Tag: q&a

Questions, questions, questions…

Okay, so, when I left home this morning I had five unanswered questions waiting for me.  Now I have nine.

What do I think of Abomasnow, and how does Snow Warning work?  I think Abomasnow’s a great Pokémon; cool design, unique and interesting powers.  As for Snow Warning… well, it’s anyone’s guess.  I tend to stay away from trying to explain individual moves and abilities, because that way lies madness.

What do I think of Dusclops, and how he steps on Dusknoir’s nonexistent toes?  Again, great Pokémon.  Spooky, mysterious, evocative design, flavourful abilities, pretty much everything I could want from a Ghost-type.  I think the trouble with Dusknoir is that Dusclops never actually needed an evolution in the first place, and there just wasn’t any room to make Dusknoir all that much better.  Once the Eviolite came along…

What do I think of Magneton and do I think Klinklang is just a remake of Magneton?  Magneton, again, I like; they’re alien and inscrutable, with all kinds of weird powers resulting from their magnetism that make them dangerous and difficult to understand.  I’m not sure what Game Freak were smoking when they went with the whole flying saucer thing, but Magnezone is far from the worst design I’ve seen.  On Klinklang: http://pokemaniacal.tumblr.com/post/17760687580/klink-klang-and-klinklang

What do I think of Pikachu?  He’s adorable, and he has badass lightning powers; what more can you ask?  I really don’t understand the people who hate Pikachu; I think maybe that’s a reaction to the massive amount of hype that surrounds him, which, admittedly, I don’t think he deserves, though he’s still a very nicely done Pokémon.  I think he could stand to be a little faster and a little tougher (same goes for Raichu, come to think of it), because even with a Light Ball he’s still a very difficult Pokémon to use.

Am I going to review all the movies?  Good lord no; I’d have to watch Arceus and the Jewel of Life again.

Have I ever played Dragon Quest 5?  No.

Have I ever read the manga?  http://pokemaniacal.tumblr.com/post/32215051289/hi-new-reader-here-ive-just-finished-reading-your

What’s my favourite type and what do I think of adding extra types? http://pokemaniacal.tumblr.com/search/grass-types http://pokemaniacal.tumblr.com/post/27973745274/if-you-could-add-an-18th-type-to-the-type-listings-what

Why don’t I like humanoid Pokémon? http://pokemaniacal.tumblr.com/post/17760678969/gothita-gothorita-and-gothitelle http://pokemaniacal.tumblr.com/post/17760680127/scraggy-and-scrafty

Okay; I don’t know what exactly has happened in the last week, but I can’t handle it.  If you’ve only joined us in that time, I feel I should explain that this isn’t actually a question-and-answer blog.  It just looks like it at the moment if you see the front page.  Normally if I get an interesting question I like to set it aside for a day or two so I can think about it and give it a proper answer.  It’s getting to the point where, if I do that now, I’ll have four more questions to deal with when I come back.  I can only spend so many hours out of every day working on this blog and I kinda want to… y’know… keep actually writing stuff.  For this reason, I must regretfully start saying ‘no’ to these mini-analyses I’ve been doing.  I know I said I would try to do them all, and I’m sorry for backing out of that, but the thing about Pokémon is that there are over 600 of the damn things, and I have full-length entries on fewer than one third of them.  If I try to deal with everyone’s favourite and give little one-paragraph snippets on everything… well, you’re not going to be getting anything that’s had a lot of thought put into it; it’s going to be my opinion as much as anything else, and you can find opinions anywhere on the internet.

Other questions I will continue to answer as far as I am able, but if I have several, I’ll prioritise them according to how interesting they are, and I’m not going to try to answer more than one or two a day.  If there’s something you really want to know, take a look through the older entries.  You never know; I might have written a 2000-word article on it.  I’m going to see if I can get a search bar that doesn’t suck, so you can browse the older stuff properly.

Apologies to everyone who’s just gotten a half-assed answer to a question, but if I keep trying to answer everything, that’s all anyone’s going to get.

If we tell you our pokemon party, would you give a brief three sentence explanation of what to change, ‘cos I think I need some major changes in HG :/

Eh… frankly, there are better places you can go for that kind of advice.  I’m honestly not all that good at battling – I just read a lot of analyses and know all the tricks and jargon.  Try the forums at a site like Serebii.net or Smogon University; they’ll set you straight.

That, and I’m already having trouble dealing with everyone asking me about their favourite Pokémon; if people started asking for advice on team composition I’d probably be buried.

I’ve been seeing people ask you about their favorite Pokemon and your perception of them, so I guess I better jump on the bandwagon on this. My question is essentially two parts: 1. My favorite Pokemon is Forretress, has been since the Gold and Silver days, and I always found his design to be simple, yet effective at conveying what he is: a bagworm crossed with a cannon and most likely a bivalve. What is your opinion on him? 2. Why Forretress can learn Zap Cannon by level up? I want to know.

(Oh, good lord; I’ve opened a can of worms here – just for future reference, if everyone’s going to start asking me this, I will answer all of them, but if I get a lot it may take me a very long time; after all, “what do you think of such and such a Pokémon” is normally a question I spend three days writing a 1500-word entry on)

Now, Forretress.

I like Forretress.  Well, I mean, I don’t actually like Forretress as a matter of personal taste, but I think Game Freak did a good job on him – and particularly on Pineco.  They’re Bugs, but they don’t look like bugs, because they hide themselves within constructed shells, like bagworms or casemoth larvae.  In fact, Pineco looks like he should be a Grass-type, which plays with our expectations in a way that also references the inspiration for the design.  They have an amusing personality too, exploding at the slightest provocation, which makes sense given their obvious desire for isolation.  Forretress even has cannons on his body to keep people from bothering him!  Basically, they’re bagworms, but not just bagworms; the designers have played with the idea in an interesting way.  I probably don’t need to explain in much detail that Forretress is also very useful in battle for laying down Spikes and Toxic Spikes, or Rapid Spinning away your opponent’s.  He’s just very well put together all around.

As for Zap Cannon… hmm.  This isn’t something he’s always had; in Gold and Silver he didn’t learn Zap Cannon, and couldn’t use the TM either.  He only gained it in Fire Red and Leaf Green.  That means Game Freak deliberately looked at Forretress’s movepool and thought to themselves “hmm… something’s missing here… I know!  ELECTRO-BLAST!”  What’s doubly weird is that Forretress isn’t even very good at using special attacks (although Zap Cannon can be useful to him as a sort of poor man’s Thunder Wave) so they must have thought it was really important to his design objectives.  Maybe they just thought he should have an attack with “cannon” in the name?  I can respect that; moves with “cannon” in the name are awesome.  Given the context, though, I have to wonder whether Spike Cannon (which Forretress inexplicably doesn’t learn, despite having cannons that shoot spikes) wouldn’t have been more appropriate…

I don’t know, moves like Simple Beam, Reflect Type, Shell Smash, the abilities Scrappy, Tinted Lens, Klutz…

Sorry, when I said “more specific” I meant with regards to what I would actually talk about (should have been more clear there).  I honestly don’t think they’re all that interesting except with reference to the Pokémon that use them.  Again, it’s something I could easily devote one or two entries to, but I think I would very quickly run out of things to say if I tried to devote a whole series to it.

Heya, loyal reader here! So you’ve repeatedly stated your opinion that at this point in the franchise, Game Freak should stop adding new Pokémon that doesn’t add anything new and start improving the ones they already have (your Top Ten Worst Pokémon comes to mind). If you were chosen to spearhead such a project, how would you do so? Would you create a pair of games that introduce a new region without adding new Pokémon, or revisit a previous region and add a whole slew of new mechanics?

Some of both, really.  I feel I should say again that I’m not actually against new Pokémon, and I would continue to add them, but I wouldn’t have a specific target number and I’d reject any that appeared to overlap significantly with existing species.  I just don’t think 100-150 new ones in a generation is necessary, and I don’t think the designers can maintain the standard of their best designs over such a large number; 30 or 40 would be more reasonable, in my view, and leave more time for everythig else I’d want to tackle.

As for what I would do… I’m sort of leaning towards the latter, but it doesn’t have to be a choice, really.  Fixing all the old ones would be a hell of a job, and I don’t think it would ever be possible to really achieve anything resembling game balance with so many factors in play, but a lot of them have obvious problems that could be fixed quite easily.  Minor stat adjustments, evolutions, more signature moves, new growth mechanics, and so on… and of course I would rip out great chunks of the type chart and reconfigure everything.

That’s only half of it, though; I’d want to work with the Pokémon as characters as well – include side stories and mini-quests and puzzles and the like that show off the particular abilities of specific Pokémon in ways that we don’t necessarily see in battles, the way the anime does.  Basically, I’d want players to feel just how important and how omnipresent Pokémon are in the game world, and place more focus on learning about their powers and ways of life (which, remember, is supposedly the whole point).

I actually want to do a whole series of entries on how I would go about creating a new Pokémon game (or pair of games) if I had the chance – I’ve sort of been meaning to do this all year, but other stuff kept happening, and now I don’t want to do it until I’ve had a look at Black/White 2 to see what they’ve done with everything (it has been strongly hinted that I will get one for my birthday in December).  Er… first thing next year, maybe?

What are your thoughts on the breeding restrictions on the nidoran family and the reasons for it?

For the benefit of readers who don’t know what this is about:

Female Nidoran and Nidorina can breed with male Pokémon from the Monster or Field egg groups and lay eggs which will hatch into Nidoran of either gender.  This makes sense.  Male Nidoran, Nidorino and Nidoking can breed with female Pokémon from the Monster or Field egg groups, who will then lay eggs which will hatch into Pokémon of the mother’s species.  This also makes sense.

What makes no sense at all is that Nidoqueen are sterile.

EDIT: I was mistaken; I think I had several Bulbapedia articles open at once and looked at the wrong one at some point.  Nidorina can’t breed either; only female Nidoran can.  This is actually what I *thought* was the case originally, until I decided to check my facts and then misread the reference.  Oh, the irony.  Anyway, this makes all of my speculation below much less plausible and I have no longer have any sensible explanation.  Game Freak are just silly.

Adult Nidoqueen cannot breed at all.  No, not even with a Ditto.  As far as I can tell, this is merely one of the stupider oversights that Game Freak haven’t quite gotten around to fixing yet for some reason.  I couldn’t tell you why; someone probably made a mistake in the original coding when they did Gold and Silver (given Nidoqueen’s unusual gender status, it’s not unbelievable that they could slip up with her) and it’s been copied and pasted ever since.  Strange that they didn’t fix it when they overhauled the entire game engine for Ruby and Sapphire, but perhaps they hadn’t noticed it by that point.  Hmm.

Anyway, there is actually a perfectly reasonable in-universe explanation they could use if they wanted to.  There’s a conjecture in anthropology, which has been floating around for a while now and has never gained a whole lot of support but never quite seems to die either, called the grandmother hypothesis.  Basically, the idea is that human women are able to live well beyond reproductive age because having older women around to help care for the children presents a tangible benefit to the survival of the community.  It’s a common sense explanation for the phenomena of menopause and post-menopausal longevity, but it’s very difficult to prove scientifically (you can read more about the hypothesis in P.S. Kim et al., “Increased longevity evolves from grandmothering,” Proc. R. Soc. B. 2012).  If you wanted a good reason for Nidoqueen to be unable to breed, this would be a solid place to start: Nidorina are the breeding adults, while Nidoqueen are the ‘grandmothers’ who hang around to help their daughters raise their own children and protect the whole group.  This makes a great deal of sense considering that very few Nidorina would ever make it that far – they evolve using Moon Stones, so in the wild you’d expect to see one, perhaps two Nidoqueen in an entire herd.  They have a more complex social function than just continuing to reproduce.

Nuzlocke- The idea of playing the game where you have restrictions on what Pokemon you can catch and that when a Pokemon faints, it dies. What are your thoughts on the phenomenon? Do you think it says anything about the Pokemon “culture”? What about the comics that are often a part of these challenges? Do they offer any particularly good/bad insight into the Pokemon world?

I’ve tried that a few times (I always knew it as ‘hard mode,’ though, I only encountered the term ‘Nuzlocke’ fairly recently).  I was really terrible at it.  I always had fun writing little obituaries for the Pokémon who died, though, like so:

“R.I.P. Altheia, the serious Illumise.  Exploded in a tragic Metronome accident, aged 28 levels.”

(That one is a true story)

Anyhow, as for your actual question.  Hmm.  I suppose it’s a natural extension of the way people use the words “die” or “kill” in Pokémon, and other video games, when they actually mean “faint” or “incapacitate” or whatever.  It’s a very different way of looking at battles, because of course the official media always portray battles as non-fatal (although there is occasionally a suggestion that deaths could potentially result if trainers pushed their Pokémon too hard).  On the other hand, one of the traditional rules of hard mode is that you have to nickname all of your Pokémon, to create an emotional attachment to them; the rules have the impact they do because you’re supposed to imagine them as your friends (I’ve even seen a couple of accounts where people have named Pokémon after their real human friends to stress the point).

What’s interesting about this is the way it turns Pokémon into a roleplaying exercise.  Technically the Pokémon games are within the RPG genre, but there’s remarkably little emphasis placed on the player’s choices and personality – the ‘RP’ of ‘RPG’ doesn’t really come into it much.  The more detailed view of the world presented by the anime – I think – is meant to encourage players to imagine for themselves all of that extra stuff that the games leave out, like interactions between the player and his or her Pokémon.  Part of the aim of hard mode  or Nuzlocke rules is to provide an added challenge, obviously (once you know what you’re doing, the single player game is trivially easy until you get to places like the Battle Subway; this rules give players the added challenge that often seems to be missing from the game), but I think the way the rules are generally expressed demonstrates that they’re also used with a view to increasing the feeling of immersion in the game world.  You’re supposed to imagine an actual emotional connection with each Pokémon and desire to protect it.  Although the presentation of the challenge is much darker than anything the official franchise likes to give us, it actually supports the aims of the game designers rather well.  Might be something for Game Freak to think about…

There’s a “Philosoraptor” meme going around the internet that goes like this: If two trainers with a Slowpoke and a Shelder respectively are battling, and the Shelder bites the tail of the Slowpoke, who gets the resulting Slowbro? An episode of the anime seems to state that the Slowpoke retains the control and allegiance for the Slowbro even if the Slowpoke is wild, but it got me thinking about symbiotic relationships in Pokemon. Mantine & Remoraid are another interesting pair. Thoughts on this?

Interesting question.

Purely from a practical perspective, the Shellder is sort of the ‘passive’ partner in the symbiosis; it just feeds off the Slowpoke’s scraps and moves wherever the Slowpoke decides to go.  Assuming the Slowpoke remains loyal to its trainer, it makes sense that the Shellder would be dragged along for the ride.  This, of course, raises the question of why a Shellder belonging to a trainer ever would willingly join with a Slowpoke belonging to another trainer, or with a wild one.  In the Slowbro episode of the anime, the Shellder actually belongs to Jessie, but abandons her when it joins with the wild Slowpoke who lives with Professor Westwood.  The obvious explanation is that Shellder didn’t really want to be with Jessie anyway, but unfortunately that explanation doesn’t work for me because of my weird theories that Pokémon are always able to resist capture if they don’t want to be partnered with humans.  I think the best answer for me is that Shellder are very fickle Pokémon (which, in fairness, does seem to fit them) who are perfectly prepared to work with humans just for the possibility of finding a Slowpoke.  They may develop true loyalties before that happens, and if they do, they will refuse to join with wild Slowpoke from then on, but in the early stages of your relationship with your Shellder, you might want to keep it away from any Slowpoke you meet…

Remoraid and Mantine are sort of a different case, because they actually can and often do separate again later (in its sprites, Mantine is shown without attached Remoraid from Diamond and Pearl onward).  The Remoraid assists with evolution, but an ongoing symbiosis relationship is only necessary in the wild.  Of course, if a wild Remoraid did attach itself to your Mantyke (or adult Mantine, for that matter) you might find that you had a new Pokémon!  They wouldn’t change allegiance the way Shellder do, though.

Your anon who mentioned rivals I agree with. Also I look forward to that. I know it’s been a meme, but I want to see if we can draw some real evidence, that in the games, Green/Blue/Gary is actually a kid who has it as bad as the memes have claimed him to. Not to mention Silver, I haven’t gotten far enough into mangas to know his story, but he has been such a mystery for so long.

Well, I don’t know anything about the manga, but Blue in the games is a total jerk.  I don’t really think you can rehabilitate him at all.  Also, I kinda think I said everything I care to say about him in my Champions series, so I probably won’t cover him again when I do the rivals.

Silver, though… Silver really fascinates me.  He has actual, honest-to-goodness character development!  Actually, Silver is practically the whole reason I want to do a series on the rivals; I think he’s far and away the most interesting.  Well, unless you count N, which I think I might.  Hmm.