I see nothing wrong with Levitate users getting other abilities because since the introduction of Abilities many Pokemon that would seem like they would be immune to Ground(Like the Magnemite line and all of the winged Bug/Poison types) can't get the ability at all.
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(Little) Things that annoy you in Pokémon
- Thread starter BriarRose
- Start date
I see nothing wrong with Levitate users getting other abilities because since the introduction of Abilities many Pokemon that would seem like they would be immune to Ground(Like the Magnemite line and all of the winged Bug/Poison types) can't get the ability at all.
Fair enough. I mean that's kind of a separate issue but IMO there aren't that many Pokemon who don't get Levitate that I think should. Lots of Pokemon levitate in their in-game models, including fish Pokemon like Goldeen. I think in the case of Pokemon like Cryogonal and Porygon-Z who seem like they should, you could make the argument that it's not true levitation but a lesser and imperfect power so it follows that particularly powerful Ground moves are capable of hitting them (ah, now I'm reminded of my sister, aged four, claiming that she could fly but only for a few seconds at a time). But it's not a cause I'm particularly wedded to, I think balance reasons are probably a consideration a lot of the time so that probably explains some of the more egregious candidates.
Thinking it over, though, I suppose there is a case from an in-universe standpoint that individuals of a species with Levitate who don't have that ability are just those who aren't capable of doing it. Actually, the Tv Tropes Pokedex does something along those lines when describing Pokemon with varying abilities, classifying them as different populations or subspecies - so like with Arcanine, the ones with Intimidate are a genetic strain that are larger and more imposing in appearance, whereas the ones with Flash Fire are unusually heat-resistant and the ones with Justified are somewhat flighty and react poorly to being hit with Dark-type moves.
So by that logic, Galarian Weezing with Levitate are lighter and more agile, the ones with Neutralising Gas emit a particularly pungent and debilitating chemical, and the ones with Misty Surge are calmer in temperament and more proficient in the use of Fairy moves.
That was fun, why have I never written any of those entries...
At the very very least Carnivine should get something oether than levitate. It can easily just walk on its tentacles, if we care about it "making sense", so it has the easiest out of everyone other than Flygon, who clearly only got the ability because they wanted it to Fly but didnt want to loses the typing (had it been a Gen 7 or 8 Pokemon it likely would have gotten a unique variant of the ability).
I agree with your overall point but minor nitpick: Cryogonal does in fact have Levitate (as its only ability no less).
I tend to think of abilities as like a magical boon (or curse) rather than as physiological subdivisions of each species. There's evidence for and against either proposition, so it's mostly a personal preference,, but it makes more sense to me that abilities are independent from the physical characteristics of a Pokemon (but still connected to it conceptually), especially given that it's possible to suppress and even swap abilities between Pokemon. It's also generally how the anime handles abilities.
On the other hand, the increase in hardcoded signature abilities arguably supports the idea of them being tied to the individual Pokemon's form and baseline physical capabilities, as does the ability to breed for a specific ability (although the magic aura theory can conveniently handwave away almost any counterargument haha).
The Duskull line didn't get their hidden ability (which is Frisk, a gen 4 ability) until gen 6, and likely the only reason they got it is that it was the only line to lose Levitate as it evolves (Dusclops and Dusknoir have Pressure instead), until Gengar got nerfed in gen 7.
Squirtle, Ivysaur, and Charizard are not color-coordinated. They look good next to each other, and their simple color pallets play off each other nicely, but they're distinctly different colors.
None of their alternate colors in Smash, especially Ultimate, got the memo.
Those locations sound strangely familiar...
Also I feel the excuse for Levitate AND Flying-types being immune to Ground being a bit flimsy.
"They're immune because Ground-type moves use the ground to attack and these Pokemon aren't touching the ground."
Except I feel this only applies to a few Ground-type moves. A quick rundown:
- Bone Club, Bone Rush, Bonemerang, Mud Bomb, Mud Shot, Mud-Slap, Sand Attack, & Scorching Sands all use a projectile (or at least an ungrounded tool) of some kind. Sure bone, mud, and sand maybe aren't the greatest things to be throwing, but they can still be used to hit an opponent that's flying/floating off the ground.
- Drill Run, Headlong Rush, High Horsepower, & Stomping Tantrum has the user using parts of its body (or its whole body) to attack, no different to many other Physical moves which attack in the similar way but are a different Type.
- Earth Power & Land's Wrath are attacks which release energy from the ground up into the air.
- Precipice Blades sounds like a attack version of Stealth Rock creating blades of stone to jet up under the target, and being its a Legendary's Signature Move those blades probably jet up really high, or at least high enough to hit a low flyer/levitator.
- Sand Tomb & Sandsear Storm implies the user kicking up a special kind of sandstorm and directing it toward the target.
- Bulldoze, Dig, Earthquake, Fissure, Magnitude, Spikes, & Thousand Waves sound like the only Ground-type moves that Levitate & Flying Pokemon would be immune to as they're specifically grounded moves.
That's kind of the point of the alt colors though.
No? The point of alternate colors is to be different from the base form in some way. There's no reason they couldn't have kept up the three having distinct color pallets that play nice together (maybe even reference other Pokemon trios). It would have been more difficult than having them all be roughly the same color, but with how hard the Smash team goes on aesthetics, little details, and deep pull references, I can't imagine it would have been prohibitively more difficult.
Eh, I can see the logic behind simply tinting them the alt color. Remember, they need to take into account the possibility of the majority if not all the players deciding to play the same character. So aside from the "default" which are the proper colors, all the others have Ivysaur, Charizard, and Squirtle tinted the color of the alt color so you know what player they are. "Oh, this Ivysaur is tinted red, it's the Red Player's Ivysaur", "Huh, this Charizard is pale, it must be Brown/White Player's Charizard", "What a VERY blue Squritle, this have to be Blue Player's Squirtle".
Note in SSB4 when Charizard was made a standalone it had very distinct colors compared to Brawl's and Ultimate's tints. This was likely because, since it didn't have Ivysaur and Squritle, it didn't have to worry about coloring mashing with its other Starter brethren so could be all Green and Blue for those alt colors.
Sometimes designers have to choose gameplay ease over fancy aesthetics. They too probably wanted to do some more fancy stuff, but it would be too easy then to lose who's Pokemon is who if many/all players chose Pokemon Trainer. At the least they tried to make the colors of Red's and Leaf's clothes match the colors of the other protags, something which can be done as they're not fighting thus won't see their profile in the player color boxes.
Oh, duh. Writing faster than I could think there. I was thinking of Vanilluxe, not Cryogonal!
Huh. Not a big anime watcher but that's an interesting approach. It certainly would account for the way in which the games are able to swap abilities now (though I think that's largely gameplay and story segregation).
I do agree that Levitate is more or less a "relic of the past", from when they went more with "thematically appropriate" abilities than for "gameplay relevant" ones.
In the case of Levitate, they probably were trying to give sense to the fact that for some reason flying pokemon would be immune to ground attacks while other pokemon that are... still actually flying weren't.
Then they realized that it wasn't really feasible (expecially due to the pretty high amount of "levitating" pokemon anyway) and left it as is.
Also same reason for which they originally were having Levitate as "either standalone or not" ability: from logic standpoint, it doesn't make sense that a given Weezing floats but another one doesn't.
Once they moved away from "abilities as intrinsec ability of the pokemon" to this
Ability Capsule/Patch realistically were implemented just as gameplay elements for competitive shenenigans, but fit into the "Ability = magical/psychic boon" a lot for pokemon that have multiple abilities as well.
In the case of Levitate, they probably were trying to give sense to the fact that for some reason flying pokemon would be immune to ground attacks while other pokemon that are... still actually flying weren't.
Then they realized that it wasn't really feasible (expecially due to the pretty high amount of "levitating" pokemon anyway) and left it as is.
Also same reason for which they originally were having Levitate as "either standalone or not" ability: from logic standpoint, it doesn't make sense that a given Weezing floats but another one doesn't.
Once they moved away from "abilities as intrinsec ability of the pokemon" to this
they also decided that you can indeed have pokemon with Levitate as non-unique ability.
Ability Capsule/Patch realistically were implemented just as gameplay elements for competitive shenenigans, but fit into the "Ability = magical/psychic boon" a lot for pokemon that have multiple abilities as well.
the "literally who?" quartet of pokemon females (I'd be really surprised if someone outside this site could name these four)
they literally popped in my head today while I was studying because they are so ironically forgettable, the respective games do nothing with them
Vaguely, arent these the N maids?
Anthea and Concordia. They do literally nothing in both games off the top of my head. They seemed to be more prominent in the anime from a quick Google Image search.
The first two are Miror B. Peon Ferma and Reath. They exist mostly for a sequential boss fight in Pokémon Colosseum on top of the Pyrite Building with a Level 20 Shadow Remoraid and an actually decently leveled Mantine respectively (latter is pretty hard to catch). One of them also literally uses a Luvdisc and I shouldn’t have to say how stupid that is.
You get the Elevator Key from Reath (who is sleeping in a jail cell) to get to The Under later, and that’s where the duo’s significance ends. They don’t show up in XD: Gale of Darkness at all unlike Folly and Trudly who also served under Miror B. as well.
then again, Colosseum also had Mirakle B, perhaps the most random bonus boss ever placed into a videogame (no I didn’t misspell the name, look him up, it’s a thing).
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As I've gotten older the time-locked pokemon encounters have become more and more of a nuisance. I generally only have time to play in the evening so I guess I'm locked to nocturnal pokemon 
Rip the Sunkern dream
Gosh, I put Colosseum down years ago and haven't picked it up partly because I hardly play console games nowadays, and partly because it was a slog and I can't remember where I left off. I suppose to stay on-topic, it has fixed save points, which are always a pet peeve of mine in video games.
You’re not missing much honestly. I’ve posted about this before at some point, but Colosseum just has an unholy combination of tedious boss battles which rely on level spikes and status conditions like they are going out of style with a very, VERY small pool of Pokémon that are good without being obnoxiously late (anything after Venus besides maybe Skarmory and Granbull and Vibrava isn’t worth it imo, and even then, while a ton use Flygon, there’s also barely any game to use it on with only Realgam Tower left).
If you didn’t like what you saw in Colosseum, I implore you to try XD: Gale of Darkness if you can. It’s a top 5 Pokémon game for me, and while the last couple dungeons can get a little tiresome, I think it’s a great game that is challenging without being artificially difficult like Colosseum often is. Plus it gives you way more options for team building that don’t suck, that’s very important. You can also save anywhere at any time in XD thankfully.
100% this. XD is a fun game with decent replay value, but the main story stops being enjoyable once you have to go to Citadark because the game stuffs almost half of the game's total Shadow Pokemon into one massive slog of a dungeon where you get ambushed over and over by grunts and have to fight all the bosses you've already beaten one-by-one.
Part of me wonders if there was meant to be an additional level in the lategame, either between the Cipher Lab and Citadark Island or preceding the former, and they didn't have time to implement it so had to shove all the Shadow Pokemon that would have been there into the final level (a lot of the Colosseum areas are still in the final game, though may just be leftovers, and the original plan was for Citadark to be another gigantic colosseum ala Realgam Tower). Allocating ten or even eight of the Shadow species on Citadark to another area would have made it feel much less of a content dump.
I honestly don't mind Citadark Isle too much. Yeah, it is insanely long but you also have one of the best area themes in the franchise playing and the terrain is varied enough to hold my interest.
Could it have been shorter? Absolutely! But it's way better than Colosseum's Realgam Tower which amounted to boss corridors more or less. And the size of Citadark Isle in XD makes the buildup to the final battles feel that much more important, unlike Colosseum where it's literally just "these villains for some reason have good publicity because Realgam Tower their actual base, I guess" (why wasn't the Shadow Pokemon Lab the final area? Makes no sense to me). Also, imagine if Citadark Isle had the "only save at PCs" restriction Colosseum did lol.
Cipher Key Lair is awesome even if it is a little long - it's probably my favorite area in the entirety of the Pokemon franchise, actually!
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Legitimate question, do Ferma and Reath actually have unique models? I know Trudly and Folly do, but I swear these two just have at most recolors of models used for a generic female trainer class
Yes, they do. The female version of the Hunter class looks similar, but Ferma has modeled bangs and Reath has entirely different hair. There might be other differences further down but Bulbapedia's pictures don't show the whole body for Orre trainers.
Well the person above answered my question, but I know for sure Mirakle B. is a recolored Cipher Peon lol
I will always remember Anthea & Concordia because they drove me nuts how they got TWO entirely seperate designs between BW1 & BW2 and some how never had high quality official art released. We have full body artwork but only from concept art (& their anime appearances, i suppose)
It drove me mad a decade ago and it will still drive me mad!!!!
It drove me mad a decade ago and it will still drive me mad!!!!
I've wanted to play XD for years, but it's rare and expensive and I don't know if any of the copies I can find on Amazon are PAL.
So with Scarlet & Violet all things considered probably not maintaining Dynamax, are we ever going to get shiny G-Max Melmetal? I don't even play SwSh and yet it's an omission that bugs me given that Max Soup doesn't work on Melmetal, preventing players from giving the Gigantamax Factor to a transferred shiny from Go. It felt like they were going to do something with that and... nothing. In a franchise full of arbitrary shiny locks it stands out as especially arbitrary.
Maybe they'll rush it out in the last couple of months of SwSh like they did with most of the shiny-locked species from Alola, since they've distributed the shiny Galarian legendary birds and the hero duo recently. Actually, looking it up, I've just been reminded that shiny Necrozma wasn't released for Gen VII until after Gen VIII had already started, so maybe not even then.
Maybe they'll rush it out in the last couple of months of SwSh like they did with most of the shiny-locked species from Alola, since they've distributed the shiny Galarian legendary birds and the hero duo recently. Actually, looking it up, I've just been reminded that shiny Necrozma wasn't released for Gen VII until after Gen VIII had already started, so maybe not even then.