VikingBoyBilly asks:

How much do you think the game would change if, say, pokémon had six moves? Or two tabs of “attack” moves and “no damage” moves?

I suppose “quite a bit.” I’m actually on the record as being against increasing the number of moves Pokémon can learn, largely because – contrary to what you might intuitively expect – I think it would reduce strategy and diversity in the game, not increase it. I expect it would slant the game towards the Pokémon with the largest and most diverse movepools, and reduce the trade-offs and calculations that go into building a team that covers its most important weaknesses with its limited resources. I also suspect you might see a fairly dramatic increase in the importance of self-buffing movesets (which could, say, include a set-up move and some way to heal while still having room for four attacks) and consequently also things that counter those strategies (Haze, Whirlwind, Unaware, hell, maybe people would even start using Punishment). Choice Band/Specs/Scarf, by contrast, probably gets slightly worse. I could be completely wrong about all of this though; it’s the sort of thing might be interesting to see playtested.

VikingBoyBilly asks:

Rhydon usurped Bulbasaur’s “Pokémon #1” spot.

If anything, Billy, the reverse is true.

The Philosophical Sheep asks:

“Spiritual energy” huh? Is it possible that that’s what all pokemon are made of, at least primarily? Pokemon, as we’ve established, seem to be awfully high energy beings, and their physical form can be easily altered by way of energy (such as with pokeballs or mega stones).

Gonna be honest, I mostly intended that phrase to mean “[insert handwavey bull$#!t here]”. All I’m really trying to say is that I think Primal Kyogre’s appearance is meant to suggest that it, specifically, is somehow less physically substantial than most other Pokémon, in a way which is probably magic and which we are almost certainly not meant to understand or think very hard about.

Phi8 asks:

Why do you think Kyogre was flying in the last episode of Generations? Isn’t it supposed to be swimming, since it’s a whale/fish? Because if it’s flying it actually shares a lot of similarities with Lugia, who also flies and also summons storms and also has weird fins/wings with fingers on it.

Well, I don’t think it needs to fly to be similar to Lugia; they’re both colossal aquatic guardians of the deep ocean, even if Lugia isn’t a literal Water-type. But as to the question… well, since Kyogre’s primal form is transparent and doesn’t seem to have much in the way of insides, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if it turned out to be somehow made of “spiritual energy” or something, and just isn’t subject to gravity to the same degree as its normal form (note that the primal form is more than twice as long, and presumably twice as wide and twice as tall, so we should probably expect it to be more than eight times heavier, but in fact its weight increases by less than 25%). Besides, do you want to be the one to tell Primal Kyogre that it can’t fly?

Anonymous asks:

If you had to pick your least favorite & favorite starters (Pikachu doesn’t count) which would you pick?

*sigh* Oh, Bulbasaur, I don’t care which regional Pokédex we’re looking at, you’ll always be #001 in my heart…

*ahem*

Totodile, on the other hand, is silly.

My thoughts on these and all the other starters in excruciating detail can be found here (the 5th and 6th generation starters as part of my general reviews of each generation, all the rest as part of a series I did on, well, starter Pokémon).

Pokémon Generations: Episodes 7 and 8

The past two weeks have given us Generations’ view of Teams Magma and Aqua.

In the Team Magma episode, we see the organisation’s base being cracked open by Brendan, the male player character of the third generation games, in the company of his powerful Sceptile. Maxie and a collection of his grunts make their way calmly to the base’s submarine bay as Tabitha, one of the admins, monitors Brendan’s progress on a tablet. As the grunts board the submarine, Maxie addresses his other admin, Courtney, ordering her to stay behind. Courtney is taken aback at first, but warms to the idea when Maxie explains that he needs her to stop Brendan, apparently honoured by his trust in her, and prays that he will succeed in changing the world. While Tabitha and the grunts fire up the submarine and Courtney waits for her opponent, she stares at the red lights of the base’s emergency sirens and… kinda trips out? The brilliant red colour causes her to have what seems to be a vision of the future, or at least a possible future – Primal Groudon awakened, raising volcanoes, searing the land and ocean alike with devastating Solarbeams, and finally turning on Maxie and Tabitha as they try to stop it. Courtney is disturbed and shaken, but before she can process her vision, Brendan and Sceptile arrive, returning her focus to the present. As the submarine leaves, she taunts Brendan for being too late and prepares to battle, calling on her Camerupt (who… rears up and neighs like a horse…?). “There’s more work for me to do… I’m going to have to stop you. But now I just want to…” she giggles, “engage you and see what happens! I want to… analyse you!” She gives Brendan a wild-eyed grin and another manic giggle, and their battle begins.

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VikingBoyBilly asks:

I got an idea to rebalance natures. Let’s take, say, a bold pokémon. The attack stat is reduced by 10%, minus 10% of the neutral defense stat. The defense stat is boosted by 10%, plus 10% of the neutral attack stat. What you get is a compound boost/debuff so the give and take is actually even (Like, if both attack and defense were 100 neutral, it would result in 80 attack and 120 defense). Of course, a stat can never be lower than 1.

Ehhhh… I think if you’re going to do this you should really commit to it and get rid of the flat 10% entirely (and maybe change the proportional part to 15% or even more). It’s not a terrible idea, and it solves the problem of natures that sacrifice your unused attack stat being obviously the best choice (Alakazam, for instance, no longer gets very much out of sacrificing attack, and needs to sacrifice special defence to get a meaningful boost to speed or special attack). On the other hand, I think it’s significantly harder for new players to understand than the current system. It also discourages using Pokémon as mixed attackers, which is unfortunate – a Pokémon that actually does have two high attack stats, like Infernape, can get a lot more out of its nature than most Pokémon do by focusing on just one attack stat, which seems contrary to what Game Freak actually want us to do with Pokémon like that.

VikingBoyBilly asks:

I’ve been listening to all the NPCs in Kalos out of boredom and noticed some weird things. One of them says the Beauty and the Beast story is about a prince that turned into a pokémon, and there’s a portrait of AZ that supposedly had to have been made 3000 years ago; which is a renaissance-style painting. Did GF realize how anachronistic that is for a time when portraits were done on Greek pottery and Egyptian bedrock murals?

Okay so there’s sort of two parts to this question – do we expect developments in the history of art and technology in the Pokémon world to mirror those of the real world, and exactly how much do you know about ancient portraiture?

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