Sawk and Throh

So, after I had such great fun last week with the unconventional Fighting-types Mienfoo and Mienshao, Game Freak now greets me with a rather spectacular return to normal by presenting these two: Sawk and Throh.  These two aren’t an evolutionary family; in fact, they aren’t related at all, but they seem to be intended to be taken as a pair – they have similar designs and similar Japanese names (Dageki and Nageki), and are found in the same places, with Sawk being more common on Black and Throh on White – so that’s how I’m going to look at them.  These two represent two different styles of combat: Throh practices judo, focussing on grappling and, well, throws, while Sawk practices karate, focussing mainly on strikes.  Hmm.  An opposed pair of Fighting-type Pokémon that dedicate their lives to two different types of martial art... I swear I’ve seen this before but I can’t for the life of me remember where.  Oh well.  I’m sure it will come to me.  Though they wear the clothing of human martial artists, right down to the black belts, Sawk and Throh look to be based on Oni, Japanese... ogre-demon... things... that are normally either red or blue.  As demonic creatures, Oni are traditionally seen as bringers of bad luck, although Wikipedia assures me that in modern times they can also be protective in nature, and there are ceremonies and trinkets for enlisting the things in warding off evil.  Not that this is really important, since Throh and Sawk don’t have any of the traits of Oni other than a vague physical resemblance.  This is a pity because elements from either portrayal of Oni would have made them a great deal more interesting.  Instead they’re just stereotypical Fighting-type Pokémon who spend all their time training and knocking the stuffing out of anything that bothers them.  The only really unique thing about these designs is the rather amusing fact that they physically get stronger when they tighten their belts, which seems a little bit flat to me.

I will say this for Throh and Sawk: although their designs are a bit bland, their in-game abilities do a pretty good job of holding up the idea that they’re supposed to be opposites; much better anyway than Hitmonchan and Hitmonlee (oh right, Hitmonchan and Hitmonlee!  I knew I’d seen this concept somewhere before!).  See, in theory, Hitmonchan, whose shtick is punching things, is defensive, while Hitmonlee, whose shtick is kicking things, is aggressive, but in practice they’re both aggressive and Hitmonchan is just  a bit less skewed in that direction.  Gold and Silver added a third brother who is actually fairly balanced between offense and defence, Hitmontop, whose shtick is... doing a headstand and spinning like a top, then flipping out and beating the hell out of everything with whichever limb is closest?  Yeah, I’ve... I’ve got nothing on Hitmontop.  Incidentally, if Game Freak decide to add another hundred-and-something Pokémon in four years (and hey, why stop now?) watch this space for a third, green (or perhaps yellow) counterpart to Throh and Sawk with a fighting style that encompasses cartwheels, escape artistry and Morris dancing.  For now, though, we shall content ourselves with these two, who, as I’ve said, form a much neater pair: Throh is beefy and Sawk is angry.  I’ll look at Throh first.  In mechanical terms, Sawk is a dead ringer for Hitmonlee but Throh is a lot more like the newer Fighting Pokémon Hariyama. He may well be the toughest Fighting-type currently in existence, outside of legendary Pokémon, and although he moves with all the grace of a beached whale he does also pack a reasonable punch, so he’s got a nice niche there.  Game Freak has also kindly given him two signature moves to emphasise his fighting style – Storm Throw, which has a low base damage but always scores critical hits, and the less exclusive but still rare Circle Throw, which does some damage and knocks a Pokémon back into its Pokéball, causing another to come out in its place (Sawk, notably, gets no such love – this does not seem fair).  Throh also has the standard spread of attacks a Fighting-type can expect: Earthquake, Rock Slide or Stone Edge, and a selection of Fighting-type attacks, though notably the best one he gets is Superpower, which is dubious for him because its side effect weakens his defences against physical attacks.  Really he’d be better off with Cross Chop or maybe Focus Punch, but he doesn’t learn them – presumably because they’re in Sawk’s territory.  And on that note...

Just as Throh is possibly the toughest of Fighting Pokémon, Sawk is among the most powerful, but unfortunately for him he has some very respectable rivals in his chosen role: Machamp and Breloom are much slower but slightly stronger, Infernape is much weaker but also much faster and more versatile, Medicham is slightly slower and far more powerful, and Heracross draws even with him in both respects.  All of these Pokémon also have better movepools than Sawk, and he has no techniques that make me think of any exciting new strategies.  Sawk does have one lovely, unique advantage, though: the ability Sturdy.  Prior to Black and White this was a tremendously silly ability that simply granted immunity to one-hit KO moves (Horn Drill, Fissure, and so on), techniques which aren’t really used in serious play, ever, because they are so very reliant on luck.  The new games upgraded this ability to make it actually useful by changing it to grant immunity to being knocked out in one hit by anything – provided Sawk hasn’t taken any damage yet, any single attack, no matter how powerful, will leave him standing (though perhaps just barely).  Other Pokémon can get this kind of protection too by using an item called a Focus Sash, but it’s nice to be able to hold a different item to give your attacks more power, and Sawk is the only Fighting-type who can have both at once (Infernape in particular would kill for this ability and it wouldn't hurt Hitmonlee either).  One especially nice thing about Sturdy is its wonderful synergy with Counter, which smacks a Pokémon that just used a physical attack on you with double the damage it just did – provided you’re still standing, of course, which Sawk usually will be if it’s the first attack he’s taken.  The trouble with this is that it’s such a good idea in theory that everyone will expect it, and Counter works best when it comes completely out of the blue, so you’re probably better off teaching it to something really weird like Meganium or Quagsire.

Sawk and Throh are a lot harder to make a decision on than I thought they would be because they are actually pretty well put together on a mechanical level.  They’re both strong examples of Fighting Pokémon and they even have something special to offer in Throh’s Circle Throw and Sawk’s Sturdiness.  When it comes right down to it, though... they aren’t really what I’d call unique.  There are other Fighting-types that can do what they do.  I would probably be happy with these two if they’d taken more than just superficial inspiration from the Oni legends, actually; I’m sure there’s something in a musty Japanese scroll somewhere that would have made their design something other than “Hitmonchan and Hitmonlee 2.0” and their powers more interesting than what Hitmonlee and Hariyama can already do.

I hereby deny this Pokémon’s right to exist!  Let them be banished from this world, never to return!

Audino

Aw, look at the cute widdle...

*ahem*

Today’s Pokémon is Audino, a cute, pink-and-white, vaguely mammalian, fuzzy, Normal-type Pokémon.  Sound familiar?  Yes, of course it does.  Now, just to be clear, I have nothing against cute Pokémon; I love cute Pokémon.  I don’t even have anything against this kind of cute Pokémon, taken in isolation.  Clefairy?  I’m a huge fan.  Jigglypuff?  Not a favourite, but those eyes just melt your heart.  Chansey?  Adorable.  But like so much else, it’s been done.  Repeatedly, and well.  Each of those three Pokémon has a nice little theme to give it a bit of (much-needed, I might add) uniqueness.  Jigglypuff has her proverbial song.  Clefairy and Clefable are From Space^TM and have mysterious powers represented by their Metronome spell.  Chansey, finally, is the doctor of the Pokémon world and can heal most any injury.  Audino... well, I guess Audino has the hearing thing.  Audino has extraordinarily sensitive hearing and perceives her surroundings as though using a sort of radar; none of her in-game powers really tie into this, but it’s a nice bit of flavour.  The trouble is, it just becomes part of a healer persona like Chansey’s; Audino uses those feelers on her ears like a doctor’s stethoscope to listen to a Pokémon’s heartbeat and assess its physical and mental state.  She also has powers related to healing.  In fact, Unovan doctors and nurses in the TV show use Audino instead of Chansey and they apparently work just as well, so clearly Nintendo knew that they had a replacement for Chansey and likely even intended it that way, because... I guess because one cute, pink, fluffy Pokémon with healing powers just wasn’t enough?  Basically, I do like Audino’s design; there’s nothing wrong with her in and of herself, but it’s another one of those cases where Game Freak could have just put an old Pokémon in Black and White (specifically, Chansey) and no one would have been bothered in the least.

You might hope that Audino would redeem herself by being powerful and having unique abilities.  She’s got a lot of competition.  It’s hard to beat Blissey, Chansey’s evolved form, who is far and away the best special wall in the game; with excellent special defence and quite unreasonable HP, Blissey ordinarily just doesn’t care about energy attacks, not even super-effective ones – Porygon-Z’s Hyper Beam, Lucario’s Focus Blast and maybe Aura Spheres from some legendary Pokémon like Mewtwo are just about the only things that’ll faze her.  Almost any physical attack will knock her on her fat ass in an instant, but the wonderful thing about Blissey is that you can very easily train her to care a lot less about physical attacks; they’ll still hurt all right, but a properly-built Blissey should be able to take one or two, with a bit of luck, and then heal herself with Softboiled.  Audino isn’t like that.  Audino actually feels special attacks.  The good news is, she’s actually just as good at taking physical attacks; the bad news is, although she’s pretty tough, “pretty tough” can only go so far when you’re a Normal-type and so have no resistances to speak of.  Normal is generally a pretty bad type; it’s one of the worst in the game offensively and so-so defensively; as a result most of the Normal-types that are worth using manage it by having a couple of absurdly high stats – the big ones (no pun intended) being Blissey and Snorlax.  Because Audino only has moderately high defences, she’ll need some kind of mysterious X-factor, so let’s see what there is... For some strange reason she learns just about every powerful special attack under the sun (seriously; she gets Ice Beam, Flamethrower, Thunderbolt, Surf, Psychic, Shadow Ball, Focus Blast and Solarbeam) but she doesn’t really have the stats to back them up (no, not even if you give her Calm Mind).  She does, however, have a very nice selection of support moves, as one might expect: Wish, Light Screen, Reflect, Heal Bell, Encore, Yawn, Thunder Wave and Trick Room are the standouts.  Notably, except for Heal Bell, Thunder Wave and Light Screen, most of these are actually things that Blissey can’t do.  I suspect that, for any given combination of attacks, you could probably find something that’d do it better than Audino but she learns so many damn moves I’m honestly not sure anymore.

If you really want to use Audino (and I guess I can’t blame you) you’d better get used to double battles because she can pull off a couple of vaguely interesting tactics if she has a partner to work with.  Trick Room is the most important move here; this is a technique introduced in Diamond and Pearl that warps space to make slow Pokémon move before fast Pokémon, turning a lot of strategies on their heads.  It’s slightly gimmicky in a traditional battle but can be done very well in a double battle, and most importantly it’s something Audino can do that Blissey can’t.  Audino can’t really heal herself because she doesn’t learn Softboiled (she can fake it with Wish, but that can get tricky) but her Heal Pulse technique does allow her to heal her partner, so can be a valuable asset.  You also might be able to get some mileage out of Simple Beam, a rare and extremely odd attack that changes the target’s passive ability to Simple, causing it to experience doubled effects from stat boosts (e.g. Swords Dance) and penalties (e.g. Screech).  Use that on a partner with a set-up move and suddenly we’re in business.  As in single battles, I’m sure you could find a better doubles supporter, but if Audino is ever going to get a chance to shine, it’ll be here.

I shall repeat this once more to drive my point home: Audino has a pretty nice design.  If Chansey didn’t exist, I would be quite happy to accept Audino into the fold (although I would still find myself wishing she had been less mediocre; what she really needs is an evolution).  I’m not sure what I would have done with Audino to make her worth keeping in a world that already had Chansey; if the designers were dead set on having another doctor Pokémon I would probably have tried to partner her with Chansey somehow... the best I can think of off the top of my head is placing more focus on Audino’s ability to hear emotions and having her care for patients’ mental wellbeing while Chansey looked after their physical ailments (maybe making her a Normal/Psychic dual-type in the process, though I’m not wild about that).  Anyway, I’ve put this off long enough... sorry, Audino:

I hereby deny this Pokémon’s right to exist!  Let it be tossed into the rubber room and prodded repeatedly by men in white coats holding clipboards!

Mienfoo and Mienshao

Today’s Pokémon are the expert martial artists Mienfoo and Mienshao.  They- um.  Wait, are we sure these Pokémon are even related?  I mean... I know the names make it seem obvious, and I guess they both have features like a weasel or a mink, but I get the feeling that we’ve missed a second stage in the middle somehow; the evolution just seems like such a dramatic change, which isn’t normally something that happens without a reason (use of an evolutionary stone, or a Magikarp-to-Gyarados-style apotheosis).  Between the two, I actually much prefer Mienfoo; she looks cute but determined, while Mienshao strikes me as arrogant and smug.  It’s also undeniably weird that the Pokédex claims she fights by using the long fur on her arms like whips, which must be one of the most bizarre attack types ever, even by Pokémon’s standards (and remember that this is the franchise that gave us Lickitung, who licks things to death).  Moreover, Mienshao learns few, if any, attacks that are related to these weird arm-whip things; her strongest techniques are typical Fighting-type stuff like Drain Punch and Hi Jump Kick.  I guess you could interpret maybe Fake Out and Knock Off that way, but I just don’t think it adds to the design at all.  I certainly don’t understand why Game Freak felt it was so important that it had to be mentioned in the Pokédex entries for both Black and White.  Mienfoo is a cool little Pokémon who, frankly, deserved a better-designed evolution, and it’s sheer good fortune that the whips aren’t exaggerated enough to wreck Mienshao.  All that said, though, I don’t dislike her; smug she may be but she also looks dangerously clever (and that’s borne out by her combat skills).  This, when it comes right down to it, is what’s good about Mienfoo and Mienshao.  We’ve seen plenty of Fighting Pokémon that are portrayed as stoic, resilient and bulging with muscle: Machamp, Poliwrath, Hitmonchan, Heracross and Hariyama are probably the best examples.  These two, however, are the first real examples I’ve ever seen of Fighting-types that rely on grace, speed and the kind of fluid ease of movement that we associate with real-life masters of kung-fu or taekwondo (Infernape is similar, but as a starter Pokémon Infernape is necessarily more dominated by his Fire element).  To me, this feels like the designers putting some thought into what the Fighting element actually means, and coming up with a different answer to what we’ve seen in the past, which is exactly the kind of thing I want out of a new Pokémon.  Unlike some other types like Grass and Bug, which tend to really take over a Pokémon’s design, Fighting doesn’t really have any features that come through strongly in a dual-type.  You can identify a unifying feature that runs through almost all of them, though – with the notable exception of Heracross, who just has ludicrous abs, these are all Pokémon that take combat very seriously, often viewing it the way a human athlete or martial artist would (or, in the case of Gallade or Lucario, a knight).  Although most Fighting Pokémon are extraordinarily muscled, there’s no reason the type needs to imply this, and there are a couple of dual-types in particular that I think have made Game Freak realise this: Infernape and Medicham.

Medicham is a Psychic/Fighting Pokémon introduced in Ruby and Sapphire who, as the name implies, is big on meditation.  Medicham is another Fighting Pokémon with very human elements, but not ones directly related to combat; he gains his psychic powers through meditation and fasting, obviously drawing inspiration from monks who engage in similar practices (and may or may not gain psychic powers).  The result is an introspective Fighting-type who doesn’t really do a whole lot of actual fighting (although he is extremely good at it when he has to), and essentially the first Fighting Pokémon (again, besides Heracross) who is, by and large, quite peaceful.  By way of contrast Infernape, the Fire-type starter of Diamond and Pearl, is nuts.  Awesome, undeniably so, but completely nuts.  Infernape fights by leaping around with superhuman agility, jumping off of walls and ceilings, and beating the living daylights out of his opponents with all of his available limbs at once, while on fire.  His combat style is frenetic, acrobatic, and quite unlike those used by typical older Fighting-types, relying not so much on overwhelming strength but on being in so many places at once that defenders just give up in despair.  Medicham’s contemplative attitude and Infernape’s reliance on speed are characteristics drawn from their Psychic and Fire elements, respectively, but I think these Pokémon made Game Freak realise that actually, it’s okay for Fighting-types to have traits like that too.  Hence, we come to Mienshao, who looks to be just about the weakest Fighting Pokémon in existence, physically, but manages a truly absurd damage output anyway by hitting the right spot at the right moment.  She illustrates, I think, just how much we don’t need Pokémon like Unfezant and Watchog that are just old ideas rehashed and given a new coat of paint: there is plenty of room for stuff that’s actually new and Game Freak are indeed still capable of creating that if they put their minds to it.

Enough of praising Mienshao’s design; I need to talk now about how she fights.  I like a Pokémon’s skills and abilities to fit its flavour; an ideal Pokémon, if you ask me, should do the kinds of things that you would imagine it doing and be awesome at it.  Mienshao is definitely fast and powerful enough to break heads with admirable efficiency using attacks like Hi Jump Kick and Acrobatics, but that’s not really what she’s best at; what’s attractive about Mienshao from a tactical perspective is that (similarly to Gallade, actually) she can make use of dangerous disruptive and supporting attacks while still having the ability to break heads, potentially leaving her enemies uncertain as to which she’s going to try to do on any given turn.  Mienshao is fast enough to make effective use of Taunt, which locks down support Pokémon by forcing them to use directly aggressive techniques, and can use Knock Off to swat away her opponents’ items if desired, which can potentially ruin strategies.  The Bug-type attack U-Turn allows Mienshao to damage her foes as she switches out and is an excellent technique in its own right, making it rather difficult to actually land a blow on her, but also has wonderful synergy with her Regenerator trait, which grants a burst of healing every time she switches out of battle.  If you’re particularly brave and good at anticipating attacks, you can even give Me First a try, which attempts to cut in ahead of your opponent – Mienshao’s fast enough to do this fairly reliably to many Pokémon – and use its own attack against it, at significantly increased power.  But wait, there’s more!  Mienshao even gets Baton Pass to let her give her own buffs to other Pokémon on your team, and has two very good ones to choose from: Swords Dance (attack) and Calm Mind (special attack and special defence).  She has a good amount of raw power, but in gameplay as well as design Mienshao’s real advantages lie in finesse.  This is not a Pokémon to be used solely for murdering all that stand in your way – although she can certainly do that too in a tight spot!

Mienfoo and Mienshao are, all things considered, among my favourite new Pokémon.  I think that the designers should have realised upon sober reflection that the whole fur-whip thing was dumb and killed it with fire, and I furthermore think that the transition from the one to the other is a little bit jarring and could’ve used an intermediate, but I don’t really think there’s anything horribly wrong here.  What’s more, there are some major elements that are oh so right.  I wholeheartedly recommend Mienfoo and Mienshao to anyone who’s tired of Machamp and Hitmonchan.

I hereby affirm this Pokémon’s right to exist!

Petilil and Lilligant

The thing about Pokémon games is that they come in pairs: Red and Blue, Gold and Silver, yada yada yada, with a couple of Pokémon are missing from each one, like Electabuzz from Blue and Magmar from Red.  In order to finish the god-awful errand that is supposedly the game’s framing device but which everyone actually forgets about within the first hour or so (i.e. filling the damn Pokédex), you have to trade with a friend who has the other game.  Since Game Freak shows no sign of wanting to give up this concept, White version doesn’t get Cottonee and Whimsicott – what White gets instead, and Black doesn’t, is these two: Petilil and Lilligant.  Now, Petilil is cute and all, and while Lilligant does feel oddly reminiscent of a Southern belle to me she doesn’t look too badly done either, but tell me... aren’t you all having flashbacks to Oddish and Bellossom?  Oddish I’ll presume everyone remembers; Bellossom, in case anyone reading this is somehow unfamiliar with her, is Gold and Silver’s alternative final evolution for Oddish, obtained through use of a Sun Stone.  Comparing the old with the new... I can’t help but feel that Game Freak must have just decided that having to evolve through Gloom in the middle was a bit of a drag and that it might be nice to have a Pokémon that was exactly the same as Bellossom but without an awkward smelly teenaged state.  Not unlike many parents, oddly enough.  The designers have then gone on to compound the obvious similarities in appearance by having Lilligant take over Bellossom’s focus on dance (at least I assume she’s supposed to be a dancer because all of the attacks she learns after evolving – Teeter Dance, Quiver Dance and Petal Dance – are, well, about dancing).  The main distinguishing feature of Petilil and Lilligant, as far as I can tell, is that they are really hard to take care of and will whither and die if their trainers aren’t skilled enough.  Maybe I’m missing something here, but as flavour elements go I think this is a bit silly; I don’t think there’s really any precedent for Pokémon actually suffering from a trainer’s benign incompetence (the franchise’s normal stance is that if you genuinely love your Pokémon it’ll all work out even if you’re totally useless) so this seems to be specific to Lilligant – do they actually need to be cared for by humans?  Can these things even survive in the wild?  Personally I think that Bellossom’s weird sun-worship thing, along with the day/night duality she had going with Vileplume, is just more interesting.

Of course, what any trainer really wants to know is what Lilligant can do for you in a fight.  Two words: Quiver Dance.  Quiver Dance is a fantastic new technique that increases a Pokémon’s special attack, special defence and speed stats simultaneously.  This is an incredibly powerful effect and is consequently very strictly regulated; other than Lilligant, only butterfly and moth Pokémon can learn it (i.e. Butterfree, Venomoth and their associated cheap knock-offs – oh, and Volcarona, but I’ll get around to Volcarona later).  Lilligant is quite fast and has excellent special attack to begin with, so the simple addition of this move can give her access to a truly frightening combination of power and speed.  The only problem is, I can’t really figure out what she’s supposed to do with it.  Some kind of Grass-type attack is a given, of course – probably Solarbeam, since Lilligant’s Chlorophyll ability makes her even faster in bright sunlight and it therefore makes sense to use her in a sun-based team – but that seems to be all she gets, and since Grass (as I mentioned when I talked about Whimsicott the other day) is an awful attacking type, that’s not enough.  Quite possibly the best attack Lilligant learns outside of her own type – and I am dead serious here – is Hyper Beam, and unless you’re still playing Red and Blue (where it’s a devastating finishing move) Hyper Beam is an utter joke.  Like almost all Pokémon, Lilligant can learn Hidden Power, which, for the edification of those unfamiliar with this attack, has a different element and power level for each Pokémon – not each species, each individual Pokémon – but is never any stronger than “okay, I guess, if your opponent is weak to it.”  Hidden Power is very useful if your Pokémon has a nagging gap in its offensive coverage that you desperately need to plug, and your Pokémon’s Hidden Power happens to be the right type (in Lilligant’s case, you should probably hope for Ice or Fire) and happens to be strong enough.  Lilligant, unfortunately, doesn’t have a nagging gap in her offensive coverage so much as nagging offensive coverage in her gap.  She also gets... um... Dream Eater, I suppose, and Sleep Powder?  Dream Eater is terrible though because your turn is completely wasted if your opponent decides to switch in a Pokémon that isn’t asleep.  In short, Lilligant’s stats and access to Quiver Dance make it clear that she wants to be a sweeper, but her move pool, with Sleep Powder, Stun Spore, Aromatherapy, Leech Seed and so on and so forth, makes it hard for her to be anything but a traditional Grass-type supporter – which she can’t do either because her defences, while not terrible, are far from strong.  Heaven help you if your Lilligant doesn’t have an appropriately-typed Hidden Power, because she has literally nothing else.

Quiver Dance makes Lilligant unique.  Unfortunately it makes her unique in a way that she simply cannot capitalise on.  I suspect the thought process behind these Pokémon must have been something along the lines of “wouldn’t it be great if Bellossom were really bad at being a supporter and sort of okay at being a sweeper?”  And the answer is no, no Game Freak, it would not be great.  It would be stupid.  People are going to think “but Lilligant with Hidden Power (Fire or Ice) isn’t actually that bad because... etc.”  From a player attempting to use the thing, I could buy an argument along those lines.  Getting a Petilil with a strong Hidden Power of the right element is such a pain that I, personally, would never bother, but if you’re prepared to do it then well done; your reward will be a Lilligant that is okay rather than awful.  If Lilligant’s designers at Game Freak came along and tried to feed me exactly the same argument I would punch them in their stupid smug faces since, coming from them, “Lilligant is good because Hidden Power” would mean that they had intentionally designed a Pokémon that is only usable (not brilliant – usable) if you put a truly ridiculous amount of effort into it.  Luckily for Game Freak, I am a firm believer in the maxim that one should never attribute to malice that which may be adequately explained by stupidity, and have long believed that they do not actually put any thought at all into making a Pokémon useful – the fact that some Pokémon are is simply the power of the normal distribution in action.

Why yes, I am a bitter, bitter person.

What?  Oh... Petilil and Lilligant are still here... wonderful.  Mechanically they’re disappointing and giving Quiver Dance to, say, Roserade would have yielded better results.  Aesthetically they’re just ripping off Oddish and Bellossom, nothing less.  The only verdict I can in good conscience produce is...

I hereby deny this Pokemon's right to exist!  Let it be set upon by hungry snails until nothing remains!

Cottonee and Whimsicott

Whee; I get to do another Grass-type!  I’m breaking from the order of the Pokédex for a bit because Whimsicott is another Pokémon I have relatively more experience with.  Cottonee and Whimsicott are... fluffy... cottony balls of... stuff.  Honestly I’m not sure what they are.  Funnily enough, I quite like this.  Pokémon don’t need to look like things, they just need to fit their powers and their character.  Think back, for instance, to Red and Blue and see if you can tell me what, in the name of all that is holy, a Slowpoke is?  Or, for that matter, a Nidoqueen?  How about Alakazam, Marowak, Magmar, Electabuzz or Kangaskhan (hint: she’s certainly not a bloody kangaroo, I can tell you that much)?  I feel that there have been, as the years go by, more and more Pokémon that insist that they need to look like something, and personally I think Pokémon that don’t really look like anything are (often) the ones that work best.  Take Cottonee, for example.  She looks like nothing so much as a ball of cotton with leaves, but that works.  Simple designs are best when you’re looking to make something cute.  Whimsicott is cute too; I’m... not exactly sure what she looks like, though it has been suggested to me that she’s a sheep, which I guess I can see.  Sheep are fluffy and cotton is fluffy, so even though there’s no other reason to link them at all, it makes sense on one level, and that’s what makes the design work.  I am a little bit concerned that Whimsicott’s “cute wind-blown plant Pokémon” concept is too much of the same as Hoppip, Skiploom and Jumpluff, from Gold and Silver.  Jumpluff even has the same fluffiness, although you can tell that, if the designers did realise there was a lot of similarity in the concepts, they’ve done a pretty good job of making Cottonee and Whimsicott look quite different.  What I really like about Whimsicott, though, is that she’s got an extra facet to her flavour that doesn’t feel tacked on or fail to mesh with her mechanical abilities: she’s a trickster.  Whimsicott enjoy sneaking into homes and pulling pranks, which they are exceedingly good at since they can slip into very tight spaces.  This fits well with their fey appearance, and this is actually the idea that’s central to Whimsicott as characters (Jumpluff, by contrast, are just peaceful drifters).  In short, I’d like to think there’s room for both Pokémon.

So what does Whimsicott do?  Well, simply put, she’s an utter pain in the ass.  Whimsicott doesn’t have massively powerful attacks or extremely strong defences.  What she does have is a wonderful ability, Prankster, that lets her move first automatically, the way a Pokémon using Quick Attack would, when using support moves (she has another possible choice, Infiltrator, which causes her to ignore Reflect and Light Screen when attacking, but this is silly and distracting).  And boy, does Whimsicott have some great support moves.  To start with, like almost all Grass-types, Whimsicott can learn Leech Seed, which opens up the Sub-Seed strategy I mentioned when I talked about Serperior – slowly drink up an opponent’s health with Leech Seed while using the health you drain to create Substitutes and soak any attacks that come your way.  This works best on fast Pokémon, and Whimsicott  always goes first with those two moves and will even outpace another Pokémon using a priority attack much of the time thanks to being very fast anyway, which makes her one of the best Sub-Seeders ever.  Whimsicott’s ability also meshes brilliantly with Encore, a technique that forces an opponent to repeat its last move over and over, because this is again something that lets her benefit from going first – it’s far less useful if you can’t go first, because you really need to know what you’re going to be locking your target into.  Taunt is wonderful too for shutting down defensive Pokémon by keeping them from using their support techniques, and again takes speed to be used effectively.  Finally, Grasswhistle is horribly unreliable, but a sleep attack that always goes first could well be tempting, and Cotton Guard might be worth a try – not many people use defence-boosting techniques since a critical hit will ignore their effects and you’re bound to get hit by one eventually if you try to stall, but Cotton Guard in particular happens to be stronger than any other similar technique in existence and will more than double Whimsicott’s resistance to physical attacks with a single use, so who knows?

So, here’s my dilemma.  Even a cursory reading of this entry will demonstrate that I think Whimsicott is awesome.  I love Grass-types, but I don’t often get to see one that can seriously compete because, frankly, the type itself comes with some serious disadvantages – offensively, it’s one of the weakest elements in the game, behind Poison, Steel and Normal, and unlike Steel it doesn’t have brilliant defensive properties to make up for it.  I could probably count on one hand the Grass Pokémon that could be considered truly powerful... ignoring anything from Black and White, there’s Breloom, Sceptile, Venusaur, Roserade and Torterra... and I guess there’s also Celebi and Shaymin, but I’m kind of inclined to leave them out, mostly because they can’t actually be caught in-game.  I like Whimsicott just for being a Grass Pokémon that’s brilliant at what she does.  The question is, though, could we have had the exact same thing just by giving a new toy or two to Jumpluff?  Jumpluff has most of the same attacks that make Whimsicott awesome – she doesn’t have Taunt, but she does get Sleep Powder, which is great fun – all she’s really missing is that lovely ability.  She can pull off more or less the same support role as Whimsicott can but isn’t as good at it.  She also comes from the same design concept; Whimsicott takes it in a different direction, but the similarities are still undeniable.  Whimsicott is what Jumpluff should have been from the very start, but when you have Jumpluff already, but I can’t really call it good game design to create a Pokémon that’s essentially “Jumpluff, only this time it’ll actually work,” when the alternative of, y’know, just making Jumpluff work by giving her some better powers was available.  Then again, Whimsicott is, in my opinion anyway, not only a more powerful version of Jumpluff but also a more interesting interpretation of the base concept they share.  If I were running things, I would take releasing a new game as an opportunity to add new background and characterisation to a Pokémon, not just new powers, and give Jumpluff a bit of attention in both areas, but if we take it as a given that that’s not how Game Freak tends to do things, Whimsicott is just about the best we could have hoped for.  The process that created her is faulty, if you ask me, but in this one instance it did work, so although Game Freak’s theories of design can expect further grilling in later entries, Whimsicott herself is going to get off lightly because, whatever else I might want to say, she is an awesome Pokémon.

I hereby affirm this Pokémon’s right to exist!

Tympole, Palpitoad and Seismitoad

I don’t want to review these Pokémon.  I really don’t.  Sadly, they’re sitting there in the Pokédex, right after Timburr, Gurdurr and Conkeldurr, and I don’t exactly have much of an excuse not to.  So... with as little ado as possible, let’s get started on the vibration Pokémon, Tympole, Palpitoad and Seismitoad.

Understand that I do not think these are terrible Pokémon.  They are not... badly designed, as such.  I think Tympole and, yes, even Palpitoad are kind of cute.  Seismitoad may be ungainly, but as he’s a toad Pokémon I think that’s intentional.  No, the crux of my problem is that they are just rather dull.  They’re not even interesting enough for me to hate properly, which makes this business of writing a blog post about them rather a trial.  Nonetheless, I shall persevere.  Tympole, Palpitoad and Seismitoad are tadpole and frog Pokémon, obviously.  “Tadpole and frog Pokémon,” unfortunately, is an idea that was already done way back in Red and Blue by Poliwag, Poliwhirl and Poliwrath (Poliwhirl, incidentally, is the favourite Pokémon of Satoshi Tajiri, the creator of the franchise, which is something of a difficult legacy to live up to when you think about it).  The Pokédex continues to classify Poliwhirl and Poliwrath as “tadpole Pokémon,” but let’s face it, they’re clearly fully-grown and looking more like frogs than tadpoles, and there’s really no question about Politoed, the alternate final evolution for Poliwhirl added in Gold and Silver.  I suppose you could make the argument that Palpitoad and Seismitoad are toad Pokémon, not frog Pokémon, what with the bumps that are meant to represent a toad’s “warts,” but since the only thing that really makes a toad a toad and not a frog is that they can live happily out of water, and Seismitoad is still a Water-type, I think that’s splitting hairs a bit (yes, all right, he’s a Water/Ground dual-type; big deal).  So Tympole’s thing is that he has sonic powers.  Y’know, because frogs and toads make loud noises.  Of course, frogs and toads made loud noises ten years ago as well, which is why Politoed’s thing is also that she has sonic powers.  This was clearly too much, so their sonic powers are slightly different.  Politoed just croaks at you so loudly that your head explodes.  Palpitoad can do that too, but he can also use sonic waves to start earthquakes... which would be great, if not for the fact that lots of Pokémon are associated with earthquakes already, most notably Whiscash, the catfish of doom.  Seismitoad has something else, the ability to vibrate his fists with those sonic gland things of his (that’s what the “warts” are) and shatter things with his punches, presumably by some sort of resonance effect... which, again, would be great, if Seismitoad were any good at punching things.  He’s not; he learns one attack that involves punching things (Drain Punch).  I mean... on a Water-type, you wouldn’t think Ice Punch would be too out-of-place, right?  How about Mega Punch?  Maybe some kind of unique sonic punch attack to represent this ability of his?  The only other mildly interesting thing about these Pokémon is that they’re poisonous, and the other, newer frog Pokémon, Croagunk and Toxicroak (who, by the way, were actually well-designed and quite distinct from Poliwrath, despite also being Fighting-types), already milked the “poisonous frog” thing for all it was worth.  At the end of it all, I’m left wondering why I’m expected to care that these things are in this game.

Now for their actual gameplay merits... again, understand that these are not terrible Pokémon.  They certainly aren’t good, but they don’t have any truly gaping inadequacies.  Water/Ground is a perfectly good type combination to have; it comes with a double-weakness to Grass-type attacks, but that’s also the only weakness you’ll find to it.  Seismitoad is the fifth Pokémon to inherit this particular mantle, so he has to work rather hard to make anything of it.  The good news is that all four of the previous Pokémon are bulky, tanky things, the best of which is probably Swampert, who makes good use of his relative dearth of weaknesses to absorb attacks safely and hit back with very powerful Earthquakes, although Black and White have been very kind to Gastrodon by dramatically improving her formerly useless passive ability, Storm Drain, so she might actually surpass Swampert now.  The other two, Whiscash and Quagsire, are similar ideas.  They’re slow, they’re tough, and it’s hard to hit them in a weak spot; end of story.

Seismitoad, to my relief, is not the same thing; he’s much more rounded.  Notably he’s the fastest of the five by a fair margin (although I should stress that this doesn’t mean much).  He’s still pretty tough and pretty strong, but he’s nothing special on either count.  Seismitoad works because of the Swift Swim ability, which allows him to move twice as fast in heavy rain and act as a sort of sweeper.  This is a wonderful ability if you build your team around it; the trouble is that it’s a fairly standard one for Water Pokémon to have, so Seismitoad has a great deal of competition in using it and unfortunately it’s not competition he can really handle.  Seismitoad’s offensive skills are evenly divided between physical and elemental combat, which means he doesn’t really excel at either.  The idea of a physically-based Seismitoad is shot down completely by the fact that, for some ungodly reason, Seismitoad cannot learn Waterfall and thus has no physical Water-type attacks to take advantage of the power boost that they get from heavy rain, so those theoretical ‘points’ spent on making Seismitoad decent at using physical attacks are really wasted.  He does, however, have just enough of a movepool to scrape together a reasonable spread of special attacks: Surf as a primary attack, Earth Power as a secondary, and Grass Knot, Focus Blast or Sludge Bomb for backup.  Like I said, though, a lot of Water Pokémon get Swift Swim and many of them are very powerful.  Kabutops comes to mind, being faster and stronger than Seismitoad and having access to Swords Dance.  Bringing Kingdra into this comparison just wouldn’t be fair at all because Kingdra is nothing short of terrifying.  For heaven’s sake, Golduck gets Swift Swim now through the Dream World and would arguably do as good a job of it as Seismitoad, and when people start comparing you to Golduck, of all things, you know you’re doing something wrong.

You might think that I am being very hard on poor Seismitoad.  You would be absolutely right.  Tough cookies.  I probably am being harder on Seismitoad than I would have been if I had been writing this about Whiscash six years ago.  Heck, I’m probably being harder on him that I would have been on Gastrodon three years ago.  The fact is, I just don’t think it’s okay anymore to be adding Pokémon like this to the game.  In Diamond and Pearl, we had nearly five hundred of the damn things and that, if you ask me, was plenty.  That doesn’t mean there should never be a new Pokémon again; there should by all means be more Pokémon but there needs to be a reason for each one, and that reason needs to be better than “I miss Poliwrath.”  If anyone were asking me, which I know they’re not, I would say that Nintendo really needs to stop focussing so much on adding more and more Pokémon and start doing more with what they have.  Anyway.

I hereby deny this Pokémon’s right to exist!  Let it be locked in a bunker with a hungry Frenchman and a bag of garlic!

Drilbur and Excadrill

Okay, what’s next in the Pokédex after Conkeldurr?

...oh, gods.  No, I’m doing that.  Not right after Gigalith and Conkeldurr.  I can only take so much idiocy.  They will live, for now.

Hey, look!  I missed one out!  Yeah, I’m doing that one instead.

Meet Drilbur, the mole Pokémon.  Okay, I know the Pokédex says we already have a “Mole Pokémon” but be honest; none of you out there ever actually thought that Diglett looked anything like a mole, did you?  If anything, Diglett and Dugtrio are actually equivalent to earthworms, not moles, since they apparently play a role in maintaining soil fertility by turning and mixing it, whereas real moles are regarded as pests.  Drilbur and the evolved Excadrill can be pests too in the wrong place because their burrows can interfere with whatever the human population is trying to accomplish underground, like building subway lines, but since they’re also brilliant at building tunnels for humans they tend to be forgiven.  I quite like how the two Pokédex entries for Black and White illustrate how the same Pokémon’s abilities can both help and hinder; it strikes me as quite a nice touch.  I also like Drilbur’s design; he’s cute but no pushover.  You’re not exactly going to run screaming, but this is clearly still not a Pokémon you want to mess with.  Excadrill, on the other hand, is nothing short of terrifying.  It could seriously mangle things with the massive blades on its hands and head if it so chose, and its expression is hard, determined and unforgiving.  Excadrill is definitely a Pokémon to be placed very high on the list of Things to Run Away from at Ludicrous Speed.  I am going to criticise his in-game sprite quite harshly because it annoys me.  As it’s smaller and less detailed than the picture we have here, and because Excadrill’s face is shadowed, if you just glance at the sprite it is possible to get the impression that the red diamond marking on his neck is actually an eye, and that his drill and his head are the upper and lower parts of some kind of bizarre beaklike structure.  This is in fact how I first saw Excadrill before Black and White were released, which bothered me to no end.  It’s not fair to punish Excadrill too harshly for that, though, because he and Drilbur are otherwise extremely nicely done Pokémon that, in terms of flavour, accomplish just what they set out to do.

Drilbur and Excadrill are both Ground-types, and Excadrill is also a Steel-type.  Now, although the Ground-type in particular has been blessed with a fair number of interesting outliers in this regard, both of these are types that produce primarily tanks – slow, powerful Pokémon with good offensive and defensive strength, normally focussing on physical offense and defence in the case of Ground- and Steel-type tanks.  Excadrill is nice enough to buck the trend; he won’t fold immediately to any attack he’s not specifically weak to, but defence is definitely not his forte (the Steel type does grant him a bucketload of resistances to work with, though).  Nor is he extremely fast, though he does have a surprising turn of speed to him.  His physical attack strength is nothing short of phenomenal, however.  Excadrill is not made for winning wars of attrition; he is made for utterly brutalising his opponents with savage efficiency.  Contrast this with the only other Pokémon to combine the Steel and Ground elements, Steelix, who looks with scorn on such meagre defences as shells, chitin, scales and the Great Wall of China.  Pokémon from both elements exist that are similar to Excadrill – the Steel/Fighting-type jackal Pokémon Lucario and the deadly Ground/Dragon-type “land shark” Pokémon Garchomp – but it’s an unusual configuration of skills for both types, and certainly an interesting choice for a Pokémon that combines the two.  Lucario and Garchomp, incidentally, are both tremendously powerful and dangerous Pokémon, and Excadrill may very well turn out to be comparable to them in more ways than just his type.

Excadrill has an absurdly high attack stat; this much we’ve established.  He also has Swords Dance, just in case he wasn’t already strong enough for you, and a pretty good selection of attacks.  Earthquake is a wonderful staple, Rock Slide and the Bug-type X-Scissor are good for backup and if you really want to confuse people you can throw on Shadow Claw (Ghost-type) or Submission (Fighting-type).  Oddly Excadrill learns no Steel-type attacks other than the inexcusably bad Metal Claw.  Nobody cares, though, because the great secret of the Steel type is that although it is hands down the strongest defensive type in the game it is, after Poison, the second-worst offensive type, being strong against only two other elements (Rock and Ice).  Long story short, the one thing holding Excadrill back from causing utter devastation is that, although he’s pretty fast, there are still a lot of Pokémon that are faster.  This is why it was extraordinarily nice of Nintendo to give Excadrill a wonderful passive ability, Sand Rush, that doubles his speed during a sandstorm.  This may sound like a very specific circumstance, but because people love Tyranitar and Hippowdon, who are both continually surrounded by raging sandstorms, it’s easily the most common weather condition in Pokémon.  Black and White may not turn out the same way, but in Diamond and Pearl it was more or less standard practice to assume that if you didn’t want to be fighting in a sandstorm, you would probably have to.  Including either Tyranitar or Hippowdon on a team with Excadrill should make it absolutely trivial to turn the latter into a very strong sweeper indeed.

Excadrill is probably the strongest of the new Pokémon I’ve looked at so far.  If he’s on your side, he’ll make a wonderful ally.  If he’s against you, crush him without a moment’s delay as he is extraordinarily dangerous, and he manages to be so in a way that isn’t quite like any other Pokémon (actually, the closest thing I can think of to the way Excadrill fights is the prehistoric terror Kabutops, whose furious onslaught in a rainstorm is roughly analogous to the way Excadrill rampages through sandstorms, but even he isn’t a perfect fit).  To top it all off, he’s suitably badass to have everyone fear him as he ought to be feared.

I hereby affirm this Pokémon’s right to exist!

Timburr, Gurdurr and Conkeldurr

If you’ve been following my rantings thus far, you’ll know I take an extraordinarily dim view of anything that could be described as “[Pokémon] 2.0” and would have much preferred it if Nintendo had just used the Pokémon that existed already and told the creature design guys to come back when they had something interesting.  This is why I was initially quite excited when I met Timburr, an impish-looking little Fighting-type whose combat style involves bitch-slapping you with a plank.  I cannot help but think that this is awesome.  Honestly, I can’t find very much to fault with Timburr; he’s a cool little Pokémon with a lot of attitude.  The only problem I have is that his ‘thing’ seems to be helping out construction workers, which is already what Machop have always been for.  Making it more blatant by giving him construction materials to carry around just seems... pointless.  Now, the Black version Pokédex entry doesn’t mention this, so I missed the whole construction theme and actually got something of a “mischievous forest spirit” vibe from Timburr and thought it would be really cool if he evolved into a Grass/Fighting dual-type and graduated to bitch-slapping you with an entire tree.  I mention this to make it known that my disappointment that this is not the case will surely colour my opinions of Timburr’s evolved forms.  Thankfully, however, I don’t think there is a great deal of room for bias on these Pokémon...

Okay, so Timburr’s plank evolves into a girder.  If I liked the idea of bitch-slapping people with a plank, the idea of doing so with a friggin’ I-beam has to have some appeal, right?  Well... yes.  I still think it’s an awesome idea.  Seriously, though, just look at this Pokémon.  Really look at it.  I can only think that something went badly wrong here.  Is it just me, or does Gurdurr look like a clown?  If so, WHY?  I don’t think the idea of a clown Pokémon is necessarily wrong in and of itself; it worked for Mr. Mime, for instance, way back in Red and Blue, but Mr. Mime looked like a clown because it was part of the design.  He was a mime; his whole shtick was creating invisible walls with his freaky mime-powers.  Gurdurr, on the other hand, is a... a body-building clown who carries a steel girder and helps out at construction sites?  Who said this was okay!?  Who looked at this concept and said, honestly, from the bottom of his or her black heart, “yep, we’re gonna roll with this”?  It can’t have been accidental; there’s just no other conceivable purpose for the giant red nose (or at least, none that I can think of) and the hairstyle is clownish too (or at least... I think that’s supposed to be hair).  My one shining bit of consolation here is the feeling I get when I remember that Gurdurr learns the attack Wake-Up Slap, which, when used on a sleeping opponent, does double damage and, well, wakes it up.  Most Pokémon that learn this technique fight with their hands (hence “slap”).  Gurdurr fights with an I-beam.  Because I am a horrible person, I find the resulting mental image absolutely hilarious.  Thank you, Gurdurr, for giving this to me.  Anyway, Conkeldurr... The tricky thing about the concept of a Pokémon that fights by dual-wielding massive blocks of concrete is that it’s going to turn out either awesome or stupid.  There’s not a lot of middle ground for something like this.  Putting a big red clown nose on it is going to make it stupid.  I’m sorry, but that is one of the thirteen irrevocable Laws of Design.  My biggest problem with Conkeldurr (besides the nose) is that, although he’s the only one that explicitly fights with his props (I assume Timburr and Gurdurr use theirs, but the Pokédex doesn’t actually confirm it; it just says they use them as training weights) I just can’t imagine him doing so, partly because of the way he holds them in the artwork.  Try as I may, I cannot picture Conkeldurr actually using those in a fight.  Maybe that’s just a problem with me, though.  Conkeldurr’s concrete blocks are the only ones that are actually evident in the attacks these Pokémon know; they naturally learn a couple of Rock attacks as they level.  Most of their other attacks are just bog standard Fighting-type ones, leaving me to wonder whether they just set the plank/girder/concrete down whenever they need to do anything...

And with that mention of attack techniques, I shall gracefully segue into the mechanical part of this entry.  The only really interesting thing I can identify about Conkeldurr’s movepool is that he naturally learns those Rock-type attacks, Rock Slide and Stone Edge, on his own, which is a pity since those attacks are already available to, y’know, pretty much every other Fighting-type Pokémon ever by way of TMs, which are reusable in Black and White and therefore no longer even a significant economic factor.  I’m not sure there’s anything useful Conkeldurr can get that Machamp doesn’t... I mean, there’s Taunt, I guess, but you generally want to put that on a fast Pokémon, which Conkeldurr isn’t.  Machamp on the other hand can inherit Thunderpunch, Fire Punch or Ice Punch from a male parent (and unlike Golem, he can still get them on Black and White, so Conkeldurr can’t even complain that this is an unfair comparison).  To be absolutely fair though, you’ve already got the makings of a pretty good set with a strong attack from each of the Fighting, Ground and Rock types.  So, since I’ve confirmed my initial suspicions that Conkeldurr is very similar to Machamp I may as well continue the comparison... *sigh*... Conkeldurr has more brute force at its disposal and is a lot tougher against physical attacks, but also slower and slightly weaker against special attacks – overall, probably a better stat line, since Conkeldurr has given up some points from special attack, which neither of them uses anyway, for more important stuff.  I am having unpleasant call-backs to my recent assessment of Gigalith as “Golem, with bigger numbers and fewer options.”  Conkeldurr does have a lovely new ability, Sheer Force, which strips away the secondary effects of attacks that have them (like the paralysis caused by a Thunderbolt, for instance) in exchange for more power.  This just makes Conkeldurr even more certain of being able to stuff more damage into the opposing team than Machamp can.  However, I’m not sure that creating Conkeldurr really achieved anything that couldn’t have been done just by giving Machamp Sheer Force as an alternate ability through the Dream World (with access to the elemental punches he’d be able to use it more effectively too)...

Quick summary of the last paragraph for those who are just skimming: Conkeldurr is bigger and stronger than Machamp but can’t do as many different things, or indeed anything specific that Machamp can’t (and Machamp isn’t without means of increasing his own damage output either).  He’s certainly a powerful Pokémon, but I’m not sure he’s so much more powerful than Machamp that you have to use him even when you don’t want Machamp’s additional options.  What’s more... I cannot get over the abject stupidity of this design, which manages to step on Machop and Machoke’s toes with the whole construction theme while simultaneously putting clown noses where they plainly do not belong.  In short:

I hereby deny this Pokémon’s right to exist!  Let it be pitched into the Hudson River wearing a pair of concrete shoes!

Roggenrola, Boldore and Gigalith

Okay, I’m not going to beat about the bush: we are in the presence of Geodude, Graveler and Golem, version 2.0.  They are great big bulky living rocks, and their distinguishing feature is that they are great big bulky living rocks.  Nintendo even seems to have hinted that they knew that and just didn’t care by giving them an identical evolutionary path: both Geodude and Roggenrola evolve once upon reaching 25^th level, and then once more when traded.  It’s going to take a lot to convince me of these ones... here I go.

Right, so, the designers have decided that the major distinction between Roggenrola, Boldore and Gigalith and their predecessors is that, while Geodude, Graveler and Golem are mountain Pokémon that hang out on the surface, these things are born very deep in the Earth, close to the mantle where the temperature and pressure are high, and sometimes make their way into shallower caves by way of fissures.  That... is actually pretty cool, I admit.  Roggenrola specifically seems a bit off, though.  The Pokédex tells us that the hexagonal depression on its face is an ear, not an eye; that, along with the name, seems to suggest that we’re looking at a Pokémon with sonic abilities, but if that was ever the plan, it seems to have been dropped when Boldore was designed.  That's easily forgiveable, I suppose; the problem is that it’s not the only inconsistency with the design.  A big part of this Pokémon’s flavour is that it has some kind of internal power core that allows it to make devastating energy-based attacks.  The energy overflowing from this core is what brings about the growth of the crystals on Boldore’s body (I don’t know; just go with it).  Gigalith’s Pokédex entry states very insistently that it can use the crystals to gather and amplify solar energy, using it to create destructive blasts capable of knocking holes in mountains.  Basically, everything here seems to indicate that Solarbeam ought to be Gigalith’s signature move.  There are two problems here.  First: although Gigalith can be taught Solarbeam, it will not learn it of its own accord.  Second: no one should ever teach Gigalith Solarbeam because its special attack stat is dreadful.  This annoys me a great deal.  Gigalith’s Pokédex entries for both Black and White make a big deal of its prowess at using energy attacks.  There is an outrageously easy and obvious way written right into Gigalith’s design of making it distinct from not just Golem but also nearly every other Rock-type in existence (only one of them, Omastar, is actually good at using special attacks, and only five others are even competent), and Nintendo chose to ignore it completely, at one and the same moment making Gigalith functionally identical to Golem and creating a glaring disconnect between its flavour and mechanics.  This... this cannot be mere incompetence.  Someone in this company is actively trolling me.  It is working.

Okay, so I’m making a lot of my claim that Gigalith and Golem are basically the same thing, so I suppose I should compare them properly.  There is, I guess, one big, obvious difference: Roggenrola and its evolutions are single-typed Rock Pokémon, while Geodude and its adult forms are Rock/Ground dual-types.  This is a mixed blessing for Gigalith.  Rock/Ground is almost universally hailed as an awful defensive typing because, despite coming with immunity to Electric attacks, it includes crippling double-weaknesses to both Water and Grass attacks, as well as weaknesses to Ground, Fighting and Ice attacks.  With the exception of Grass, these are some of the most popular attack types in the game, and Gigalith is definitely better off for shedding its Ice weakness and lessening its Grass and Water weaknesses.  On the other hand, Rock/Ground does happen to be one of the better offensive combinations out there, doing super-effective damage to a total of seven types, and not being resisted by any single type (though there are many dual-type combinations that will resist both).  Gigalith can learn Ground attacks like Earthquake, of course, but all attacks are more powerful when used by Pokémon of the same type, making Golem’s Earthquakes stronger.  Gigalith’s significantly higher attack stat goes some way towards compensating for that, though, and makes his other attacks better as well.  Advantage: Gigalith.  This significantly higher attack stat is also the only major difference between their numbers.  Gigalith is slightly tougher and quite a bit slower, but both of them are so slow that it’s hard to really care.  Again, advantage: Gigalith.  That just leaves their move-pools.  Golem can learn quite a few attacks that Gigalith can’t, but most of them are irrelevant and distracting.  The important part is that Golem can learn some strong Fighting-type attacks like Hammer Arm, which is the first big advantage on his side.  I normally ignore moves available to older Pokémon through TMs and move tutors exclusive to the older games, since I suspect the new Pokémon are going to gain access to many of them eventually and I don’t think it’s quite fair to include them in my judgements, but I have to admit it is pretty important that, on Platinum, Golem can learn Fire Punch and Thunderpunch to nail more Pokémon with super-effective attacks.  Some cross-bred Gigalith have one trick that Golem is missing, though, and it’s a big one: the power to bring flying and levitating Pokémon crashing to the ground with the Gravity technique, thus rendering great swathes of normally-immune Pokémon vulnerable to Earthquake.  Gravity also makes all attacks harder to dodge, so you can even design a team around it by loading your Pokémon with powerful but inaccurate attacks like Blizzard and Thunder, and since very few Pokémon can use it, it’s quite a nice trick to have.

In brief: if we allow Golem to use the attacks that it could learn on older games but can’t on Black and White, his wider move-pool probably clinches it for him; Gigalith has very little outside of Rock- and Ground-type attacks.  If not, Gigalith’s greater power is the deciding factor.  The thing is, though, I’m not here to judge which Pokémon is better; I’m trying to give an overall assessment of whether or not these new Pokémon really ought to exist.  Compared to Golem, Gigalith has fewer options and bigger numbers.  Mechanically, it’s a more boring version of Golem.  This is extraordinarily disappointing because it would have been so easy to make Roggenrola, Boldore and Gigalith interesting not by doing anything outlandish but simply by being consistent with their established flavour.  The correct course with this Pokémon would have been either to toss it and replace it with its 1^st-generation equivalent, or to make it do something new.  Nintendo did neither, and thus I am annoyed with them.

I hereby deny this Pokémon’s right to exist!  Let it be sledge-hammered into tiny fragments and sold in crystal shops for exorbitant prices by elderly hippies!