Pokkén Tournament, the new Pokémon fighting game, launches this Friday, and I’m taking a look at each playable fighter in hopes of deciding who I’m going to choose as my go-to monster. Realistically, I’ll have to give each one a spin and then choose a favourite based on play style, but it’s fun to sort them out based on which ones I already like.
Yesterday I ran down the pokémon that I feel I’m least likely to play as, and today we’re going to take a look at the monsters that have me on the fence:
MEWTWO
Mewtwo is a psychic powerhouse, artificially created by cloning and messing around with the DNA of Mew. He is the original unstoppable force in Pokémon; a Pokémon that you can only find and capture after becoming the Champion in the original Red and Blue versions. I’m not too fond of the idea of psychic-types in a fighting game, but Mewtwo can be a physical threat as well, especially when it evolves into Mega Mewtwo X and gains a secondary fighting-type.
Mewtwo has shown that it is a capable fighter in Super Smash Bros, where it uses a combination of deadly psychic attacks and its powerful tail to pummel its opponents. However, while it is a large and somewhat slower, it’s actually a very light fighter, and can be launched fairly easily. I like playing as Mewtwo in Smash, but I don’t know if it will be as satisfying to play in Pokkén.
There is also a secret (and unlockable) boss character known as Shadow Mewtwo (pictured). I don’t know at all if the dark version plays differently from regular Mewtwo, but it hasn’t really pique my interest yet. Time will tell how I end up feeling about this non-canon form.
CHANDELURE
The most unexpected fighter on the Pokkén roster, Chandelure is a big, ghostly chandelier. Evolved from the adorable candle pokémon, Litwick, it floats and spins around the battlefield while presumably launching fireballs and ramming into opponents. Chandelure never really caught my attention in the RPGs, but in Pokkén, I am very curious about this monster. Curious enough to main it? I don’t know about that, but I’m certainly going to be giving it a whirl.
How will this ghost/fire-type fighter stack up against the rest? It’s really hard to say. It doesn’t seem at all like the kind of Pokémon you’d choose to put in a fighting game, and I think that’s why it strikes a chord with me. I am very curious about what kind of fighting style Chandelure will bring to the table. I never really saw its branches as flexible before, but that will have to be the case, right? If nothing else, Pokkén will make me look at this spooky pokémon in a whole new light.
GARCHOMP
A huge, bipedal shark monster. What else do you really need? Merely the sight of Garchomp is enough to strike fear into the hearts of men, and its brutal strength is just the icing on the cake. Garchomp has been widely considered to be staggeringly overpowered in the main Pokémon game; it’s been one of the top tier monsters since it first appeared in generation four, and was beefed up even further with a mega evolution in generation six. Garchomp’s popularity is rivalled only by its notoriety.
While I think that Garchomp is awesome, there are a couple things that hold me back. Firstly, it has never really fit onto my team before, so we have no rapport. But that’s not so important. I’ve been trying all sorts of new monsters in recent runs through the main games (<3 Flygon). No, what really takes the cake here is simply that Garchomp is one of the first pokémon I ever felt was “overdesigned.” It’s got all sorts of extraneous spikes and details that don’t really need to be there. And Mega Garchomp takes it all the way to eleven and looks completely ridiculous. It’s petty, sure, but it fills up more of a paragraph than “it just doesn’t resonate with me, and I can’t pinpoint exactly why.”
SUICUNE
One of the two legendary Pokémon to land a spot on the Pokkén roster, Suicune is a unique Pokkén fighter in that it is a water-type and a quadruped. Appearing as one of the three legendary beasts in Pokémon Gold and Silver, Suicune is said to race around the world purifying water as it goes. It was also the cover monster for Pokémon Crystal, which I never played, so I have no idea why it got top billing. Perhaps I’ll have to remedy that soon.
The only thing that I can tell you with any certainly about Suicune is that it has consistently been the most aggravating of the legendary beasts to catch. Like, so much so that bears mentioning. So this kind of already puts it on the naughty list. Being a quadruped also hurts my interest in it, since as a result, Suicune’s playstyle seems to be very much dependent on keeping some distance from the enemy and spamming beam attacks. Lame. The only saving grace is that Suicune is a water-type. The only water-type. And water just happens to be my preferred Pokémon typing. This could all be fixed if they would just do the obvious thing and add Marshtomp as a playable fighter. But so far, signs point to Suicune as my only choice if I want to play Pokkén as a water trainer.
GENGAR
Gengar, like Chandelure, is a ghost-type pokémon. Also, like Garchomp, it is a very popular choice when it comes to competitive battling in the main games. Maybe not quite as notorious as Garchomp, but it still belongs to the “Uber Tier” so I guess that means that it must be pretty popular. Certainly, it was popular enough to earn a mega evolution, and even a special shiny distribution in 2014.
Truth be told, I was ready to put Gengar on the list of Pokkén fighters I was most likely to play as, but I wanted to segment the roster into three sets of five. So onto the Maybe List it goes. It was really easy to like Gengar in Gen 1, as it was one of only three ghost-types in existence (the other two being its previous forms). These days, we have many more ghosts to choose from, and while a lot of them are more defined and interesting, Gengar still has that clout as the OG. That and, man, it’s actually pretty terrifying. I’ve seen a few brief clips of it in battle, and it uses all sorts of trickery to win. Vanishing, attack portals, sending the enemy into a hallucinatory nightmare where it is swallowed whole by a massive Mega Gengar. Even if Gengar doesn’t turn out to be the most capable character, it’s surely going to be fun to play.