One lunatic's love-hate relationship with the Pokémon franchise, and his addled musings on its rights, wrongs, ins and outs. Come one, come all, and indulge my delusions of grandeur as I inflict my opinions on anyone within shouting distance.
I just realized Paras is based on H.P. Lovecraft’s Mi-Go. The Mi-go are crab-shaped fungi from pluto! (and what is Mt. Moon, but an allusion to Pluto?) It’s so cool that Ken Sugimori and Satoshi Tajiri were reading lovecraft.
…yes. Clearly.
I really like the Sinnoh starters, how their typings countered each other and how they all have mythological influences behind them! It helps set the atmosphere of D/P/Pt and shows that a lot of thought really go into the starters. Do you think Game Freak should do more of that kind of thing?
The Sinnoh starters are definitely my favourite trio, and the way Game Freak chose to play with their type combinations is certainly part of that. It’s nice to have a bit of variety mixed in with the Grass/Water/Fire standard, and the way Torterra can beat Infernape with Ground attacks, Infernape can beat Empoleon with Fighting attacks, and Empoleon can beat Torterra with Ice attacks gives it all a pleasing symmetry. As long as we have to keep Grass/Water/Fire, I’m glad there’s some scope to play with it.
Continue reading “Anonymous asks:”I agree completely with you! Grass types pokemon have many flaws. Grass was, Is and will always be my favorite. But now for the question, Have you noticed that almos all grass starters have a more passive role than the water and fire ones? They always get a narrower offensive movepool, worse offensive stats than the other ones (Sceptile and Torterra are exceptions and maybe Chesnaught) and have a lower stat total than the other starters? (Sceptile is an exception) Do you think it will change?
Well, I don’t know if you can say “almost all” when three out of the six are exceptions, and the stat totals don’t mean a whole lot (sure, Torterra, Venusaur and Meganium have the lowest base stat totals of any starter Pokémon, but they’re only ten points below Swampert, who’s the highest – it doesn’t actually matter). Venusaur, Serperior and Chesnaught are great Pokémon, and Grass may be the only starter type that hasn’t yet produced anything completely broken (I’m looking at you, Speed Boost Blaziken and Protean Greninja), but is that a bad thing? I think the main problem with the Grass starters is the same as the problem with all Grass Pokémon – that Game Freak have convinced themselves that most attack types are somehow not thematically appropriate for Grass Pokémon to have (i.e. Grass Pokémon Don’t Get Nice Things), and Grass itself is one of the weakest offensive types in the game. There’s also the broader problem that each new generation tends to give fewer tools to Pokémon with defence and support roles than to Pokémon with aggressive roles (except for II, when literally every Pokémon in the game started using Leftovers). So no, it’s never going to change; that would be way too much effort.
Odd question, but do you have a favorite Fakemon, or one that you’re particularly fond of? If yes, what is it and why? Also for obvious reasons you’re not allowed to answer Scribis or Krakentoa :p
Tricky… I have a kinda awkward relationship with fakemon, in that there are clearly several really good ones out there, but there are also a lot of really rather dull ones, and I get bored sifting through to find the good ones… If I had to pick a favourite it’d probably be one of the ones from the BoltBeam project, since they had a good few that I thought were quite inspired… here’s a few that I was most fond of:
Capsikid and Pepricorn for being capsicum Pokémon that aren’t just humanoid chilli peppers, and being a very nice way of fusing two elements that are difficult to combine.
Wulverize for being just really bizarre and interesting.
Arthromemnon for being a very clean, nicely done fulfilment of a fairly simple concept.
Meipale, Pailock and Bakount for having such a cool ‘backstory.’
Niftea and Porslayne for combining a lot of weird design elements very elegantly.
Renownd for making Unown less pointless.
Sarkrend and Sarkrisis for being fossil Pokémon that aren’t just “hey, look at this extinct animal.”
Meurgot and Scaravera for doing something so cool with an interesting cultural phenomenon, and just ‘getting’ the Dark type so much better than a lot of fakemon do.
And honourable mentions to Kabllama and Alpacalypse for having the most awesome names ever.
Theoretically speaking, what do you think Missingno would be like if it appeared in the Pokemon anime? Like, what would its origin story, nature, and powers be like to keep it as close to the game glitch as feasible?
You know how sometimes satellite TV gets all pixellated or cuts out entirely because the weather’s bad? It would look like that.
Okay, okay, serious answer. I think the obvious answer is that Missingno has to be an offshoot of the Porygon project, specifically of the technology that allows Porygon – a Pokémon composed entirely of data, of information – to manifest itself as a physical entity. Missingno can similarly convert data into physical reality… but not always smoothly. You can’t just plug in the code for the Pac-Man video game and have the character Pac-Man materialise in front of you, fully realised and functional; you need to have a program that was specifically written with this process in mind, like Porygon was. Any other form of data that goes into Missingno results in a garbled mess of matter and energy. What we “see” as Missingno’s body is actually Missingno’s best effort to interpret the countless radio waves and other signals that are constantly passing through it. If you just give Missingno a real, physical object, though, it can break that object down into a workable code with which it can create copies of that object. At some point shortly after its creation the thing crashed through a natural history museum somewhere, and as a result it “knows” how to create copies of several Pokémon fossils. It’s also possible to coax Missingno to spit out multiple copies of any small object you want (you can’t do this to living things or most larger objects because of safety features built into the core of the original program). Getting close enough to Missingno to do this isn’t always safe, though – if it picks up on your brain waves and tries to translate them into energy, the pseudo-physical nonsense it produces in response can often cause serious and lasting amnesia.
A lot of pokemon seem not to get moves that would seem to fit them perfectly, because “they would be too good with them.” For example, snorlax doesn’t get slack off. Giratina, the god of the distortion world, doesn’t get trick room. Zekrom, who literally shakes the ground when sent out, can’t learn earthquake. And several explicitly evil pokemon, like chandelure, can’t learn nasty plot. There are several more, but these annoy me the most. But I understand the game needs to be balanced. Thoughts?
I don’t think that is the reason, to be honest. I mean, if preventing Pokémon from being “too good” was ever a matter of even the slightest concern for Game Freak, then making Giratina and Zekrom available to players in the first place was their mistake, not any specific item in their respective movepools. Even if they’d given Zekrom Earthquake, Reshiram would still have been even stronger because Dragon/Fire is just such a potent combination under 5th-generation rules (i.e. with no Fairy-types). I’m much more inclined to suspect some obscure flavour-related reason for these absences – like, Snorlax is literally always slacking off anyway, so he really shouldn’t expect to get any special bonus for doing so more than usual. Or perhaps they were simply oversights; it simply didn’t occur to the designers to stick Nasty Plot on Chandelure for some reason (I mean, when we think about this stuff we tend only to give any thought to the 5 or 10% of all moves that are useful at the competitive level; they presumably give consideration to the whole lot, so you can see how they might forget things that seem like obvious choices to us). Either way, eh. I have a saying: Pokémon should be good at the things they’re good at. If it makes sense, let them have it.
I heard that farfetch’d was put in the game to teach players a ‘lesson’ about trading a spearow that could evolve into a fearow for something that will only have limited usefulness (because fearow is so godly, right?), just like magikarp is there to be a lesson. You know what I did with magikarp? I put it in the daycare until the end of the game. It was at level 31 by that time and evolved into gyarados with no effort. Isn’t that what everyone did? Their lesson was lost.
Everyone? I beg to differ. Personally I’ve never done anything of the kind. And I think the point is there all the same – you evolved your Magikarp with no effort, but waited until the end of the game for it to reach a high enough level on its own, so you certainly had to exercise patience. Even if you catch a Magikarp at level 19 and use a Rare Candy to evolve it immediately, Magikarp still expresses one of Pokémon’s central themes, that something small and weak can grow into something great and powerful with the right kind of care. I don’t think we have to interpret Magikarp in such a narrow way. The lesson is “lost” if you choose to ignore it, but that’s always been the case for everything.
As for Farfetch’d… well, yes and no. It makes sense with Farfetch’d’s… wait, that doesn’t look right. Farfetch’ds? Farfetchd’s? Farfetch’s’d?
Continue reading “vikingboybilly asks:”I was reminded that things like Delibird, Wobuffet, and Girafarig looked weird when they were introduced, and that was just in generation 2. Then by the time the next generation comes, the ones that looked weird in the last gen are comparitively normal. The oddest thing about delibird was that the bag is actually its tail, and it’s hollow. Does anybody remember that?
Is it actually hollow? I sort of assumed that the tail was flat and broad, and Delibird kind of rolled it up into a bundle. Honestly I thought it was kind of a creative way of giving Delibird a sack when Pokémon aren’t really ‘supposed’ to use manufactured items.
What do you think of Pokemon obviously designed to be sexualized like Lopunny? I think it’s really creepy myself, and can’t stand playing with them in Pokemon amie because they keep giving me giggles, hip shakes, hair/ear flips, and generally acting like they’re trying to flirt with me. Not to mention in their first sprites, their elbows were deliberatly placed to make it look like they have breasts. It’s really screwed up, and feels like a desperate attempt to pander to “adult” demographics.
To be honest it’s not something that’s ever bothered me a great deal. I mean, I think it’s silly, and doesn’t make for interesting designs, but I’ve never had the kind of visceral discomfort with it that you seem to. Nor do I quite see what you mean about Lopunny’s fourth-generation sprites, although I suppose they could be taken that way. I will say it seems like a very odd choice to me, given the ‘family-friendly’ image that Nintendo has always tried to cultivate, and Game Freak’s obvious discomfort with saying anything explicit about how ‘breeding’ works. The disconnect leads me to suspect that there’s some level of cultural nuance here that that the Western audience just isn’t quite getting, and I don’t really know enough about the Japanese to probe the matter any further.
Murkrow and Honchkrow vs. Misdreavous and Mismagius, purely on a design/concept level.
Well, I guess I would say that I think Misdreavus and Mismagius seem to hold together in a more coherent fashion. With Murkrow and Honchkrow there seems to be this weird disconnect, where Murkrow is all about witchcraft, superstition and misfortune, but then Honchkrow is… like, a mob boss for some reason? I can kind of see links there, don’t get me wrong – the Mafia are Italian, and Italians are a superstitious lot; Honchkrow apparently gets called “the Summoner of Night” for his role in leading groups of Murkrow, which sounds a lot more like a name you’d give to the master of a coven of witches than to a Mafia Don; Murkrow steals and hoards shiny things, so an association with criminality isn’t out of the question. But there just isn’t anything there, for me, that ties it all together. Honchkrow is just… odd, as an evolution from Murkrow. On the other hand, that same mix of different influences kind of makes them more interesting Pokémon to me than Misdreavus and Mismagius, somehow. There’s stuff about Murkrow and Honchkrow that demands explanation in a way that isn’t the case for Misdreavus and Mismagius; you can imagine weird stuff about their social structures, and their existence kind of suggests some odd overlap between organised crime and superstition or witchcraft in the Pokémon world, which is the sort of curious place that makes a good starting point for telling a story. So… “hmmmm…” is what it comes down to, more or less.
Pokémaniacal 