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Little things you like about Pokémon

All* the fruit-based Pokemon get a pass from me because they feel like a natural extension of the fact that there are plant-based Pokemon. It's the Pokemon based on human-made foods that I have to head-canon an explanation for. My usual go-to is "they fell out of the dream world." Also works for mons like Trubish.

*except Appletun, since it's apple pie, but it gets a pass for being adorable.

There is also the very likely probability that canonically in the Pokemon World these mons existed first and then humans based dishes off of them.
 
There is also the very likely probability that canonically in the Pokemon World these mons existed first and then humans based dishes off of them.
Honestly it reminds me of the Amoonguss and Voltorb dilemmas. If they exist since ancient ages (cough cough hisuian Voltorb) how can they have the shape of something that did not exist?

The Hisuian Voltorb/Electrode variant is a interesting take on it (they look more wooden like the original pokeballs), but again, that still doesn't solve the issue of why are they pokeball shaped in first place.
 
Honestly it reminds me of the Amoonguss and Voltorb dilemmas. If they exist since ancient ages (cough cough hisuian Voltorb) how can they have the shape of something that did not exist?

The Hisuian Voltorb/Electrode variant is a interesting take on it (they look more wooden like the original pokeballs), but again, that still doesn't solve the issue of why are they pokeball shaped in first place.
In-universe Coincidence. Even Laventon goes 'happens to bears a resemblance to a Pokeball' and leaves it at that; there's no reference to Voltorbs of other regions either.
Hisuian Voltorb is ultimately just a ball with a seed blow hole in it

modern, non-hisuian Voltrob seemingly evolved to base itself off modern ball since it was only discovered around Pokeball factories.



Foongus/Amoonguss also...doesn't seem especially mysterious? They either probably evolved their pokeball patterns after the introduction of the ball (like flowers or insects that do similarly) or they always had a similar pattern; its like moths that looks like a spooky skull or whatever.
If Brute Bonnet "truly" exists then it's firmly the latter. And if it doesn't, well, it's irrelevant.
 
There is also the very likely probability that canonically in the Pokemon World these mons existed first and then humans based dishes off of them.
That's the obvious workaround and "just don't think too hard about it" solution, but to me it starts to feel more and more convoluted as more mons are introduced that are based on human made things and have properties of those things, like a doughy looking dog that has literal yeast breath or a living trash bag. At some point it just feels cleaner to say "screw it, they came from the dream world."
 
a living trash bag

Well, Trubbish is explicitly more of a Grimer case, where manmade pollutants were brought to life by mysterious factors (insert your preference of “comic book chemistry” or “esoteric quasi-tsukumogami magic”)

White Pokédex entry: “The combination of garbage bags and industrial waste caused the chemical reaction that created this Pokémon.”
 
It’s also worth mentioning that the Scarlet dex entry of foongus says “There is a theory that the developer of the modern-day Poké Ball really liked Foongus, but this has not been confirmed.” It’s not a direct confirmation, but it makes it seem more likely that the pokemon came first imo
All they'd actually have needed to do is retcon Apricorns to have a bi-color look* during L:A, and suddenly it all makes sense. Various things eat Apricorns, Foongus/Voltorb look like Apricorns to catch prey**, humans turn Apricorns into pokeballs, later balls keep the same design out of tradition, Foongus/Voltorb evolve over time to match the new design. Solve the problem and flesh out the natural world at the same time.

*Or state that modern White/Blue/Black/etc Apricorns are the result of selective breeding by humans and the OG Apricorns were White+Red
**Why Voltorb, whose primary reaction to meeting anything is to blow itself up, looks like something people WANT to interact with, has never been satisfactorily explained, but that's not new.

Wait, scratch all of that. Voltorb reacts really badly to being interacted with and Foongus is slow and toxic. They don't have Pokeball colors for disguise, they have them as a warning. "I'm red+white, colors that camouflage with nothing when together. Come near me and die." Which would mean humans modeled our balls after dangerous-to-approach mons(presumably so that if you drop your ball in the wild nothing plays with it), and then those mons evolved to look more like our balls after wild mons learned that the human's Red+White balls are dangerous.
 
In the past two Generations with the DLC its been easier for GF to spice up more of the non-mascot Legends with a bit of Lore which is nice.

I also like that over the previous 3 Gens we’ve had more and more Legends that break that 580 or 600 mould. e.g Zygarde 10%, Type Null/Silvally, Tapus, Cosmog/Cosmoem, Kubfu, Calyrex, Treasures of Ruin, Loyal Three, Ogerpon. Very small change of course and most of these are prevos or have their own unique gimmick, but I like that they are experimenting a little more.
 
Something else that's occurred to me recently, as I've been transferring a lot of species from the VC to Bank, is how surprising it is that every move was retained from the earlier gens through the cutoff in Gen III.

Like, they didn't have to keep every move in the game in the transition from Gen II to Gen III, and yet they did anyway. Which I think is really cool. That commitment to retaining old mechanics is genuinely commendable and I think we took it a little for granted. Especially since there are a quite ridiculous amount of moves in RS that go entirely unused (you can't even call them by Metronome, since nothing in RS gets that move either).

Obviously there wasn't really a need to get rid of any moves since they all pretty much worked as intended, but they scrapped a whole lot of other stuff from Gen II. It's something that stands in contrast to later generations because a lot of Pokemon games are made using previous ones as a starting point and so tend to inherit a lot of data that goes unused. But to the best of my knowledge Gen III were (more or less) made from scratch so they had the opportunity to throw out anything they didn't need. The fact that they thought every move was worth keeping is incredibly cool and part of the general commitment to keeping connectivity between games that I've always really appreciated.
 
I find Emerald such an enjoyable game to replay, and I love the additional trainers on numerous routes to showcase the 2v1 tag battle feature that game. Emerald is one of the better localisations in the series, and a lot of these paired trainers have very amusing dialogues that often play off against each other. A particular favourite would be Bird Keeper Presley and Expert Aaron on Route 125:

Presley: Why would a BIRDKEEPER like me come out to the sea?

Okay. I'll tell you why I'm here.

I put a message in a bottle and put it out to sea. I'm sure that a girl SWIMMER will find it!


Aaron: Hey! Was it you throwing garbage into the sea?

Oh, you weren't throwing trash into the sea.

I found an unsightly bottle bobbing in the waves earlier. It angers me that someone would pollute the sea!

Or Cooltrainers Darcy and Jonathan and Experts Paxton and Makayla on Route 132:

Makayla: I'm always with my husband, but I can win even without him.

Oh, I guess I wasn't good enough.

That young man over there looks just like my husband when he was young. He's making me blush!


Jonathan: Someone's been watching me intently. Was it you?

Wow! That's pretty strong, all right!

I can't shake this feeling that someone's watching me. I can't concentrate!



Paxton: Now where could my wife have gone? I'm always with her. I wonder if I can win on my own.

Ah, I see that I couldn't manage to win on my own after all.

My wife must be looking for me. I'd best go find her right away.


Darcy: I liked training here by myself. It's awful that all these people came!

Okay! I won't complain about other people being here.

I suppose I can partner up with that old man and challenge that other team.

(How were Jonathan and Makayla battling side by side without him seeing her...?)

Or the conspicuous difference between Felix and Dianne in Victory Road:

Dianne: The elite among the elite gather in this cave. How are you finding it?

Not rattled in the least bit!


Felix: I've come this far, but the tension's giving me awful stomach pain...

Ooh... it hurts...

While looking up the names of the trainers in a text dump, I found a couple of other amusing trainer dialogues I liked:

My liar of a boyfriend told me that I look great in a bikini..

Even if it's a lie, I love being told I look great. We girls are so complex...

Can't you see that I have all this stuff with me? Despite that, you still insist that we battle?

Of course I lost! I'm holding stuff in both hands!

I bought too much stuff at the LILYCOVE DEPT. STORE. It's up the road from here. I wish I had a BAG like yours.
 
Most people already know that Team Flare cribs off of Team Rocket, between showing up in the same cave where you get the regional fossils (Mt. Moon/Glittering Cave) and raiding the where Pokeballs are made (Silph Co/Pokeball Factory), but those aren't the only ways. They also disturb Pokemon burial grounds (Lavender Tower/ Kalos Route 10), infiltrate a power plant (The singular Rocket grunt in the Johto postgame/Kalos Power Plant), and agitate Pokemon through experiments (Lake of Rage/Frost Cavern).
 
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One thing I'm loving in Gen 9 is that with the Exp. Candies from Tera Raids, along with having access to boxes anywhere, I can legitimately use a constantly rotating team and have their levels up to par with the rest of the team without that much effort.
Adding on to this, I just started Teal Mask and playing it semi-blind. I’m doing somewhat of an “Ash Ketchum” challenge where I boxed my entire main game team and am going to try and beat the DLC with only Pokemon I catch in Kitakami, and I like that vitamins/EV items are plentiful enough when playing in the postgame that I can raise an entire team from scratch this way and actually have a viable playthrough.
 
I like The gallade buff in gen9 with sharpness and sacred sword. Literally exactly what I imagined when I thought about givinga sig ability to my fav mons
I am a big fan of this buff as well. Sacred Sword (and a bunch of other slicing moves) pushes Gallade's power level up to a lot of the other fighters it was lagging behind like Urshifu and Great Tusk.
 
All this talk of Colosseum/XD shinies in another thread reminded me that I saved a page a while back containing a bunch of Gamecube shinies mocked up as GBA sprites. Didn't title the bookmark, though, did I? So I just had to wade through every imgur page I've ever bookmarked... which is a lot. Lesson learned.

Anyway. The Gamecube games notoriously went off-model with the shiny colourations for several species. It's interesting that Genius Sonority were allowed to do that; there was a discussion on r/SilphRoad a while back about how much licence Niantic have to alter official Pokemon designs, since they're Nintendo's IP; the consensus was "not very". If anyone has any more information on this I'd be interested in learning more.

Genius Sonority really did a great job making some Pokemon look way better than they do in the main series, so I figured I'd do some side-by-side comparisons. Let's dive in! These are only a few of my favourites; credit to Polarbair on Imgur for the larger list, go check it out.

Quilava

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Oh yeah. Starting off with an absolute corker. The green flames add a weirdly haunting beautiful edge to this, contrasting well with the slightly more vibrant red back colour. It's reminiscent of several other Fire-types whose flames turn more unusual colours when they're shiny; kind of puts me in mind of high school science classes where the teacher would throw all kinds of weird crap onto a Bunsen burner. Sadly Typhlosion does not retain this delightful palette once evolved.

Mr Mime

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Fully committing to the green! I like this a lot, looks much more visually pleasing than the official shiny - the highlights are a more pleasant colour, and I hate the way the face on the latter clashes so strongly with the rest.

Suicune

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The KING of altered shinies. I love that black mane so much, it's gorgeous! Suicune's official shiny is fine - good, even - but the GC version just pops. Bolder, more dramatic, suits the bleak and gritty world of Orre so much more.

Glalie

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Eh, I'm not really super into either of Glalie's shiny sprites tbh but the pink gives it a bit more character. The original is... just kinda there, tbh.

Porygon2

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Definitely prefer the GC model here. Not that the GBA version isn't good already, but the blue-on-blue makes it look so much more artificial and ethereal. Big upgrade (no pun intended).

Pelipper

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Pelipper has grown on me a lot over the years. The difference between the GC shiny and the official shiny is less obvious here, but on the Gamecube proper you really notice it - the green tinge really makes the crest and wing tips stand out, and the darker beak just makes the whole thing pop in a way it didn't before.

Magcargo

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A fairly small change, but I loooove this. It hearkens back to the original GSC shiny, which is much superior to the one from later generations. The deeper blue gives it a much more imposing presence (okay so it's a Magcargo, but you get me).

Masquerain

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Agh, now this hurts me. Masquerain is quite possibly my favourite bug, and yet I detest the shiny we got for it. The yellow clashes so horribly with the green, and it just ends up looking incredibly unsightly. The GC model is much more restrained; it's a slightly off-colour version of the non-shiny form, which normally I'm not crazy about but it just about works here.

Slowbro

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It's already a good shiny, but I love the additional green for the psychedelic tinge. Very fitting for a Psychic-type, after all. A lot of the shiny models in Colo/XD have that slightly radioactive look to them, like they'd glow in the dark. Slowbro is perhaps the standout example of this tendency and I am here for it.

Miltank

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Miltank's official shiny is really good... after Gen 5 when they saturated it a bit. In Gen 3 it just looks washed-out. The GC version is cleaner-looking and a less sickly colour; more blue-grey than the icy blue we got, which works better with the black and white parts of its body. The red tinges on the official version make it look odd; much better the other way.

There are a few I'm less fond of, though (as is to be expected):

Corsola

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Corsola's shiny is genuinely one of the most gorgeous in the entire series, I heartily dislike the GC model. Generally I prefer ones which go brighter/cleaner and this just feels like a washout; the purplish colour is less striking.

Camerupt

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Definitely prefer the official shiny Camerupt, the black is just far cooler.

Sharpedo

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I like Sharpedo's official shiny, but something about the GC version is just more appealing even though it's closer to the non-shiny standard. That ever-so-slightly different blue is just gorgeous on it, and gives it such a sharp, clean look against the white. By comparison, the purple makes the white and yellow sections look dull - still prefer it overall, though.
 

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