Tag: QandA

How would you feel if in a new generation, Game Freak allowed Pokemon to have more than 2 types? (i.e. Water/Flying/Dragon Gyarados). What are some Pokemon who you could see as having more than two types thematically?

Eh.  I feel like dual-types are already stronger than single-types; the extra weaknesses are more often than not balanced by extra resistances, and dual-typed Pokémon generally have more powerful and versatile offensive skills because they have STAB on two elements.  Provided you avoid any triple-weaknesses (which wouldn’t be that common; hell, against 1/3 of all attacking types it wouldn’t even be possible), I think triple-typed Pokémon would in general have an unfair advantage – unless you changed some of the games’ other underlying assumptions about type; you could do away with single-typed Pokémon altogether, for instance, adding a second type to all of them, or you could reduce STAB from +50% to (for example) +35% for dual-types and +20% for triple-types.  That might make things interesting.

In terms of the idea of it, apart from the mechanics, well, I’d go for it if I thought the two-type limit was a constraint on the designers’ freedom, but I don’t, really.  Giving a Pokémon abilities like Levitate or Swift Swim can already convey an affinity for or link with a particular type without having to actually add the type itself.  I don’t think we lose anything by not having that option.

Having said that, you did ask, so… Gyarados as Water/Flying/Dragon would make sense, switching to Water/Dark/Dragon upon mega evolution; Flygon could become Dragon/Ground/Flying and swap out Levitate for something else (watch out for those x8 Ice attacks, though); Jirachi I think would make sense as Steel/Psychic/Fairy; Stunfisk really should be Ground/Electric/Water; Yanmega maybe could go to Bug/Flying/Dragon (‘cause, y’know, dragonfly); Dragalge could be Dragon/Poison/Water… there’s probably a few more I’m not thinking of.

hello! this is my first time asking or saying anything to you, I’ve to say everything you write is pretty awesome! please keep’ em coming! I wanted to ask about your thoughts on shiny pokemon, I’ve read almost all your entries and I can’t recall ever reading about it. In game or in anime, any thoughts? What about Ash’s Noctowl? I stopped watching the anime so I’m not sure if there are more than one shiny variation, as opposed to the games.

I feel like this has come up before, probably in a question someone asked me… yeah, here it is.  They’re not something I find terribly interesting in themselves – mostly I figure it’s just a rare recessive gene that happens to be prized by collectors, although it would be interesting to see how communities of wild Pokémon react to the trait.  I suspect they do not generally view it positively, or you would expect it to become more common.  As far as the games are concerned it doesn’t alter their abilities at all; Ash’s Noctowl was also very small and unusually intelligent even for a Noctowl, but as far as I know no other shiny Pokémon in the anime have exhibited special properties.  They don’t really turn up often enough to see any particular patterns in their behaviour or status.

I am a fan of Rapidash, but its not as powerful as some other Fire Types. It’s thing is that it runs really fast, which would make me think it has one of the highest speed stats in the game, but it’s not even the fastest Fire Type.. So I wanted to share my idea for a signature ability and have your opinion. “Fast Burn” – All Fire moves have Priority 1 and will go before any attack (including Extremespeed).

Well, minor point of description, what you’re actually saying is “all Fire moves have priority +3” – the reason Gale Wings doesn’t beat Extremespeed is because Extremespeed has +2 priority rather than just +1 like Quick Attack et al.  +3 would mean that Rapidash automatically outruns Extremespeed, Feint, Follow Me and Rage Powder, and can potentially outrun Fake Out, Endure, Wide Guard, Quick Guard, Crafty Shield and King’s Shield, but still loses to Protect. [EDIT: At the time of writing, Bulbapedia listed King’s Shield as +3. This is incorrect; it’s actually +4, which means you can ignore the rest of this paragraph.]  The big deal here is King’s Shield, because +3 priority on Fire moves would mean that Rapidash absolutely murders Aegislash (who’s not going to outrun her on a priority tie).  If you’re okay with that, fine – Aegislash could stand to be taken down a peg or two – if not, make it +2 and Rapidash can still outrun slower Pokémon using Extremespeed and faster Pokémon using lesser priority attacks.

Anyway.  What we’re getting here is the Fire equivalent to Talonflame’s priority Brave Bird, in the form of Flare Blitz, so it makes sense to compare the two (priority Will’o’Wisp is not nothing, but I feel like Flare Blitz is the big draw here).  Rapidash’s physical attack stat is significantly higher than Talonflame’s, though, which is worrying when you consider what a dangerous Pokémon Talonflame is, largely on the back of Gale Wings.  Their defences are similar, and Rapidash has less trouble with Stealth Rock but doesn’t get Earthquake immunity.  The main disadvantages are that Rapidash doesn’t have a second STAB attack, can only heal herself with Morning Sun, doesn’t have set-up moves (although Hypnosis could be interesting), and doesn’t have U-Turn.  She does have marginally better coverage with Megahorn, Wild Charge and potentially Drill Run through the Black and White 2 move tutors.  Another point is that Fire, unlike Flying, has no shortage of good special attacks, and while Rapidash prefers physical, her special attack stat is actually very similar to Talonflame’s attack, which means that bunging in Overheat to murder physical walls is a very real possibility.  I don’t think it really ruins any of the Pokémon that would otherwise counter you, but it will certainly make life more difficult for them.  Overall… it makes perfect sense in terms of Rapidash’s flavour that she should be the fastest of the Fire-types; she’s supposed to be a speed demon, and this certainly gives her that. She would certainly be dangerous, and I’m just generally wary of handing out anything that compares favourably, by any metric, to Talonflame’s Gale Wings, but she lacks some of the little extra tricks that help Talonflame to really shine like Swords Dance and priority Roost, so I don’t think we’re getting into broken territory here.

RandomAccess asks:

There’s something I’ve been wondering about lately, and I want to get your opinion. Do you think the Flygon line are reptiles with an insect motiff, or insects with a reptillian edge? I myself lean toward the former, but I’m very much interested in your input.

Does it matter?  Trapinch is basically an insect – it’s supposed to be an antlion or something – and Flygon looks basically like a reptilian western dragon, with Vibrava being somewhere in between (and, appropriately enough, a dragonfly).  Since they’re in the Bug breeding group, I’m inclined to say that they’re biologically more like insects, despite Flygon’s appearance.

Anonymous asks:

Nice and informative goodra fact, but why you referred to it as a “she?” It seems the community wants to make goodra a female only Pokemon for some reason. Still, thanks for the insights, I liked them!

I offer no explanations, justifications or apologies for my brain’s subjective gendering of Pokémon designs (which often makes little sense even to me), nor do I expect such from others.

Anonymous asks:

I don’t know if you’ve been following the VGC world championships, but if not (or still if so, I suppose), there’s a guy named Se Jun Park who just won the video game Masters’ division with a surprisingly effective Pachirisu on his team. While it is admittedly still a rather redundant Pikachu clone, does the fact that it’s actually somewhat competitively useful make you feel any better about Pachirisu?

Well, that was really quite spectacular.

See, this is the thing that’s quite nice about Pokémon.  In a lot of games that have… shall we say ‘issues’ with balance, the inferior option is completely and unarguably inferior all the time.  Pokémon just has so damn many attacks and abilities that practically everything has some skill or combination of skills that nothing else can imitate.  Se Jun Park has found Pachirisu’s: only a bare handful of Pokémon can learn Follow Me, which is an incredibly easy attack to screw up but very dangerous if you’re good with it, and of those, Pachirisu is the only one who can actually restore health while using it (via Volt Absorb).  Super Fang also means that her nonexistent attack scores don’t really matter, while her defences are actually pretty solid – not great, but she only has one weakness anyway.  Stick a couple of powerful Electric-weak, Ground-immune Pokémon on the team – Gyarados and Talonflame – to force your opponent to bring out powerful Discharges and Thunderbolts while messing up their Earthquakes, and you’re all set.  I mean, she’s still useless in singles – it’s just not the same game, and you’d never pull off that kind of $#!t without the right partners – but hey, it’s something Pachirisu’s good at!  This calls for celebration!

Anonymous asks:

So what do you think of the mystery dungeon games?

Well, I only ever played the first one and have incomplete secondhand knowledge of the plot of the subsequent titles, so anything I say here applies only to Mystery Dungeon Red/Blue and should be taken with a grain of salt.  I like the feel of them a lot.  It’s nice to have Pokémon games that are just about Pokémon, without any of those pesky humans to get in the way (even if the plot felt it was necessary to have humans exist… somewhere else… without ever really explaining their relation to the world we were actually playing in…).  It’s just cool to have Pokémon working together to solve their problems and protect each other, although some more effort could have been spent on explaining why exactly their problems seemed primarily to be “other Pokémon” (“they’re really mad at everything because of the natural disasters, okay!”).

The gameplay was… flawed in a number of ways, though (and here I will remind you that I’m going purely off the first titles in the series; many or all of my complaints may actually have been addressed later, I don’t know).  Adding new Pokémon to your team happens entirely at random, which is frustrating.  The dungeons themselves very quickly start to feel like they’re all the same – you wander through a randomly generated maze hitting anything that gets in your way until you reach whatever it is that you’re there for.  Tactical positioning doesn’t play nearly as much of a role as you’d think.  Sometimes your companions’ AI just does incredibly stupid things, like running off down a long corridor in pursuit of… something… and not being able to find you again.  Some moves are either crazy overpowered or completely useless: Silver Wind just damages everything on the screen (in addition to its side-effect of sometimes raising all the user’s stats), so sometimes you just die before you can even get close enough to attack whatever is using it, whereas your companions’ AI has no clue how to handle some support moves like Reflect, and will spam them every time you take a step until they run out of PP, which is not really helpful.  Each Pokémon’s level-up move list seems to have been directly copied over from Ruby and Sapphire without any consideration for how the strengths and purposes of the different moves are changed by the radically different demands of the battle system – I can understand not wanting to review every Pokémon, but surely it would have made sense to tinker with the ones available as player characters (I played as Psyduck, whose level-up list is appalling compared to what most of the starter Pokémon get, with no real advantages to balance that).  In short… there’s a lot of evidence in there of a general lack of effort in adapting the existing material of the Pokémon franchise to the game mechanics implied by the new concept.  Maybe it got better; I don’t know.  I hope so, because it was a very cool idea.

Anonymous asks:

Why do some people equate Ash with Michael vick? Is it because of superficial judgment or real reasons with merit?

People keep bringing up this Michael Vick dude and I have no idea what he did (I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen anyone compare him to Ash either – just people objecting to that comparison).  I understand from what readers have told me that he was in the news a lot in the United States a few years back for something to do with animal abuse, so some of the stuff in my answer to this question might be of interest to you, but I just don’t know or care enough about this guy to say anything specific about him.

GrayGryphon asks:

Do you think there should have been a Fairy-type that got Illusion as an ability? Not necessarily an existing one, just as a concept in general.

Hrm.  It makes sense, don’t get me wrong – fairies go well with illusion and deception – but I think the Illusion ability is something that it’s better to keep as Zoroark’s ‘thing,’ both for Zoroark’s sake (because, to be honest, it would probably not be difficult to come up with a Pokémon who gets more out of Illusion than Zoroark does) and to avoid the chaos that would be brought about by having both of them on the same team.  That’s not to say we can’t try to think of something that draws on a similar idea of deception, though… fairies from different cultures and different stories can have control over a wide variety of elemental forces, so… maybe a Fairy-type who can have several different secondary types, which the opponent can’t immediately identify.  It can be (say) Fairy/Fire, Fairy/Electric, Fairy/Water or Fairy/Grass, chosen at birth, and its appearance is the same for all four (maybe including elements from all four types), which means that the opponent has to fire off one or two “test” attacks to figure out what its weaknesses and resistances are.  Undecided on whether to have moves that are unique to each form or just give all four a wide range of attacks.  Could go either way there.