Kingler

Sixty kilos spread over 1.3 metres, and a good chunk of that weight is in one place: the left claw. All six Pokédex entries insist on the same thing, and not on its strength but on the inconvenience. Ten thousand horsepower, as hard as steel, and at the same time so heavy that if it lifts it too quickly, it loses its balance and staggers. One of the descriptions says it bluntly: outside battle, the claw is a problem.

There are two source animals. The fiddler crab provides the asymmetry—a claw three times the size of the other—and also the behaviour described by the Pokédex: waving it in the air to communicate with others of its species, until it gets tired. The king crab supplies the bulk, the shell spines and the red.

Its official category is Pincer Pokémon, which sums up the whole thing. It caps a two-stage line that starts with Krabby, and the leap is not one of shape but of scale: what was a large claw on the previous Pokémon becomes a limb that dictates how it moves, how it communicates and how long it can keep doing it. Its habitat is the water's edge, the strip where water meets land.

The 475 points are distributed very unevenly: 130 Attack and 115 Defense on one side, 50 and 50 in the special stats and 55 HP on the other. That high Defense is deceptive. With 55 HP behind it, there is nowhere to absorb anything, and 75 Speed leaves it slower than almost any attacker that cares about moving first.

The interesting Ability is Sheer Force, its Hidden Ability: it boosts the power of moves with secondary effects and removes those effects. The cruel joke is that it does not affect Crabhammer, because a high critical-hit ratio does not count as a secondary effect. What it does improve is Razor Shell, learned at level 36, and Rock Slide by TM. The other two Abilities are more honest than useful: Hyper Cutter prevents its Attack from being lowered, and Shell Armor blocks the critical hits it receives.

Being pure Water gives it resistances to Fire, Water, Ice and Steel, along with two well-distributed weaknesses, Grass and Electric. On offense, Water only punishes Fire, Ground and Rock, and runs into trouble against Grass types. The answer lies in the TMs: X-Scissor, with 80 power, is the only hit that patches that hole.

The full plan exists. Swords Dance at level 48, Crabhammer at 54 with 100 power, and Brick Break available from level 1 for anything that is not neutral to Water. The problem is that two turns of setup with 55 HP and 75 Speed are two turns that almost nobody is going to give it. Guillotine, at 60, is an acknowledgement of the flaw: a move that knocks the target out in one hit or does nothing.

It belongs to a single Egg Group, Water 3, the one for crustaceans and shelled molluscs, which limits who it can breed with quite a bit. The gender ratio is 50%, so breeding does not depend on luck with the Pokémon's sex or force you to use a Ditto.

Twenty Egg cycles are about 5355 steps, an average figure. This game's list contains no Egg Moves, so breeding adds nothing to its movepool: everything it knows comes from levelling up or from TMs.

The evolution has no trick to it. Krabby becomes Kingler upon reaching level 28, with no stones, no held items and no time-of-day or friendship conditions. It grows at a medium rate, the most predictable of the six.

Its catch rate is 60, in the difficult part of the scale—45 is what starters and genuinely troublesome Pokémon have; 255 is a Pokémon that stays in the Poké Ball on the first attempt—. You will have to weaken it first. Defeating it yields 2 Attack EVs and 166 base experience, figures that fit what it is: a physical attacker that does not stand out in anything else.