There’s this new fan game beta called Pokemon Evoas on deviantart. It’s like a pokemon game but they’ve made changes like learnable abilities, took out the steel, dragon, bug, and fairy types and added in metal and light, pokemon having more or less move slots, and instead of a villain team there’s this evil meloetta that controls trainer’s minds with music and has no qualms with killing. Might be worth checking out to see how these changes might affect the tone of the main games, if applied.

You know, this sounds worth looking at just to see how they work with the idea of a Pokémon villain outside of a Mystery Dungeon-type setting, especially one like Meloetta who’s normally viewed as more or less exclusively benevolent. Other changes you mention sound interesting but not terribly exciting; I’ve gone on the record before as saying I don’t like the idea of changing the number of moveslots, and X and Y do actually introduce a way of changing a Pokémon’s ability (or at least, I think that’s what it does), the Ability Capsule (having two abilities at once, while very cool in some cases, would be frighteningly powerful for some Pokémon like Yanmega, so I am distrustful). Not sure I understand the purpose of removing Steel as a type only to add Metal.

Who is your favourite random NPC in pokemon?

Okay, by “random NPC” I am understanding you to mean excluding Professors, rivals, Gym Leaders, villain bosses, Champions, Elite Four members, and other similar recurring character archetypes? Um… I’ve never really given it a great deal of thought but I guess there are a few I have fond memories of…

The Super Nerd from Mount Moon. He had his priorities straight – live in the dark, hoarding the calcified remains of extinct animals and responding with violence to anyone who tries to take them. Or the Aroma Lady outside Mauville City in Ruby and Sapphire who can inexplicably walk up ledges. Or the old guy with the Weedle in Viridian City who tries to teach you how to catch Pokémon but fails miserably! Man, good times… And who could forget Youngster Joey with his top percentage Rattata?

Also, I don’t know whether he counts as “random” but I have a certain fondness for Zinzolin in Black and White 2, purely because his motivation in those games is totally at right angles to what everyone else in the plot is concerned with, but still actually kind of interesting (he wants to separate Pokémon from people just to see what will happen, in a kind of twisted social experiment).

Have you ever considered getting more involved in the Pokemon Internet community, or are you happy in your little secluded corner of the Internet? I’m not entirely sure how you’d go about it, mind you, but I’m sure there’d be podcasts and such that you could go on.

Eh… that sounds like it’d be a lot of effort. I mean, if I spent a lot of time on forums anyway, that’d be one thing, but if I were doing it purely for the sake of being more involved, it’d be more of a chore than anything else… if you see what I mean? As for any sort of collaborative stuff… well, there are a few people I’d consider doing something with, but for the most part I kinda like being able to work to my own schedule (or lack thereof…) too much.

Do you think they should have made grass good against fairy? Fairies tend to nourish forests and such since nature is their home, and grass tends to be good against things that it gets nourishment from, such as water and the earth. At the least, I think it would have made sense to give grass a resistance against fairy.

You know me too well. I’m on board with anything that means Grass gets more advantages. However… I think statements like “fairies tend to nourish forests” and “nature is their home” are kind of dependent on a very particular notion of what a “fairy” is, not unlike the idea that dragons should have leathery wings and breath fire. Also, couldn’t this just as easily be spun in the opposite direction, giving Fairy Pokémon an advantage over Grass-types because they have power over plants?

I’ll probably do a whole entry on the Fairy type once my playthrough is done, so there will be more to be said here.

What’s a Nintendo?

A little-known and extremely rare Electric/Steel evolution of male Nidoran.

(Alternatively, according to Wikipedia, the word is Japanese for something like “leave luck to heaven”)

You seem to have a lot of strong, and IMO note worthy (pun intended) opinions about Pokemon. Both mythos and the games themselves. So my question is: are you for or against the PRIVATE use of hacked pokemon?

And a second bonus question from the same person: “Why don’t you put all of this in a book and sell it?! Seriously, I’d buy that shit…”

1. By ‘private,’ I would understand you to mean exclusively for single-player aspects of the game, neither using them in battles with other people (except with permission) nor offering them for trade? I’ve honestly never really given it much thought, but it seems little different to cheating in any other single-player game. If you’re going to go and rack up a bunch of wi-fi victories with a team of Pokémon you magicked up out of nothing, well, then you’re starting to devalue the time and effort your opponents have put into raising their Pokémon ‘honestly,’ but if you just want to stomp Diantha with a shiny Ho-oh because it looks cool, who am I to deny you?

2. Would you, when it’s all available on here for free? Well, perhaps you would, at that, but I can’t think all or even most of my readers would. Besides which, publishing a book would probably require me to deal with copyright law… since everything I do here most likely falls under ‘discussion or review’ I might well be okay there, but I feel I’m safer not trying to sell any of it.

Are you going to do Diantha and Iris Pokemon Champion entries?

Diantha, probably, and if I do her I’ll probably have to do Iris just so she isn’t the only Champion I haven’t written about. Look for that in another week or two, I guess.

Do you regret the Krakatoa project…?

(For reference, this question references the process that resulted in this)

Eh. I am ambivalent about it. It took a lot longer than I thought it would, and for that reason alone I don’t think I’d do it again, but it was at a time when I wasn’t posting a whole lot anyway, and I think I learned a bit from the process, so I certainly wouldn’t say I regret it.

What was your first gaming console?

Gameboy Colour with Pokémon Blue. I was a hair too young for the original black-and-white Gameboy.

If there was a Mega Arceus, what do you think its ability would be? I’d make it omnitype, which makes all its moves super effective and restores Mega Arceus to full health as regular arceus the first time it faints in a battle. (basically, an extra life to make up for the fact that mega evolutions don’t increase total hp). For the record, I would still make it a normal type.

Well, if it were me, I’d say that any Mega form of Arceus would be quite powerful enough without needing a super-ability (not all Mega Pokémon get new abilities, mind – Abomasnow, for instance, keeps Snow Warning, even though it is of no use to him after he first switches in). Not that that’s likely to sway anyone at Game Freak.