Every time a new generation comes out, all you hear from people for a while is how much the new designs suck, how stupid the names are, how much better things used to be, yadda yadda yadda. And of course there are always the oldschool guys who claim that Generation I was the best. Now I'm not saying I hate Gen I; far from it. I grew up with these Pokemon and love them dearly. But in all honesty, Generation I was THE stupidest generation of Pokemon. We all just take it for granted because it was presented to us in childhood.
We can start off on the type effectiveness chart. Everything wrong with it is Gen I's fault, except for the Dark and Steel types, which have relatively few issues. Yeah, Dark doesn't make much sense as a type, but it makes a lot of sense as a balancing factor, so that makes things better. The fact is, Gen I had complete freedom and could have balanced things in different ways, so anything that doesn't make sense here is their fault entirely. Let's start out with the big one. If I were to ask you, "What is Psychic's relationship to Poison?", you would probably say, "It's super-effective!" BECAUSE YOU WERE BRAINWASHED AS A CHILD. A normal person, one who wasn't raised on Pokemon, would probably instead answer, "What the fuck kind of question is that?" There is really no good reason for Psychic to affect Poison super-effective. Or for Fighting to be not very effective. Ok, the Grass thing makes sense. I can even understand Ghost, Ground and Rock resisting it. But why poison should be weak to Ground and Psychic? There's really no explanation to it except that it feels right. Why? Because it's what we grew up with.
While we're on the topic of Psychic, what the hell kind of elemental type is that? Ok, we got grass, fire, water, electric, flying (air), ground, etc. What other elements are there? Uh... psychic? Like psychic powers? That's totally an element right? AND FIGHTING. BUFF GUYS ARE THEIR OWN ELEMENT. LETS GO ALL OUT BUGS ARE AN ELEMENT TOO. ONE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL STRUCTURES OF THE UNIVERSE IS BUGS. I'm not saying I don't like these types, just that they are, when you actually stop to consider it, REALLY FUCKING STUPID.
One final complaint against the typing system I will always have is the relationship between Electric and Flying/Ground. I'm sorry, but as a physics major I can't let this slide. HURR DURR GROUND IS IMMUNE TO ELECTRIC BECAUSE WE GROUND THINGS TO PREVENT POWER SURGES/VOLTAGE IMBALANCES. The Earth doesn't have any electrons in it and we all know that charge can't flow through minerals. Dumbasses. Why do you think lightning hits the tallest object? IT WANTS TO MOVE CHARGE BETWEEN THE CLOUDS AND THE GROUND. That's right, Electric should AUTO-HIT Ground. It's harder to move through air (thanks Flying), so it hits the path of least resistance TO THE GROUND. The way that this happens is that the large collection of charge pushes charges away in other areas. Once those like charges are moved, we see a huge potential difference, which causes the charge to jump - lightning. In the ground, the charges can be pushed very far away - they can move anywhere in the entire Earth. In something flying through the air, the charge has nowhere to go because the air won't easily accept it. Only a very small charge difference will be created, making it quite unlikely that a flying bird would be hit by lightning. But RAIN will make it hard to fly. Flying should be weak to water and at least resistant against Electric.
This went on a lot longer than I expected it to, so I will continue next time. We haven't even moved into the meat of the matter yet - the actual Pokemon.
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