Hello everybody, my name is Aviator99, and I'm relatively new to Smogon. I usually hang around the wifi forum on here, but I thought I'd stray from my usual haunt to discuss something interesting I've noticed. In the game of Pokemon, the Pokemon usually had moves that stayed pretty static to their appearance/typing. Electric types got thunderbolt while grass types did not, Fire types got flamethrower while ice types did not, etc. But recently I've seen that with the advent of Diamond, Pearl, and especially Platinum, Pokemon got some pretty strange moves added to their arsenals that quite honestly, don't make a whole lot of sense (even in Pokemon terms). A couple examples include:
Crobat learning heat wave (since when could it breathe fire?)
Delibird learning gunk shot (I don't want to know where the "gunk" comes from)
Celebi learning thunder wave (I never knew it could shoot electricity)
Snorlax learning whirlwind (Where does the wind come from?)
Although I'm not saying these moves aren't useful on these Pokemon (I actually use quite a few of them), but I can't help but feel that it defeats the purpose of the game a bit by giving some Pokemon capacities beyond what they were designed to be capable of (To be honest, I never thought Crobat would breathe fire). I thought Zapdos was the electric bird, and Moltres was the fire bird. Now Zapdos can use Thunderbolt and Heat Wave? What's up with that? Do you guys think that gamefreak distributed these strange moves to unlikely recipients to mix up the game? I'd love to hear some opinions on the perplexing matter.
