Tag: QandA

Brick3621 asks:

I take it you haven’t fiddled around that much with Pokémon-Amie, but I personally think it’s one of the absolute best additions to the series simply because of how much thought went into each Pokémon’s uniqueness; try petting Slugma or feeding Kangaskhan or touching Honedge’s tassel and you’ll see what I mean. What’s your favorite interaction you’ve had so far in Amie?

I’m extremely fond of Pokémon Amie, just because of how it changes the way players relate to their individual Pokémon.  Personally, I like the idea of feeding cream puffs to really big, scary Pokémon like Gyarados – or Wailord, who just sloooowly opens his mouth wide and gulps the whole thing down in one bite.  The fact that you literally cannot touch Slugma without burning yourself is cool but also kinda sad.  I want to pet my adorable little lava slug abomination!  Note to self: triple-thick asbestos gloves…

Inksword asks:

I always thought the rock typing was a side-effect from the fossil reviving process.Since fossilization is the replacement of stuff with rock, and you’re specifically reviving from FOSSILS not DNA (except, I guess, for aerodactly) the typing changed

Mostly works for the games (except for, as you mention, Aerodactyl).  Doesn’t work once you bring the anime into it, because there are episodes where Ash encounters surviving populations of supposedly extinct Pokémon (like the Kabuto in the Orange Islands), and even one where he actually travels through time and sees Tirtouga and Carracosta in their natural prehistoric habitat.  It’s pretty clear from instances like these that the fossil Pokémon aren’t substantially altered from their original biology.

Inksword asks:

I thought they made the switch from clefairy because they wanted a more gender neutral pokemon and clefairy was too pink and girly? Or is that just a rumor that’s never had evidence?

Dunno.  It would kind of make sense?  I can’t find anything reputable online that discusses it in any detail.  Most people who talk about the decision are pretty clearly extrapolating from Bulbapedia’s rather bare-bones account.

Anonymous asks:

If you had the power to make any other Pokemon besides Pikachu the mascot, who would it be? (I would choose Poliwhirl)

You know, I’m honestly not sure that I would.  Pikachu being the mascot, like a lot of other stuff from Pokémon’s early development, kind of happened by accident.  Pokémon didn’t really have a mascot at first; Pikachu gained the spot because of the popularity of the anime, for which he was largely responsible.  But Pikachu being Ash’s starter and the most prominent Pokémon character in the anime was a last-minute change; he was originally supposed to be a Clefairy, and it’s not entirely clear why they made the switch.  Ultimately, he’s the mascot because people love him, and people love him because, objectively, he is adorable as f$%&.  Much as I like to complain about Pikachu spawning a line of irritating knock-offs in subsequent generations, it’s hard to deny that he earned his popularity.  So yeah.  I’d keep Pikachu.

VikingBoyBilly asks:

In regards to the nidorina and nidoqueen thing and the cubone thing, I’m going to connect them into a theory that makes sense. Cubone and Marowak were meant to be unable to breed, and gamefreak accidentally somehow put the unbreedable trait on nidorina and nidoqueen instead, and they never corrected their mistake by making nidoqueens able to lay eggs and marowaks unable to.

A lovely idea, marred only by the lack of any evidence whatsoever…

The story of Red and Blue establishes that a Marowak can be a “mother,” regardless of whatever else is going on with the Cubone skulls, so why would they have intended to make Cubone and Marowak unbreedable?  Moreover, it makes perfect sense that, if they were going to make a mistake with the breeding rules, it would happen to a Pokémon whose relationship to gender is unusual – there’s no need to bring Cubone and Marowak into the picture to explain the slip-up with Nidorina and Nidoqueen, particularly as the two Pokémon have nothing to do with each other.

Anonymous asks:

Gamefreak have tried before to design insanely powerful pokemon with a shockingly bad ability (Regigigas, Slaking, Archeops) and they’ve generally failed or at least turned out pretty shakily. Do you think it would be possible to ever do this and make a consistently usable pokemon?

Hrrm.  Tricky.

I feel like it has to be possible, because we have items that give their users severe disadvantages, and those get used all the time.  If you imagine for a moment a Pokémon with really high attack and special attack scores, maxing out somewhere in the 550-600 region, and decent stats elsewhere, whose ability locks it into using only one attack until it switches… people would almost certainly use that, right?  Because people use Choice Band and Choice Specs, and that’s basically what I’ve just described, in ability form.  Obviously this particular example is impossible because if a Pokémon like that existed, people would stack choice items on top of its existing advantages for no extra cost, and all hell would break loose, but the point is that some disadvantages are clearly worth it.  The trouble is that I’m pretty sure the competitive multiplayer environment is not really on Game Freak’s minds when they playtest these things, and that’s the only way you’re ever going to draw the line between broken-because-good and broken-because-bad, both of which will be serious possibilities whenever you create a Pokémon like this.  I mean, Archeops is fine in single-player; I used him in my first playthrough of Black and he was fantastic.  Slaking has the potential to be ridiculous in the right hands because the AI doesn’t know how to exploit his weakness.  So the designers are kind of firing shots in the dark here, I think.  That makes it unlikely that they’re ever going to get it exactly right, but sooner or later they’re bound to get something that falls on the overpowered rather than the underpowered side if they keep trying.

VikingBoyBilly asks:

Why are mamoswine and relicanth not fossils? Also, Relicanth should evolve into a Dunkleosteuss pokemon. Cool idea, no?

Well, the whole point of Relicanth is being based on something that’s actually not extinct but just looks like it should be.  Making Relicanth a fossil would sort of defeat the purpose, in a way.  I mean, you could have Relicanth available as both a fossil and a wild Pokémon, which I think would be a cool way of emphasising its unusual status, but from Game Freak’s perspective, why would you do that?  And would most players actually like that, or would they feel cheated by getting a ‘fossil’ Pokémon that they could just catch normally?  Dunkleosteus… eh.  Sure?  It is again kind of defeating the purpose of Relicanth, but it’s not like evolutionary history in the Pokémon world makes any damn sense anyway.

As for Mamoswine… well, one of the ideas I have about fossil Pokémon is that they’re all Rock-types because Rock-type skeletons are unusually robust, and so representation in the fossil record is overwhelmingly skewed towards Rock Pokémon.  Fossils of prehistoric Pokémon of other types – including Mamoswine – are rare enough that we just never come across them in the games.

Cell Block Chacha asks:

So between your experience in New Zealand and what you’ve got so far here in America, which place would you say is more LGBT friendly? Just asking out of curiosity as a gay American myself.

Eh.  I don’t think I’m really the best person to ask.  Like, I come from New Zealand’s biggest city, so I grew up in an environment that was quite socially progressive even by our standards, and now I live in Ohio, which is… probably not the very best America has to offer on that front?  But on the other hand, most of the people I actually have anything to do with are academics like me, and academics pretty much everywhere are overwhelmingly liberal and have no patience for discrimination (my department has… at the moment, I think like seven or eight openly gay or bi graduate students, including me?).  I don’t really get out much, and since I don’t have a boyfriend there’s really no reason a stranger would know I’m gay unless I choose to tell them, so it just doesn’t come up.  That’s… that’s probably not a very good answer.  In strictly legal terms New Zealand is certainly very progressive as far as that goes, more so than most parts of the United States, but I don’t actually know how we’d compare to somewhere like California or Massachusetts.

Anonymous asks:

If you had the power to mind control Gamefreak employees while they’re brainstorming Pokemon ideas, what would you have them come up with?

Okay, let’s be clear on one thing here; if I had the power to mind-control Game Freak employees at any time at all, I would use it to make them wire all of their company’s money into my US bank account, then high-tail it to Acapulco and never be seen again. Just so that’s clear.

But aside from that, I would probably start by temporarily blocking out all memory of Pikachu and Pikachu’s popularity, because that is the only way I’m ever going to get them to stop making more goddamn cookie-cutter electric rodents.  Then I would compel them to spend hours on end staring at Mediaeval European bestiaries.  Then again, it’s possible they do that already.  It would explain Murkrow startlingly well.