Farfetch’d

A duck that barely uses its wings to fly and fights with a vegetable clutched in its feathers. The official category, Wild Duck Pokémon, gives no hint of what the Pokédex entries have to say: it wields its leek “as if it were a sword to slice up its opponent”, and handles it in such different ways depending on the individual that the custom has grown into its own schools.

The leek is no decoration. It uses it to build its nest, defend itself and, when things get tough, eat it for nourishment. Some leeks are better than others, and several specimens have been seen fighting among themselves to get the good ones. The species lives near farmland, and its population depends on it: as leek fields become increasingly scarce, Farfetch’d’s numbers are believed to have fallen at the same rate. Few creatures have an agricultural explanation for their own rarity.

It is 80 centimetres tall and weighs 15 kilograms, the size of a farm bird. For six generations it was a one-member evolutionary line, with nothing before or after it. Sirfetch’d arrived much later, and only through Galar’s branch.

377 base points with a spread that makes sense at a glance: 90 Attack, with everything else below 65. 52 HP, 55 Defense, 58 Special Attack, 62 Special Defense and 60 Speed. Defeating it gives 1 Attack Effort Point, which sums up where its only real strength lies.

The ability that defines it is neither of the two visible ones. Keen Eye prevents its Accuracy from being lowered, and Inner Focus prevents flinching; its Hidden Ability, Defiant, raises its Attack whenever the opponent lowers one of its stats. It is reactive: it does nothing until someone decides to annoy it.

On the attack, Normal and Flying do not offer much. Normal is super effective against nothing, while Flying covers Fighting, Bug and Grass. Defensively, it fares even worse: two convenient immunities, Ground and Ghost, in exchange for falling to Electric, Ice and Rock with 52 HP behind it.

The interesting part is the Leek it sometimes carries in the wild. It raises its critical-hit ratio by two stages and does not work on any other species except its evolution. With Slash, at Lv.40, or Leaf Blade, at Lv.55 and 90 power, critical hits stop being a lottery. Swords Dance comes at Lv.45 and Brave Bird at Lv.65.

None of that saves it. 60 Speed leaves it moving second against almost anything, and with those defenses there is rarely a second turn. Where it is useful is during a normal playthrough: False Swipe, at Lv.35, for catching without knocking out, and Cut and Fly via TM, which in the games where they were Hidden Machines turned it into half the team’s HM carrier.

Flying and Field Egg Groups, two of the most populated, so it inherits moves easily from half the Pokédex. The gender ratio is perfectly even: 50% female. Its 20 Egg Cycles work out at about 5355 steps.

The Egg Moves are better than much of what it learns by level. Aerial Ace hits with 140 power, Feint always strikes first, Night Slash adds 70 power of a type its normal movepool barely touches, and Feather Dance sharply lowers the opponent’s Attack. Leaf Blade can also be inherited, for anyone who does not want to wait until Lv.55.

It does not evolve. The Kanto one stays the same for the entire game. The Galarian variant does change, and under one of the strangest conditions in the series: land three critical hits in a single battle. That is where the Leek and its two critical-hit stages stop being a gimmick and become the method.

Its habitat is the grassland, and its experience growth rate is Medium Fast. Its catch rate, 45, belongs to a Pokémon that is difficult to catch. In Red and Blue it did not even appear in the wild: you had to trade a Spearow in Vermilion City. You had to wait until Yellow to find it in the wild, on Routes 12 and 13.