My newest unpopular opinion: Grumpig > Lechonk.
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Unpopular opinions
- Thread starter antemortem
- Start date
The issue with Scald isn't distribution(though the fact that it's on everything doesn't help). The problem is, there's 3 things you can switch into Surf: Grass, Water, or Dragon. None of those 3 want to be burned, as a general rule. The only things that are immune to burn are Fire-types, which die to Scald. Lava Plume is fine, you probably have a Flamethrower/Fire Blast/Sacred Fire switch-in, and that can take Lava Plume as well. It's like Discharge, it's theoretically annoying, but since you're already switching in a ground because you expect Volt Switch, the para chance on Discharge is irrelevant. Scald hits everything Water(already a good type) can hit AND hits the things that resist it with an annoying status. Mono-attack builds like CroCune should be a risky play, not the primary build for most of the mons of a type for multiple generations.
This is a misconception. Masuda is on GameFreak's Board of Directors (up until yesterday), meaning the only person with direct power over him is the CEO, Tajiri.
The presence of even a single person above him can still validate my theory you know :p
And now that he's been moved to TPC Tajiri might even answer to him when it comes to the franchise.
Even ignoring how unbalanced Scald is (which is a pretty hard ask, but that's beside the point), it just doesn't make any sense from a flavor perspective how every Water type learns it, either. How, exactly, are most water types producing the heat necessary to spray boiling water? Scald just feels very poorly considered, both in terms of balance and how it fits into most Pokemon's movesets. Strictly from a flavor perspective (balance may warrant a few more Pokemon losing it), I'd restrict Scald to the following Water types:
- Blastoise: The cannons on its back is sufficient justification to shoot boiling hot water, even if it doesn't learn any other moves associated with fire. Make it a pulse move for extra chaos in NatDex, because why the hell not?
- Lapras: It's always had an oddly diverse movepool, and it's said to be highly intelligent; I'm sure it can figure how how to produce scalding water. This is probably the biggest stretch out of the entire list, but also consider that Lapras deserves it
- Lanturn: The electricity it produces should be capable of heating up water.
- Octillery: Its design draws from a tank, and it learns Fire Blast as is. Learning Scald is well within reason for it.
- Simipour: Notably, this is one of the only Pokemon to naturally learn Scald by level-up, and it connects with their primarily associated trainers, the Striaton Trio, as chefs. The pattern on its chest also somewhat resembles a geyser, which is more than what most Water types can say.
- Clawitzer: This little guy is based off pistol shrimp, which can produce water bubbles that can briefly reach temperatures of almost 4,800 degrees Celsius - and yes, this is a real animal, not an exaggerated Pokedex entry! I see no reason why it can't shoot scalding water.
- Volcanion: duh.
You could also make the argument for... pretty much anything that isn't Toxapex, which doesn't deserve it; a couple that come to mind are Inteleon and Gyarados. The point is more that Scald is too widely distributed, and taking a good hard look at what Pokemon can actually logically use the move and reducing it would be ultimately a good thing for the meta, as well.
I am afraid you are mistaken here.
OHKO moves are actually legitimately used in VGC/BSS, expecially in BSS. "30% chance to win the game on the spot" is pretty strong, much more than people think it is.
It's unironically same as why smogon banned evasion, because turning a match into "30% chance to lose the match the spot with nothing you can do about it" is never fun.
It's kind of weird to suggest Lapras given that it is one of the few Water-types that currently doesn't get Scald when fully evolved, probably because of the thematic clash with the Ice typing. The Kingdra line is also a good candidate because it has a cannon-like mouth and several "shooting" attacks such as Flash Cannon which it shares with Blastoise, Octillery, and Clawitzer.
Main series Pokémon games which come in pairs can generally be divided in two categories: one version of the pair is "red" and the other is "blue". For most of the game pairs, it is quite clear which is red and which is blue. But it is not quite that clear for B/W. From what I have seen in the fandom, most people seem to consider Black as red and White as blue. But I personally prefer to see it the other way around, Black as blue and White as red. I think this is unpopular since I don't think I have seen anyone else seeing it the same way. There are two reasons for as for why I see it this way. The first is that there is actually a very minor detail on the game covers which features red and blue: Reshiram has blue eyes, while Zekrom has red eyes. I also think it makes more sense to see it this way because of the sequels. Black 2 is definitely blue while White 2 is definitely red.
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I don't think Scald is too unbalanced anymore since the burn nerf in gen 7. Compared to before, the chip damage from Burn isn't as big of a hindrance as it once was and whether the attack drop is bad or not is situational compared to Paralysis or Poison, where the chance of being fully paralyzed and the extra chip damage from poison will always have utility. Some pokemon like dragapult might actually want to get burned since then they can't get paralyzed or poisoned.
IMO the unbalanced move is Hydro Pump and not in a good way. If you crunch the numbers, the move only has around 88 BP on average, which is worse than Surf. Combined w/ the lower pp and surf is pretty much always the better move.
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While I don't think it really matters, if you want to label the games as the "Red Version" and "Blue Version" you could use the recent Legendary Hunts which has the mascots be version exclusives:
ORAS:
OR: Ho-Oh, Groudon, Palkia, Reshiram
AS: Lugia, Kyogre, Dialga, Zekrom
USUM:
US: Ho-Oh, Groudon, Dialga, Reshiram, Xerneas, Solgaleo
UM: Lugia, Kyogre, Palkia, Zekrom, Yveltal, Lunala
SwSd:
Sw: Ho-Oh, Groudon, Dialga, Reshiram, Xerneas, Solgaleo, Zacian
Sd: Lugia, Kyogre, Palkia, Zekrom, Yveltal, Lunala, Zamazenta
BONUS: In Pokemon Battle Revolution, the final boss Mysterial would use different Pokemon depending on the game cartridge you have linked:
Diamond/SoulSilver: Lugia, Kyogre, Palkia
Pearl/HeartGold: Ho-Oh, Groudon, Dialga
Going by these, and counting out the exceptions, we come to the non-surprising pattern that "Red Version" and "Blue Version" usually follows the "Version 1" and "Version 2" template:
Red/Version 1: Gold, Ruby, Diamond, Black, X, Sun, Sword
Blue/Version 2: Silver, Sapphire, Pearl, White, Y, Moon, Shield
But there are exceptions which are worth a quick look at:
ORAS-Palkia/Dialga: The first Legendary Hunt, I guess it shouldn't be too surprising there would be an exception as they were figuring things out. So, why Palkia in Omega Ruby and Dialga in Alpha Sapphire? I'm wondering if they were maybe more trying to match Legendary by not Version 1 & 2 but by colors? Omega Ruby's Legendaries were "lighter/warmer" colors: orange, red, pink, & white; Alpha Sapphire's were "darker/cooler" colors: blues & black. when you lined them up they all nicely went together.
Mysterial Teams: Now the interesting thing is that the Pokemon all do match-up with their Version number and whichever Gen II remake is linked, but it's the actual Gen IV version which is switched. I can only guess that they wanted to throw the opposite version Gen IV Pokemon at the player as they would likely be using at least the native caught Legendary. As for why they didn't do this for the Gen II remakes, remember that though we associated the Tower Duos with a specific version you can still catch both of them in the game, they didn't start doing version exclusive Legendaries until Gen III. And, if you're wondering, Platinum just uses the Diamond/SoulSilver team (my guess is that they only programmed the Diamond & Pearl teams and, to make Platinum and HGSS compatible, when linked to Battle Revolution Platinum & SS is programmed to have an id of a Diamond game and HG as a Pearl game).
HGSS also switches around what Hoenn legendaries you can find. Kyogre and Latias are exclusive to HeartGold, while Groudon and Latios are exclusive to SoulSilver.
two things:
1) Lapras (and every other Ice/Water type) cannot learn the Scald TM
2) So almost every non-Ice type water being able to make Ice is a-okay(even the few that can't learn Ice Beam get something like Icy Wind outside of of a few rare cases like Rotom-W and Volcanion), but making scalding hot water is too weird?
To add to this, scientifically to make something cold is HARDER than to make something hot
To be fair, boiling-hot water is pretty rare thematic concept, which is more relevant for the magical creature game. In terms of the natural world, mythology, culture, etc, the only themes I can think of involving boiling-hot water are:
- Geysers/hot springs/underwater geothermal vents (Volcanion)
- Steam engines (Coalossal)
- Cooking (Polteageist)
- Fossil fuel/nuclear power plants (none really)
All of these are fairly rare as inspirations for Pokemon, and there aren't many concepts that you can stretch to include these (Pokemon with water cannons such as Blastoise and Clawitzer work, as mentioned previously). On the other hand, ice/coldness is more generic and pretty clearly thematically associated with Water.
An analogy would be that even though auroras are caused by solar/electromagnetic phenomena, Aurora Veil is learned by Ice-types because it's associated with cold places.
That being said, from a competitive standpoint I don't think I'd be in favor of taking (Gen 7+) Scald away from so many Pokemon because I like "support attacks" and not having enough of them makes a lot of defensive Pokemon too passive (especially with the removal of universal Toxic). There's still plenty of janky flavor in movepool distribution and giving Scald to so many Water-types is far from the worst offender (though I still like it when Pokemon have a thematically coherent movepool that still works well competitively). Maybe when they've made more support attacks to replace it so the defensive Water-types aren't just slapping on Ice Beam instead.
That's one way to look at it, but it doesn't really work. US/UM and S/S switched around Dialga/Palkia, Reshiram/Zekrom* and Xerneas/Yveltal. They are in the game which is the opposite color of their game of origin.
*in my opinion
If we go by colors, this does not really work either as Diamond, Black*, X and Sword are blue, while Pearl, White*, Y and Shield are red.
*again, in my opinion
Not only the legendaries, but if we look at all of the version exclusives for OR/AS, Omega Ruby generally has exclusive Pokémon which are red, white or have lighter colors, while Alpha Sapphire has exclusive Pokémon which are blue, black or have darker colors.
You are correct about Groudon/Kyogre, but the Lati@s match the color of the game. Latias is red like HeartGold while Latios is blue like SoulSilver.
Latios is exclusive to Ruby, and Latias is exclusive to Sapphire. Ruby and Sapphire are much more obviously analogous to the colors red and blue than HeartGold and SoulSilver are.
I feel like people are needlessly overcomplicating this. Version 1 is the first title, and version 2 is the second.
HeartGold and SoulSilver.
Ruby and Sapphire.
Black and White.
X and Y.
Sword and Shield.
Etc.
Various titles have switched up what Pokemon are exclusive to where, but that doesn't change which title is 1 and which is 2. I suspect HGSS's switching the typical exclusives was very consciously done as a sop to those people, like me, who typically trend towards one version (in my case, version 2 - Sapphire, LeafGreen, Pearl, SoulSilver etc*) to give them those Pokemon like Groudon, Latios, and Mawile that they usually wouldn't get.
ORAS didn't deviate from the usual formula - it got all the "version 1" exclusives like Ho-Oh, Reshiram, and Tornadus, with the only exception being the Sinnoh fossils - Cranidos is exclusive to AS while Shieldon is exclusive to OR. XY, USUM, SwSh, and even BDSP to an extent have all continued this pattern. If they were going to mix things up we'd see a more random mix of what legendaries are exclusive but it's ALWAYS Version 1=Ho-Oh, Dialga, Reshiram et al. It's unrelated to their colouring.
*though for SV, I'm leaning towards Scarlet unexpectedly... curious as to whether that'll continue as more details are revealed
HeartGold and SoulSilver.
Ruby and Sapphire.
Black and White.
X and Y.
Sword and Shield.
Etc.
Various titles have switched up what Pokemon are exclusive to where, but that doesn't change which title is 1 and which is 2. I suspect HGSS's switching the typical exclusives was very consciously done as a sop to those people, like me, who typically trend towards one version (in my case, version 2 - Sapphire, LeafGreen, Pearl, SoulSilver etc*) to give them those Pokemon like Groudon, Latios, and Mawile that they usually wouldn't get.
ORAS didn't deviate from the usual formula - it got all the "version 1" exclusives like Ho-Oh, Reshiram, and Tornadus, with the only exception being the Sinnoh fossils - Cranidos is exclusive to AS while Shieldon is exclusive to OR. XY, USUM, SwSh, and even BDSP to an extent have all continued this pattern. If they were going to mix things up we'd see a more random mix of what legendaries are exclusive but it's ALWAYS Version 1=Ho-Oh, Dialga, Reshiram et al. It's unrelated to their colouring.
*though for SV, I'm leaning towards Scarlet unexpectedly... curious as to whether that'll continue as more details are revealed
Oh. It seems I misunderstood what you were trying to say.
I agree. But as I am the one who started this, let's get back to the point.
Paired Pokémon games can generally be divided in two colors, which are red and blue. For some of them, it is easy to see which one is red and the other blue. There's no question about R/B, R/S, B2/W2, X/Y and S/S. For the others, it is generally accepted that Gold/HeartGold, Pearl/Shining Pearl, Sun/Ultra Sun and Scarlet are red, while their counterparts are blue. For B/W, the general opinion seems to be that Black is red and White is blue, while my unpopular opinion is that it is the other way around.
The ones I am unsure about are LGP/E. I have no idea which one of them should be seen as red and which should be blue. Neither of them really leans to either color, so I guess they might be an exception to the rule of pairs coming in red and blue colors.
Well I believe the exclusive pokemon are respectively almost identical to Red (Pikachu) and Blue (Eevee) so not exactly hard to connect them ;)
Iirc the only difference is that Magmar and Electabuzz are not version exclusives but they were in RB
Hot take: Red and Blue versions have never been a thing. If we can call versions 1 and 2 consistently the "red and blue" versions then the third version should be the Yellow version, right? But the most common colour for a "yellow version" is actually... white, or thereabouts, with Crystal and Platinum holding that fort.
Red and Blue are appealing from a market standpoint because they're bold, opposite colours. That's also why Black and White worked, and for a long time Red and Blue were being used as a pseudo-callback or brand thing, but with the intended Gen V reboot they wanted to try out two other completely opposite colours. Gold and Silver I also wouldn't characterise as a red or blue version, they're also their own colour scheme, as opposite to red and blue as Crystal is to Yellow. Interestingly the red-blue-GREEN theme can be found in spinoffs like Mystery Dungeon Explorers, where Time is blue, Darkness is red, and Sky is green. Was this as a callback to Gen I, or because it gave each version of the game clear identity from the others and ensured people knew they were different to one another? In my opinion it's the latter.
Red and Blue are appealing from a market standpoint because they're bold, opposite colours. That's also why Black and White worked, and for a long time Red and Blue were being used as a pseudo-callback or brand thing, but with the intended Gen V reboot they wanted to try out two other completely opposite colours. Gold and Silver I also wouldn't characterise as a red or blue version, they're also their own colour scheme, as opposite to red and blue as Crystal is to Yellow. Interestingly the red-blue-GREEN theme can be found in spinoffs like Mystery Dungeon Explorers, where Time is blue, Darkness is red, and Sky is green. Was this as a callback to Gen I, or because it gave each version of the game clear identity from the others and ensured people knew they were different to one another? In my opinion it's the latter.
I doubt GameFreak intended red and blue to be a thing when the original releases were red and GREEN.
I see the Red/Blue term in the same vein as "Eeveelution" used to be used: a fandom shorthand that the company hasn't directly adopted in this manner (yet) for marketing despite both parties seeming to share views on the concept that term is referring to.
One big issue I feel by comparison is that while Eeveelution is a categorization that explains something for the individual member (i.e. "This Pokemon evolves from Eevee"), the Red/Blue idea for Paired versions doesn't necessarily explain much about the individual game so much as just distinguishing the two paired members as not being the other, since there isn't always a consistent rule for which version gets what kind of perk (EX: Kyogre is attached to the "first" version of the Gen 2 remakes, while being "Second" version in Gen 3 appearances or USUM, and then both-appearing in its Gen 8 availability), not least of which probably stemming from small additions the games have had over the years like Pinsir (who is Version Exclusive in Kanto and Sinnoh, but otherwise a "both versions" Pokemon) changing its pair-off from Scyther (as a Gen 1 V-E) to Heracross (who's always a Double-Version Pokemon).
Like, the term "Red" only has meaning in saying the other version is its "Blue" as the second paired version, but while that tells you the two games are like 95% identical, saying which one is "Red" doesn't necessarily impart a consistent idea of what that 5% different content consists of until both versions are thoroughly looked at in the first place.
One big issue I feel by comparison is that while Eeveelution is a categorization that explains something for the individual member (i.e. "This Pokemon evolves from Eevee"), the Red/Blue idea for Paired versions doesn't necessarily explain much about the individual game so much as just distinguishing the two paired members as not being the other, since there isn't always a consistent rule for which version gets what kind of perk (EX: Kyogre is attached to the "first" version of the Gen 2 remakes, while being "Second" version in Gen 3 appearances or USUM, and then both-appearing in its Gen 8 availability), not least of which probably stemming from small additions the games have had over the years like Pinsir (who is Version Exclusive in Kanto and Sinnoh, but otherwise a "both versions" Pokemon) changing its pair-off from Scyther (as a Gen 1 V-E) to Heracross (who's always a Double-Version Pokemon).
Like, the term "Red" only has meaning in saying the other version is its "Blue" as the second paired version, but while that tells you the two games are like 95% identical, saying which one is "Red" doesn't necessarily impart a consistent idea of what that 5% different content consists of until both versions are thoroughly looked at in the first place.