Machop

First stage of a three-stage line that ends with Machamp, and the only one of the three that can still be picked up off the ground: 0.8 metres and 19.5 kilograms, the size of a child. The Pokédex gives it little more than one idea repeated in different words since Generation I — it’s a mass of muscle shaped like a small person. It trains by lifting Graveler as weights, a daily workout mentioned again and again in the entries, and that’s where the figure it’s always associated with comes from: it’s strong enough to pick up 100 people, or throw them into the air, depending on which game you check.

The rest of the entries describe an obsessive. It doesn’t get tired no matter how much effort it puts in, and when it watches its muscles grow day after day, it gets more passionate and trains even harder, so the cycle feeds itself. Some travel all over the world to learn different kinds of martial arts, and the very first entry even claims that it has mastered them all.

That’s where its official category, the Superpower Pokémon, comes from, along with a design that hides nothing: grey, upright, bipedal, with no decorations to distract from its arms. It’s the mould that Machoke and Machamp come from; they don’t change the concept, only the size and number of arms.

It has 305 points distributed with little imagination: 80 Attack, 70 HP, 50 Defence and a triple 35 in Special Attack, Special Defence and Speed. With those last two figures, anything that hits on the special side and moves first knocks it out before it gets to do anything.

Its place is in Little Cup, and it doesn’t earn that place through its stats but through No Guard: the Ability makes every move hit, its own and the opponent’s, turning Dynamic Punch —normally a lottery— into a guaranteed hit that also causes confusion. The set described by Smogon uses Choice Scarf to cover its Speed problem, along with Ice Punch and Revenge for anything that survives the Fighting-type hit. The drawback is literal: the opponent never misses either, so a burn or paralysis ruins it. Guts, its other Ability, goes in exactly the opposite direction and raises its Attack when it gets a status problem. You have to choose one of the two.

Outside that format, it doesn’t appear, and in a normal playthrough what matters is the order in which the hits reach it. Rock Smash at level 6 and Mach Punch at 22 are the only Fighting-type moves it gets before evolving; Bulk Up, at 25, raises Attack and Defence at the same time and is the closest thing to a plan you can build around it. It doesn’t get Close Combat until 43, fifteen levels after level 28 has turned it into something else. Bullet Punch, at 11, is its only priority move and its only Steel-type answer to Fairy, which together with Flying and Psychic completes the list of types that hit it for double damage.

It belongs to a single Egg Group, Human-Like, the same one as the human-shaped Fighting- and Psychic-types, which cuts down the breeding options quite a bit compared with species in two groups. The gender ratio is three males for every female: 25% female, so breeding starts by obtaining one or resorting to a Ditto.

The 20 Egg cycles come to about 5355 steps, an average figure that isn’t too punishing. It evolves when it levels up to 28, and that’s it: no item, no time of day, no friendship and no unusual conditions. The next step is the expensive one, because Machoke only evolves into Machamp through trading, which means relying on another person or a second cartridge to complete the line.

In the wild, it lives in the mountains and has a catch rate of 180, which is high: it isn’t the 255 of things you catch with the first Poké Ball, but it’s a long way from the 45 of the starters. It can be holding a Focus Band. Defeating it gives 1 Attack EV, its base experience is 61 —low— and it grows at a medium-slow rate, so the early levels take more work than they seem to.