Tag: pokemon design

Anonymous asks:

Hopfé, the Two Brews Pokémon. Water/Fairy. The liquid inside Hopfé’s transparent body changes depending on the time of day. In the morning, it’s dark and scalding, while at night, it turns cold and effervescent. Some trainers claim to be Hopfé connoisseurs and refuse to bond with any but a very particular strain of the Pokémon.

It’s… coffee that turns into beer?  Um… why?

Gotta say, though, I think this could be hilarious in a comedic or satirical take on Pokémon.  Detective Pikachu played by Danny DeVito would approve.

Anonymous asks:

Maybe the “different franchises” thing was an exaggeration, but you can’t deny that overall Pokemon have gotten much less natural. Besides oddballs like Mr. Mime or Voltorb, first gen Pokemon looked like real creatures and now they’re like action figures.

I believe you’ll find I can deny anything that I think is untrue.  We agree the style is different, but I would never have thought to describe it in terms of being more or less naturalistic; that varies from one design to another but I don’t think there’s an overall trend across generations.  I honestly have no idea what “like action figures” even means in this context.

Anonymous asks:

How do you feel about how much more cartoon Pokemon designs have gotten lately? Most of them don’t even look like they’re from the same franchise as the original 151.

I think maybe some of your phrasing here needs dissecting – like, calling one of two groups “more cartoon” is an extremely vague way of comparing them when both of them objectively are cartoons.  I would understand “more cartoonish” to mean something along the lines of… probably more zany, more “out there,” less naturalistic, and I honestly don’t think that would be a remotely fair assessment.  Voltorb and Electrode, I think, are some of the most cartoonish Pokémon of any generation.  But maybe we’re understanding the words differently.

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Anonymous asks:

The thing about the pika-clones is that Gamefreak has stopped trying to use them to recapture pikachu’s popularity and seems to now be making them just for the sake of tradition, just like the generic birds and rodents. But at least diggersby and talonflame have had multi-dimensional designs, cool new elements, and awesome hidden abilities to make up for their low stats. So if Gen 7 has a new electric rodent, do you think gamefreak could do the same and make it actually interesting and useful?

Okay well first of all I don’t think VII having a new Electric rodent is an “if.”  And certainly they could, and I hope they will.  I agree that Diggersby and Talonflame (and I suppose to a lesser extent even Vivillon, I will grudgingly admit) prove that there’s scope for cleverness even within the “templates.”  Emolga, I thought, was a good start, though Dedenne was a rather depressing return to form.  And I suppose one could argue that Se Jun Park’s famously creative use of Pachirisu in the 2014 world championship gives them some justification for continuing to include Pokémon that demand a very… unconventional strategic approach, though not much (I believe we are still waiting on such championship-level breakthroughs for Farfetch’d, Delibird, Kricketune, Phione, Girafarig… you know, I’m just not going to list them).  They may by this point actually regard competitive uselessness as an essential part of the template.  So of course they could; that doesn’t mean they will.

Anonymous asks:

Obviously, any regular reader knows that you’re a champion of the Grass type. One thing that occurred to me recently – any thoughts on why is there only a single Grass/Ground type? Wouldn’t that seem an obvious combination to be exploited? Roots would presumably feature heavily. It seems that flavour wise, at least, this one would seem natural.

I think maybe the fact that it seems so natural is actually part of the reason.  Ground is, let’s face it, a poorly thought out mess of a type.  Pokémon can be assigned to the Ground type because they have powers related to earth and soil, or because they happen to live on the ground, or sometimes, it seems, just because they’re generally tough and resilient.  It’s a really vague set of traits, most of which also apply to pure Grass-types.  If most of the things that define Ground are also essentially inherent to Grass anyway, there’s never any need to add Ground to a Grass Pokémon, unless you come up against something like Torterra who’s associated with the earth in a much more elemental sense than most Ground Pokémon.

Anonymous asks:

I realize now that my previous question may have been misleading. When I said “weird” I wasn’t referring to the grass/fighting type combination itself, as that’s been done several times, but to the idea of a mysterious owl suddenly evolving into an aggressive grass/fighting bird.

Imagine, though. Rowlet turns into a badass fighting or dragon type, litten into a large, chubby, lovable cat, and popplio into a grotesque mammoth/walrus-like thing. Nobody will be satisfied.

The previous question alluded to here: “Watch rowlet lose its flying type upon evolving and become a grass/fighting type or something even weirder. That would certainly be interesting”

See, I don’t think that sort of thing is likely, purely because the starters are the one place where, more than any other (except maybe the mascot legendaries), they want mass appeal, and while that doesn’t exactly rule out weird and quirky designs for the evolved forms, I believe it makes Game Freak more likely to incline towards safe choices.  Looking back at past starters… they really just don’t tend to “do” major reversals in aesthetics and design as they evolve.  I suspect there’s kind of an expectation that, when you choose your starter, you should pretty much know what you’re getting.  It’s supposed to be your partner, so if it evolves into something radically different and you don’t like it anymore, the design has kinda failed, in that particular respect.

Anonymous asks:

Couldn’t gamefreak have simply taken volbeat/ilumise and plusle/minun and mashed them into a single pair of designs? They would have then had a pair of firefly pokemon with a relatively exclusive type combination, unique breeding mechanics, and a whole teamwork thing going on, backed up by the plus/minus thing. This would have been objectively interesting, and also not have ripped off pikachu.

And make ‘em Bug/Electric, you mean?  Hmm.  Yeah, I think quite like that, actually.  The cliché that “opposites attract” would tie Volbeat and Illumise’s romance theme together with their new Electricity powers quite nicely.  I think the problem is that Game Freak considered ripping off Pikachu to be a virtue of Plusle and Minun rather than a fault.  Which… y’know, is not really a position I can understand, but clearly it’s important to them since they keep bloody doing it.

vikingboybilly asks:

So there’s debate over what makes a pokémon a dragon type, or a fairy type, or even a normal type, but I’m wondering what GameFreak thinks constitutes a bug-type. At first it seems obvious, but there are anomalous outliers like anorith being bug while kabuto, krabby and corphish are not. Shuckle is a worm; I don’t think of a worm as being a bug. Skorupi loses it’s bug typing for Dark, and if a bug has a secondary typing and grows wings when it evolves, it won’t be a FLYING type.

Well, Shuckle’s not a worm; it’s labelled the “mould Pokémon” so I think it’s probably meant to be more like a slime mould, but that’s hardly a “bug” either.  I’m not sure that I have a good answer for this one.  I think probably their ideas of what “Bug-type” means are more aesthetic than biological.  Crustaceans aren’t Bug-types because they more clearly “belong” in Water.  Anorith not being Water is really odd, because the way Armaldo is portrayed, as one of the first living things to move onto land, seems like it should give a good reason for Anorith to change from Rock/Water to Rock/Bug when it evolves; I think they may have wanted to avoid Rock/Water for the second set of fossil Pokémon, though, since Kabuto and Omanyte had both been Rock/Water.  So I suppose what it seems to be, to me, is “arthropods that don’t obviously belong somewhere else,” with one or two odd extras like Shuckle, who certainly doesn’t seem to belong elsewhere either… Grass, maybe?