Gen 2 introduced the idea of pokemon that ar extremely rare or impossible to catch until a herd on some days. This adds an exciting factor to the hunt when you have a small window of opportunity to find a certain pokemon, but all of these pokemon were bad. Azumarill got buffed over the years, yanma evolved, and dunsparce got niche uses, but back then they stank, and quilfish is still unusable. Gen 1’s safari zone rewarded your effort with good mons, so what gives here?

We-ell, I don’t know if it’s entirely fair to generation II to draw such a sharp distinction – generation I has its share of pretty useless Pokémon that are hidden away in frustrating places. I mean, you mention that Azumarill and Yanma were much weaker originally than they are now, but the same is true of Scyther and Pinsir, who are some of the Safari Zone’s rarest Pokémon; Pinsir is rubbish in generation I (indeed, Pinsir is sub-par in everything up to and including generation V), and Scyther’s not great either. And need I even bring up Porygon? Meanwhile, one of the swarming Pokémon available in generation II is Tauros, who was amazing in generation I. I think the main problem is that what makes a Pokémon ‘good’ is often kinda difficult to anticipate without actually using the damn thing for quite a while, and particularly in the beginning Game Freak a) didn’t have a whole lot of experience with that and b) didn’t really care all that much either.

Do you know about the “Pokedex- Extended Fanon Edition” ? Any thoughts on their interpretation of the Pokémon universe or how they depicted various Pokémon species?

I think I might have seen it before? It’s not really something I’d want to spend much time looking at, partly because it would probably suck me in, partly because it’s the sort of thing that I keep thinking I might want to do myself someday (not sure I ever actually will, because it’d be such a horrendously massive project, but it’s something I would do if I had unlimited time), and I don’t really want a whole lot of other people’s ideas floating around in my head if I ever do. It looks like a solid effort, for the most part.

I was looking at the old official type chart and I noticed something intriguing. The first five types on the chart are NORMAL, FIRE, WATER, ELECTRIC, GRASS. I expected grass to come before electric with grass and fire in the order, but electric precedes it (the 6th element is ICE). Do you think this means they intended to have an electric type starter in the trio, with fire SE against electric? It’s curious, because the megaman games have electic and fire robots trump each other sometimes.

Well… to be honest I kinda feel like that’s just reading way too much into it… and it’s also probably worth noting that there are no three-stage Electric-types in generation one (although whether that would necessarily have mattered in the formative stages of the game is hard to say)… but… oh, what the hell, let’s go look at the damn hex numbers and see if that says anything.

(Obligatory explanation for anyone reading this who doesn’t know what these are: every Pokémon has a unique hexadecimal (base-16) number that identifies it within the games’ coding; from Ruby and Sapphire onward these ID numbers follow Pokédex order, but in the games from the first two generations they’re all over the place, and we think they represent the order in which Pokémon were created, since Rhydon is 01 and we know independently that he was the first design ever. It’s therefore possible – if you’re sufficiently credulous – to mine this list for patterns that tell us things about the design process of the original Pokémon games.)

So, I’m pretty sure the establishment of Grass/Water/Fire as the standard starter trio actually did happen very late. This is because Squirtle, Wartortle, Charmander, Charmeleon and Charizard turn up all together at B0 to B4, near the very end of the list, and I think this represents the moment they decided on a selection of three three-stage starters. Bulbasaur and Venusaur come in a little while before that; Ivysaur and Blastoise have both been around for ages by this point. So, on the one hand, there is good reason for thinking that the mechanism by which players received their first Pokémon was fluid for a long time during the game’s development, but on the other hand it’s the Fire and Water starters who are late to the party, not the Grass-type. It’s sort of difficult to come up with anything more solid than that… although you can, I suppose, look for places in the list where Grass, Water and Fire types seem like they could have been designed all together – there aren’t any – or for places where Water, Fire and Electric types seem like they could have been designed all together… and there are, interestingly, two of those. One is the set of Pikachu, Vulpix, and a Pokémon that was actually rejected from Red and Blue but ultimately resurfaced in Gold and Silver as Remoraid (EDIT: take this with a grain of salt – see comments section). The other… the other is Eevee and her evolutions, and Eevee’s role in Yellow Version does make it awfully tempting to suggest that maybe she was intended as the starter Pokémon up until Charmander and Squirtle were designed. Total conjecture, of course. Can’t prove a word of it. But it’s interesting to speculate.

Have you ever done a nuzlocke run of a pokémon game?

Well, I actually did have this question just a little while ago, but the thought occurs that I’ve been so awful at answering questions lately that this one may have been sitting in my inbox since before I answered the other one… so, um… let’s just say ‘yes’ and quietly forget about how long I’ve been keeping you waiting.

I think Victreebel should get a Mega Evolution. What do you think it would be like?

Eh… hmm… that’s a tricky one. Victreebel’s a pitcher plant, yeah? Well… maybe it would be neat if… hmm… there’s a kind of pitcher plant called a ‘cobra lily,’ because its leaves look sort of like the hood of a rearing cobra. What if that long vine that on Victreebel’s head that it uses for attacks like Vine Whip and Slam actually took on a life of its own and grew a little serpent head on the end? It’s used to lure prey into Victreebel’s ravenous maw, and can attack on its own as well. Eh… I don’t know if I like the idea of giving a mega evolution features that are most interesting in terms of how they’d work in the wild, though, since wild Pokémon don’t do that. Mrrm. Dunno.

Thoughts on contrary Serperior being a real thing?

Mostly along the lines of “MUWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

Do you Remember the crystal onix in the Orange islands arc? I feel it should have been implemented into the games somehow, like with the ability water absorb or whatever seeing how it had the immunity to water. I guess my question is, do you think other variants, other than shiny, of pokemon should be in the games?

I’ve thought about it. Not sure how I feel, all things considered. If there are obvious visual differences, then I don’t think there’s really any inherent balance issue from a competitive standpoint (assuming we even care about that at all). It’d allow the introduction of regional variations, which would be nice. I guess the main question is whether doing this would take away from time spent designing completely new Pokémon, and I don’t really think that it would. Personally I’ve always thought it would be really funny to have a Psychic Nidoran variant, for no other reason than because male Nidoran can inexplicably get Confusion as an egg move. Maybe that’s one way you could access these variant forms? By breeding in an egg move that would normally be hilariously suboptimal for that species? Then again, if you have a lot of these, then it will start to get silly… we’ve already got stats and movepools for seven hundred of the damn things to keep track of…

Re: Matt’s relationship with Archie. One word: sailorshipping!

Headcanon violently accepted.

Since ORAS is the ‘in’ thing right now, I have a question: why do you think we need Relicanth and Wailord to access the Regi trio? Why those two specifically? Do Relicanth and Wailord share a symbiotic relationship of some sort?

If there is some special link between the two, nothing else hints at it… The golems were sealed away deliberately, so I would presume that the people responsible for that are also the ones who determined the mechanics of the lock; they probably chose Relicanth and Wailord for some reason. They might have picked Wailord as being the largest Pokémon they knew of (and therefore strongest) and Relicanth as the oldest (and therefore wisest). Alternatively, since the inscriptions claim that people actually lived in the chamber where the lock is located – which is at the bottom of the ocean – Wailord and Relicanth may both have been Pokémon that were central to their culture and way of life. Or maybe it was that a Relicanth and a Wailord played an important part in subduing the golems and allowing them to be sealed away in the first place, and the people who built the lock wanted to honour them by making them the Pokémon that would open it. Take your pick; not sure there’s enough information to be more definite.

In the anime, whenever they trade pokemon, they always use this superfluous machine that exchanges the two pokemon’s pokeballs. I know this is meant to emulate trading methods in the game (as a machine in the pokemon center is needed to trade). In the the anime this could be because the pokeballs need to be re-registered, but there are also parts in the anime where pokemon are just given away without a machine. So why is a machine needed for trading, but not for giving away a pokemon?

I suppose it might be that the point of the machine is actually to move the Pokémon themselves from one Pokéball to the other – we know that Pokémon in the anime do seem to be tied to their own Pokéballs (take, for instance, Pokémon Food Fight, when Ash has to drag Snorlax over a mountain because his Pokéball is broken – for whatever reason, he can’t just, say, stick Snorlax in Pikachu’s Pokéball for a few hours). When you give a Pokémon away, you normally give away the Pokéball with it, so you don’t need a special machine. Of course, that just raises the question of why they’re so damned possessive about their Pokéballs that they aren’t willing to let them go when they make a trade. Could be some sort of weird throwback to a period when Pokéballs were rare and valuable artisanal objects – before production was automated and standardised, they might have been covered with valuable decorations, or emblazoned with a noble trainer’s crest, so that traditionally trainers would want to keep their own Pokéballs even when trading their Pokémon away. Basically the machine’s function is actually completely insignificant for the vast majority of people, but they use one because that’s how trades have always been done.