Koffing

Gastly also floats and is also made of gas, but it’s a spirit. Koffing is matter: a purple-skinned balloon with its mouth open, sixty centimeters tall and weighing one kilogram, filled to the brim with a mixture it produces itself. Pokédex entries describe the process in almost industrial detail — it combines its toxic substances with waste, the chemical reaction releases poison, and the higher the temperature rises, the more gas it produces.

That gives it the only two things it knows how to do: float and burst. The same gas that keeps it in the air is what inflates it until its skin can’t take it anymore, and several entries warn about the same thing in different ways: if it gets nervous, its toxicity increases and it inflates, while in hot places it can explode without warning.

It lives in urban areas and feeds in garbage dumps, drawn by the smell of rotting rubbish. The official category assigned to it by the game, Poison Gas Pokémon, doesn’t even try to look for a metaphor.

It’s the first half of a two-stage evolution line. At the end waits Weezing, which is basically two Koffing stuck together.

The 95 Defense is the only respectable part of a spread that totals 340, and the 40 HP makes sure it’s not useful either: taking physical hits with that amount of health means taking one. Special Defense sits at 45, Speed at 35, and both attacking stats show exactly how mediocre it is, 65 physical and 60 special. No EV spread can fix that.

The interesting part is the Abilities. Levitate removes its weakness to Ground, the only weakness Poison has alongside Psychic, and leaves it resisting Grass, Fighting, Poison, Bug, and Fairy. Neutralizing Gas, introduced in Generation VIII and only shared by it and its evolution, shuts down the Abilities of every other Pokémon on the field while it remains in battle: weather, Intimidate, whatever. The price is giving up Levitate and getting its Ground weakness back.

It gets nowhere by attacking. Sludge Bomb, learned at level 32, is its strongest move at 90 power, and Poison only hits Grass and Fairy for super effective damage while Steel ignores it completely. Where it does find a place is in a normal playthrough, using up turns rather than winning them: Toxic Spikes by TM to poison anything that comes in on the ground, Will-O-Wisp to burn a physical attacker that’s hurting it, Toxic at level 36 against something that can last longer than it can.

Then there’s the way out. Self-Destruct comes at level 28 with 200 power, and Explosion at 44 with 250, which is the most profitable way it has to turn an Attack stat of 65 into real damage.

The Amorphous Egg Group, the drawer for things with no recognizable anatomy, with a 50% gender split that makes breeding trivial: any two specimens and into the Day Care. The 20 egg cycles are about 5355 steps, on the shorter side.

Six moves can come from the Egg, and two are worth bothering with. Pain Split averages out the HP of both Pokémon, and with 40 base HP that exchange almost always works in its favor. Curse, on a Pokémon that isn’t Ghost-type, raises Attack and Defense at the cost of Speed, and losing Speed when you start at 35 costs nothing. The other four are Spite, Stockpile, Spit Up, and Swallow.

It evolves into Weezing at level 35, with no items, friendship, or time-of-day conditions. The only variation is in Galar: there, that same level 35 produces the regional form, Poison- and Fairy-type, instead of the Kanto one.

Its Pokédex habitat is urban, and its catch rate, 190, puts it among the easy ones: it isn’t the effortless catch that a 255 is, but it goes down to a regular Poké Ball without spending the turn weakening it much. Wild specimens sometimes carry a Smoke Ball, the item that always lets you flee from a battle against a wild Pokémon.