Tag: QandA

thephilosophicalsheep asks:

War has been a concept alluded to several times in the pokemon games, but has never outright happened. What would you think of a pokemon game in which the whole premise was that a war has started to break out, and your job was to stop it? War in the pokemon world sounds like an interesting concept, and using pokemon as tools of destruction could eventually be shown to be an unspeakable sin.

Well, we do have Conquest, don’t we?  That’s not really what you’re asking, but I think that would be Game Freak’s answer, that they don’t want that kind of theme in the core series; Pokémon’s preferred tone is a good deal more optimistic than that, and in fact even in Conquest war is pretty seriously declawed, from what I’ve seen of it.  Which is the problem, of course; Pokémon’s been around so long that you have people like me who’ve grown up with it, and wish it could have grown up bit more with us, and think that something exploring themes like that would be really interesting, but then you also have Game Freak, for whom Pokémon is (I think) a vision of what they wish our world could be like.  Evil exists, but it can always be overcome; people get hurt, but they can always be healed.

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Anonymous asks:

I miss douchebag rivals like blue and silver. Why dont they make more characters like that? Do you think they should?

Hmm.  Well, it sort of depends what you mean by “douchebag rivals.”  

I think rival characters should say something interesting about what it means to be a Pokémon trainer, and sometimes characters with major negative qualities can be good ways to do that.  “Nice” rivals like Bianca can do the same thing in different ways, though.  Blue was a douchebag because he was supposed to illustrate what a good trainer is not; Silver was a douchebag because he was supposed to illustrate how being a trainer changes you.  The closest thing we’ve had to that since Silver is Hugh, who isn’t really a douchebag but does have his troubling anger issues, but he’s sort of doing something different because the point of him is to reframe the Team Plasma conflict with a new perspective.  So I suppose I think it’s a matter of whether you can do something clever with it, and what kind of message you can use the character to create.

Anonymous asks:

Do you consider bronzong to step on claydol’s toes?

Hmm.  Interesting question.  

They’re definitely very similar aesthetically, as artefact Pokémon with mystical powers that move by levitating and are pretty much inscrutable.  I think there are some important differences, though, particularly Claydol being vaguely humanoid, and Bronzong having a very particular cultural inspiration (Japanese Iron Age ritual bells that were used, among other things, to pray for rain – this is why Bronzong can remember Rain Dance and Sunny Day via Heart Scales).  They’re both very closely tied up with the ancient civilisations of the Pokémon world, but in different ways; Bronzong was actually worshipped for its specific powers, whereas it’s sort of unclear whether Claydol were ever actually alive in ancient times, or just came to life somehow afterwards (perhaps even relatively recently).  You can do very different things with them, I think.

Anonymous asks:

Couldn’t gamefreak have simply taken volbeat/ilumise and plusle/minun and mashed them into a single pair of designs? They would have then had a pair of firefly pokemon with a relatively exclusive type combination, unique breeding mechanics, and a whole teamwork thing going on, backed up by the plus/minus thing. This would have been objectively interesting, and also not have ripped off pikachu.

And make ‘em Bug/Electric, you mean?  Hmm.  Yeah, I think quite like that, actually.  The cliché that “opposites attract” would tie Volbeat and Illumise’s romance theme together with their new Electricity powers quite nicely.  I think the problem is that Game Freak considered ripping off Pikachu to be a virtue of Plusle and Minun rather than a fault.  Which… y’know, is not really a position I can understand, but clearly it’s important to them since they keep bloody doing it.

Anonymous asks:

Do you have any Pokémon fan theories you are particularly fond of? If so, what are some of them? Would love to hear what theories a Pokémaniac such as yourself find intriguing! 😀

Other than my own? 😉 Heh.  No, that’s a joke; mine are a load of nonsense (just browse for a while, especially the anime commentaries).  But yeah, I don’t know… I don’t really go out of my way to look for these, and my reaction to a lot of them is “well, sure, if you like?”  I’m quite fond of the whole Venonat/Butterfree mix-up thing, purely because I think it’s one of the few bits of wild internet speculation that might actually be true.  Beyond that, though, mostly I just really enjoy the thought processes that go into some of the really dark interpretations of little details of the game, like the story that got built up around Blue’s Raticate dying on the S.S. Anne.  It’s going way further than I think you can take the creators’ intentions, but it’s interesting enough in its own right to be a lot of fun.

vikingboybilly asks:

So there’s debate over what makes a pokémon a dragon type, or a fairy type, or even a normal type, but I’m wondering what GameFreak thinks constitutes a bug-type. At first it seems obvious, but there are anomalous outliers like anorith being bug while kabuto, krabby and corphish are not. Shuckle is a worm; I don’t think of a worm as being a bug. Skorupi loses it’s bug typing for Dark, and if a bug has a secondary typing and grows wings when it evolves, it won’t be a FLYING type.

Well, Shuckle’s not a worm; it’s labelled the “mould Pokémon” so I think it’s probably meant to be more like a slime mould, but that’s hardly a “bug” either.  I’m not sure that I have a good answer for this one.  I think probably their ideas of what “Bug-type” means are more aesthetic than biological.  Crustaceans aren’t Bug-types because they more clearly “belong” in Water.  Anorith not being Water is really odd, because the way Armaldo is portrayed, as one of the first living things to move onto land, seems like it should give a good reason for Anorith to change from Rock/Water to Rock/Bug when it evolves; I think they may have wanted to avoid Rock/Water for the second set of fossil Pokémon, though, since Kabuto and Omanyte had both been Rock/Water.  So I suppose what it seems to be, to me, is “arthropods that don’t obviously belong somewhere else,” with one or two odd extras like Shuckle, who certainly doesn’t seem to belong elsewhere either… Grass, maybe?

Anonymous asks:

Hey you pokéstupid why do you think Australia and NZ are stupid countries? Your usa not america isn’t the center of the world, its the center of xenofobics like u

You misunderstand, gentle reader.  I’m from New Zealand (I thought my use of the phrase “back home in New Zealand” would render all confusion impossible, but clearly not…).  I was calling the United States ridiculous and backward (tongue firmly in cheek, of course… well, mostly).

Anonymous asks:

How do you think a Cherubi would feel if you fed it a cherry?

Unclear.  On the one hand it seems likely that the resemblance between the two is mostly superficial, but on the other hand, do they know that?  I would think they’d be pretty creeped out… but then, there are parts of the world where people eat monkeys.  Possibly a Cherubi would just feel insulted that we even thought it was similar enough to a cherry to be worth the comparison.

vikingboybilly asks:

So… ghost types. It’s pretty well implied that ghost pokémon are spirits of the deceased, but you can breed them… and hatch ghost pokémon from eggs. Does something have to die somewhere for the egg to be laid? Or do they just… procreate new spirits, who may eventually incarnate a living being? (you can breed yamask, btw) Shedinja is handled well; it’s a shed skin with sentience. Froslass, though… fact: Gengar is white on the original red/blue box art.

…is it?  I mean, very clearly they have an affinity for death, the dead, and places of spiritual power, but if anything I’d say that they are implied to be very much not what everyone thinks they are.  

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