Everyone is very quick to form an opinion on a Pokémon, but they don’t always live up to the hype. Here’s three examples of one each of us used which failed to live up to expectation, and found themselves eternally confined to the PC Box of Shame.
MAGMA
This Pokémon looks amazing! A blue and yellow electric doggie! So what about Manectric makes it so bad? The simple answer is because it’s a glass cannon. Its insanely high speed and special attack will make any Water type cower in fear, but that’s about it. If Manectric goes up against something that even resembles bulk it’s done for. It can’t even take a hit from one of its type resistances! I really did try to use this Pokémon in my latest run of Alpha Sapphire but it was just awful, it never won a single battle, not even against the rival’s Flying type!
Not even its amazing looking Mega Evolution could save it. If anything it became even more fragile than it already was, from the very moment I caught it as a puny Electrike all the way to the easy decision of boxing it. After I switched to Magneton I had a lovely time. Manectric is a bad boy, and it knows it. Boltund is the true good boy of electric doggos.
AQUA
I struggled with this, I mean not being a particularly competitive Pokémon player means I can normally find something to love about any ‘mon. However, even I have my limits, and that limit was knocked into the Goddamn stratosphere by the rad looking mistake that is Shiftry.
Evolving from Nuzleaf (canonically the only Pokémon with nipples) when assaulted with a leaf stone, you can imagine my hype when I saw my little Nuz evolve into a rad, white maned, tree warrior. Unfortunately what I soon learned was Shiftry is the glassiest of glass cannons. He would melt at the first sign of any attack and this low defence was only aided by Grass/Dark being seemingly weak to EVERYTHING. I persevered for as long as possible but on my 15th visit to the Pokémon Centre to fix up my grassy warrior, I decided it was best to leave this little monster in the box…
PLASMA
Just last week, Aqua was extolling the virtues of the Steel type, but ever the party-pooper I just have to shoot down one poor example of the type: Skarmory. I spotted one in the wild during my second or third playthrough of Omega Ruby, and as I’d always wanted one but never got round to it previously, I immediately added it to my team and levelled it all the way through to challenging the Elite Four.
I don’t recall the exact move pool I had but I do know that after laying down one or two layers of Spikes, Skarmory was almost always annihilated by whatever the Elite Four member I was facing had used. After proving categorically it was going to be precisely no use whatsoever, and because the rest of my team would have been solid enough to do well without the boring baggage bird following us around, I dropped it the second it hit level 100. Such a disappointment, and one of the reasons why I still seldom use a Steel type.
Let us know which Pokémon let you down in the comments, and Team Respawn will return in 2022!