Tag: Pokémon

Anonymous asks:

My nidorino was put to sleep in battle and then got its defense lowered by leer. How does that work? How do things like leer, scary face, or mean look work on sleeping pokemon?

I dunno.  Magic?

Truth is, the battle mechanics of the Pokémon games are not really meant as a 100% accurate simulation of anything, and there are probably a million and one things that don’t make too much sense when you look too closely at them, but which we just accept because the game needs to have understandable and predictable rules in order to be playable.  I think this is best illustrated by looking at what happens when you run the exact same imaginary scenario (a Pokémon using an intimidation technique like Leer on a sleeping opponent) through a different set of rules – those of the trading card game.  Exactly what Leer does in the TCG varies slightly depending on the Pokémon using it, but basically it tends to stop the target from attacking, and sometimes also from switching out, during its next turn (Mean Look only seems to prevent switching; Scary Face always prevents both).  So what happens when it’s used on a sleeping Pokémon?  Well, sleeping Pokémon normally can’t do either of those things in the TCG anyway, so the answer is “nothing,” much as you’d expect.  Neither system of rules is ever going to be complex enough to provide the intuitively “correct” answer to every possible imagined scenario; there are always going to be weird corner cases that throw up an interaction that just doesn’t seem to make sense.  I think in those situations the best thing to do is ask “what would probably happen in the anime?” because the anime is less constrained by the need for absolute consistency in the rules – and in this case, I suspect the answer (if anyone ever actually made a move like that, which strikes me as unlikely) is, again, “nothing.”

Anonymous asks:

Homosexuality in the Pokemon series? maybe realationship between human characters or the life style of some species, how feasible is it?

I’m not totally sure what you’re getting at here – by “feasible” do you mean “would Game Freak get away with it?”  Because I imagine in Japan they would but in America it might be a bit of a tough sell, which is probably why we don’t see it in the anime (not that romantic relationships are a major theme of the Pokémon anime anyway).  As for the Pokémon themselves… well, pretty much the one thing we know is that you won’t get an egg from two Pokémon of the same gender, and that Attract never works on Pokémon of the same gender.  Since the only real constant in how the games talk about Pokémon breeding is that no-one actually seems to know much about how it works (not to mention the fact that some Pokémon species appear to be single-sex), that could mean just about anything.

Homosexuality is well-documented in many animal species in the real world, most famously giraffes (who, on average, actually seem to have more gay sex than straight sex), bonobos, penguins, and dolphins (who have been known to engage in – I swear I am not making this up – blowhole sex).  I think it’s reasonable to assume that the Pokémon world works like the real one unless stated otherwise, so homosexuality is probably just as common; it just gets totally lost in the obscuring fog that surrounds everything even remotely connected to Pokémon reproduction.

Anonymous asks:

What IS PP? How is it that a Pokémon can’t use e.g. Cut or Rock Smash in battle because they’ve run out of PP but they can still use them outside battle?

Well, there are gameplay reasons it has to be that way – if field moves were dependent on PP you could become trapped in certain areas and unable to return to a Pokémon Centre.  In any case, for a lot of field moves it’s not like the combat and out-of-combat uses are actually the same or even similar – clearly we’re not supposed to imagine that using Surf (a special attack usually depicted as a powerful wave) involves vigorously swimming at the opponent with your trainer on your back.  Even when the two actions are basically similar, I would imagine that doing something in the middle of a fight is a good deal more stressful and difficult than doing it any other time.  Me, I think of PP as a vague measure of a Pokémon’s energy or exhaustion, the same way as HP is a vague measure of a Pokémon’s health or injuries.  Obviously HP was never meant to be a realistic and precise account of the billion and one different kinds of godawful nonsense that can happen to a Pokémon on a daily basis; it’s just a number that answers the question “can I or can I not keep fighting?” and we accept that without thinking, even though it clearly doesn’t make much sense, because HP is an abstraction that literally everyone has been using for decades.  PP is the same kind of thing.

Anonymous asks:

I know you don’t like to speculate, but what would your opinion be on Sun and Moon bringing in facets of the Ranger games / mentality into the main series (as some people apparently think due to similarities between the ranger regions and alola)? It’s pretty unlikely, but what do you think such a thing could add to world-fleshing-outness, conflict, story, et cetera?

Well, I think you’re right about it being unlikely – the fact that Alola is an island region (if that’s what we’re getting at?  Not sure what else there is) seems like a pretty flimsy reason to make a prediction like that to me.  But having said that, I don’t think it would necessarily be a bad idea to, say, replace HMs for field moves with a minigame where you convince a wild Pokémon to temporarily join you and help you to clear an obstacle.  HM moves are a pain, and you can potentially get a nice sense of negotiation with the wild Pokémon, show how they fit into their environment, and emphasise that wild areas really belong to them.  Other parts of the Ranger philosophy, like having only one partner Pokémon rather than large teams, seem incompatible with the basic assumptions of the gameplay; you could have characters who live with Pokémon in that way, but I suspect that much of the significance of that would be lost if the player wasn’t the one doing it.  If you don’t actually play from the Rangers’ perspective, they probably just seem from the outside like trainers who only have one Pokémon.  You can’t really make the Rangers the villains either, for obvious reasons, although a faction like that certainly would have been an interesting presence in a story like that of Black and White, just to make things more complicated for everyone – what would they have thought of Ghetsis’ rhetoric of Pokémon liberation?  It would be also interesting to introduce some new mechanics that emphasise the uniqueness of the player’s relationship with the starter Pokémon in the same way as the Ranger games do, but that’s probably something you have to build from scratch to serve the very different gameplay of the core series.