Tag: specific pokemon

I may as well throw my hat in the ring. My favorite pokémon is Anorith, but I can’t help but be a little disappointing with Armaldo. Now, Anorith is based on the anomalocaris, which was a voracious (& compared to the other species of the time) massive and speedy marine predator. So I was hoping it would have an evolution that showed those sort of traits off a bit better. But instead we get a bulky dino-thing. What are your thoughts on this, & would you consider an article on the fossil pokémon?

I’ve always liked Anorith and Armaldo.  The anomalocaris is such a weird and alien creature that you almost don’t need to do anything with it to create a cool Pokémon, and actually I think the Cambrian explosion in general would provide a fertile vein of inspiration for future designs.  I think the reason they took the design in the direction they did was to create a vision of evolution, sort of like what they did with Eevee, by showing the adaptation of marine species to life on land (although, in fact, Armaldo can still move and hunt underwater, and retains Swift Swim as his Dream World ability).  In fact, I rather like this progression, although, now that you mention it, perhaps a sleeker, faster form would have been better.  This might be a good place to introduce a branched evolution, actually, since it’s a place where you can use the choice to tell a story – one form focused on the land, and became the ancestor of such and such a Pokémon; the other form focused on the sea, and became the ancestor of some other Pokémon – which is the kind of thing that happens all the time (well, on a geological timescale) in reality.

An article on fossil Pokémon… you know, there’s rather a lot I could say about them in a one-off, and I am a great lover of the prehistoric beasties.  Yes… yes, I think I will.

My fave pokemon is furret because it was my first lv 100 pokemon ever. What is your view of it and how would you make it better because I know other than speed it is terrible : (

Honestly, Furret is one of those Pokémon that just plain needs more stats.  Speed actually isn’t his only strong point; there are zillions of cool moves you can teach him, and I think they fit his flavour really well too (he’s supposed to be very agile and slippery, difficult to pin down because he can slip through tight spaces and make hard turns very quickly).  I reckon giving Furret 15, maybe even as few as 10 extra points to his base stats across the board would do it.  He won’t be top-tier, but he should be able to hold his own.  He also suffers a little from the stereotypical Normal-type blandness, though he’s far from the worst, and clearly you like him anyway, so I think I’ll just leave that.

Smeargle’s a cool pokemon. He’s kinda weak but with sketch can use everything except for chatter… but how exactly does sketch work? I mean I could see him painting a bunch of rocks to use rock slide or painting fire for a flamethrower but how does he paint hyper voice or even better… how does he paint psychic? Penny for your thoughts?

Magic.

Some things, even I can’t figure out…

Smeargle does live in the Ruins of Alph, which might suggest some connection with the Unown – if he’s somehow able to tap into their ability to alter reality by painting sequences of Unown sigils, that might explain it… but I’m afraid that’s all I’ve got.

I am the unfortunate soul who’s favorite pokemon is Ledian… I know you aren’t planning on doing reviews of all these different pokemon but what’s your basic opinion on the 5-star pokemon?

I’ve always had a soft spot for Ledian, because Ledyba was the first Pokémon I ever caught on Silver version.  I don’t think Ledian is a badly designed Pokémon; the punching theme is weird but makes sense for a six-limbed Pokémon, and the connection Ledian has with stars and starlight is cool.  Why anyone would pair a reliance on punching attacks with Ledian’s abysmal attack score is beyond me, though.  The really sad thing is that, considering her terrible stats, Ledian actually makes a very noble effort to be a usable support Pokémon.  If you need someone with Reflect and you like Ledian anyway, there are worse choices out there.  I mean… people will laugh at you, and you’ll probably lose often, but you’ll learn to suffer through adversity with a smile and teach others the true meaning of Christmas.  Or something.

You’ll most probably cover this in your wrap-up for the Eeveelutions, but because the focus is now on adapting to the environment I see it unlikely that, for example, a bug evolution would occur because it would require a mammal being in a position where it thinks “Screw it, I’mma just be an insect now.” Just realised this wasn’t a question but yeah, I’ll be patiently waiting for that specific entry :3

That is definitely something for the wrap-up entry, but I hadn’t thought of that particular way of looking at it.  I’ll certainly look at it now, though, so thanks!

What are your thoughts on the breeding restrictions on the nidoran family and the reasons for it?

For the benefit of readers who don’t know what this is about:

Female Nidoran and Nidorina can breed with male Pokémon from the Monster or Field egg groups and lay eggs which will hatch into Nidoran of either gender.  This makes sense.  Male Nidoran, Nidorino and Nidoking can breed with female Pokémon from the Monster or Field egg groups, who will then lay eggs which will hatch into Pokémon of the mother’s species.  This also makes sense.

What makes no sense at all is that Nidoqueen are sterile.

EDIT: I was mistaken; I think I had several Bulbapedia articles open at once and looked at the wrong one at some point.  Nidorina can’t breed either; only female Nidoran can.  This is actually what I *thought* was the case originally, until I decided to check my facts and then misread the reference.  Oh, the irony.  Anyway, this makes all of my speculation below much less plausible and I have no longer have any sensible explanation.  Game Freak are just silly.

Adult Nidoqueen cannot breed at all.  No, not even with a Ditto.  As far as I can tell, this is merely one of the stupider oversights that Game Freak haven’t quite gotten around to fixing yet for some reason.  I couldn’t tell you why; someone probably made a mistake in the original coding when they did Gold and Silver (given Nidoqueen’s unusual gender status, it’s not unbelievable that they could slip up with her) and it’s been copied and pasted ever since.  Strange that they didn’t fix it when they overhauled the entire game engine for Ruby and Sapphire, but perhaps they hadn’t noticed it by that point.  Hmm.

Anyway, there is actually a perfectly reasonable in-universe explanation they could use if they wanted to.  There’s a conjecture in anthropology, which has been floating around for a while now and has never gained a whole lot of support but never quite seems to die either, called the grandmother hypothesis.  Basically, the idea is that human women are able to live well beyond reproductive age because having older women around to help care for the children presents a tangible benefit to the survival of the community.  It’s a common sense explanation for the phenomena of menopause and post-menopausal longevity, but it’s very difficult to prove scientifically (you can read more about the hypothesis in P.S. Kim et al., “Increased longevity evolves from grandmothering,” Proc. R. Soc. B. 2012).  If you wanted a good reason for Nidoqueen to be unable to breed, this would be a solid place to start: Nidorina are the breeding adults, while Nidoqueen are the ‘grandmothers’ who hang around to help their daughters raise their own children and protect the whole group.  This makes a great deal of sense considering that very few Nidorina would ever make it that far – they evolve using Moon Stones, so in the wild you’d expect to see one, perhaps two Nidoqueen in an entire herd.  They have a more complex social function than just continuing to reproduce.

There’s a “Philosoraptor” meme going around the internet that goes like this: If two trainers with a Slowpoke and a Shelder respectively are battling, and the Shelder bites the tail of the Slowpoke, who gets the resulting Slowbro? An episode of the anime seems to state that the Slowpoke retains the control and allegiance for the Slowbro even if the Slowpoke is wild, but it got me thinking about symbiotic relationships in Pokemon. Mantine & Remoraid are another interesting pair. Thoughts on this?

Interesting question.

Purely from a practical perspective, the Shellder is sort of the ‘passive’ partner in the symbiosis; it just feeds off the Slowpoke’s scraps and moves wherever the Slowpoke decides to go.  Assuming the Slowpoke remains loyal to its trainer, it makes sense that the Shellder would be dragged along for the ride.  This, of course, raises the question of why a Shellder belonging to a trainer ever would willingly join with a Slowpoke belonging to another trainer, or with a wild one.  In the Slowbro episode of the anime, the Shellder actually belongs to Jessie, but abandons her when it joins with the wild Slowpoke who lives with Professor Westwood.  The obvious explanation is that Shellder didn’t really want to be with Jessie anyway, but unfortunately that explanation doesn’t work for me because of my weird theories that Pokémon are always able to resist capture if they don’t want to be partnered with humans.  I think the best answer for me is that Shellder are very fickle Pokémon (which, in fairness, does seem to fit them) who are perfectly prepared to work with humans just for the possibility of finding a Slowpoke.  They may develop true loyalties before that happens, and if they do, they will refuse to join with wild Slowpoke from then on, but in the early stages of your relationship with your Shellder, you might want to keep it away from any Slowpoke you meet…

Remoraid and Mantine are sort of a different case, because they actually can and often do separate again later (in its sprites, Mantine is shown without attached Remoraid from Diamond and Pearl onward).  The Remoraid assists with evolution, but an ongoing symbiosis relationship is only necessary in the wild.  Of course, if a wild Remoraid did attach itself to your Mantyke (or adult Mantine, for that matter) you might find that you had a new Pokémon!  They wouldn’t change allegiance the way Shellder do, though.

Apparently, the Trapinch evolutionary line is based off of antlions, a type of insect which gained popularity through the sink hole traps of the larva. Here’s what bugged me, they were classified as Dragons (excluding Trapinch, of course) instead as part Bug. What do you think was the reason for this?

I think they probably started with the idea of a desert dragon, implying a Dragon/Ground type, and only later tried to come up with an unassuming ‘baby’ form for it.  When they did, they eventually settled on Trapinch and then worked the dragonfly aesthetic into the mature designs to build on it.

Also, do notice that they’re in the Bug breeding group, but not the Dragon breeding group.  Although they have many of the traits of Dragon Pokémon and few of the traits of Bug Pokémon, they can breed with most Bug-types, and are presumably more closely related to them than they are to other Dragon-types.

Why do you suppose the legendary birds aren’t on the power bracket?

There was a preliminary round.  They had 35 legendary Pokémon and wanted 32 so they could have a neat tournament format, so they put the Kanto birds up against the Johto beasts before the main tournament started.  Suicune, Entei and Raikou won.

I didn’t cover this because I was late to the party and didn’t know about the event until the preliminary round was over.