Feraligatr

Gold and Silver kicked off the second generation with three starters built from the Kanto template, and the Water-type one ended up being the most brutal of the three. It finishes the Totodile line at level 30, after passing through Croconaw, and the jump is obvious: a 2.3-metre, 88.8-kilogram blue crocodile that walks on its hind legs.

The animal it starts from isn't just one thing. Alligator, caiman and crocodile traits are mixed into the same design, with three-pronged red crests on its head, shoulders and tail, and a yellow V crossing its belly. The official category, Big Jaw Pokémon, gets straight to the point.

The Pokédex entries always repeat the same contradiction. It moves slowly, almost listlessly, until it decides to attack; then it reaches dizzying speeds. When it bites, it doesn't just close its mouth: it shakes its head from side to side to tear its victim apart, the same manoeuvre used by real crocodiles. Before charging, it pounds the ground with its hind legs and opens its jaws to intimidate its opponent, a gesture the game's descriptions treat as part of the attack rather than a prior threat.

530 base stat points distributed without ambiguity: 105 Attack and 100 Defense out front, 79 Special Attack and 83 Special Defense behind them, with 85 HP and 78 Speed in the middle. That 78 decides almost everything. It comes in late against most offensive threats, so the plan revolves around Dragon Dance, which it learns by TM and which fixes both missing numbers at once.

Sheer Force, its Hidden Ability, boosts the power of moves with secondary effects by 30% at the cost of removing those effects. With 105 Attack behind it, that rewrites Waterfall, Ice Fang, Crunch and Ice Punch, and what it loses—recoil, freezing, Defense drops—is precisely what you could never plan around. Torrent, its regular Ability, only activates below one-third of its HP and doesn't compete with that.

Pure Water is a solid defensive type: it resists Fire, Water, Ice and Steel. Attacking is another story, because half the game shrugs off neutral Water damage, so coverage has to come from outside with Earthquake or Ice Fang. Its two weaknesses, Grass and Electric, are spread everywhere, and without a Dragon Dance boost it doesn't break through anything on its own.

In a normal Johto playthrough, the calculation comes out differently. Bite at level 13 and Ice Fang at 21 give it an answer to Grass types before Grass types have an answer to it, and Crunch at 32 arrives almost alongside the evolution. Thrash, at 51, has 120 power and misses one time in ten.

Monster and Water 1 Egg Groups, an easy pairing that connects it with almost every Water-type starter and a good part of the Pokédex's reptiles. Females make up 12.5%, the usual starter ratio, so breeding starts with a Ditto or a lot of patience while looking for the exception.

Twenty egg cycles come out at around 5355 steps. Of the five egg moves, the one that matters is Aqua Jet: a Water-type priority move that the line can't learn by any other method and that covers the Speed gap when all that's left is finishing something off. Counter, Ancient Power, Flatter and Block complete the list, and none of them changes much.

The evolution has no trick to it. Totodile evolves into Croconaw at level 18 and Croconaw into Feraligatr at 30, with no items, no time requirements and no friendship involved. Its growth rate is Medium Slow, so the final stage arrives later than the bare number suggests.

Its habitat is the riverbank. In Johto, it isn't found on routes—Professor Elm gives the player Totodile in New Bark Town—and the catch rate of 45 only comes into play when the player obtains it by another method. It's the value of a difficult Pokémon to catch: with a regular Poké Ball, most attempts get away even when it's on the verge of going down.