Dunsparce

The tail ends in a drill and isn’t used to attack. It’s for escaping: as soon as it sees a person, it drills into the ground and backs into the hole it has just opened. Pokédex entries have repeated this scene since Gold and Silver, adding that anyone who manages to see one can consider themselves lucky. The official category, Land Snake Pokémon, describes an animal that spends its life underground, digging deep burrows with complicated layouts.

It is a meter and a half tall and weighs 14 kilograms, so as a snake it has the length and not much else. Its body is a yellow tube with a striped back, topped off with a pair of tiny wings that barely let it fly short distances. One entry notes that, precisely because of those wings, some scientists believe its ancestors could fly. Neither entirely reptile nor entirely bird, neither obvious predator nor obvious prey.

It shares tunnels with Diglett and gets along well with them. For twenty-five years, it was the beginning and end of its own line: it didn’t come from anything and didn’t lead anywhere. That changed in Scarlet and Violet, when Dudunsparce appeared.

415 points distributed without any real flair: 100 HP, then 70 Attack, 70 Defense, 65 in both Special stats and 45 Speed. HP is the only thing that stands out, and it isn’t enough to withstand anything that hits seriously.

What saves it from complete irrelevance is Serene Grace, which doubles the probability of secondary effects. Headbutt, a 70-power Egg Move, makes the opponent flinch 30 % of the time; with Serene Grace, 60 %. Bite, also an Egg Move, works the same way. That gives rise to the only strategy it’s remembered for: paralyze with Glare, learned at level 12, and then hit with Headbutt. Between paralysis and flinching, the opponent can spend half the battle unable to make a move. It depends entirely on luck and drives whoever has to face it up the wall.

There’s a bit of structure around that. Coil, learned at level 44, raises Attack, Defense and accuracy in one go; Roost, at 36, restores half its HP. With those, it can put together something resembling a slow offensive wall.

The ceiling appears immediately. Normal doesn’t hit anything super effectively, so its 70 Attack stays at 70 against everything, and its 45 Speed means paralysis has to land before anything else. Since it’s slow, any decent Fighting-type takes it down before it can even set up its game plan. Outside of that, its place is in a regular playthrough: it arrives early, lasts quite a few turns and, with Glare and Yawn, learned at level 28, handles more fights than its stat sheet would suggest.

It belongs to a single Egg Group, Field, the most populous of them all, which lets it breed with almost any land-dwelling quadruped. The gender ratio is straightforward, 50 % female, so there’s no need to chase some unusual probability to start your own line. Its 20 Egg cycles amount to around 5355 steps.

Six moves can come from the Egg, and two of them are the important ones: Headbutt and Bite, the moves Serene Grace turns into flinching machines. The other four are Curse, Astonish, Aqua Tail and Last Resort, the latter with 140 power and the drawback that it only works if it moves last in the turn.

Its evolution has one specific condition and no trick to it: level up while knowing Hyper Drill. It learns that move naturally at level 32, so all you have to do is leave it in your party a little longer. What you can’t control is the result, because out of every hundred evolutions, ninety-nine produce a two-segment Dudunsparce and only one produces the three-segment form.

Its habitat is caves, and its catch rate, 190, sits in the comfortable part of the table: a regular Poké Ball is usually enough after a couple of attempts. It grows at an average rate, with no surprises.