Haunter

In caves, and on nights with a new moon. Pokédex entries always place it far from the light: it avoids cities because they are lit up at night and prefers complete darkness, where no one can tell a silhouette from a shadow. That feeling of being watched, according to one of those entries, is usually all in its head.

It doesn't have much of a body. A purple gas head with two rows of spikes, two hands that float on their own —because there is no torso— and a gaseous tongue that is its only real weapon. It licks its prey with it and gradually sucks away its life. No one drops from a single lick: the victim weakens little by little until it slips away. Another entry warns that if you see one floating in the dark and beckoning, the sensible thing is not to approach.

Its official category is the Gas Pokémon, and the numbers back that up. It is 1.6 metres tall and weighs 0.1 kilograms: one hundred grams spread across the height of a person.

It is the middle stage of a three-part evolutionary line. Gastly is a ball of gas with no limbs; Gengar already has a compact shape, legs and a shadow. This one stays halfway between them, with hands and a mouth but nothing connecting them.

405 base stat points distributed very unevenly: 115 Special Attack and 95 Speed on one side, 45 HP, 45 Defense and 55 Special Defense on the other. It hits fast and hard from the special side, and goes down to almost anything that lands a hit.

Levitate, its only Ability, removes the Ground weakness that the Poison typing normally gives it. With it, the Ghost and Poison combination gets three immunities —Normal, Fighting and Ground—, a quarter resistance to Bug and an inability to be poisoned. It is left with three active weaknesses: Psychic, Ghost and Dark.

Its own attacks are Shadow Ball, which it learns at level 48 or earlier through a TM, and Sludge Bomb, which only comes through a TM. Nasty Plot is what turns those 115 points into something serious, and Focus Blast, with 120 power, is its answer to Dark types that can take everything else. It already has Hypnosis at level 1, and learns Destiny Bond at level 54, which is the way to make an opponent go down with it when the battle is already lost.

It has no place on competitive teams. It can hold Eviolite because it is a middle stage, but 45 HP with 45 Defense cannot take hits even with the item, and everything it does is done better by Gengar, which can only be obtained through trading. Where it does work is in a normal playthrough, and quite well: it appears early, those 95 Speed points give it the jump on almost everything in the wild, and with Hypnosis and Confuse Ray it can catch things that otherwise refuse to be caught.

It belongs to a single Egg Group, Amorphous, with a 50% gender ratio. Its 20 incubation cycles come to about 5355 steps, putting it among the longer stretches. Its Pokédex entry lists no Egg Moves: all the unusual options come through TMs, including the three elemental punches —Fire Punch, Ice Punch and Thunder Punch— which make no sense with 50 Attack and are still there anyway.

Its evolution has no shortcuts. It evolves from Gastly at level 25 and becomes Gengar only through trading: no stone, no level, no time of day and no friendship. Anyone playing alone is stuck here.

Its registered habitat is the cave. Its catch rate, 90, sits in the middle range —far from the 45 of the difficult catches and the 255 of the ones that go down to a Poké Ball at point-blank range. In the wild, it can carry a Spell Tag, an item that boosts Ghost-type moves, and defeating it gives 2 Special Attack effort points. It grows at a medium-slow rate, so during the first few levels it falls behind what you would expect.