Tag: QandA

vikingboybilly asks:

Do you find it odd that Carnivine, a venus flytrap, is poorly matched against bug type pokemon? What would you do to fix that (besides ignoring it)?

Hmm.  It hadn’t occurred to me, but yes, that is unfortunate.  Well, I’ve talked before about improving Carnivine by changing its type to Grass/Poison, among other things, which would help, but looking at it from this particular perspective… at the moment Carnivine has an ability, Levitate, which is great but actually not particularly helpful to a Grass-type.  You could replace that with a unique ability – “Flytrap,” “Flycatcher,” something like that – which absorbs Bug attacks for healing (in the manner of Water Absorb) or an attack boost (in the manner of Sap Sipper).  I think that would get the point across nicely.

Anonymous asks:

What do you think the in-universe justification for the national pokedex is? like why is kanto first, then johto, and so on. Is it because Oak created the pokedexes?

I think maybe the better question is “why is there an order at all?”  

They’re not physical books; they don’t need to be printed, so there’s no need for the entries to actually exist in any sort of canonical order.  The user can just ask for one specific entry, or for a list of entries arranged alphabetically, or by type, or by geographical distribution, or whatever.  In-universe there is no obvious reason why, for instance, the Pidgey line should come immediately after the Weedle line.  And then, of course, the one clear ordering principle – the fact that evolutionary families go together – is then violated apparently at random (again, from an in-universe perspective) by Pokémon like Pichu or Kingdra.  

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vikingboybilly asks:

Okay, listen to this: What if, instead of breeding eggs, pokemon trained each other by playing at the day care, giving their IVs, egg moves, or abilities to the other pokemon, and your pokemon can reach it’s full potential by learning and growing from the other pokemon at the day care instead of ridiculous egg breeding chains? This could be controlled with the power items and everstones and such, but it might work a little differenty (The power bracer’d pokemon get the attack IV from the other

You know, I think I like that, or something along those lines anyway.  I talked a bit in one of these old things about expanding the complexity and interactivity of Pokémon storage, placing a bit more emphasis on what your Pokémon are getting up to when they’re not actually with you, and this kind of thing might play into that kind of aim really well.  I think it reinforces the sense you get of Pokémon as individuals if they help each other to learn and grow, rather than just keeping it as the sole responsibility of the trainer.  There’s a lot of scope there for, say, the combinations of Pokémon’s natures having different effects on each other, or for abilities that (in addition to their battle effects) alter the way Pokémon can interact with each other in the day care.  Maybe Pokémon that have trained together will be more effective in double or triple battles together?  Lots of different directions you could take it.

Anonymous asks:

What are your feelings in the whole Pika close thing? Like that fact that they keep making them, and do any of them really stick out to you?

Urrrrrrrgh.  Eh.  I don’t know.  Like, it used to really annoy me, because I’ve been sick of them essentially reusing the same concept since generation III, but I’ve kinda moved past that now, not because I’ve come to think it’s any less dumb, more because I can’t be bothered getting annoyed about it anymore.  Clearly they’re going to keep doing it, so maybe it’s a more productive use of my time trying to figure out why on earth it’s so bloody important to them that every generation have a small cute rodent or lagomorph with electrical powers, and try to look at them in isolation with a view to what is neat about each of them.  I liked that they tried to do something different with Emolga, I suppose, by going with a flying squirrel.  That was somewhat redemptive.  I think they must do it, more than anything else, because they want someone to “carry the torch,” as it were, to say “no matter how much things change, this is still Pokémon.”  And this is hardly the only or best way they have of doing that, but clearly it matters to them a great deal.

Anonymous asks:

Who is/are your favorite Classical mythological figure(s)? Me, I’ve always been partial to Prometheus and Hephaestus (what can I say, I’m a sucker for fiery things, and Fire’s my favorite type! :P)

You know, I don’t think I really have one.  I probably should because I’m a classicist and stuff, and I talked about it with Jim the Editor (who is a classicist as well) for like an hour about it and came to no particular consensus, so I’m just going to go with something interesting and non-obvious and say Helen, just because she’s such a complex and controversial character.  Like, you have Homer’s version in the Iliad, where she is vilified by pretty much all the Greeks and some of the Trojans while simultaneously being the exact thing they’re supposedly all fighting over, and she knows it.  She is well aware that everyone blames her for this terrible war, and she kinda blames herself for it too, because even if she wasn’t really in control of anything that happened, how could you not, in her position?  And there is this one amazing scene where she calls out Aphrodite – the goddess of sexuality, the source of what little power a woman can ever have in Helen’s world – for all the awful bull$#!t she’s been put through over the years because of her beauty.  And true, Aphrodite does immediately slap her down for it, but the thing is, no one else in Homer ever talks back to a goddess the way Helen does; they talk to each other about the awful things the gods do to them, but no one will ever actually say it to their faces (or at least not knowingly), because that’s the kind of thing that gets your ass smited, big time.

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Anonymous asks:

Long time reader of the blog, I went back and reread some of your black and white reviews and noticed something. In your Genesect review, you showed the picture of a lot of robotic pokemon and said in the picture that all of them, bar Magnezone, are done better than Genesect. Which leads me to what I wanted to ask, are you not a fan of Magnezone? If so, why is that? Is it purely from a design standpoint, or is it something mechanical, or just personal hatred that I’m not getting?

You know, I honestly don’t remember what exactly was going through my mind when I wrote that particular caption.  It was some years ago, after all.  I do prefer Magneton’s design to Magnezone’s by quite a lot, not even so much because Magnezone is awful, but because Magneton is sort of fine without it.  Magnemite evolving to Magneton makes sense and is kind of neat; they’re magnets, they attract each other, so they evolve by moving together and coordinating.  And then… they turn into a flying saucer?  Why?  I mean, it’s not even a horrible idea, and Magneton was already associated with cosmic phenomena, albeit loosely, but… why?

Also I was a great deal snarkier back then.