Kinda find it weird meloetta cant learn boomburst. Actually there are a lot of other mons that should learn it too.
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Pokémon Movepool Oddities & Explanations
- Thread starter Kurona
- Start date
1) Flapple weighs 1 kg but learns Heavy Slam because Troll Freak I guess. At least Final Gambit Shedinja was because Shedinja inherited moves from Ninjask.
Meanwhile heavy Pokemon like Emboar, Camerupt, Gigalix and Torterra need to learn it from a pre-evolution. I checked, Appletun weighs 13 kg so it can't use the move well either.
2) Despite the animation showing it Spinning, Ferrothorn can't learn Rapid Spin.
Meanwhile heavy Pokemon like Emboar, Camerupt, Gigalix and Torterra need to learn it from a pre-evolution. I checked, Appletun weighs 13 kg so it can't use the move well either.
2) Despite the animation showing it Spinning, Ferrothorn can't learn Rapid Spin.
Maybe they wanted to give Flapple coverage for Fairies?
I guess Boomburst is all about making a huge cacophonic noise and Meloetta is a singer, so she'd produce melodious sounds.
Flapple is strongly themed around Newton's apple, if Grav Apple wasn't of enough indication. Heavy Slam is just another move that it performs by falling over its opponent, if anything it makes sense because an apple falling on you doesn't actually hurt that much compared to heavier objects. Not every move has to be useful to make sense in the learnset of a Pokémon.
Oh, come on. You know as well as I do that Final Gambit Shedinja was purely for the bantz.
No more as bantz as Gigantamax Shedinja. GF must have been laughing their butts off when they gave it 7 barrier bars...
If those barriers actually worked, it would remind me a lot of an enemy from Desktop Dungeons Alpha, the Animated Armour.
Fun game, by the way. I don't find many opportunities to plug it, but it provides short bursts of roguelike fun for the low cost of free. There are a few unlockable things to work towards (mostly incremental things like increasing the number of shops or max gold), but once you unlock a class you jive with, it's also fun to ignore those goals and just load up a new run. Personally, I like to load up a run of the magic-filled Library with the Vampire, reset until I find the magic-hating god of melee Taurog, and then go on a power trip and just crush all resistance. You basically become Assault Vest Triage Conkeldurr, if Drain Punch didn't cut its healing short when you KO something, and all your opponents are special attackers.
A full version does exist (it's not called Desktop Dungeons Alpha for nothing), but it's not free, it seems more complex which might ruin the simplistic appeal of the alpha version (I've never played it so I can't give a fair assessment), and it's ugly as sin as opposed to looking like the out-of-battle style of Pokemon gens 1 through 3 (3 for the player, somewhere between 2 and 3 for everything else).
Here's a bit of a weird move which I don't think has been mentioned before, since it's a little obscure. Metal Burst (same name in Japanese) is, as the name implies, mostly learned by Steel-Type Pokémon. There are 3 exceptions, one of which is Zamazenta which is fine because its Crowned form is Steel-Type. But the other 2 are kinda strange.
Sableye and Rhyhorn learn Metal Burst as egg moves. Sableye kind of makes sense if its gems are made of metal, but Rhyhorn is wholly rock. There's no metal on it at all. If it were treated more as a "Mineral Burst" and several Rock-Type Pokémon learned it I probably wouldn't think it strange, but it's really odd that Rhyhorn is the only Rock-Type Pokémon to learn it who isn't also Steel-Type, and I still think it's an odd choice for Sableye since it gained access to the move in Gen V, meaning it wasn't expressly included in its moveset for its mega-evolution (which isn't Steel-Type, but the gem is a much more pronounced part of its design and is used as a shield).
Another odd thing about it is when different Pokémon have gained access to the move. In D/P when the move was created, only the Aron and Shieldon families could learn it. It was then added to Dialga's moveset in HGSS. Then in Gen V it was added to Sableye and Mawile's movepools, while the new additions Bisharp and Cobalion also learned it. In Gen VI the only Pokémon to newly get the move was Rhyhorn. In Gen VII, new additions Sandslash-Alola and Solgaleo learn the move, but also now Wormadam-Trash for some reason. And then 3 Gen VIII Pokémon learn the move, as well as suddenly Durant and Escavalier. And Mawile can no longer learn it in Gen VIII even though its counterpart Sableye can, when Mawile's the Steel-Type Pokémon out of the pairing!
In total, we have 8 oddities in regards to Pokémon learning the move. Mawile & Sableye didn't get the move when it was introduced in Gen IV like the other Gen III family that learns it; Rhyhorn didn't learn it until Gen VI waiting 2 generations to gain access to the move; Wormadam-Trash, Escavalier, and Durant all had to wait 3 generations after their various introductions in order to learn it; Dialga doesn't have it in its own region, but does in HGSS; and finally Mawile inexplicably loses it in Gen VIII. It's all really strange to me, especially when only 16 evolutionary lines have ever been able to learn it at all.
Sableye and Rhyhorn learn Metal Burst as egg moves. Sableye kind of makes sense if its gems are made of metal, but Rhyhorn is wholly rock. There's no metal on it at all. If it were treated more as a "Mineral Burst" and several Rock-Type Pokémon learned it I probably wouldn't think it strange, but it's really odd that Rhyhorn is the only Rock-Type Pokémon to learn it who isn't also Steel-Type, and I still think it's an odd choice for Sableye since it gained access to the move in Gen V, meaning it wasn't expressly included in its moveset for its mega-evolution (which isn't Steel-Type, but the gem is a much more pronounced part of its design and is used as a shield).
Another odd thing about it is when different Pokémon have gained access to the move. In D/P when the move was created, only the Aron and Shieldon families could learn it. It was then added to Dialga's moveset in HGSS. Then in Gen V it was added to Sableye and Mawile's movepools, while the new additions Bisharp and Cobalion also learned it. In Gen VI the only Pokémon to newly get the move was Rhyhorn. In Gen VII, new additions Sandslash-Alola and Solgaleo learn the move, but also now Wormadam-Trash for some reason. And then 3 Gen VIII Pokémon learn the move, as well as suddenly Durant and Escavalier. And Mawile can no longer learn it in Gen VIII even though its counterpart Sableye can, when Mawile's the Steel-Type Pokémon out of the pairing!
In total, we have 8 oddities in regards to Pokémon learning the move. Mawile & Sableye didn't get the move when it was introduced in Gen IV like the other Gen III family that learns it; Rhyhorn didn't learn it until Gen VI waiting 2 generations to gain access to the move; Wormadam-Trash, Escavalier, and Durant all had to wait 3 generations after their various introductions in order to learn it; Dialga doesn't have it in its own region, but does in HGSS; and finally Mawile inexplicably loses it in Gen VIII. It's all really strange to me, especially when only 16 evolutionary lines have ever been able to learn it at all.
Side note but this came up over in the SQSA thread a while ago and this might be one of the weirdest things Gen 8 does. Most of the time a move is removed from the egg pool its because they have it in the TM/TR pool now but there's fringe cases like this where nope you just uhhh cant get it any more.
There's not even an excuse of not having someone in its egg group who gets it, Rhyhorn is right there in the Field group.
This irritates me so much when it happens. It makes me feel like those movepools were rushed, and that multiple people working on them didn't contact each other on things, giving situations like Krabby loosing Haze even though Galarian Corsola could pass it. All of these moves becoming TMs/TRs also makes it feel like a low-effort way to not have to think about this.
This one though, is probably the worst i've seen yet.
I wonder if there's correlation between pokemon with large egg moves that had to get hacked up because they becamse TMs & TRs and losing random moves like this
I'd love help with this, but have no clue where else to look.
For R/B(not sure about /Y), there was a magazine which listed all the Pokémon in Pokédex order with a rating system for their stats like how Game Freak has recently done EVs, or how they showed a Pokémon's Condition for Contests in Gen III. For Mewtwo, there was a move listed as something like "SUPIIDOSUDA" and I've always wanted to know what it was. Unfortunately, I don't have the magazine anymore, and I haven't been able to find anything on this online. My hypothesis is that it was a mistranslation...and then it occurred to me that it could be Swift if you take the translation to be the Romaji of スピードスター (Speed Star), but they thought the penultimate character was "da" instead of "ta" (since the only difference between the two is a little `` over the top-right edge of the character).
But yeah, does anyone know anything about this?
Also, what *is* Swift supposed to be, anyway? And why does it never miss?
For R/B(not sure about /Y), there was a magazine which listed all the Pokémon in Pokédex order with a rating system for their stats like how Game Freak has recently done EVs, or how they showed a Pokémon's Condition for Contests in Gen III. For Mewtwo, there was a move listed as something like "SUPIIDOSUDA" and I've always wanted to know what it was. Unfortunately, I don't have the magazine anymore, and I haven't been able to find anything on this online. My hypothesis is that it was a mistranslation...and then it occurred to me that it could be Swift if you take the translation to be the Romaji of スピードスター (Speed Star), but they thought the penultimate character was "da" instead of "ta" (since the only difference between the two is a little `` over the top-right edge of the character).
But yeah, does anyone know anything about this?
Also, what *is* Swift supposed to be, anyway? And why does it never miss?
Do you remember if it was a magazine or a guide book? There were a few "unofficial" guide books at the time they had a lot of untranslated or weirdly translated stuff.
Like this one. https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pokémon_Trainer's_Survival_Guide
Which doesnt list this specifical mistranslation in its trivia and I cant check it out since it's at my parents, but it would track with some of the other names listed in the guidebook. Do you remember if it was shown towards the top of the move list? It's one of gen 1 Mewtwo's 4 "level 1" moves.
As for Swift ... I feel like it's just a hold over from the days where pokemon was as inspired by kaiju as it was insects. Just this vague, generic attack you'd probably see monsters use in a tokusatsu show. It's a really weird attack once yo ustart thinking about it, huh?
There was also no description for it in the first games so I wonder if the localizers just interpreted it as "fast as a shooting star" (thus, "Swift") and not literally Star Rays that the anime and Stadium games would codify and then continue in every description fro mgen 2 on.
Suicune is associated with the North winds, as its mane is meant to represent the auroras and several Pokedex entries point out the northern feel. Which of course don't produce hurricanes, so this one I think is perfectly justified.
Except Hurricane's japanese name isn't "hurricane", or at the very least isn't necessarily so.
It's possible that means using winds as strong as hurricanes, not actual hurricanes.
It just seems like they don't want to give Suicune "harsh" wind attacks. Its only 2 attacks are Gust (the weakest wind-based flying move) and Tailwind (a support move). An ancient event gave it Air Slash which is still a magnitude less than Hurricane/Wind Storm and that event is probably why it'll come back in Tundra, rather than flavor reasons, since it certainly didn't get the move at any other point between gens 4 & 8.
It also doesn't get Air Cutter or even Defog (which I think would fit imo).
Just seems like a gentle flavor addition
It also doesn't get Air Cutter or even Defog (which I think would fit imo).
Just seems like a gentle flavor addition
Then maybe Suicune is simply meant to be more of a benevolent wind spirit, as gust translates to stir up wind, and tailwind is tailwind. A lot of the Pokedex entries give an impression of calm, and since it embodies the rain that put out the fire that engulfed brass tower.
Thank you so much for looking into this! I think it was a more general gaming magazine which happened to include the Pokédex entries for Pokémon. My gut tells me it's IGN, but I can't be certain - did they ever even release magazines? (turns out they did, but I'm only able to find their wiki, which is only a few years old) And it was something Mewtwo learned at like...Lv:16 or 17 or possibly 18, so of course there was no way to test out if they actually learned such a move or what it actually was. >.<
In R/B/Y, Swift sent out 3 stars as part of the attack. So I would agree with your hypothesis but just add that the people designing the animations for the attacks in the original R/G may have done the same? (I tried looking up the animation for the Japanese version of the games, but no luck)
Oh, and according to Bulbapedia, Swift was called "Speed Star" in the Japanese games! Lends more credence to the hypothesis that Mewtwo's mysterious move they put in there was really just Swift. And star animation or no, I think the jury's still out on if the people who created the move intended for it to be visualised as a Pokémon launching multiple stars. Another interpretation could be that they make a star-shaped object out of energy and ride that to make a ramming attack against the opponent, for example?
Animations were I believe unchanged between the japanese & western versions. I think outside of some framerate stuff in rereleases the only changed naimations between regions was Imprison. So it's always been stars shooting out.
I do think it was intended to be like literal stars shot out though. While Swift in the final game went to a few other (electric, mostly) pokemon and was a TM, it internaly lines up with Staryu. As helix chamber points out
And from the prototype assets, there was a move called Star Freeze which has a remnant in the TCG associated with Starmie. So my theory does kind of line up: it was a tokusatsu-type move associated with a tokusatsu-type monster, that got expanded to other pokemon for some reason. And then it'd probalbly meant to be "upgraded" to Star Freeze for Starmie
The localizers probably didn't have that context so you just have "Speed Star" and maybe you get to see that the animation is a bunch of stars
But without the context of "this was meant as a quasi-signature move for Staryu" you can easily interpret this as just going really fast and hitting you [like a star]
There was a lot of localization stuff that got leaked as part of gen 1 recently, but there's a ton to sift through...wonder if there might be some older translations aor notes about the move that landed on "Swift".
Something I learned recently was that Gyarados could not learn Crunch until ORAS, 1 pair of games after it got a dark type mega evolution.
Hi! Okay, this might be a little out of place in the thread, but I think it still more or less fits. It's not really a movepool oddity - a Pokémon being able to learn a move - but a moveset oddity: an enemy Pokémon in a specific fight knowing a specific move that doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.
I've seen other people question this decision, and I think I know why it happened it's kinda funny actually, but I haven't seen anyone else point out this justification, so I thought it would be worth sharing.
The question: in USUM, why does
Totem Mimikyu's ally
Jellicent know Snore of all things?
I mean, I guess you could argue that there's a weird little theme in the fight in that each of the three Pokémon seems to deal with sleep in a different way. Mimikyu has a Lum Berry, Banette has Insomnia, and Jellicent has Snore - so I guess no matter how hard you try to put them to sleep, they always have some way around it, huh?
... but why would that be the theme of the fight?! The vast majority of the other Totems in USUM tend to go all out with clear theming that's impactful against every player: speed control, move-binding effects, weather, avoiding moves and repeated stat boosting. None of them dedicate all of their efforts entirely towards nullifying a strategy that most players aren't even going to try in the first place - it seems clear that the anti-sleep thing is just a funny coincidence (and a pretty big stretch of one at that) rather than the intended theme of the trial.
So what was the "theme" of the Totem Mimikyu fight supposed to be? And why DOES Jellicent have Snore?
... okay, hear me out: I genuinely think it was the result of a typo, and there is actual evidence for that.
In the internal order of moves, Snore comes 173rd... and as it happens, move 174 is Curse, which is already used by Mimikyu's own other ally,
Banette.
I think the gimmick of the fight was supposed to revolve around both allies using Curse, just like most of the other themed Totems have ways to manifest their core ideas with each of their allies - and it would have been a pretty terrifying and relevant theme, since all three enemies in the fight individually have ways to make the fight take longer (and also to discourage switching out defensively to cure Curse, since you're already wasting too many turns without getting enough done). It certainly makes a lot more sense than Snore, and the fact that it's a mere one entry away in the move list makes it easy to see how they ended up with the wrong one!
That said, I can also see why a mistake like this was easy to miss. Like I said, most players aren't going to rely on sleep in the first place - let alone go out of their way to put an ally Pokémon to sleep rather than the Totem itself! ... which means Jellicent would probably never have used Snore during beta testing (and on the incredibly low chance that it did, I'm sure whoever triggered it would have been impressed that they were anticipated like that and assumed it was intentional), so there was no way to notice that anything was amiss.
The moral of the story: always use Ditto when testing boss battles?
I've seen other people question this decision, and I think I know why it happened it's kinda funny actually, but I haven't seen anyone else point out this justification, so I thought it would be worth sharing.
The question: in USUM, why does
Totem Mimikyu's allyJellicent know Snore of all things?I mean, I guess you could argue that there's a weird little theme in the fight in that each of the three Pokémon seems to deal with sleep in a different way. Mimikyu has a Lum Berry, Banette has Insomnia, and Jellicent has Snore - so I guess no matter how hard you try to put them to sleep, they always have some way around it, huh?
... but why would that be the theme of the fight?! The vast majority of the other Totems in USUM tend to go all out with clear theming that's impactful against every player: speed control, move-binding effects, weather, avoiding moves and repeated stat boosting. None of them dedicate all of their efforts entirely towards nullifying a strategy that most players aren't even going to try in the first place - it seems clear that the anti-sleep thing is just a funny coincidence (and a pretty big stretch of one at that) rather than the intended theme of the trial.
So what was the "theme" of the Totem Mimikyu fight supposed to be? And why DOES Jellicent have Snore?
... okay, hear me out: I genuinely think it was the result of a typo, and there is actual evidence for that.
In the internal order of moves, Snore comes 173rd... and as it happens, move 174 is Curse, which is already used by Mimikyu's own other ally,
Banette.I think the gimmick of the fight was supposed to revolve around both allies using Curse, just like most of the other themed Totems have ways to manifest their core ideas with each of their allies - and it would have been a pretty terrifying and relevant theme, since all three enemies in the fight individually have ways to make the fight take longer (and also to discourage switching out defensively to cure Curse, since you're already wasting too many turns without getting enough done). It certainly makes a lot more sense than Snore, and the fact that it's a mere one entry away in the move list makes it easy to see how they ended up with the wrong one!
That said, I can also see why a mistake like this was easy to miss. Like I said, most players aren't going to rely on sleep in the first place - let alone go out of their way to put an ally Pokémon to sleep rather than the Totem itself! ... which means Jellicent would probably never have used Snore during beta testing (and on the incredibly low chance that it did, I'm sure whoever triggered it would have been impressed that they were anticipated like that and assumed it was intentional), so there was no way to notice that anything was amiss.
The moral of the story: always use Ditto when testing boss battles?
I'd say this belongs more in the "Little things that annoy you" thread, and many examples have been posted there... buuuuut this DOES fit well with the theme of the thread, and we're running out of feasible examples for the topic starter that there's only so many times I can repeat "balancing reasons" for why a specially-offensive normal-type legendary doesn't get the 100% accurate 140 base power special normal move. I say fire away.
Can someone explain what Rock Smash actually is? The description says it's a punch, but the learnset doesn't corelate.