Kabuto

Eleven and a half kilos for half a metre tall: almost everything Kabuto weighs is shell. Barely anything shows beneath the brown carapace, just a few short yellow legs, and above them, embedded in the frame itself, two small eyes. Its official category is Shellfish Pokémon, and it couldn’t be more literal.

The Pokédex entries repeat two ideas. One is its age: it lived on beaches 300 million years ago and hasn’t changed at all in that time. The other is that the ones around today are regenerated from a fossil, with one exception that the entries themselves can’t agree on — some say it has gone extinct everywhere except in one particular region, while others say living specimens have occasionally been found in the wild. The best detail is in the most recent entry: it used the eyes on its back to explore its surroundings while staying hidden in the seabed, buried and motionless, looking upwards.

It’s the smaller half of a two-stage line. At level 40 it evolves into Kabutops, which rises from the bottom, stands upright and replaces the shell with two scythes. The jump between the two is one of the most drastic in the first generation: from buried bug to predator.

355 total points, with the distribution falling apart in one very specific place: 30 HP. A Defence stat of 90 looks decent until you combine it with that figure, at which point you’re left with a Pokémon that loses half its health bar to a neutral physical hit. 80 Attack and 55 Speed are filler. 55 Special Attack and 45 Special Defence don’t amount to anything.

Swift Swim is the only reason this distribution exists. In rain, its Speed doubles and that 55 behaves like 110, which is an entirely different league. Rain Dance is in its TM list, so it can set up the weather itself, although spending a turn with 30 HP usually means not making it to the second. The other two abilities are worse. Battle Armor only blocks critical hits. Weak Armor, its hidden ability, lowers its Defence — its best stat — whenever it takes a physical attack, in exchange for Speed it already had another way to obtain.

Offensively, Rock and Water complement each other well: between Stone Edge, which it learns at level 60 with 100 power, and Aqua Tail, at level 50 with 85, very little can resist both. Aqua Jet, at level 15, gives it a priority move to finish things off. Defensively, the same typing is a disaster: Grass hits for four times the damage, while Fighting, Ground and Electric hit for twice as much.

Its realistic role is occasional support. Stealth Rock by TM and Rapid Spin by egg move make it capable of setting hazards and removing them, two jobs that take one turn and don’t require it to stick around. With 30 HP, it does them once and leaves.

It belongs to the Water 1 and Water 3 Egg Groups, a combination that lets it breed with common Water-types on one side and shells and crustaceans on the other. Its 30 incubation cycles come to about 7905 steps, one of the highest figures in the game, and its gender ratio doesn’t help either: 12.5% female, or one in eight. Breeding your own line starts with a Ditto or a lot of patience.

Its egg-move list is long — eleven moves — and uneven. Rapid Spin is the one that justifies the effort, since it can’t learn it any other way. Aurora Beam, Icy Wind and Bubble Beam are weak coverage inherited from the aquatic side of its breeding tree; Flail, Knock Off, Screech, Confuse Ray, Take Down, Mega Drain and Mud Shot round out the catalogue without adding much.

It evolves upon reaching level 40. No stones, no items, no time of day or friendship: just experience. It grows at the Medium rate and gives 71 base experience, a low figure. Its effort yield is 1 Defence.

Its assigned habitat is the sea, although in practice nobody fishes it up: it comes from a regenerated Dome Fossil in a museum. Its catch rate, 45, is that of a difficult Pokémon to catch, and it’s a number that almost never gets used, because the one you get from the fossil is already registered.