Entei

The Volcano Pokémon doesn’t live in one. The habitat assigned to it by the games is the grassland, and the first Pokédex entry sums it up without embellishment: “A Pokémon that races across the land.” The mountain is where it comes from, not where it usually lives.

What it wears isn’t fire, either. It’s a grey cloud of smoke stretched along its back, star-shaped plates with six points on its face, and white legs with black rings that look like shackles. The heat comes from inside: the third entry says it contains the glow of magma within and spits blasts that devour and reduce to ashes everything they touch. Two metres ten and 198 kilos of quadruped, somewhere between a lion and a mastiff.

Its link to volcanoes is one of birth and noise. They say one is born whenever a new volcano appears, and that when it roars, one erupts somewhere on the globe — two claims that the entries themselves present as rumours, prefaced by “they say” and “it is believed”.

It has no evolutionary line. No before or after: the chain begins and ends with it, as it does with the other two members of its trio, Raikou and Suicune. The category describes an origin, not an address.

580 points split between two high figures and a contradiction in the middle. 115 Attack and 115 HP, 100 Speed, then 90 Special Attack, 85 Defense and 75 Special Defense. The problem is that nearly all the Fire moves it learns by levelling up are special: Smog at 54, Flamethrower at 72 and Eruption at 78. That 150 power is backed by the weaker of its two offensive stats. On the physical side, what it gets by level is Flame Wheel at 6 and Fire Fang, 65, at 30; Flare Blitz, with 120, comes by TM and deals recoil damage every time it is used.

The version that actually fits comes from the two moves in its Egg Move list. Sacred Fire has 100 power and is physical, while Extreme Speed has 80 and priority; both make use of the good 115. With them, the distribution stops fighting itself.

Pressure, its normal ability, removes two PP per turn from the move used against it instead of one, and only pays off in long battles. Inner Focus, its hidden ability, prevents flinching and does nothing else.

Fire by itself resists Grass, Ice, Bug, Steel, Fairy and Fire, and ignores burns; in return, it opens the door to Water, Ground and Rock, and with 75 Special Defense, any of those coming from the special side gets through its 115 HP. Its coverage outside its own type is short and second-rate: Crunch (80), Iron Head (80), Stone Edge (100), Dig (80). None of them threatens anyone who wasn’t already losing.

It can’t breed. Its Egg Group is Undiscovered, and the female percentage doesn’t exist because it has no gender either, so even with a Ditto in front of it, nothing comes of it. The 80 incubation cycles are still written into its data — around 20 655 steps, one of the longest counters in the game — and in practice they only appear if the egg arrives through a route the game doesn’t offer.

There’s no evolution condition to explain, either: the chain has a single entry. What you get is what you see, at the level where you find it.

The number that matters here is the catch rate: 3. It’s one of the worst in the game, one step below the usual 45 for starters and worlds away from the 255 of a first-route Pokémon. With a Luxury Ball or a Fast Ball, little changes; what does change things is putting the target to sleep and lowering its HP to the brink, and even then you count the balls by the dozen.

Its recorded habitat is the grassland, not the cave or the mountain. In Gold, Silver and Crystal, that was literal: after waking it in the Burned Tower, it fled across the Johto routes and you had to run into it by chance, with the possibility of it leaving on the very first turn. It gives 261 base experience, grows at a slow rate and awards 1 HP and 2 Attack in effort. Its starting friendship is 35, the value for an ill-tempered Pokémon.