The Top Ten Worst Pokémon Ever, #8: Sunflora

I’ve searched long and hard to bring you the worst Grass Pokémon of all time, and I reckon I’ve found it.  Yes, I sincerely think that even Maractus is... um, that is to say... on balance, I really think that Maractus...

...look, I don’t want to say it.  I can’t actually go on the record as saying that Maractus might be... y’know... better than something.  I just couldn’t take it.  Haven’t I been through enough?

Okay, today’s Pokémon is Sunflora, who really is the worst Grass Pokémon ever, with the most boring design and arguably with the weakest powers as well.  Sunflora, the sunflower Pokémon, was released way back in Gold and Silver and is the evolved form of Sunkern, a tiny seed Pokémon whose unfortunate claim to fame is that she has the worst stats of any Pokémon in the entire game (yes, worse than Magikarp and Caterpie).  Sunkern is... bizarre.  The reason this entry is titled “Sunflora” and not “Sunkern and Sunflora” is that I honestly think Sunkern is an absolutely fascinating Pokémon.  Like Metapod, Sunkern spends her entire life preparing for evolution.  She eats nothing, rarely moves, drinks only morning dew, and can defend herself only by vigorously shaking her leaves in the general direction of her attackers.  She also, and I quote, “suddenly falls out of the sky in the morning.”  This... is probably the weirdest non sequitur the Pokédex has ever spat at me, which is saying something, and it keeps doing it; variations of the same line reoccur in game after game, like it’s the most important aspect of the design, but there’s never been any explanation of where they fall from or how they get there.  For all I know, Sunkern inflate themselves with helium while they sleep and gently drift into the sky each night before expelling the gas with a massive belch in the morning and plummeting back to earth.  That’s why I find myself unable to dislike Sunkern; I can’t muster any emotion towards her at all other than abject bewilderment.  Sunflora, on the other hand, I am capable of disliking with immense vigour.  The entire point of Sunflora’s design was that she gains nutrition and energy from sunlight and is extremely active during the day, but becomes inactive after sunset.  The first problem is that this is a baseline characteristic of all Grass Pokémon.  They’re plants, they all draw energy from the sun; even Gloom and Vileplume, who are based on one of the few plants in the world that doesn’t photosynthesise, learn Solarbeam and were eventually given the Chlorophyll ability in Ruby and Sapphire.  The second and much thornier problem (if I may be excused the pun) is that Sunflora wasn’t even the only Grass Pokémon introduced in Gold and Silver who was associated particularly closely with the sun.  The other was Bellossom, whose ritualistic dances to summon the sun are a far more interesting way of emphasising the solar connection than Sunflora’s frightfully generic characteristics.  There’s nothing to justify Sunflora’s existence.  I mean it.  I’ve checked.

That, then, is why I think Sunflora deserves everything she suffers; now to look at what exactly constitutes that suffering.  Sunflora is, in many ways, the epitome of “Grass-types don’t get nice things.”  Like many Grass Pokémon, she enjoys an excellent special attack stat.  Sadly, that’s all she has to offer; she’s delicate and one of the slowest Pokémon in the game, so many opponents can simply outrun her and stomp her into the dirt.  Sunflora’s passive abilities are the key to her survival; Chlorophyll doubles her speed in bright sunlight, while Solar Power boosts her special attack in bright sunlight by burning up a bit of her health each turn.  Clearly, as her design would lead us to expect, Sunflora needs Sunny Day to operate effectively (she can either set it up herself or have another Pokémon that’s actually competent do it for her).  Solar Power is great for offense and will allow Sunflora to rip through her enemies like tissue paper with Solarbeam or Leaf Storm, but it exacerbates her frailty and, unlike Chlorophyll, doesn’t address her biggest problem – her lack of speed.  Chlorophyll, on the other hand, doesn’t give Sunflora the power she needs to muscle through strong opponents before they murder her; moreover, Sunflora is so slow to begin with that many Pokémon still outrun her at twice her normal speed, and a lot of them can one-shot her without difficulty.  As a Grass-type, Sunflora’s offensive movepool is very limited outside of Grass attacks; the only bright spot is Earth Power, which allows her to take revenge upon Fire- and Poison-types, but you have to jump through hoops to get it; she learns it from a move tutor on Heart Gold and Soul Silver.  Sunkern from the Dream World may have Earth Power, but they’ll also have Sunflora’s Dream World ability, Early Bird (and if you thought Sunflora was useless when she had to choose between Chlorophyll and Solar Power, wait until you see what she’s like with neither).  Even with Earth Power, her only option against most Bug- and Flying-types is Sludge Bomb (heaven help her if she comes up against a Crobat or something).  She has some of the support moves you’d expect from a Grass-type, but she’s too slow and too fragile for them to save her; even Leech Seed, Ingrain and sun-boosted Synthesis can’t help her if she’s going to drop after one hit anyway, and many physical attacks will drop her.  Light Screen keeps her safe from special attacks, at least, if she can get it up fast enough (which she can’t).

Not quite what I had in mind, but you get the general
idea.  This Grass/Fire evolution of Sunflora is the work
of Ryknow, whose Pokémon fanart can be found here:
http://www.smogon.com/forums/showthread.php?t=64295

Sunflora practically embodies everything that has ever gone wrong with the Grass type... and now, heaven help me, I have to try to fix her.  The major difficulty is that I don’t think I’m allowed to evolve Sunflora.  Sunkern evolves through use of a Sun Stone, and long-established convention dictates that once a Pokémon uses an evolutionary stone, it’s the end of the line – so we have to change something else.  Chlorophyll and Solar Power are already really good abilities.  That’s not to say we can’t write a better one, but it would have to be pretty obscene; it might be fun to try a kind of über-Chlorophyll that grants priority (like Quick Attack) to all attacks of the user’s own type.  What I want to do is retcon her into a Grass/Fire dual-type (giving her very strong coverage to use with the ability I’m suddenly going to call Solar Vigour) and liberally splash her artwork with reds, oranges and some flame imagery.  According to this version of Sunflora, Sunkern are born when the rays of the morning sun strike seeds blowing on the wind, which is why they mysteriously drop out of the sky every morning.  They carry a glowing spark of sunfire inside their bodies, but because of their weakness it quickly goes out and they have to store and conserve their energy to reignite it when they evolve into Sunflora.  Sunflora collect and amplify solar energy to fuel their fire, but they cannot store that energy, so they become dormant at night to keep their fire from burning out.  During the day, their flowers shine like tiny suns and encourage other plants to grow rapidly.  Sunflora have to live near water, because their ability to amplify sunlight sometimes causes soil to become parched in summer (one of the few salient points of Sunflora’s original ‘dex entries is that she needs a lot of water to be healthy – which, again, is fairly standard for a plant, but I’m going to run with it).  Unfortunately for me, I don’t think it’s technically ‘allowed’ to retcon a Pokémon’s type (it happened with Magneton in Gold and Silver, but only because the Steel type didn’t exist before then), which means that I can only have my Fire-typed Sunflora either by breaking the evolution rule or by retconning the way Sunkern evolves, which is likewise unprecedented (Feebas gained a new path to evolution in Black and White, the Prism Scale, but technically the old way still works too – it’s just that the mechanic supporting it has dropped into obscurity).  I think my rewrite is still better than what Sunflora’s got at the moment even without Grass/Fire typing, and would just about fit if she gained Weather Ball or Heat Wave, either of which would dramatically improve her coverage. I’m also tempted to give her Agility, since Sunflora is characterised by frenetic activity during the daylight hours and honestly shouldn’t be slower than a tortoise in a sack race; provided she had someone else to set up Sunny Day for her, Agility might make Sunflora fast enough for Solar Power to be a realistic option.

Honestly, I think we’ve been written into a corner with Sunflora.  Except for giving her Weather Ball and Agility, which I don’t think would be enough on their own (they’ll help, but Sunflora needs something that will fundamentally change her fighting style), every suggestion I can think of is forbidden by an unwritten law of Pokémon design.  I advocate writing down these laws, and then burning them because they are dumb.  For now, though, I have to move on to my next unmitigated disaster...