Tag: Pokémon

Robin asks:

You already did a Top 10 worst/least favourite Pokémon, but is there any chance you’d do a Top 10 best/favourite Pokémon?

Probably not, mostly because I don’t think I would be able to come up with a good rationale for it. When I did that top 10 worst Pokémon list, I chose Pokémon that were both extremely weak and (in my estimation) poorly designed or bland – and there’s really not that many of those. If you set something like Kricketune as your standard for power, you’re eliminating the vast majority of Pokémon right off the bat, and then it’s fairly easy to sort through what’s left and decide which ones are interesting enough to be redeemed on design grounds. That doesn’t really work for picking the best ones. I could start by getting a list of all the most powerful legendary Pokémon – Kyogre, Necrozma, Mewtwo, Reshiram, and so on – and maybe a couple of other top-tiers like Blaziken and Aegislash, then pick ten that I think are well-designed, but… well, for one thing, at that point we’re basically doing a list of the top ten coolest legendary Pokémon, which I don’t think is really what you’re suggesting, and for another, I don’t believe those Pokémon are actually good for the game. Well, obviously then I should start by ruling out all the Pokémon that I think are unreasonably powerful and start picking the best-designed ones from the upper echelons of what’s left. The problem is, I don’t actually know where that point is – and even if I did, I’m not sure how I would convince anyone to agree with me. The “worst Pokémon” list made sense because it was a way of talking about what makes a Pokémon bad, and how to fix the kinds of problems those Pokémon had in common. A “best Pokémon” list… ultimately would probably just be a list of my favourite Pokémon, which I don’t actually think is particularly interesting.

A rambling chat about game balance

In lieu of a Pokémon review (because what even is my life right now, arghghghl; next weekend my students are handing in essays and I have to write an exam for the week after that), here is a message log with a conversation between me and Jim the Editor about game balance in Pokémon (and elsewhere).  This is the kind of thing I might post regularly to a Patreon page, if I ever actually create one?  So, comments would be useful.

Screenshot 2018-10-21 at 6.41.51 PM.png Continue reading “A rambling chat about game balance” →

Komala

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Komala

Back in the day, we had Snorlax, a Pokémon whose sole purpose in life is seemingly to eat (everything) and sleep (for weeks). Snorlax was, for many of us, an aspiration: a promise that, if we worked hard and gained enough weight to tip the scales at 460 kg, we too could spend our days in blissful slumber, waking up only long enough to blunder into a supermarket, scarf down some chips or chocolates or whatever else takes our fancy, crash out through the wall without paying, and then stumble back to bed for another month. Or… maybe that was just me. In any case, Snorlax has now been convincingly one-upped by a Pokémon that is lazier still: the coma koala Pokémon, Komala. Continue reading “Komala” →

Bellossom asks:

Have you ever wondered if I have feet under my leaves or if my leaves do the “walking” for me?

HOLY $#!T A TALKING BELLOSSOM

…

…well, Bellossom, I think we can extrapolate from when you were an Oddish. The Pokédex describes Oddish’s feet as actually being “roots” – and, well, presumably you do still need roots to absorb water and nutrients from the soil. They might not look exactly like an Oddish or Gloom’s, but I’d say you probably have some sort of tuber-like structure under there somewhere.

oh god damn it; why won’t they LEAVE ME ALONE

Can’t they SEE I’m not done reviewing the seventh generation Pokémon yet!?

Sooo… Apparently this is a “mythical Pokémon,” meaning one of the subset of legendary Pokémon that can’t be obtained through normal gameplay.  It started appearing in Pokémon Go earlier this week… or rather, Ditto that have transformed into Meltan started appearing.  The workaround with Ditto is odd, but the idea of introducing a new Pokémon through Go is neat, and creates a cool feeling of discovery for people who stumble upon it without already knowing it’s there.  This is also a pretty clever way to quietly advertise generation 8 to players of the mobile game (many of them players who had dropped Pokémon for a number of years, and were drawn back by nostalgia and Go‘s low barriers to entry).

Meltan is apparently a Steel-type Pokémon made of living, liquid metal, capable of absorbing other metal objects into itself.  It’s apparently based on a hex nut, which is… weird… but the liquid body, and being based on something that is only a part of larger machines or constructs, could both point towards multiple Meltan being able to combine into more powerful entities.  There is a distinct and worrying possibility that Meltan will be only one of several weird-cute little Steel-types in the shape of machine parts, and then when you bring them all together they assemble into the fµ¢&ing dragonzord or something.  Where there’s a nut Pokémon, there must be a bolt Pokémon, and why stop there?  Washers, nuts, screws, the sky’s the limit.  THERE, I made a damn prediction about something; I hope you’re happy, because that’s officially 100% of my prediction quota for the leadup to generation 8.

Minior

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Minior

Pokémon Sun and Moon are, as the names imply, games that always have one eye on the heavens. A lot of the time this manifests as a day/night theme, but they are interested in other celestial phenomena as well – Cosmog is a nebula that gives birth to a star, one of the games’ prominent locations is an observatory, and of course the Ultra Beasts have a certain sci-fi aesthetic to them and emerge from wormholes. A lot of Alola’s ordinary Pokémon draw on themes related to the real Hawaiian islands (or at least tropical islands in general) but today’s Pokémon is one that cares a lot more about Alola’s relationship with the sky. Meet Minior: the Meteor Pokémon. Continue reading “Minior” →

roughly 3,700 bees ask:

why does sableye have stall? it was already one of the absolute weakest pokemon in the game prior to prankster or its mega, it was introduced a generation after sableye itself was made, it’s on nothing else, and as far as i can tell there’s no flavour reason for it, so why?

I suppose it could be a joke ability – something that intentionally made Sableye worse than it already was in generation III – but that seems unlikely; Sableye was bad all right (and believe me, I know; one of my partners on my first playthrough of Sapphire back in the day was a Sableye), but not comically so.  I think it has to be a flavour reason, right?  Because nothing else makes any damn sense; Stall is too weak an ability to have been intended as any kind of buff to Sableye.  We’re told that Sableye (a lot like Wobbuffet) are reclusive Pokémon that spend most of their lives in darkness.  When attacked, their instinct is to keep to the shadows, to hide and try to avoid combat.  That instinct can be overpowering even in a serious fight, to the point that, in most exchanges, they will hang back and wait for their opponents to attack first.