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SPOILERS! Mysteries and Conspiracies of Pokemon

Ironmage said:
Random bit of speculation: the primary purpose of Basculin-White is to future-proof the evolution method. Basculegion requires HP lost to recoil moves, which doesn't produce a problem within Legends. However, Basculin-Blue can have Rock Head as an ability, which would prevent evolution without a lot of effort put into a specific setup. That issue can be sidestepped by making it so Basculin-Blue can't evolve at all, but that breaks the symmetry between the two forms. So instead they made a third form of Basculin that is the only one that evolves (another solution would have been to give a different evolution method to Basculin-Blue).

Basculegion having mechanically different forms might also indicate that it was intended to evolve from Basculin-Red and Basculin-Blue before this issue was pointed out.
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I mean they could also have just tied it to "use Recoil moves X times"

Other off the cuff options:
-Use Wave Crash specifically X times
-Take X amount of damage, from any source
-Deal X amount of damage with recoil moves
-Make Wave Crash work like Steel Beam: the recoil is hard coded and not cancelled out by things like Rock Head
 
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misterdarvus said:
Is White Basculin a new Basculine form, or it's actually regional form (Hisuian Basculin) that GF wont admit?
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They explicitly mention it in the game. It's called "White Stripe" but the Laventon notes in the dex he officially considers it a Regional Form; likewise the TCG just calls it "Hisuian Basculin", presumably for convenience & consistency with the other regional forms.

I assume it just gets an extra name so it has a little parity with their naming conventions of its counterparts. If there was something like a regional Flababe I'd be they call it some ____ Flower in various material but it'd still be considered a regional form
 
So I was thinking how weird it is that Cyrus is 27 despite looking way older.

Then I was thinking how creepy it is that the protagonists are all ~11 years old despite looking older.

Than I was thinking how weird it is that 10 is considered old enough in the Pokemon world to leave home and live on your own.

What if humans in the world of Pokemon just age faster than humans in our world?
 
In Legends Arceus, Pokeballs are a semi-recent invention brought to Hisui by the Galaxy Team, yeah?

And the Noble Pokemon are descendants of blessed ancient Pokemon?

1646072053954.png


What the hell are you?
 
DrPumpkinz said:
In Legends Arceus, Pokeballs are a semi-recent invention brought to Hisui by the Galaxy Team, yeah?

And the Noble Pokemon are descendants of blessed ancient Pokemon?

View attachment 410117

What the hell are you?
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What's funny is Laventon only barely comments on it. Voltorb "happens to resemble a Pokeball" and Electrode has the same composition as an Apricorn.

Shame the game had no interest in Pokeball Lore.
 
Here's some bizarre headcanon for you: Anorith is the result of convergent evolution, and is not actually the direct counterpart to the real-life Anomalocaris.

Firstly, there are a few pieces of information, including the most concrete data on when it was around, that point to it being much more recent than the Cambrian-only Anomalocaris. The end of Anomalocaris' range is about 50M years before Japan started forming, which would prevent there from being naturally-occurring claw fossils in Hoenn and Sinnoh if we assume those regions are the same age as their real-life counterpart. Meanwhile, Sword's dex entry states Anorith were around circa. 100 M years ago, which falls about 400M short of the Cambrian period. Interestingly, there's also no overlap between the time ranges of Anomalocaris and the Crinoids that were the inspiration for Lilleep, but the latter has not currently gone extinct and so could be contemporary with any later organisms that evolved into being Anomalocaris-shaped.

Secondly, and on the topic of Dex entries, both the Emerald and HGSS ones refer to evolving the wings over time in response to living in the ocean. However, this really doesn't make any sense in the context of a Cambrian-era animal. Every complex lifeform lived in the ocean at that point, and that style of limb structure shows up a lot more often than actual walking legs. This info does, however, make perfect sense in the context of a Cretaceous-era terrestrial arthropod that ended up moving into the oceans.
 
Spr_B2W2_Giovanni.png

So how exactly was Giovanni allowed in the PWT? The obvious meta reasoning is "they needed the full Kanto gym leader cast for fanservice lol don't overthink it" but fuck that I'm gonna overthink THE SHIT out of this and you can't stop me.

Statute of limitations? Corrupt PWT officials? RR Giovanni getting in a quick tournament bracket battle in a random timeline for the shits and giggles?
 
Yung Dramps said:
Spr_B2W2_Giovanni.png

So how exactly was Giovanni allowed in the PWT? The obvious meta reasoning is "they needed the full Kanto gym leader cast for fanservice lol don't overthink it" but fuck that I'm gonna overthink THE SHIT out of this and you can't stop me.

Statute of limitations? Corrupt PWT officials? RR Giovanni getting in a quick tournament bracket battle in a random timeline for the shits and giggles?
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He's in his (unreleased HGSS event) outfit which implies he's still in training.

He's a trainer.

It's a tournament for trainers.
 
Yung Dramps said:
Spr_B2W2_Giovanni.png

So how exactly was Giovanni allowed in the PWT? The obvious meta reasoning is "they needed the full Kanto gym leader cast for fanservice lol don't overthink it" but fuck that I'm gonna overthink THE SHIT out of this and you can't stop me.

Statute of limitations? Corrupt PWT officials? RR Giovanni getting in a quick tournament bracket battle in a random timeline for the shits and giggles?
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I'm more bothered that he attends the same tournament that Red and Blue are a part of. Are Red and Blue the only people in the Kanto League to even see Giovanni? If so, was Giovanni avoiding contact with them since they were in different tournament brackets? Was Team Rocket even that threatening or well known in Unova?
 
CPU said:
He's in his (unreleased HGSS event) outfit which implies he's still in training.

He's a trainer.

It's a tournament for trainers.
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That event was released wasn't it? All it needed was a fateful encounter Celebi, which was definitely distributed during Gen IV.

What his appearance in B2W2 really confirms is that Giovanni didn't actually commit suicide after losing to Ethan/Lyra, as many people argued at the time. But I've always personally viewed his presence in those games as more of a bonus rather than a strict canonical appearance. They needed someone to be the eighth Kanto gym leader and it couldn't be Blue otherwise there'd only be seven champions.
 
Yung Dramps said:
Spr_B2W2_Giovanni.png

So how exactly was Giovanni allowed in the PWT? The obvious meta reasoning is "they needed the full Kanto gym leader cast for fanservice lol don't overthink it" but fuck that I'm gonna overthink THE SHIT out of this and you can't stop me.

Statute of limitations? Corrupt PWT officials? RR Giovanni getting in a quick tournament bracket battle in a random timeline for the shits and giggles?
Click to expand...

We're talking about the guy that was a respected Gym Leader at the same time he was the leader of the mafia that terrorized the region.
 
green_typhlosion said:
That event was released wasn't it? All it needed was a fateful encounter Celebi, which was definitely distributed during Gen IV.

What his appearance in B2W2 really confirms is that Giovanni didn't actually commit suicide after losing to Ethan/Lyra, as many people argued at the time. But I've always personally viewed his presence in those games as more of a bonus rather than a strict canonical appearance. They needed someone to be the eighth Kanto gym leader and it couldn't be Blue otherwise there'd only be seven champions.
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Oh maybe, I was thinking it was a specific event that never got distributed.
 
The PWT is definitely one of those not really canon type deals, in that it absolutely exists in-universe but the full scope of it and how many people are there are not, and Giovanni is just there for fanservice.
Really they should have included Koga for the same reasons (since even if he's not the leader now, he still used to be one) but i guess their "no e4" rule won out over that

CPU said:
Oh maybe, I was thinking it was a specific event that never got distributed.
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For reference the only major events (there's quite a number of smaller things here & there throughout the series) that have gone completely unreleased are the Azure Flute event & the Lock Capsule event. The Lock Capsule was proabbly what you wer ethinking of, as it was the only HGSS event never done anywhere probably since it was so roundabout for little reward once BW1 came out.
 
CPU said:
Oh maybe, I was thinking it was a specific event that never got distributed.
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There are very few "specific events" in the games, as increasingly events in the games are triggered by simply having a certain species with a fateful encounter flag set on them. So any Celebi that was met in this way, even if hacked and not with the specific OT and ID number the event at the time had, would work. Very occasionally a Pokemon will need to have a certain ID number or OT iirc, but that's rare.
 
Yung Dramps said:
Spr_B2W2_Giovanni.png

So how exactly was Giovanni allowed in the PWT? The obvious meta reasoning is "they needed the full Kanto gym leader cast for fanservice lol don't overthink it" but fuck that I'm gonna overthink THE SHIT out of this and you can't stop me.

Statute of limitations? Corrupt PWT officials? RR Giovanni getting in a quick tournament bracket battle in a random timeline for the shits and giggles?
Click to expand...
Entertaining it as Canon for the sake of discussion, consider Giovanni was still operating as the Viridian Gym Leader up to the end of the Gen 1 games. The implication to me was that his position was never necessarily connected to him in an official capacity, and I think flavor dialogue says the Viridian Gym Leader was rarely seen, suggesting not many people actually know his face as such at the time. RBY has him give up on Team Rocket and take up a more mundane training life for a while until the moment you run into him during the HGSS Celebi event, and the only people who have seen Giovanni's face as Team Rocket's leader are Red and the Silph Co. President, with the latter likely too busy with running the Pokemart supplier for an entire region to tune into the PWT.

As for Red, putting aside "he doesn't talk much" jokes, he was a child who might have been trusting/naive enough to think Giovanni would actually go straight after being foiled that many times by one trainer (I use both terms depending on if you think Giovanni stopped and relapsed with HGSS/Rainbow Rocket later, or was just bluffing in the first place to bide his time). Even if this wasn't the case and Red went to the Police, he didn't necessarily have any evidence to specifically connect the two figures besides his word as some random (skilled or otherwise) kid trainer, so he probably wouldn't get very far trying to press people about it while Giovanni is keeping a low profile. From what I can tell, Giovanni is not an incredibly specific or uncommon name, nor would I assume his Japanese name of Sakaki (though I don't know any stats so do correct me if this hunch is off-base), so the calls from Johto Rocket over the Radio could be chalked up post-hoc to a shared name but him being just some dude trying to train. All of the above is also me assuming Giovanni's role and standing is in the context of a context where proving his connection is enough to cause legal action, when the Organized Crime bases for Team Rocket and/or his role in it (The Yakuza or Mafia by territory) are often depicted as acting above the law, having systems or connections or leverage that keep the Police from acting against them on a large scale even with provable guilt. It's entirely possible that before disappearing Giovanni would try to have all traces of him as a Rocket boss cleaned up, if only out of convenience.

As for then appearing at the PWT, as discussed, it's just a chance to show off and flex one's skills against other big name Trainers and Gym Leaders, something that Giovanni has reason to participate in whether to better himself or simply to see what the competition is like, since they're the first major obstacle if he ever tries to make a return (besides a new Player of course).
 
DrPumpkinz said:
Not really a mystery, more just like "huh, that's weird".

:dp/uxie: :dp/mesprit: :dp/azelf:
:ss/uxie::ss/mesprit::ss/azelf:

Uxie and Mesprit are commonly depicted as sitting, while Azelf is commonly depicted as not sitting.
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Not sure Mesprit is exactly sitting in that top sprite. To me it always looked more like it was soaring, and the animation in Gen IV where it's sort of swooping from side to side adds to that.
 
Uxie is still/sitting because it's the calm, knowledgable one

Mesprit is more playful (it sways back & forth and is clearly in motion in its sprites and is more vibing in its model) because it's the excitable emotions one

Azelf leans forward because being more determined/about to fight is a decent equation with having a lot of will power.
 
The talk of the Dark type in the Unpopular Opinions led me to wonder why Knock Off was buffed to the extent it was in Gen 6. It was already an incredibly powerful move in previous gens. What changed that would lead to such a drastic change?

Mega Evolution

Before Gen 6, if you clicked Knock Off, you were going to permanently cripple a Pokemon by removing their held item. Barring specific counterplay like Sticky Hold or maybe Mail (sources unclear if Mail blocked Knock Off, though it doesn't really matter since its main utility was blocking Trick) there was nothing your opponent could do to prevent something from losing its item if none of their Pokemon had already been Knocked.

In Gen 6, that situation changed. Now almost every team effectively had a Sticky Hold Pokemon, except the immunity to item manipulation was completely incidental and just an added bonus on top of an already-powerful Pokemon. Such Mega Pokemon would be able to freely switch into a 20 base power Knock Off all day, so Knock Off's base power was bumped up to 65 to give it at least some teeth against them.

I dunno why they also gave it a damage boost against knockable Pokemon. Maybe to further incentivize switching into Mega Pokemon?
 
DrPumpkinz said:
The talk of the Dark type in the Unpopular Opinions led me to wonder why Knock Off was buffed to the extent it was in Gen 6. It was already an incredibly powerful move in previous gens. What changed that would lead to such a drastic change?

Mega Evolution

Before Gen 6, if you clicked Knock Off, you were going to permanently cripple a Pokemon by removing their held item. Barring specific counterplay like Sticky Hold or maybe Mail (sources unclear if Mail blocked Knock Off, though it doesn't really matter since its main utility was blocking Trick) there was nothing your opponent could do to prevent something from losing its item if none of their Pokemon had already been Knocked.

In Gen 6, that situation changed. Now almost every team effectively had a Sticky Hold Pokemon, except the immunity to item manipulation was completely incidental and just an added bonus on top of an already-powerful Pokemon. Such Mega Pokemon would be able to freely switch into a 20 base power Knock Off all day, so Knock Off's base power was bumped up to 65 to give it at least some teeth against them.

I dunno why they also gave it a damage boost against knockable Pokemon. Maybe to further incentivize switching into Mega Pokemon?
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Probably because of Megas and Z-Crystals. That's probably why Knock Off is not a TR, TM, or Tutor in Gen 8, its super spammable due to the lack of items that cannot be removed.
 
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