Hmm.
I’ll start by giving you the short version.
There’s this group of hardline animal rights activists who dress up as mediaeval knights and-
Yeah, you’re right; that does sound stupid.
The truth is, just like Team Galactic, Team Plasma are pretty silly. The grunts wear costumes that look like mediaeval tunics and chainmail (and yes, I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re meant to look like) and they don’t help matters by using “Plasmaaaaa!” as their battle-cry (it gets worse when one of them decides to coin an adjective to describe anything bad for Team Plasma: “Plasbad”). As for their leader, Ghetsis… well, he looks like he’s accidentally stumbled in from a high fantasy setting, wearing an enormous blue-and-yellow robe with huge eye-like patterns embroidered on it and some kind of angular monocle made from red glass; the whole ensemble simply defies description and is lacking only a ludicrously ornate sceptre to complete the image (his colleagues, the other six of the so-called “Seven Sages,” wear mercifully plain clothing which, while very old-fashioned, would not seem horribly out-of-place on oriental wise men). The only explanation I can think of for making Ghetsis so ridiculously over-the-top is that Game Freak wanted to make absolutely sure that the kids would know when playing the game that he’s the bad guy – because, believe it or not, if you don’t already know that anything called a “Team” in Pokémon is a bad guy, you might not immediately realise it. Continue reading “Team Plasma”
Today on Pokémaniacal I have the dubious pleasure of discussing Basculin. There are red Basculin and blue Basculin, and they hate each other. That’s really all there is to it, and to be honest even that seems to be open to interpretation; the Pokédex entry for Basculin on Black version says that red and blue ones will start fighting the instant they meet, but the entry on White version contends that Basculin sometimes do mingle with schools of the opposite colour, despite normally hating each other. So, to make this clear… the only vaguely amusing thing about these Pokémon is that they hate each other… and they don’t even hate each other all that much! We don’t know why they hate each other – well, actually, they seem to hate just about everything, but we don’t know why they hate each other particularly – nor do we have any reason to care since there’s nothing else interesting about them. 
After having Sewaddle, Swadloon and Leavanny show the Bug/Grass dual-types of yester-year how it’s done, it’s time to try pushing our luck and seeing whether we can do the same for the half-dozen assorted worthless Bug/Poison Pokémon. Here’s the latest addition to this already overfull type combination: Venipede. To be honest, I don’t have a whole lot to say about Venipede or his evolved form, Whirlipede. Their main defining feature is that they’re extraordinarily ill-tempered. Beedrill were ill-tempered too, of course, but that was something they grew into – Weedle are perfectly sweet, if disturbingly pointy – and it was mainly about defending their nests from predators anyway. Venipede, on the other hand, have deep personal grudges against just about everything, which they express by repeatedly and insistently poisoning you. 
I knew it was coming. When Game Freak put together Black and White, they decided to abandon all existing Pokémon in favour of new ones, which meant it was once again time to get out their sheets of formulae on how to design standard, comfortable everyday Pokémon, and one of these old standards is the caterpillar Pokémon. So it is that we come to meet the obligatory caterpillar, Sewaddle, the obligatory cocoon, Swadloon, and the obligatory butterfly, Leava-
So, after I had such great fun last week with the unconventional Fighting-types Mienfoo and Mienshao, Game Freak now greets me with a rather spectacular return to normal by presenting these two: Sawk and Throh. These two aren’t an evolutionary family; in fact, they aren’t related at all, but they seem to be intended to be taken as a pair – they have similar designs and similar Japanese names (Dageki and Nageki), and are found in the same places, with Sawk being more common on Black and Throh on White – so that’s how I’m going to look at them. These two represent two different styles of combat: Throh practices judo, focussing on grappling and, well, throws, while Sawk practices karate, focussing mainly on strikes. Hmm. An opposed pair of Fighting-type Pokémon that dedicate their lives to two different types of martial art… I swear I’ve seen this before but I can’t for the life of me remember where. Oh well. I’m sure it will come to me. 
Aw, look at the cute widdle…
Pokémaniacal 