Exploud

It inhales air through the tubes running across its body, and that is the warning to get out of the way: what comes next is a roar that can be heard ten kilometers away. Pokédex entries return again and again to the shaking — the din it unleashes when attacking makes the ground quake with the force of an earthquake — but they also insist on the opposite. The same tubes are used for speaking. It produces different whistles and tones to communicate with its own kind, and only raises its voice when it is battling. One entry says that, in ancient times, its roars were used as a means of communication between distant settlements, making it less a weapon than infrastructure.

The jump from Loudred is a change of instrument. Where the middle stage had two speakers for ears, the adult spreads tubes all over its body, shaped and arranged like those of a pipe organ. One and a half meters, 84 kilos, the official Loud Noise Pokémon category, and the same blue carried by the whole line since Whismur, which, with 64 HP and 23 Defense, mostly shrieks out of fear.

It lives in caves. For an animal whose job is making noise, it is the only habitat with the acoustics on its side.

490 points distributed with the logic of a mixed attacker and no finishing blow in either direction: 91 Attack and 91 Special Attack, identical figures, on top of 104 HP. That is where the problem lies, because 63 Defense, 73 Special Defense, and 68 Speed mean it almost always hits second, and a single well-placed physical attack leaves it hurting.

The interesting part comes from the combination of Boomburst and its hidden ability. Boomburst is a 140-power special move of the Normal type, with no secondary effect and no charging turn; Scrappy lets Normal- and Fighting-type moves hit Ghost types. Put the two together and the only hole in the Normal type disappears: the strongest attack in its repertoire now hits everyone with STAB. Focus Blast and Flamethrower, through TM, cover the Steel and Rock types that resist Normal; Ice Beam is there for Ground types.

Soundproof, the regular ability, is an immunity to opposing sound-based moves, with the irony that it belongs precisely to the Pokémon that turns practically everything into a sound-based move. It works in specific situations and nowhere else.

What holds it back is the schedule. Boomburst does not arrive until level 72, and Hyper Voice, with 90 power, not until 63, so for much of a normal playthrough its best native special hit is Uproar, learned at 45. That works well enough: 104 HP is enough to take a hit while it deals damage, and there is nothing about its typing that leaves it without targets. Beyond that, it has no recovery outside Rest.

It belongs to the Monster and Field Egg Groups, with the sexes split down the middle, 50% female, so breeding it does not depend on luck or require going through a Ditto. Its 20 Egg Cycles amount to roughly 5355 steps.

The evolution has no trick to it. Whismur evolves into Loudred at level 20 and Loudred into Exploud at 40, with no items, no friendship, and no time-of-day conditions. It grows at a Medium Slow pace and gives 221 base experience, making the stretch from 20 to 40 feel long precisely when the middle stage is the worst of the three. Defeating it yields 3 HP EVs.

Its recorded habitat is caves and its catch rate is 45, the same rate given to difficult-to-catch Pokémon: in practice, it is almost always obtained by evolving a Whismur, which drops at 190 on the first try. In the wild, it may be holding a Chesto Berry, the exact item a Pokémon with both Rest and Sleep Talk learned at level 15 would ask for.