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Little things you like about Pokémon

I used to really dislike Weavile's shiny colouration but a while back decided "nah, you know what, it's actually pretty good" figuring that my tastes had changed with time and experience...

...but then I realised the colours were altered slightly in the transition from DS to 3DS. Wonder if this was deliberate? Either way, it looks miles better with the darker palette. Any other notable species this happened to? Nothing springs to mind but I'm sure it can't be the only one...

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It occurred to me earlier that the reason why Sword and Shield's Japanese logo resembles the English one (jagged font, yellow with blue outline, the handakuten in "po" looks like the stylised "O"s) might be because the games are set in a place based on England. Granted, that logo was designed by Americans, but it makes me wonder if Actual British Person James Turner had a say in what it looked like.
 
I like how all the Normal types in Black and White 2 carve out their own niches and balance each other out. In previous games, especially Gens 1-2, most Normals only had differences in base stats. But in Black and White 2?

-Watchog probably sucks the most out of all of them, but can do stuff like Seed Bomb and the elemental punches, Low Kick, Gunk Shot, and Aqua Tail through tutors, in addition to Confuse Ray / Hypnosis and Super Fang to play a mildly okay supporter.
-Audino has many great support options and great 103/86/86 bulk with good support options, dual screens, and Regenerator, the perfect Ability for a bulky booster.
-Raticate has Swords Dance and Toxic / Flame Orb Guts maingame, but is significantly frail and is an extreme glass cannon.
-Lopunny does a good job carving out a niche for itself. Lopunny has significantly higher defenses in exchange for having the second-lowest offenses of the Normal types (but with Work Up, this is hardly an issue). Lopunny gets a bevy of support options, and of all the Normal types in BW2, Lopunny is the second fastest - only Cinccino is faster.
-Cinccino is probably the best Normal type attacker in the game in spite of its accuracy issues making it roughly on par with Stoutland in practice, and has Skill Link Tail Slap / relearned Rock Blast and Bullet Seed to tear things to shreds with.
-Stoutland and Unfezant are both great, with Stoutland having Intimidate and some coverage in exchange for Unfezant having slightly higher Speed and Attack.
-Braviary has the highest raw power of all the Normals but it lacks the coverage the other Normals use outside of Rock Slide and Superpower (nothing to really get excited over tbh).
-Sawsbuck is part Grass type, gets interesting options like Megahorn / Horn Leech / Wild Charge / Jump Kick and has good Attack and Speed.
-Zangoose gets Swords Dance and is alright with decent Speed and coverage like Close Combat, X-Scissor, and Shadow Claw, but it's also the latest Normal not named Bouffalant.
-Bouffalant has an interesting niche in Reckless Head Charge and Wild Charge along with Swords Dance and other coverage like Megahorn.

Most of the Normal types in this game are very well balanced and that's legitimately amazing. Some may play similar to each other, but it's not even close to stuff like Gen 2, where your choice of good Normals was Fearow / Tauros / Miltank / Rattata, literally all of them just spam Return the same way with pretty similar stats.
 
DrumstickGaming said:
-Lopunny does a good job carving out a niche for itself. Lopunny has significantly higher defenses in exchange for having the second-lowest offenses of the Normal types (but with Work Up, this is hardly an issue). Lopunny gets a bevy of support options, and of all the Normal types in BW2, Lopunny is the second fastest - only Cinccino is faster.
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No mention of Jump Kick at Level 23? Boo.
 
:ss/Zarude:
Something that I like about Zarude is its Dex Number.
In case you don’t know, the original of the name “Yakuza” actually comes from a Japanese Card game where the combination of 8 - 9 - 3 would be considered the worst combination, with those numbers sounding like “Yakuza” when said outloud. You can learn more here
You know what Pokemon has the Dex number of 893? Zarude of course.
This also explains a lot about Zarude’s design, its typing, and behavior. The jungles Zarude are from and the gangs they form can be seen as metaphor for cities and organized crime too.

Surprised this isn’t mentioned on the Bulbapedia page under the trivia section.
 
aegon the unlikely said:
Watchog should have been a hedgehog or a literal hog. Many more opportunities with the Pokémon design.
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I was going to say, we should have had a hedgehog already, but we kind of have with Cyndaquil. But only kind of, there's no true hedgehog. Which leads me to:
One of the things I like about mon designs is that there's infinite variety. Every pokemon can correspond to something and there's still a huge well of ideas untapped. People complain about humanoid mons or cats or whatever, but there's still plenty that can be done with that(see the latest IX reveal) that doesn't tread over old ground. Pokemon designs are distinctly pokemon, but they can do anything, and often stretch themselves in various ways every generation.
 
Hugin said:
I was going to say, we should have had a hedgehog already, but we kind of have with Cyndaquil. But only kind of, there's no true hedgehog. Which leads me to:
One of the things I like about mon designs is that there's infinite variety. Every pokemon can correspond to something and there's still a huge well of ideas untapped. People complain about humanoid mons or cats or whatever, but there's still plenty that can be done with that(see the latest IX reveal) that doesn't tread over old ground. Pokemon designs are distinctly pokemon, but they can do anything, and often stretch themselves in various ways every generation.
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Shaymin is about the most true hedgehog you could ask for

the chesnaught line is about the most "well i guess" hedgehog you could ask for, in comparison
 
Hugin said:
One of the things I like about mon designs is that there's infinite variety. Every pokemon can correspond to something and there's still a huge well of ideas untapped. People complain about humanoid mons or cats or whatever, but there's still plenty that can be done with that(see the latest IX reveal) that doesn't tread over old ground. Pokemon designs are distinctly pokemon, but they can do anything, and often stretch themselves in various ways every generation.
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One thing I like is how even "repeat designs" can have different vibes.
Take domestic cats for example. Meowth, Skitty, Purrloin, and Espurr have widely different designs and play rather differently thanks to access to different moves, Abilities, and even stats, in spite of following the trend of great Speed and okay-ish stats everywhere else:
  • persian.gif
    Persian    's main niche is Technician and the many moves that benefit from this Ability: Aerial Ace, Bite, Fake Out, Hidden Power, Icy Wind, Round, Shockwave, Thief, and Water Pulse are all viable options for Giovanni's lap cat. Nasty Plot makes it a functional setup Pokémon, and it can pivot with U-turn. Knock Off is also an option.
  • persian-alola.gif
    Persian's Alolan cousin has Fur Coat, making it a better pivot than the Kantonian one. It also has higher Special Attack than the Kantonian one, making Garfield a stronger Nasty Plot sweeper.
  • delcatty.gif
    Delcatty is notoriously bad, but I guess you can make it work in-game? It does have interesting Abilities: Cute Charm is cheesy, Wonder Skin is a rare Ability that helps setup I guess? And Normalize Thunder Wave is a gimmick that fails because Delcatty's stats are that mediocre.
  • purugly.gif
    Purugly is similar to both Persian flavor-wise, being mean and spoiled cats. Unlike Persian however, this surprisingly fast fat feline has better Attack, Defiant, and Sucker Punch, making it more of a physical sweeper.
  • liepard.gif
    Liepard has Prankster. Offensively, it has 88 Attack and Special Attack, Fake Out, Nasty Plot, and Sucker Punch, but who cares when you have priority on Encore, Rain Dance, Sunny Day, Swagger, Taunt, Trick, and Thunder Wave? R.I.P. priority Assist w/ Dive, we won't forget you.
  • meowstic.gif
    Male Meowstic also has Prankster, even getting Fake Out, Rain Dance, Sunny Day, Trick, and Thunder Wave, but unlike Liepard, he can use Ally Switch, Imprison, Light Screen, Reflect, and Skill Swap.
  • meowstic-f.gif
    Female Meowstic instead has Competitive, an Ability that needs more love, fight me. She also has a decent special movepool that benefits from it, plus some support like Fake Out.
 
KalosianPorygon said:
  • delcatty.gif
    Delcatty is notoriously bad, but I guess you can make it work in-game? It does have interesting Abilities: Cute Charm is cheesy, Wonder Skin is a rare Ability that helps setup I guess? And Normalize Thunder Wave is a gimmick that fails because Delcatty's stats are that mediocre.
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Honestly, Skitty and Delcatty were probably designed with Contests in mind, specifically Cute contests.
 
Scorpio said:
Honestly, Skitty and Delcatty were probably designed with Contests in mind, specifically Cute contests.
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Daily reminder that a Pokémon with contest in mind ends up aging poorly, for the fact that other Pokémon can perform in contests just as good, if not better, since there’s no actual base stats for the contest stats. Pokémon with contest in mind may be easier to to get the moves for the contest category, but battle is still the main attraction overall, especially with the introduction of Double Battle.

Milotic are also with Contest in mind (max Beauty and a lot of Beauty moves) but managed to be capable fighters as well. Too many other Pokémon fell into the mistake of being specialized in contest but being horrible for battle, making them dex fillers who those who have no interest of or even hates Pokémon contest.
 
I absolutely do not think Delcatty was designed with contests in mind, and I think people just get the anime & manga on the mind. Delcatty is not inherently even good at contests compared to anyone else, and its movepool consists of the same amount of variety as any other Pokemon

Reading a bunch of posts about the cut Gen 2 mons, a switch clicked for me from how I used to look at these early gen just absolutely terrible mid-to-late game Pokemon: Gen 3 was sort of the last bastion of "[probably bad] pokemon you collect for the sake of collecting" and that's just Delcatty to a T. Rare, hard to evolve, it's a fancy cat you sit on the shelf alongside Spinda and its spots, Surskit the needlessly rare swarm alongside Skitty, Chimecho the 1% encounter at the peak of Mt Pyre....

Why did they make it so bad? Who knows. But it's right there alongside like all the swarm pokemon from gen 2 who operate in a similar design niche.

Though it was still present in Gen 4, Wormadam for example, I'd say those Pokemon still started to get out of this idea and after that even most gimmicky pokemon with a collection gimmick will hover around "eh, you know, this is pretty usable". Gen 3 Alcremie would have been dire.
 
Way back before the Internet was a reliable resource, a friend told me that Ralts only appeared if your team had high friendship and that Absol would only ever appear once on the route it's found on.

It was a long time before I found out that he was wrong. Wish I still believed it though. It makes a huge mindset difference believing that you've got a good chance of finding it vs knowing it's a 1% chance.
 
R_N said:
Though it was still present in Gen 4, Wormadam for example, I'd say those Pokemon still started to get out of this idea and after that even most gimmicky pokemon with a collection gimmick will hover around "eh, you know, this is pretty usable". Gen 3 Alcremie would have been dire.
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You say that, but the Burmy line feels like an early attempt at the "every Pokémon needs a gimmick" trend. Like, if they were made today, there'd be an entire trailer dedicated to their evolution gimmick and people in the comments would argue about how good they'll be.
 
Nitro Indigo said:
You say that, but the Burmy line feels like an early attempt at the "every Pokémon needs a gimmick" trend. Like, if they were made today, there'd be an entire trailer dedicated to their evolution gimmick and people in the comments would argue about how good they'll be.
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I end up thinking of Wormadam as closer to something like having a Gmax form: the promotional gimmick of gen 4 as a whole was form differences, and Wormadam happens to interact with that concept more than usual (by not having it be purely visual).
 
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