Growlithe

Nineteen kilos for seventy centimetres. That is the weight of a genuinely medium-sized dog, with its muscle mass and skeleton, not that of a fire creature one might imagine to be hollow. The official category, Puppy Pokémon, falls short of that figure.

Pokédex entries insist on two traits. The first is its character: loyal, brave, capable of standing up to larger, stronger enemies without backing down. The second is its sense of smell, and that is where things get interesting, because it does not use it to track. It has an extraordinary sensory memory and never forgets a scent; what it does with that gift is identify the sensations of the living beings in front of it. A dog that smells fear and can tell it apart from affection.

The rest of its behaviour is considerably less friendly. It barks as a warning at any stranger who invades its territory, and if you approach another Trainer’s territory, it will most likely try to bite you. In the wild, it engages in violent territorial disputes with Rockruff, which occupy the same kind of open terrain.

Its evolutionary line has two stages and no level in between. Arcanine appears when the Trainer decides to spend a Fire Stone, not when the creature grows enough. It is one of the few evolutions that depends entirely on someone else’s decision.

350 base points spread out without a single peak: 70 Attack, 70 Special Attack, 60 Speed, 55 HP, 50 Special Defense and 45 Defense. Nothing above 70 and nothing below 45. A spread like that does not win trades.

What saves it is Intimidate, which lowers the opponent’s Attack as soon as it enters. With 45 Defense, that reduction is worth more than any point it could have on the sheet. In Little Cup, the level 5 format, it has been used for exactly that reason: switch in against a physical attacker, cut a third off the hit and burn it with Will-O-Wisp, which it does not learn by level and gets through a TM. Morning Sun, an egg move, is its only way to recover health, and without it the wall falls apart in two turns.

The problem with Intimidate is that it cuts both ways: opponents with Defiant receive +1 Attack instead of −1, and in a format where Pawniard is common, that turns a safe switch-in into a gift.

Offensively, it has little to offer. Fire Fang at level 24, Flamethrower at 40 and Flare Blitz at 56, the last of them with recoil that a body with 55 HP cannot afford many times. Play Rough at 48 gives it something against Dark and Dragon. Flash Fire and Justified, its hidden ability, are left behind: the first is negated because nobody uses Fire against a Fire type, and the second only reacts to Dark-type hits.

As a pure Fire type, it punishes Grass, Ice, Bug and Steel, and struggles against Water, Ground and Rock, three of the most widely distributed attacking types there are. In a normal playthrough, it does its job through the middle part of the game and little more: that is what the Fire Stone is for.

It belongs to a single Egg Group, Field, the most populated of them all, so breeding it is trivial once you have the female. And that is the bottleneck: only 25% of specimens are female, one in four, so setting up your own breeding project usually starts with a Ditto.

Twenty Egg Cycles, around 5355 steps, an average figure that does not force you to cycle around forever. Six moves can come from the egg, and two are worth the trouble: Morning Sun, the species’ only recovery move, and Raging Fury, a physical Fire-type move with 120 power. The other four are Rage, Double Kick, Covet and Double-Edge.

The evolution condition has no trick to it: Fire Stone, with no minimum level, no time window and no friendship involved. The stone works just as well a minute after hatching as it does at level 100.

It lives in grasslands and its catch rate is 190, a comfortable figure — it is not the 255 of some random Pidgey, but a Poké Ball after a couple of hits will usually do. It sometimes holds a Rawst Berry. Defeating it gives 1 Attack effort point, and its growth rate is Slow, which means it levels up more slowly than average while it waits for the moves at the end of its list.