Tag: QandA

Did you ever watch Pokémon Parodies? 2nd question, did you watch pokemon parody don’t mess with Pikachu? What do you think of these parodies? lol

Well, I don’t know the one you mentioned, but this one is amazing.  I think it’s still going, but very slowly.  You sort of have to accept from the beginning that it’s not going to make a great deal of sense, but once you get past that, it’s… well, it’s an experience, put it that way.  The party dynamic is basically as follows: Ash is mildly retarded, Pikachu is a psychopath, Brock is an incredibly creepy potential rapist, and Misty is the only sane person in the entire world.  Chaos ensues.  People who consider themselves completely mentally stable should stay well away.  Anyone else should jump right in.

If you were a Pokémon Professor, what would be your field of research, and where would you set up your lab? And most importantly: how much would you pay your interns?

Without a doubt, my field would be the history of Pokémon training.  Pokémon Professors tend to be portrayed as specialists in the hard sciences, with the lab coats and such, but I think there’s room for some more tweed-wearing humanities (Pokémonities?) people in there.  As for location… well, there are a lot of places I could potentially set up shop, but I think on balance I’d want to be in Johto; it’s one of the quieter, less densely populated regions, which tends to bode well for archaeological research.  It’s also the only region we’ve seen to which apricorns are endemic, and the only one where they are still used to make Pokéballs, which has always made me suspect that Pokéballs were invented in Johto – kind of an important development.

Interns don’t get paid!  Jeez, do I look like I’m made of grant money!?  Seriously, though, if I were offered a position with “intern” in the title, I wouldn’t necessarily expect any money at all; often you’re just in it for the work experience.  And I would exploit them for all they were worth!

Regarding the notion that humans could only have evolved BECAUSE the dinosaurs became extinct: How come non-avian dinosaur-like Pokemon (e.g. Meganium, Tropius) still exist at the same time as modern mammalian Pokemon? Would there have been any way that mammalian Pokemon managed to occupy the large-animal niches even with the presence of dinosaurian Pokemon (or vice versa)?

This is sort of getting close to trying to construct an evolutionary history of the Pokémon world, which is something I said I would never try to do because trying to work that $#!t out in the real world where we have thousands of prehistoric species to compare is complicated enough (did you know that the closest living relative of the elephant is a small hamster-like creature called a hyrax?), and I am not an evolutionary biologist.  But hey, what the hell?

It’s entirely possible that the whole thing is just convergent evolution – that is to say, Meganium and Tropius, despite their common appearance, are actually no more closely related to Aurorus than they are to Pikachu; they just happen to have adapted in similar ways to similar stimuli.  If you believe that Pokémon type is a reliable indicator of evolutionary lineage (which I don’t, but just for the sake of argument) then this makes a great deal of sense, because the modern sauropod Pokémon are Grass-types, while Aurorus is an Ice-type.  I’m not totally sold on this because I’m not sure I can think of any real-world examples of convergent evolution that are so striking, but it’s possible that the internal biology of these species is radically different and they just happen to look similar…

Anyway.  There’s no reason, ultimately, why large reptiles necessarily have to precede large mammals and die out before mammals can become dominant.  There’s nothing that makes one inherently superior to the other, which is the thing people tend to forget about evolution; it’s not about general superiority, it’s about suitability to particular conditions.  Things just happened to turn out that way in our world, because there was a meteor, and lots of pain, and I think the phrase “global firestorms” has been thrown about, which is never a fun time, and as a result all the largest animals died out very suddenly and all their niches became open all at once, which is a recipe for major adaptive radiation on the part of the smaller animals.  People weren’t totally sure for a while what caused the KT extinction but I think most paeleontologists tend to agree now that the ten-kilometre-wide hunk of flaming rock certainly didn’t help.  It’s possible that the Pokémon world just didn’t experience KT, or didn’t react to it in the same way.  If we believe the events of the first Mystery Dungeon games, Rayquaza (who may well be immortal) has both the power and the inclination to prevent apocalyptic meteor strikes, and while I tend to take Mystery Dungeon with a grain of salt it is worth remembering that there are, and probably always have been, godlike powers at work in the Pokémon world.  I would hypothesise that in some parts of the world the ‘saurian’ Pokémon lineages died out in a much more peaceful and gradual fashion (which let’s face it, many dinosaur lineages were beginning to do in the real world anyway, long before KT) and were replaced by large mammalian Pokémon, while in other areas they continued to flourish, adapt and evolve, creating two or more radically different ecological spheres, which were only recently brought together again by humans in a sort of Columbian Exchange-type fashion.  Think Australia, but with surviving dinosaurs instead of marsupials.  I’d say that’s my best guess.

Now that you made it that far, I can ask. What do you think of the NPC in X/Y who says that Pokemon eggs aren’t really eggs but more like cradles? I wonder how that would work exactly.

The problem is that I have no idea what he means.  When he says they “aren’t really eggs,” presumably he is contrasting them to something else which he does consider an egg, but whether or not other egg-laying creatures even exist in the Pokémon world is something of a point of contention.  That being the case, the only thing I can think of that could be considered an egg by whatever definition he’s using is a human egg – which is so completely and obviously different that the statement is just totally banal.  What’s more, describing an egg as being “like a cradle” would be a perfectly straightforward metaphor anyway, so it’s hard to see why being “like a cradle” should somehow disqualify them from being eggs… unless he’s saying that they are “like cradles” in the sense that they are artificially constructed and have viviparous infants deposited in them after birth, but that seems just too weird to contemplate…

Hi, I was thinking about Reshiram and Zekrom. It took me several minutes to remember which one stood for truth and which for ideals, does this happen to you? Do you think it’s a design flaw and how would you fix it?

I thought about this quite a bit when I was writing about Black and White, and when I reviewed the Victini movie.  In both the games and the movie, Reshiram and Zekrom are basically interchangeable, as are their values.  This is necessary so that the same story can be told whichever one N partners with, and is made possible largely because the writers seem to have a very loose interpretation of what ‘truth’ is.  I think this is the real problem, rather than anything in their physical designs; both Reshiram’s ‘truth’ and Zekrom’s ‘ideals’ basically boil down to “the way you believe in your heart the world should be,” so there’s nothing to distinguish them conceptually.  Zekrom stands for ideals and Reshiram stands for truth, but ultimately both of them admire and reward the same things in their human partners: the desire for change, and the will to pursue it.  Honestly, I don’t think they’re forces of ‘truth’ and ‘ideals’ at all; I think they personify conflict itself in a way so abstract and primal that our pathetic little human minds just give up and start arbitrarily assigning them to pairs of opposites like light and dark, male and female, or passion and serenity, in an effort to explain their nature in terms we can understand.  Since playing the sequels I’ve actually come to think that the fuzziness of their boundaries is intentional; you can see this, for instance, when you meet Drayden in the sequels and he talks about how, in spite of their long-standing and bitter opposition, Reshiram and Zekrom aren’t even all that different, and don’t really need to be enemies at all.  I think the fact that you have difficulty remembering which is which is sort of the point; the whole thing, I suspect, is supposed to be an allegory for the wastefulness of conflict.

All that said, I don’t really like the way Reshiram and Zekrom were handled.  If I had been running Black and White, I probably would have demanded significantly more divergence between the two games in the way the story unfolded, to give room for Reshiram and Zekrom to look for and cultivate different qualities in their chosen heroes – Reshiram respects intelligence, discipline, pragmatism and an analytical worldview, while Zekrom respects confidence, passion, determination and an idealistic worldview.  N could actually fit either of these – he can earn Zekrom’s trust through his desire to change the world for the better and his dedication to his cause, while he can command Reshiram’s respect through his undeniable brilliance and his ability to view the world with mathematical objectivity.  I think I would probably work this by playing up different aspects of N’s personality on the different games, to make it more obvious how he fits each dragon.  Then, starting from the point when the player obtains the Light Stone or Dark Stone (which I might put earlier in the game), Reshiram/Zekrom will begin sending the player visions or dreams that require difficult moral choices (“who do you save and why?”-type dilemmas with no ‘right’ option, both choices leading to a different explanation from the dragon about why you suck), basically with the intention of moulding you into a hero who suits their preferences.

Ok, so this is a question about the in-game level progression. Let’s consider White for example. You start off in Nuvema town, encountering pokemon around level 5, and finally end up in Lacunosa town, surrounded by Pokemon of levels upto 60! The inhabitants of these end game towns must live in constant mortal peril, and their kids probably have no chance of becoming trainers! My question is whether you can think of any way of logically reconciling this level gap? – Adi

Hrm… I’ve thought about this before and failed to come up with any satisfactory answer.  This isn’t a problem specific to Pokémon, of course – almost any combat-centred RPG has to introduce progressively more difficult opponents in order to keep the game interesting, and while most players are willing to suspend disbelief for something so clearly necessary to the functioning of the game, it’s still nice to have an explanation.  However, this is easier for some games to produce than others, simply depending on the nature of the story being told and the world in which it takes place, and Pokémon definitely has more to justify than most.

I think the most obvious possibility is that you encounter more powerful Pokémon later in the game because stronger Pokémon become willing to challenge you as you get stronger (so we imagine that the strange level distributions are actually an illusion of sorts) but that doesn’t explain why you still find weak Pokémon when you go back to earlier areas.  The weird thing is, NPCs in the games actually do acknowledge this pattern sometimes – for instance, if you try to head east from Santalune City towards Snowbelle City right at the beginning of the game, you’re stopped near the entrance to Victory Road and told that you aren’t ready for the kind of opponents you’ll find that way.  It seems, at least at times, like the inhabitants of this world are well aware that some parts of their regions are much more dangerous than others for no readily obvious reason.  I think what this has to suggest is that the skewed level distributions we see are very real, and that they can deal with it.  Pokémon are not, in any real sense, in conflict with humanity as a group, so I doubt that towns in even the most high-level areas are in constant or unmanageable danger – you’d want to be careful walking around outside town without protection, obviously, but we’ve always received the same warnings about even the most benevolent areas at the beginning of each game.  As for new trainers, it seems likely to me that a trainer’s career can start in a number of ways, and that in places with tougher wild Pokémon it’s more common to practice with and then inherit a fairly powerful starter a little later in life rather than be given a low-level one right off the bat (think about it – the trainer classes that represent prepubescent children like Youngsters, Lasses and Bug Catchers tend to hang out in the earlier areas of the game; trainers in higher-levelled areas tend to be older as well as stronger).  Basically, their surroundings do present difficulties for Pokémon training as a career and an institution, but they manage to get around it.  None of this, unfortunately, explains why some areas have higher-level Pokémon in the first place…

Favourite X and Y Pokemon so far? Also, be patient with Skrelp… He evolves very late; I believe level 49?

Hmm… that’s a tough one.  I think at the moment it might be Inkay, for having such an offbeat fighting style and being so ridiculously cute, as well as daring to be a sea creature that isn’t a Water-type.  I also have a major soft spot for Amaura and Aurorus, for reasons of dinosaurs, and I kinda like Goomy for being such a weird Dragon-type, but I’m waiting for the final evolution to make up my mind about that.

So I feel like Stantler is one of those Pokemon Gamefreak doesn’t care about. It’s normal-type, and weaker that other similar Pokemon like Tauros, so I wanted to come up with an exclusive move and am curious about what you think. The move is called Doom Bell, where Stantler vibrates its horns to release an eerie tone that will faint the opponent if Stantler isn’t knocked out before the end of the turn. The move can only have 3 PP and fails if the opponent is switched in during that turn.

Hmm.

It’s… kind of an all-or-nothing tactic?  Like, in theory, a Stantler with a Focus Sash can kill absolutely anything with this move, barring entry hazards, weather damage and multi-hit attacks, which strikes me as a terrible thing to give to any Pokémon.  The smart thing for the opponent to do is always to switch out against Stantler until it runs out of Doom Bell PP – which means that the smart thing for Stantler to do is never actually to use Doom Bell, and instead to exploit the fact that very few Pokémon will willingly stay in against it by spamming Calm Mind or Thunder Wave.  You get this irritating game of chicken, where Stantler is daring an opponent to stay in, try to kill him, and risk being Doom Belled, and the opponent is daring Stantler to use Doom Bell and risk running out of PP for it without killing anything.  Worse, it’s clearly a very good idea for Stantler with this move to have Substitute as well – so the opponent is in a situation where they can either switch out and risk letting Stantler set up a free Substitute, making him even more annoying to deal with, or not switch out and risk instant death.  I actually think a lot of Stantler might wind up not having Doom Bell at all – just something along the lines of [Calm Mind | Psyshock | Thunderbolt | Substitute/Energy Ball], keeping one of the attacks secret until very late in the game, and just exploiting the fear of the possibility of Doom Bell, since optimal tactics for the damn thing involve not using it.  I’m… not convinced it’s a good idea.

If it’s any consolation, Stantler’s not… that bad.  His movepool is solid and he has two great abilities; his stats are just a bit lacklustre.

Also… why a bell?  As far as I know Stantler doesn’t have any sonic powers or any flavour related to bells or ringing… he doesn’t even learn Heal Bell.