Where I come from, the phrase “having beef with” something gets thrown around a decent amount. It usually means that someone has a stronger dislike of someone or something. For example, I bet a lot of fans of the Johto games, pardon the cow pun, could say they had beef with Whitney’s Miltank back in the day. It makes sense, too, this is a pretty strong Pokémon for a Gym battle at that point in the game, and options for available counterplay aren’t completely absent but are fairly limited. Enough people have played a Johto game and, by extension, probably dealt with this Miltank to where the Pokémon’s legacy is almost entirely tied to Whitney herself.
This served as inspiration for a new thread I wanted to make. It feels like wherever you look, most Pokémon fans you’ll run into, especially returning fans to the mainline games, are going to have some kind of story about one or two Pokémon in particular that, for whatever their reason is, they just absolutely hate on a personal level. A lot of the time it’s not even because they dislike the Pokémon, either. It could be anything, really. If I’m being completely honest, I mainly just want to hear people’s stories and let you guys share with each other. I’ll get this discussion kicked off with an example of my own.
On paper, Kingdra is a really cool Pokémon, and to its credit the changes brought about in Gen 6 absolutely gutted this thing. Pretty much every change in Gen 6 that I can think of indirectly nerfed this Pokémon. In reality, though, this thing is absolutely terrifying to me. Let’s put this into context. Seahorses are pretty cute animals, usually pretty small, if a bit unfortunate in the wild with the rough hand they were dealt as a species. By comparison, my height officially registers in at around 5’11”, or just under 180 centimeters for anyone that prefers the metric system.
Imagine a seahorse that is also a dragon, that is MY HEIGHT, and can breathe paralyzing energy and can create large whirlpools capable of altering the flow of the water and possibly drowning anyone or anything that swims too close to this thing. Yeah, nope, I’m good. But wait, it gets worse. “Let’s also introduce this Pokémon to the masses in one of the hardest Gym battles in the region,” Game Freak must have said during a 1999 press conference. “Let’s also proceed to do the same thing again in Emerald and lazily give Juan the same ace as Clair from the last games, and put it in the Elite Four, and start throwing Kingdra into a bunch of spinoff boss fights on top of that.” I’m not exaggerating when I say that Kingdra is pretty much single handedly keeping me from wanting to play Pokémon Emerald, because I kid you not, practically every single time I even graze this thing’s presence, even on Pokémon, Kingdra just happens to be able to find some way to get me really angry and upset. It’s like clockwork.
It got so bad at one point that, following me watching some unrelated YouTube videos where the person also said he was sick of seeing this thing so much, I actually started a running gag that’s carried over to my writing that me and my fictional Pokémon character (so basically just the player character in-game) had a chronic fear of this thing going as far back as HeartGold & SoulSilver. Being someone that primarily only played the DS games (Gens 4-5) back then, I also realized, “Hey, both of the first two Ranger games also have Kingdra boss fights”, ironically leaving Guardian Signs, the one Ranger game you would expect to have a Kingdra boss fight given the high usage of Johto Pokémon, as the only game without one. Because that makes sense. In any case, yeah, this thing drives me insane and I don’t know if I have it in me to feel bad for it and want it to get any kinds of buffs following Gen 6’s changes to the games. It’s not actually a scary Pokémon or anything, but I think it was neat how I was able to find some positivity from the Pokémon that gave me this much trouble when I was younger. My beef with Kingdra’s always going to be there, but nowadays I would say it’s more like a respected rivalry that also happens to be terrifying to think about existing in real life whenever people say they want Pokémon to be real.
TLDR; between the difficulty spikes it brings with it, the inconsistency with where and when you would expect it to show up in different games, and because it started out terrifying but arguably got nerfed way too hard, Kingdra represents a lot of what I don’t like out of a Pokémon. And did I mention this thing is my height in real life? That’s horrifying.
This served as inspiration for a new thread I wanted to make. It feels like wherever you look, most Pokémon fans you’ll run into, especially returning fans to the mainline games, are going to have some kind of story about one or two Pokémon in particular that, for whatever their reason is, they just absolutely hate on a personal level. A lot of the time it’s not even because they dislike the Pokémon, either. It could be anything, really. If I’m being completely honest, I mainly just want to hear people’s stories and let you guys share with each other. I’ll get this discussion kicked off with an example of my own.
On paper, Kingdra is a really cool Pokémon, and to its credit the changes brought about in Gen 6 absolutely gutted this thing. Pretty much every change in Gen 6 that I can think of indirectly nerfed this Pokémon. In reality, though, this thing is absolutely terrifying to me. Let’s put this into context. Seahorses are pretty cute animals, usually pretty small, if a bit unfortunate in the wild with the rough hand they were dealt as a species. By comparison, my height officially registers in at around 5’11”, or just under 180 centimeters for anyone that prefers the metric system.
Imagine a seahorse that is also a dragon, that is MY HEIGHT, and can breathe paralyzing energy and can create large whirlpools capable of altering the flow of the water and possibly drowning anyone or anything that swims too close to this thing. Yeah, nope, I’m good. But wait, it gets worse. “Let’s also introduce this Pokémon to the masses in one of the hardest Gym battles in the region,” Game Freak must have said during a 1999 press conference. “Let’s also proceed to do the same thing again in Emerald and lazily give Juan the same ace as Clair from the last games, and put it in the Elite Four, and start throwing Kingdra into a bunch of spinoff boss fights on top of that.” I’m not exaggerating when I say that Kingdra is pretty much single handedly keeping me from wanting to play Pokémon Emerald, because I kid you not, practically every single time I even graze this thing’s presence, even on Pokémon, Kingdra just happens to be able to find some way to get me really angry and upset. It’s like clockwork.
It got so bad at one point that, following me watching some unrelated YouTube videos where the person also said he was sick of seeing this thing so much, I actually started a running gag that’s carried over to my writing that me and my fictional Pokémon character (so basically just the player character in-game) had a chronic fear of this thing going as far back as HeartGold & SoulSilver. Being someone that primarily only played the DS games (Gens 4-5) back then, I also realized, “Hey, both of the first two Ranger games also have Kingdra boss fights”, ironically leaving Guardian Signs, the one Ranger game you would expect to have a Kingdra boss fight given the high usage of Johto Pokémon, as the only game without one. Because that makes sense. In any case, yeah, this thing drives me insane and I don’t know if I have it in me to feel bad for it and want it to get any kinds of buffs following Gen 6’s changes to the games. It’s not actually a scary Pokémon or anything, but I think it was neat how I was able to find some positivity from the Pokémon that gave me this much trouble when I was younger. My beef with Kingdra’s always going to be there, but nowadays I would say it’s more like a respected rivalry that also happens to be terrifying to think about existing in real life whenever people say they want Pokémon to be real.
TLDR; between the difficulty spikes it brings with it, the inconsistency with where and when you would expect it to show up in different games, and because it started out terrifying but arguably got nerfed way too hard, Kingdra represents a lot of what I don’t like out of a Pokémon. And did I mention this thing is my height in real life? That’s horrifying.
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