with Pickup at the moment, but it makes sense that Run Away should allow Pachirisu (and the other Pokémon that have it) to escape from trapping techniques like Mean Look or Fire Spin, instead of only allowing them to escape from wild Pokémon without fail.

 
There; victory is mine!
 
I am never looking at any of these Pokémon again.
 
EDIT: I must have forgotten when I wrote this that Black and White did actually add an in-battle effect to the Pickup ability: if Pachirisu’s opponent uses a consumable item like a berry, she’ll run and snatch it (or a copy of it, or something)  for herself, assuming she isn’t holding an item already.  Can you say “absurdly situational”?

The Top Ten Worst Pokemon Ever, #7: Spinda

…great.  I’m only four Pokémon in, and Spinda’s already shown up.  Well, let’s get this over with…
 
Spinda is a crazy-eyed dancing midget panda, and that is yet another phrase I never imagined I would one day have to use.  Although Nintendo will never admit this because their name is built on being family-friendly, Spinda lurches through life in a state of perpetual drunkenness.  His movements are erratic, halting, and unpredictable, and in battle he relies mainly on stumbling around the attacks of his bewildered opponents as they try in vain to comprehend his demented tactics.  Despite appearances, Spinda actually maintains perfect mental clarity throughout his seemingly random dance; whether he moves like that on purpose to confuse his enemies or his thought processes are simply too warped for other Pokémon to follow is open for debate.  Much like Delibird and Castform, Spinda was designed as a gimmick Pokémon, and his gimmick is in his physical appearance: no two Spinda, the Pokédex confidently informs us, have exactly the same pattern of spots.  I don’t really think this is that interesting, but I… suppose it’s nice that they went to the effort of writing a little sequence of code to randomly generate four and a half billion different patterns of spots for Spinda to choose from… and then went to the effort of mentioning it in every Pokédex entry they ever wrote about Spinda, just so no-one would forget how clever they’d been… and then went to the effort of moving directly on to the next Pokémon in the Hoenn ‘dex, because the spot gimmick was obviously so awesome that Spinda didn’t need anything else, like an evolution…
 
…
 
…please kill me…

Seriously, though… this thing about the spots isn’t clever.  In the real world, that’s the norm, not the exception (giraffes, cows, cheetahs, penguins; the list goes on), and until I’m told otherwise I’ll assume that it’s the norm for Pokémon with spots as well (yes, Game Freak, I know that the sprites for other Pokémon don’t have four and a half billion different personalised spot patterns to choose from, but they don’t show other physical deviations like scars either – that doesn’t mean they aren’t there).  It’d be a lot more unusual if we’d been told that all Spinda have exactly the same pattern.  It still wouldn’t be particularly interesting unless they’d invented a fun reason for it, mind you, but it would at least get an eyebrow raise out of me.  I might be harping about Spinda’s spots rather excessively, but I think that as mature adults the important thing for us to remember here is that HE STARTED IT!

Norikumi (who has a great deal of brilliant Pokémon fanart at http://norikumi.deviantart.com/) shows us what Spinda does for fun: be ridiculous.

If Spinda’s peculiar fighting style intrigues you, I have good news and bad news.  The good news is that his support movepool is incredible.  Trick Room, Encore, Baton Pass, Calm Mind, Work Up, Trick, Wish, Fake Tears, Icy Wind, Hypnosis, Rapid Spin and Disable are all open to him, a list that contains a number of useful utility powers with applications in both aiding teammates and crippling the opposition.  Powerful Normal attacks like Return add offensive options to his repertoire.  Shadow Ball and Psychic are on offer if you want him to use special attacks, Rock Slide and Wild Charge if you want him to use physical attacks, and Sucker Punch for hitting stuff before it kills him.  If you’re prepared to get a Spinda from one of the older games, even more options open up.  Dream World Spinda have access to a very powerful combination indeed: Spinda’s Dream World ability, Contrary, reverses all stat changes applied to him, while Superpower, a devastating Fighting attack, cuts both attack and defence when used – a Contrary Spinda will actually get stronger and stronger each time he uses it.  Now for the bad news.  The bad news is that Spinda’s stats are awful.  He can’t take hits, he can’t dish them out, and he can’t even run away very fast.  Those support moves are nice, but if Spinda wants an opportunity to use them he needs to either outrun something or scare it off, and he doesn’t have the speed for the former, the firepower for the latter, or the bulk to take a hit when he fails.  To make things worse, Normal is just a painful type; Spinda’s primary attacks will never be super-effective, and his solitary resistance (actually an immunity) ensures that almost every Pokémon in the game will have a move capable of exploiting his brittle defences.  By virtue of his huge movepool, there are probably several ridiculously specific combinations of support techniques that only Spinda can pull off, but in any single role he’s almost certainly outclassed several times over (Espeon is a better Calm Mind-Passer than Mr. Mime, who’s better than Girafarig, who’s better than Spinda… you get the idea).  No-one wants a Rapid Spinner with Wish badly enough that Spinda becomes a better option than just picking independently useful Pokémon.
 
Part of the problem with Spinda is that his iconic powers focus on confusion.  Assuming your Spinda doesn’t come from the Dream World, he can have one of two confusion-related abilities: Own Tempo makes Spinda immune to confusion, Tangled Feet allows him to dodge attacks more effectively while confused, and his signature move, Teeter Dance, confuses all the other Pokémon currently in play (so in a double battle, that’s both of your opponents and your partner).  The reason this is part of his problem is that confusion is not something serious players use.  Like sleep, confusion has a variable duration that limits its effectiveness, but unlike sleep, confusion only disables an afflicted Pokémon half of the time, and can be cured just by switching out.  Facing an opponent who relies on confusion is a pain, as anyone who has ever set foot inside a cave in the Pokémon universe will attest, but relying on confusion yourself pays off only sporadically, and there are other strategies that offer a much more predictable return on your turns and moveslots.  When confusion is used in serious play, it’s normally stacked with other effects that can deny an opponent’s turn: paralysis and flinching (neither of which Spinda can use effectively).  Because confusion is an unusual tactic, abilities that defend against it are, at best, situational.  Spinda’s flavour is all about confusion, though… and I want his strategy to be the same.

Okay, this... this is not what I had in mind at all, but it's AWESOME. A lot of people who do Spinda evolutions seem to focus on the dazed/drunk aspect, and Spindrunk here, by Shinyscyther (http://shinyscyther.deviantart.com/), was by far the most hilarious one I found.Unlike Sunflora, there’s no reason Spinda shouldn’t evolve, so we have plenty of latitude to change his movepool, abilities, stats, and even type.  Spinda has two abilities that are worryingly situational at best, so I think the most straightforward thing to do is change them for new ones that fix Spinda’s main problem (the fact that confusion, compared to the five primary status effects, is simply not very debilitating) by imposing additional penalties on confused Pokémon while Spinda is in play.  Confusion represents a failure of a Pokémon’s strength of will, which is commonly connected with special attack or special defence, so I want one ability to automatically weaken both of those stats when a Pokémon becomes confused while Spinda is in play (the penalty stays in place after the confusion wears off, or if Spinda switches out, and can be triggered by self-induced confusion such as Petal Dance causes).  This ability is geared at making it impossible for a confused Pokémon to do anything but switch out to shake off the penalties.  For the other, let’s take the opposite route: confused Pokémon cannot switch out while Spinda is in play; they can only stay in and suffer.  If Spinda uses Baton Pass to switch out to another Pokémon, the confused Pokémon stays trapped (the same way Mean Look used to work and inexplicably no longer does), but only as long as it stays confused.  Spinda’s evolution should have strong defences so he can switch into some attacks without the benefit of resistances, and high speed to be able to fire off a Teeter Dance before being attacked, but his damage potential should remain low to encourage him to keep to his customary support role.  Likewise, his offensive movepool should not be notably expanded (his enormous support movepool should be enough for anyone once he has the stats to back it up).  As for flavour… Spinda’s evolution has spots that, impossibly, seem to move.  In fact, when researchers look at a photograph, it has no spots at all… but when the photograph is held up next to the real Pokémon, the spots seem to mysteriously reappear.  The light-twisting properties of its shimmering fur can cause people to see what they expect to see, rather than what is really there, and its form appears to distort subtly as it moves, causing headaches in anyone that tries to focus on it.  Other Pokémon who lock eyes with it feel compelled to imitate its unsteady, lurching walk, dazing them and limiting their movements, but however erratically this Pokémon walks, it always seems to reach its destination as quickly as if it had gone in a straight line.

 
I’m not sure what Spinda’s evolved form should look like (personally I want it to defy all attempts at nailing down its exact appearance, but there’s got to be something for the artwork and sprites), but I think that flavour and abilities like this are the way to go.  This little jerk should be able to bamboozle you just by looking at you, and then do what he came to do and be gone before you even know what’s happening.  As is, he simply fails not only to do that, but to do anything useful whatsoever.  I get that Game Freak thought the spot thing was cool (well, no, actually that’s a lie; I don’t get it at all, but let’s pretend that I do for the sake of argument) but it doesn’t mean that Spinda shouldn’t also be a powerful Pokémon – there is no such thing as too much awesome!

The Top Ten Worst Pokémon Ever, #8: Sunflora

I’ve searched long and hard to bring you the worst Grass Pokémon of all time, and I reckon I’ve found it.  Yes, I sincerely think that even Maractus is… um, that is to say… on balance, I really think that Maractus…
 
…look, I don’t want to say it.  I can’t actually go on the record as saying that Maractus might be… y’know… better than something.  I just couldn’t take it.  Haven’t I been through enough?
 
Okay, today’s Pokémon is Sunflora, who really is the worst Grass Pokémon ever, with the most boring design and arguably with the weakest powers as well.  Sunflora, the sunflower Pokémon, was released way back in Gold and Silver and is the evolved form of Sunkern, a tiny seed Pokémon whose unfortunate claim to fame is that she has the worst stats of any Pokémon in the entire game (yes, worse than Magikarp and Caterpie).  Sunkern is… bizarre.  The reason this entry is titled “Sunflora” and not “Sunkern and Sunflora” is that I honestly think Sunkern is an absolutely fascinating Pokémon.  Like Metapod, Sunkern spends her entire life preparing for evolution.  She eats nothing, rarely moves, drinks only morning dew, and can defend herself only by vigorously shaking her leaves in the general direction of her attackers.  She also, and I quote, “suddenly falls out of the sky in the morning.”  This… is probably the weirdest non sequitur the Pokédex has ever spat at me, which is saying something, and it keeps doing it; variations of the same line reoccur in game after game, like it’s the most important aspect of the design, but there’s never been any explanation of where they fall from or how they get there.  For all I know, Sunkern inflate themselves with helium while they sleep and gently drift into the sky each night before expelling the gas with a massive belch in the morning and plummeting back to earth.  That’s why I find myself unable to dislike Sunkern; I can’t muster any emotion towards her at all other than abject bewilderment.  Sunflora, on the other hand, I am capable of disliking with immense vigour.  The entire point of Sunflora’s design was that she gains nutrition and energy from sunlight and is extremely active during the day, but becomes inactive after sunset.  The first problem is that this is a baseline characteristic of all Grass Pokémon.  They’re plants, they all draw energy from the sun; even Gloom and Vileplume, who are based on one of the few plants in the world that doesn’t photosynthesise, learn Solarbeam and were eventually given the Chlorophyll ability in Ruby and Sapphire.  The second and much thornier problem (if I may be excused the pun) is that Sunflora wasn’t even the only Grass Pokémon introduced in Gold and Silver who was associated particularly closely with the sun.  The other was Bellossom, whose ritualistic dances to summon the sun are a far more interesting way of emphasising the solar connection than Sunflora’s frightfully generic characteristics.  There’s nothing to justify Sunflora’s existence.  I mean it.  I’ve checked.

That, then, is why I think Sunflora deserves everything she suffers; now to look at what exactly constitutes that suffering.  Sunflora is, in many ways, the epitome of “Grass-types don’t get nice things.”  Like many Grass Pokémon, she enjoys an excellent special attack stat.  Sadly, that’s all she has to offer; she’s delicate and one of the slowest Pokémon in the game, so many opponents can simply outrun her and stomp her into the dirt.  Sunflora’s passive abilities are the key to her survival; Chlorophyll doubles her speed in bright sunlight, while Solar Power boosts her special attack in bright sunlight by burning up a bit of her health each turn.  Clearly, as her design would lead us to expect, Sunflora needs Sunny Day to operate effectively (she can either set it up herself or have another Pokémon that’s actually competent do it for her).  Solar Power is great for offense and will allow Sunflora to rip through her enemies like tissue paper with Solarbeam or Leaf Storm, but it exacerbates her frailty and, unlike Chlorophyll, doesn’t address her biggest problem – her lack of speed.  Chlorophyll, on the other hand, doesn’t give Sunflora the power she needs to muscle through strong opponents before they murder her; moreover, Sunflora is so slow to begin with that many Pokémon still outrun her at twice her normal speed, and a lot of them can one-shot her without difficulty.  As a Grass-type, Sunflora’s offensive movepool is very limited outside of Grass attacks; the only bright spot is Earth Power, which allows her to take revenge upon Fire- and Poison-types, but you have to jump through hoops to get it; she learns it from a move tutor on Heart Gold and Soul Silver.  Sunkern from the Dream World may have Earth Power, but they’ll also have Sunflora’s Dream World ability, Early Bird (and if you thought Sunflora was useless when she had to choose between Chlorophyll and Solar Power, wait until you see what she’s like with neither).  Even with Earth Power, her only option against most Bug- and Flying-types is Sludge Bomb (heaven help her if she comes up against a Crobat or something).  She has some of the support moves you’d expect from a Grass-type, but she’s too slow and too fragile for them to save her; even Leech Seed, Ingrain and sun-boosted Synthesis can’t help her if she’s going to drop after one hit anyway, and many physical attacks will drop her.  Light Screen keeps her safe from special attacks, at least, if she can get it up fast enough (which she can’t).

Not quite what I had in mind, but you get the general idea. This Grass/Fire evolution of Sunflora is the work of Ryknow, whose Pokémon fanart can be found at http://www.smogon.com/forums/showthread.php?t=64295

Sunflora practically embodies everything that has ever gone wrong with the Grass type… and now, heaven help me, I have to try to fix her.  The major difficulty is that I don’t think I’m allowed to evolve Sunflora.  Sunkern evolves through use of a Sun Stone, and long-established convention dictates that once a Pokémon uses an evolutionary stone, it’s the end of the line – so we have to change something else.  Chlorophyll and Solar Power are already really good abilities.  That’s not to say we can’t write a better one, but it would have to be pretty obscene; it might be fun to try a kind of über-Chlorophyll that grants priority (like Quick Attack) to all attacks of the user’s own type.  What I want to do is retcon her into a Grass/Fire dual-type (giving her very strong coverage to use with the ability I’m suddenly going to call Solar Vigour) and liberally splash her artwork with reds, oranges and some flame imagery.  According to this version of Sunflora, Sunkern are born when the rays of the morning sun strike seeds blowing on the wind, which is why they mysteriously drop out of the sky every morning.  They carry a glowing spark of sunfire inside their bodies, but because of their weakness it quickly goes out and they have to store and conserve their energy to reignite it when they evolve into Sunflora.  Sunflora collect and amplify solar energy to fuel their fire, but they cannot store that energy, so they become dormant at night to keep their fire from burning out.  During the day, their flowers shine like tiny suns and encourage other plants to grow rapidly.  Sunflora have to live near water, because their ability to amplify sunlight sometimes causes soil to become parched in summer (one of the few salient points of Sunflora’s original ‘dex entries is that she needs a lot of water to be healthy – which, again, is fairly standard for a plant, but I’m going to run with it).  Unfortunately for me, I don’t think it’s technically ‘allowed’ to retcon a Pokémon’s type (it happened with Magneton in Gold and Silver, but only because the Steel type didn’t exist before then), which means that I can only have my Fire-typed Sunflora either by breaking the evolution rule or by retconning the way Sunkern evolves, which is likewise unprecedented (Feebas gained a new path to evolution in Black and White, the Prism Scale, but technically the old way still works too – it’s just that the mechanic supporting it has dropped into obscurity).  I think my rewrite is still better than what Sunflora’s got at the moment even without Grass/Fire typing, and would just about fit if she gained Weather Ball or Heat Wave, either of which would dramatically improve her coverage. I’m also tempted to give her Agility, since Sunflora is characterised by frenetic activity during the daylight hours and honestly shouldn’t be slower than a tortoise in a sack race; provided she had someone else to set up Sunny Day for her, Agility might make Sunflora fast enough for Solar Power to be a realistic option.
 
Honestly, I think we’ve been written into a corner with Sunflora.  Except for giving her Weather Ball and Agility, which I don’t think would be enough on their own (they’ll help, but Sunflora needs something that will fundamentally change her fighting style), every suggestion I can think of is forbidden by an unwritten law of Pokémon design.  I advocate writing down these laws, and then burning them because they are dumb.  For now, though, I have to move on to my next unmitigated disaster…

The Top Ten Worst Pokemon Ever, #9: Castform

Much as Delibird was (I believe) the best-designed Pokémon in my Top Ten, Castform is arguably the strongest (and if that doesn’t send shivers down your spine, nothing will).  Introduced in Ruby and Sapphire, Castform is a Pokémon created by Hoenn’s Weather Institute to serve a very specific purpose: predicting and manipulating the weather.  To this end, he possesses a unique ability that is his claim to fame: Forecast.  In calm, overcast weather, Castform is a wholly unremarkable Normal-type, but Forecast causes his form and element to change with the weather; he becomes a Water-type in heavy rain, an Ice-type in snow or hail and a Fire-type under clear skies.  His signature move, Weather Ball, changes too; giving him an excellent Water, Ice or Fire attack as appropriate (the Water and Fire versions of Weather Ball also get power boosts from the routine effects of rain and sun, respectively, becoming very strong indeed); it can also become a Rock attack in a sandstorm, but Castform himself lacks a form for that weather condition, so the attack itself will be weaker and Castform will have to expose himself to sandstorm damage in order to use it.  Weather Ball, Forecast and his wide selection of other special attacks make it relatively easy to tailor Castform for use on a rain, sun or hail team, but I don’t think he has the defensive bulk to pull off the set Game Freak probably had in mind when they created him: [Weather Ball – Sunny Day – Rain Dance – Hail], switching between weather conditions and forms as appropriate.  Probably better to stick with just one, and supplement Weather Ball with Thunder (if you’re using rain), Thunderbolt (if you aren’t), Solarbeam (if you’re using sun), Energy Ball (if you aren’t), Fire Blast, Scald, Ice Beam, or Shadow Ball.  Like I said, Castform has a lot of choice; he’s unlikely to get far as anything other than a special-attacking weather controller, but the diversity he can manage within that role is surprisingly impressive.


Castform's four different weather forms posing as a team, by Tazsaints (http://tazsaints.deviantart.com/).

Now, don’t get me wrong; Castform is bad.  He’s fairly slow, relatively frail and, unless he can score a super-effective hit, unlikely to do much damage with anything besides a sun- or rain-boosted Weather Ball.  However, he’s only garden-variety bad, not gouge-out-your-own-eyeballs bad.  Unlike Delibird, you can actually use Castform in a variety of roles.  He’ll be outclassed in just about all of them, and by his very nature he’s actually more vulnerable to other Pokémon that like to mess with the weather, such as Politoed and Ninetales, but he’s also capable of putting on a respectable performance now and again.  Why, then, am I spending this entry talking about Castform instead of one of the many Pokémon out there who are even more horrible?  Well, truth be known, I have long regarded him as one of the blandest Pokémon in existence.  In order to be totally fair to Castform, I must point readers to the relevant instalment of George Hutcheon’s BulbaNews column, On the Origin of Species (http://bulbanews.bulbagarden.net/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species:_Castform – seriously, go read it; it’s not long), which traces the poufy, grey-white Castform we know to a traditional Japanese weather-charm called a teruteru bozu (‘sunshine monk’).  In principle this is a perfectly solid idea, but I’m still inclined to say that it’s been handled poorly.  Aside from the weather manipulation idea, which was the whole point, the only thing Castform takes from the teruteru bozu is the most boring thing about them: their physical appearance.  Why would you create a Pokémon in imitation of an entirely nondescript doll made of white tissue paper?  If it had been my work, I’d say that the dull appearance was a necessary evil to get at the interesting stuff – the folktales and customs behind these things.  However, not only does the traditional lore associated with teruteru bozu have no impact on Castform’s design whatsoever (the Pokédex just repeats “Castform’s appearance changes with the weather” ad nauseam), Game Freak have managed to lock themselves out of using those ideas in future by declaring that Castform was an artificial Pokémon created by the Weather Institute – a glorified barometer, not something that could ever have had any impact on Hoenn’s cultural development or mythology.  So, with respect to George Hutcheon, I still think Castform is a terrible idea!
 
All right, money where my mouth is and all that… if I’m so clever, how would I have changed Castform?  Well, as you may have guessed, my first move would be to retcon that idiocy about Castform being a creation of the Hoenn Weather Institute, because that doesn’t make sense anyway.  Why would a bunch of meteorologists have the expertise to create a new Pokémon?  Having a bunch of Castform in the Institute for research purposes I could buy, but creating them from scratch has got to be ridiculously high-level genetics.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to read up on where teruteru bozu come from, culturally speaking, and try to rewrite Castform based on that…

Edface (http://edface.deviantart.com/) shows us that even Castform can, in fact, be awesome.

…okay.  Got it.  So, Castform.  Castform have the ability to draw atmospheric water into themselves or expel water back into the air, allowing them to summon or banish clouds within a small area.  They can also break down pollutants and purify the water they absorb.  Castform use their powers to regulate weather patterns and encourage the plants they eat to grow tall and produce lots of berries.  Because they cannot create rain, only move it around, they normally travel a great deal to manage the climate of larger regions, drawing water away from places with too much rain and bringing it to drier areas.  Their passage is welcomed by humans, who offer Castform gifts and treats to entice them to return often, because villages in Castform’s territory nearly always enjoy successful harvests.  However, if Castform are attacked or insulted, they may strike back by causing droughts, or even by freezing rainclouds to create hailstorms.
 
Mechanically speaking, Castform is just about the only Pokémon on this list that I think could be made to work without evolving it; you could probably make him at least usable by tacking a couple of rider effects onto Forecast – I’d say first, that as long as Castform is actually on the field, he has absolute control of the weather and all other Pokémon attempting to change it will fail (so Tyranitar, Hippowdon and Politoed can no longer block Castform’s Solarbeam just by switching in), and second, that all of Castform’s weather effects are permanent until overridden, like the effects created by the Drought and Drizzle abilities.  Of course, you could also evolve Castform to rid us of his tissue-paper-doll blandness (bearing in mind that those changes to Forecast might well be too much if Castform actually had good stats to back them up; I might still make the first change, but I think I would leave the second).  Actually I’d be tempted to evolve him into a Dragon or pseudo-dragon, a la Gyarados, given the associations dragons have with rivers and water in Asian myth, and the appearance of dragons in Japanese weather stories.  Alternatively, he could shift further towards a humanoid design, to reflect the idea of itinerant weather-priests that made me suggest Castform should be a habitual wanderer; this also allows us to keep closer to the teruteru bozu that originally inspired Castform’s appearance (at the moment I’m thinking of an ethereal figure somewhat like Gardevoir).  Either of these ideas could be combined with an evolutionary split like Eevee’s, into forms that specialise in sun, rain and hail, carrying the Drought, Drizzle and Snow Warning abilities for automatic and permanent weather effects.  Part of me wants to keep Forecast on any evolution that Castform gains because it’s so much the core of his design, however, the split evolution would allow me to rewrite Forecast as I suggested without concern for making it overpowered, while his newfound “not fully evolved” status would give Castform himself the option to buff his meagre defences by holding an Eviolite.  Between Forecast and an Eviolite, Castform might actually be able to hold his own even against his more powerful evolutions (much as, for instance, Chansey can fulfil certain specialised roles more effectively than Blissey).
 
It could be argued that I’m inherently prejudiced against Castform because of my flagrant ignorance of Japanese culture, and that would probably be fair.  The thing is, though… nothing about Castform suggests that that’s where his origins lie; it’s almost like the designers wanted it to be an inside joke, or something, and once he’s stripped of those cultural associations, there’s nothing left.  He’s just a greyish-white blob that can turn into a cartoon sun, a raindrop, or a snowcloud.  Given the sheer prominence of weather-manipulation in Ruby and Sapphire, with the advent of Groudon and Kyogre, I would have thought that putting slightly more effort into making Castform interesting was a no-brainer; this little guy should by all rights be one of the flagship Pokémon of those games, not the barely-used gimmick he is.

The Top Ten Worst Pokémon Ever, #10: Delibird

Alone of all the Pokémon on my Top Ten list, Delibird makes me feel a little guilty about putting him on here, which is why I’ve shunted him all the way down to #10, of course.  Why?  Well, on my very first play-through of Silver version, all those years ago, I had a Delibird.  He was absolutely useless, bless his little heart, but he tried his best and I loved him for it (I was young and naïve, and still believed the Nintendo propaganda that any Pokémon could be powerful if you worked hard enough at it).  A rare Ice Pokémon found in the coldest part of Johto, Delibird is a cute if somewhat awkward-looking red-and-white bird with a long, wide tail that he wraps around himself to serve as a sack for carrying food.  He looks a little like a penguin, and some aspects of his design make me think of puffins and similar seabirds, nesting on rocky cliff-faces and carrying food to their chicks all day.  Delibird aren’t actually marine Pokémon; they live in high mountains, although I suspect that the specialised tail is an indicator that they naturally have a very wide foraging range, possibly covering many terrain types.  They seem to be an inherently altruistic species, as they have a reputation for sharing the food they’ve gathered with lost travellers.  In various contexts outside of the main series of games, Delibird are often employed by humans as messengers and couriers because of their natural delivery habits and unusual intelligence.  The associations with delivery make clear the real inspiration for Delibird’s design: with his red-and-white colour scheme, his sack of goods, and even a white feathery ‘beard,’ this is nothing other than the Pokémon Santa Claus.  It’s a strange idea, to be sure, but it hasn’t been pushed beyond the boundaries of good taste; Delibird’s dedication to collection and delivering food to his offspring is a sensible way of translating the gift-giving idea onto an animal, especially since it exaggerates the habits of many real birds rather than coming completely out of nowhere.  Physically, Delibird looks a bit odd, and you have to wonder how he manages to fly with those penguin flippers (I suppose it doesn’t require that much more suspension of disbelief than, say, Dragonite with his dinky little wings), but the bright scarlet of his body and the white of his downy tufts make him look cheerful, cute, and most importantly different from all the other innumerable bird Pokémon.  What I’m saying, in short, is that my guilt about putting Delibird in the Top Ten Worst Pokémon Ever, even at number ten, isn’t just about my own fond memories of the little guy; I genuinely think this is a well-executed concept.  If that’s the case, you may well ask, then what on earth did he do to deserve this treatment?


Artwork of the Delibird card from the Heart Gold and Soul Silver set of the Pokémon trading card game.

To be blunt, although I may have a soft spot for Delibird, he is undeniably one of the most useless Pokémon ever created.  To start with, his stats are terrible; in fact, Delibird has the worst stats of any adult Pokémon (discounting Ditto, Smeargle and Shedinja, and tied with… one of the other Pokémon on my Top Ten list).  His speed is barely average, his attack and special attack scores are worse, and his defences are nothing short of appalling.  To add insult to injury, left to his own devices Delibird will only ever learn one attack: his phenomenally bad signature move, Present, a Normal-type attack with variable power; sometimes it’ll be terrible, sometimes it’ll be decent and occasionally it will do a great deal of damage… but, then again, sometimes it will actually heal its target.  Needless to say, if you’re brave enough ever to use Delibird, you should avoid Present at all costs and teach him something worthwhile.  The trouble is, there’s very little you can teach him.  Since we’ve established that Delibird is marginally less terrible offensively than defensively, you might look at his available special attacks… and learn that he can only manage Ice attacks, plus Future Sight (a Psychic attack which is admittedly powerful, but doesn’t hit until two turns after being used).  His physical movepool is arguably better; Ice Punch is weaker than Ice Beam, but if you’re importing Delibird from an earlier game, old TMs and move tutors give him access to Focus Punch for punishing Steel-types, Seed Bomb for Water-types, and Body Slam to spread paralysis (as well as Signal Beam and, if you’re desperate, Water Pulse on the special side), none of which make me jump up and down with excitement, but Delibird needs everything he can find.  Even though Delibird himself is even more inept with physical attacks than special attacks, his Hustle trait compensates by letting him trade accuracy for power on all of his physical moves (and since Aerial Ace can never miss anyway, that’s win-win for Delibird).  The sad thing is that even with Hustle, Delibird’s attacks are fairly impressive but not game-changing, especially considering that Brick Break, Ice Punch and Aerial Ace are quite low-power anyway, and that missing even once will probably doom Delibird thanks to his papery defence stats.  The two alternative abilities to Hustle, Insomnia and Vital Spirit, do exactly the same thing, just to troll the poor bird – they grant Delibird immunity to sleep, which is useful, don’t get me wrong, but only a minor benefit, and it’s hard to forego Hustle for that since it represents the closest thing to a niche Delibird can ever hope to attain.  Delibird’s support movepool is, if that’s possible, even worse, with but a single gem: Rapid Spin.  Rapid Spin clears away the nasty pointed things scattered by the very popular Stealth Rock, Spikes and Toxic Spikes techniques, which would otherwise cause damage to your Pokémon every time you switched one in.  There are perhaps a dozen Rapid Spinners in the entire game, and Delibird bears the dubious honour of being the worst one, since he’s the only one afflicted with a double-weakness to Stealth Rock, and therefore loses a full 50% of his health just from switching in while the move is in effect.

Delibird portrayed in a more realistic style by Luckybaka (http://luckybaka.deviantart.com/). I sort of wanted a picture of a fake Delibird evolution, but I couldn't find any that I liked; this is very well done, though.

Now, then: how do we fix this?  With the right attacks or abilities, you can go a long way on surprisingly little, but I think Delibird’s stats are just too far gone, barring some sort of absurd custom item or ability, which means we have little choice but to evolve him.  I am loathe to do so, since much of the appeal of Delibird’s art is in its neatness and simplicity, and I’m not sure where evolution could take the design; in particular I am worried about the risk of inflating the Santa Claus influences, which would quickly make the whole thing irredeemably tacky.  Again, though, there is little choice; Delibird needs a boost to all of his stats.  The second thing to do is repair that dreadful signature move.  Delibird is the Delivery Pokémon, and Present signifies an attack using the eclectic contents of his delivery sack.  There’s already an attack that lets a Pokémon throw its held item – Fling, a Dark attack – and Delibird actually learns it; he just doesn’t want to use it because the only item that does enough damage to make a single-shot Dark attack worthwhile is an Iron Ball, the weight of which strips Delibird of the solitary advantage his Ice/Flying typing gives him (immunity to Ground attacks) until after he’s thrown it.  Flinging a Flame Orb or Toxic Orb does only minor damage but provides a reliable, accurate burning or poisoning attack; again though, those items will make Delibird suffer as long as he holds them.  Now, we’ve established that Delibird’s Dream World ability, Insomnia, is completely redundant to one of his regular abilities, Vital Spirit (do you see where I’m going with this yet?).  So, when he evolves, let’s have Insomnia change to Klutz, Lopunny’s ability, which renders a Pokémon both unable to use items and immune to their negative effects.  Then, let’s rewrite Present into a version of Fling that can be used multiple times; Delibird doesn’t have just one Iron Ball, he’s got a whole bag of them (also, change the dumb rule that says a Pokémon with Klutz can’t use Fling).  Lopunny takes advantage of Klutz by using the Switcheroo technique to swap harmful items onto her opponents while stripping them of their beneficial items; Delibird is going to take advantage of it by simply bombarding targets with whatever dangerous cargo he’s carrying.  Fighting with items is exactly what Delibird’s flavour and signature move suggest he should be good at doing; this would allow him to do it properly.  He’s going to need some more attacks as well (I’d suggest U-Turn, Acrobatics, Air Slash, Light Screen, Stockpile, Endeavour, Baton Pass and Agility, for starters) but that’s the substance of what I’d want to change.
 
Unlike most of the Pokémon in my Top Ten, I really genuinely want to see Delibird succeed… I just know in my heart it’s never going to happen.  So I’m going to have to take out my frustrations on the other nine!

Next time on Pokémaniacal: The Top Ten Worst Pokémon Ever

All right, let’s lay some ground rules here.  Like I always did when I was working through the Unova Pokédex, I’ll do my best to examine all aspects of a Pokémon before assigning it a place in the Top Ten: I’m not putting anything on this list unless it is both a terrible concept and irredeemably pathetic – which automatically disqualifies pretty much everything from Black and White, because even though some of them were shockers, all of them, except for maybe Watchog, are an order of magnitude more useful than everything on this list.  Think about that for a moment.  Think back to some of my most vitriolic entries – Unfezant, Maractus, Emolga, Garbodor, for goodness’ sake – and let that sink in.  In terms of blinding stupidity, many of them rival or even surpass some of the wastes of oxygen on my list, but none of them are anywhere near as blitheringly incompetent.  Let that sink in.  Conversely, a few legitimately terrible Pokémon have escaped inclusion on this list by being more quirky and interesting than the ones I’ll be covering over the next month; they are the Pokémon that belong on my wish list for future evolutions, while the ones you’ll find here just need to die in a fire.
My other big rule is that anything that evolves doesn’t count.  I could spend an entry wittering about how useless Magikarp is, but the fact is, one day that Magikarp might evolve into Gyarados and come after me for revenge, and I don’t want that to happen.  More to the point, the suckiness that is Magikarp was deliberately intended as a counterweight to the awesomeness that is Gyarados, so it’s not even as if Magikarp is weak because of incompetence on the designers’ part; that was done on purpose, and there was a valid reason for it.  A few Pokémon would once have been absolute shoe-ins for this list until Game Freak, apparently realising the sins they had committed against the poor things, granted them evolutions in later generations.  Nosepass gets an honourable mention here for taunting me by evolving into Probopass in Diamond and Pearl, becoming far too strong for me to consider him seriously for the Top Ten while at the same time becoming the stupidest Pokémon of the generation for two generations running, which I hadn’t even thought possible.
Why am I doing this?  Well, as I’ve explained in the past, I consider myself to be on Game Freak’s side in that I want Pokémon to keep getting better and still genuinely believe that they’re the best people for the job… more or less.  The fact is, though, writing about stuff I like gets repetitive after a while, and writing about stuff that’s merely average is boring from the start… but being able to work up a really good bit of bile against something is far more interesting.
I think it’s time for a good old-fashioned holy war…

Champions of the Pokémon League, Part 6: Alder

…y’know, after the scale of my last project, finishing this one just doesn’t have the same inherent drama.  Then again, I’m a little scared to try for something bigger, for fear I may rope myself into reviewing every Pokémon ever and die before I finish.  Hrm.  Anyway, on with the show!
 
The Champion of the Unova region, the New York-inspired setting of Black and White, is an exuberant, light-hearted giant of a man named Alder, who is the Pokémon universe’s equivalent to Bear Grylls.  The man jumps off a cliff, for heaven’s sake, quite casually, without comment, and apparently for no other reason than that it was faster than walking.  Not content with sitting in his palace at the Pokémon League waiting for challengers, Alder prefers to spend his time exploring Unova, and claims to know “every corner” of the region; it is on just such a trip that he first meets you and Cheren, one of the two rival characters of Black and White.  Cheren is… well, I wouldn’t call him a jerk, to be fair; compared to Blue he’s an absolute saint, but he tends to look down on people who don’t take life as seriously as he does, and he’s extremely focussed on becoming a more powerful trainer, to the exclusion of all else.  Cheren’s great ambition in life is to become the Champion, and he’s not impressed when he meets the current Champion, in his words, “goofing off” at a festival outside Nimbasa City, feeling that such frivolity is beneath the dignity of this noble office.  Alder responds by questioning why Cheren wants to become Champion in the first place and what he thinks the whole point is, something Cheren doesn’t seem to have ever thought about.  Another day, after Alder watches you defeat Cheren in a battle, Cheren is disturbed and annoyed that Alder described it as “a fine battle,” assuming that Alder was pleased he had lost (because, after all, what about a battle could possibly matter besides who won and who lost?).  You later learn that Alder is interested in Cheren’s motives because he sees something of himself in Cheren; when Alder was younger, he was equally obsessed with becoming stronger, an obsession shared by his Pokémon partner.  In time, though, Alder’s Pokémon (whose species is never mentioned, though it could conceivably have been one of Unova’s three starter Pokémon) became sick and died, causing Alder’s outlook to change.  He now views strength for its own sake as transient and ultimately pointless, and focuses more on enjoying life.


So, if Alder isn’t still the Champion because he wants to keep getting stronger, why does he have the job, anyway?  Alder is the first Champion who is explicitly identified as such before you challenge him, so his involvement in the story of Black and White gives us a closer look at the responsibilities of a Champion and the significance of the position.  Alder is important to the plot because Team Plasma’s spiritual leader N, a strange teenager who wants to free all Pokémon from human oppression, thinks he can convince Unova’s people to side with him by defeating the greatest champion of the opposite set of beliefs (that humans and Pokémon are both stronger together) – I think N’s desire to prove the validity of his beliefs to himself plays into this too.  Alder is the Champion, and the Champion is supposed to be the most powerful trainer as well as the most committed to the philosophies of Pokémon training, so defeating Alder (as N eventually does, with the help of one of the legendary dragons, Reshiram and Zekrom) should represent a decisive symbolic victory in Team Plasma’s campaign to separate humans and Pokémon.  Alder, for his part, recognises the importance of this challenge to the wider ideological conflict, and meets it with all of the considerable vigour he can muster.  The trouble is that Alder isn’t as dedicated to his beliefs as N is.  Ghetsis, Team Plasma’s ‘power behind the throne,’ taunts him at one point by suggesting that Alder hasn’t fought a real battle since his partner Pokémon died, and that he’s avoiding his responsibilities by spending his time travelling Unova and leaving the Elite Four to take care of things at the Pokémon League.  What’s more, he seems to strike a nerve by suggesting that Alder, of all people, should agree with them, because of his memories of the pain of losing his first Pokémon.  My suspicion is that the death of his partner, although it taught Alder to enjoy life with his Pokémon, also shook his faith in the idea of Pokémon training.  Alder ‘believes’ that people and Pokémon should stay together, but N has an absolute conviction burnt into his very soul that they should be separated – and this is why Alder loses when N challenges him.  It takes your subsequent defeat of N, with your own legendary dragon at your side, to restore Alder’s conviction and turn him back into the trainer he used to be – the trainer you face when you return to the Pokémon League for the second time.


Okay, I found this on the internet and it's brilliant but I cannot for the life of me figure out who the artist is. This piece of fanart shows Alder in the company of his his entire team. Clockwise from the top right: Volcarona, Vanilluxe (who seems to be wilting under Volcarona's radiance), Accelgor, Bouffalant, Escavalier and Druddigon.

Alder is like Blue and Cynthia in that he has no avowed preference for any given element, but when you actually fight him it seems that, like Steven, he actually does like to use mainly Pokémon from a single type, and it’s just about the last one you’d expect: Alder trains Bug-types.  None of this namby-pamby Beautifly-and-Dustox nonsense for him either; Alder is a Real Man and his three Bug-types are a ninja, an armoured knight, and a sun god.  Accelgor makes a frustrating lead to face, being faster than everything and capable of stealing the attacks you’re about to use with Me First (Alder isn’t that good at predicting attacks, though, so Accelgor will often mimic an attack that would be weaker than one of his own anyway), while Escavalier is simply a pain to kill, with only one weakness (Fire), good defences, and some powerful attacks.  Volcarona is Alder’s signature Pokémon, and he seems to have styled his hair in imitation of it.  Volcarona are always tricky Pokémon to deal with because of Quiver Dance, which can buff their special attack, special defence and speed all at once, but Alder’s Volcarona has a tendency to burn itself out with Overheat, so it will normally become a much less significant threat if you can just string it along until it’s incinerated most of its own special attack score.  You’ll also get a free turn now and then courtesy of the recharge time for Volcarona’s Hyper Beam, a move that was a brilliant finisher in Red and Blue but has become a complete trap since Gold and Silver because of mechanical changes (a trap that every Champion since then has fallen into with gusto).  Volcarona’s terrible moveset notwithstanding, these are Pokémon I can respect.  The rest of Alder’s team… not so much.  If you remember my entry on Bouffalant, you’ll know I didn’t like it much, but I actually think Bouffalant was a strikingly appropriate choice for Alder: like its trainer, Bouffalant is big, loud, and has ridiculous hair.  Heck, Bouffalant could practically have been his signature Pokémon (and I must grudgingly admit that it can be problematic if you’re not ready for it).  Druddigon is the sort of Pokémon that I like to describe as “not unusable” in order to spare its feelings; Alder has exacerbated Druddigon’s many issues by giving it two Dark attacks (Payback and Night Slash), the kind of redundancy you quickly learn to avoid in the real world.  Alder’s final Pokémon is Vanilluxe, whom I can scarcely bear to dignify with a mention.  I think its presence on Alder’s team proves that the designers really did think it was a good Pokémon simply because of its high stats, but all it really does is throw into harsh relief what a terrible Pokémon Vanilluxe actually is.
 
Remember how I thought that Steven had an excellent team but was terribly portrayed as a character?  Well, Alder is just the opposite; he’s a great character who fits into the story of Black and White extremely well and is probably the most interesting Champion of the lot in terms of characterisation, but his team is full of holes!  He utterly fails to use most of his Pokémon to their full potential, and when he succeeds, it’s only because the Pokémon in question have so little potential to begin with!  Luckily, this is a much easier problem to fix than a boring character; I’ve got my fingers crossed for a slightly less poorly-designed team for Alder in the inevitable Grey Version.
 
So, that’s the Champions!  As always, I hope my rants have amused you; check back in a couple of days, when I will begin the month-long course of self-flagellation that is my list of the Top Ten Worst Pokémon Ever…

Champions of the Pokémon League, Part 5: Cynthia

Just to prove that the Pokémon League is an equal-opportunity employer, here’s the series’ only female Champion to date: Cynthia, master of the Sinnoh League.  Of all the Champions across all the different versions of the game, Cynthia is dearest to my heart, because, as of her debut in Diamond and Pearl, she was quite possibly the only halfway legitimate archaeologist in the entire Pokémon universe.  She seems to think of herself as a Pokémon trainer first and a historian second, but her research is clearly important to her and she spends every free moment studying the history and mythology of ancient ruins around Sinnoh, like the Spear Pillar.  If Cynthia’s glorious trench coat and its luxuriant fur trim represent what qualifies as casual attire for her, she has probably not spent a full day on a dig site in a very long time.  Nonetheless, I can scarcely put into words how refreshing it was to meet someone in these games who was genuinely interested in the Pokémon world’s ruins for their historical significance and not because of the obsession with ancient treasure that drove the Ruin Maniacs of Ruby and Sapphire.  Cynthia’s function in the plot is mainly to provide hints and exposition about the ruins you encounter, but she also has an inexplicable tendency to give you things at random for her own impenetrable reasons, like the HM for Cut when you first meet her in Eterna City, along with (only on Platinum) a Togepi egg, which is a remarkably silly thing for a Pokémon master to give to a total stranger (then again, it’s well-established that Pokémon masters can recognise, or think they can recognise, talented trainers by sight).  Later she turns up again and gives you a few doses of Secretpotion to allow you to clear one of the most absurd obstacles in video game history: a blockade of Psyduck whose chronic headaches have rooted them to the spot on the road to Celestic Town.  These headaches are not going to get better on their own, there is no other way to move the Psyduck, and Cynthia definitely isn’t going to give them the medicine herself; her research is far too important for her to waste time with such trivialities.  This is doubly inexplicable because as soon as you give them the Secretpotion, Cynthia shows up to congratulate you and gives you your next assignment: to return a necklace (some kind of artefact she’s been studying) to her grandmother in Celestic Town.  Wouldn’t this sequence have made far more sense if she’d given you the Secretpotion and the necklace at the same time?  As far as Diamond and Pearl go, Cynthia fades into the background after that – almost to the point that meeting her again at the Pokémon League creates the same reaction as Steven does; you remember that you used to know who she was, but you’re not sure why you ever cared.
 
Cynthia is similar to Steven, in some ways; although a tremendously adept and unfailingly noble Pokémon trainer, she’s almost more concerned with her own studies and interests, in contrast to characters like Lance and Alder, for whom Pokémon are very much the centre of their personal worldviews.  Again like Steven, Cynthia isn’t a notably vibrant or excitable person either.  The difference is that in Cynthia’s case (in Platinum, anyway; Diamond and Pearl do nearly as bad a job with her as Ruby and Sapphire do with Steven) it actually works because her personal research is directly related to what’s going on in the plot – Dialga and Palkia, the legendary Pokémon summoned by Cyrus to end the world, feature in the myths Cynthia studies, as do Uxie, Mesprit and Azelf, the spirit Pokémon that try to stop him.  She’s the one who figures out what’s going on when Giratina appears on Mount Coronet and drags Cyrus into hell, the one who explains why you need to follow them (the portal into Giratina’s freaky chaos dimension is apparently destabilising the real world, and needs to be closed), and the one who goes through the portal with you.  Finally, she manages to understand something of the nature of the other dimension where Cyrus fails; Cyrus believes that defeating Giratina will destroy its world, which, as our world’s twin, was the only thing keeping it stable as Dialga and Palkia attempted to dissolve it.  After you defeat him, he encourages you to go on and fight Giratina, which was what he’d planned to do anyway.  Cynthia also encourages you to fight Giratina, believing that if you can master it, you will calm it down and repair the damage done to the connection between the worlds (why she doesn’t deal with it herself will have to remain a mystery for the ages); she turns out to be right.  In short, she does a heck of a lot more than Steven (again, at least she does in Platinum).  There’s also an interesting scene with her in the Celestic Ruins if you return there after the epilogue, in which Cynthia discusses her theories on the meaning of the designs in the ruins, and how the appearance of Giratina at the Spear Pillar has altered her interpretation, hinting at the existence of Arceus, the Original One.  I would be concerned that all of this makes Cynthia less a character and more a vehicle for exposition, if not for one thing: she doesn’t actually know anything.  She’s speculating, just like we do all the time when we think about the nature and role of legendary Pokémon; Cynthia presumably has the benefit of a great deal of background knowledge on the beliefs and worldview of the ancients of Sinnoh, but in the end, her interpretations are just that – interpretations – and that’s a lot more interesting than just being told how something is and expected to go along with it.

Aonik (http://aonik.deviantart.com/) has here shown Cynthia with her partner Pokémon, Garchomp, taking some time out to watch the sunset from a beach.

In a return to tradition Cynthia, like Blue (and Red), has no specialty element, which makes her that much more difficult to fight.  She doesn’t seem to have a particularly pronounced theme either, but she tends to like Pokémon that belong to the game’s élite, particularly ones that are hard to hit for super-effective damage.  For instance, in all of Cynthia’s appearances, she begins the match with her Spiritomb, an extremely rare and ancient Ghost Pokémon that is best known for having no weaknesses at all and being harder to kill than a cockroach in a bomb shelter.  Spiritomb can only be found at an ancient ruined shrine in Sinnoh by using an item called an Odd Keystone after talking to other players in the Sinnoh Underground thirty-two times; similarly, her Lucario is a Pokémon that doesn’t exist in the wild and has to be hatched from an egg as a Riolu, while Milotic’s juvenile form, Feebas, can only be caught on four randomly-assigned squares of a large pool inside Mount Coronet, comprising several hundred squares.  As a Steel-type and a Water-type, respectively, Lucario and Milotic also have relatively few weaknesses.  The sea slug Gastrodon and the flower sprite Roserade are the least outlandish of her Pokémon, but they’re both powerful and have a wide variety of attacks at their disposal, and Gastrodon has only one weakness (Grass attacks).  On Platinum, Cynthia replaces her Gastrodon with a Togekiss, the final evolution of Togepi, another fantastically rare upper-echelon Pokémon, while in her appearance on Black and White, both Togekiss and Roserade go in favour of Eelektross and Braviary – again, Pokémon that are hard to find and naturally quite powerful (and Eelektross, like Spiritomb, has no weaknesses).  Then, of course, there’s her signature Pokémon: Garchomp.  Garchomp is commonly held to be Diamond and Pearl’s answer to Dragonite, but this is a malicious lie put about by Nintendo; he is in fact Diamond and Pearl’s answer to the entire damn Pokédex, being arguably the most powerful Pokémon Game Freak have ever created, outside of the high-tier legendary beasties like Mewtwo.  Then again, he is a cross between nature’s most perfectly-evolved hunter, the shark, and the most feared creature of high fantasy, the dragon, so when you think about it, he’s exactly the sort of thing you would come up with if you wanted to murder the universe and had a over-developed sense of flair.  With the exception of Spiritomb, none of Cynthia’s Pokémon have any connection to the particulars of her character; for this one, the designers seem to have been mostly interested in giving you a fight to remember – which is precisely what Cynthia does.
 
Cynthia’s extra characterisation is one of those little things that get added to the third game of each set that really, if we’re being honest, should have been in the first two.  Cynthia as Champion is not that interesting (although she does, one must admit, look pretty badass in that trench coat); Cynthia as a companion to Giratina’s world makes the whole experience a lot more fascinating, precisely because she finds it so fascinating – that, incidentally, is one thing that Platinum needed more of, because the Distortion World as it stands is more a vehicle for fancy 3D graphics than anything else.  She’s just a really good person to have around, and it’s a shame she doesn’t do anything in Black and White, where she likes to spend Spring and Summer at Caitlin’s villa in Undella Town checking out the Abyssal Ruins and sunbathing… mostly sunbathing… then again, she is on holiday.  Speaking of Black and White, I’m up to the last one now: the series’ newest Champion, Alder of Unova.  How does he compare?
 
The suspense is killing me.