Machoke

Level 28 is the cutoff. That’s where Machop leaves its childlike body behind and grows to 1.5 metres tall and 70.5 kilos, with its musculature already laid out like an adult’s. And that’s where it stops, because the final step towards Machamp can’t be reached by training.

The first thing you notice is the belt. The Pokédex calls it a power-save belt and explains its purpose without beating around the bush: its body is so strong that it needs something to hold back its movements.

The rest of the entries hammer home the same point from different angles. It lifts a large truck with one hand. It hoists a sumo wrestler with a single finger. Its muscles are as hard as steel. And, despite what that résumé might suggest, it doesn’t spend its strength fighting: it does bodybuilding sessions every day and volunteers for people’s heavy-lifting jobs, because moving other people’s weight is good training. On its days off, it heads into the countryside or the mountains to keep exercising.

Its official category is the Superpower Pokémon, and its type is simply Fighting, with no second half to add any nuance.

Four hundred and five points arranged around a single high number: 100 Attack. Next come 80 HP, 70 Defense, 60 Special Defense, 50 Special Attack and 45 Speed, which is where the whole thing falls apart. It moves last against almost anything.

The ability that defines it is No Guard: while it’s on the field, no move misses—its own or its opponent’s. That makes Dynamic Punch always hit and, with it, confusion automatic. That detail got it banned from PU in Smogon, with 88% of the votes in favour of removing it and confusion as the central argument; it was classified as BL4, banned there and with no place in the tiers above it. With Eviolite, its defensive spread takes special hits better than Gurdurr and physical hits better than most Fighting-types in the same bracket. Its other ability, Guts, raises its Attack when it’s carrying a status condition, but gives up the accuracy gimmick.

Pure Fighting hits hard against a good part of the field and offers no useful resistances: Flying, Psychic and Fairy get in cleanly, while the 50 Special Attack rules out any idea of special coverage.

In a normal playthrough, the spread works just as well. According to the Pokémon Legends: Arceus record, it gets Bullet Punch at level 11, giving it a priority hit from very early on; at 25, Bulk Up raises Attack and Defense at the same time and partly covers the Speed gap; at 43, Close Combat is the hammer, with the drawback that it lowers its own defences every time it’s used. When defeated, it leaves 2 Attack EVs.

The Human-Like Egg Group and no other, which lets it breed with the rest of the bipedal, hand-having crowd, and with Ditto for everything else. The sex ratio is three to one: 25% female, so breeding your own line starts with finding one.

Twenty egg cycles, around 5355 steps.

The line’s two evolutions work differently, and only one is entirely up to you. Machop becomes Machoke simply by reaching level 28. Machoke becomes Machamp through a trade, meaning someone else has to be on the other end; in Pokémon Legends: Arceus and later games, an item replaces that trade, but the original mechanism requires you to send it away and receive it back. It grows at a medium-slow rate and gives 142 base experience.

Its habitat is the mountains. A catch rate of 90 leaves it in no-man’s-land: twice as easy to catch as a 45 and nowhere near the 255 of something you can grab with the first Poké Ball tossed carelessly. Wild specimens sometimes hold a Focus Band.