Natu

You find it in the forest and almost always at ground level: the Pokédex entries agree that it looks for food down there and only occasionally climbs onto branches to peck at tender shoots. It climbs, it doesn’t fly. Its wings haven’t grown enough and it gets around by hopping, although that shortcoming has become an asset — it has developed its jumping ability so far that it can reach high branches nobody else can.

It is 20 centimetres tall and weighs 2 kilograms. Its body is a green ball with short wings striped red and yellow and a crimson feather on its head; the official category, Tiny Bird Pokémon, doesn’t try very hard.

What comes up most often in the descriptions is its stare. It is always watching something. If someone meets its gaze, it returns it without looking away, and the moment that person moves or comes closer, it runs off in a series of hops. It watches more than it eats.

It is the first half of a two-Pokémon line. At level 25 it becomes Xatu, which can fly, stops hopping and looks the other way.

The 320 base stat points are low even for an unevolved species, and the spread doesn’t help. The two high figures are 70 Special Attack and 70 Speed; the rest is a paper body: 40 HP, 45 Defense and 45 Special Defense. The 50 Attack goes to waste, because the physical movepool it learns — Peck, Aerial Ace and Steel Wing — goes nowhere with that figure.

The only thing that is really its own is Magic Bounce, its hidden ability: it sends status moves back to whoever used them, so anyone trying to paralyse, poison or set hazards ends up taking them themselves. That doesn’t give it any staying power, but it forces the other side to change plans while it remains on the field. Its two regular abilities are well below it — Synchronize passes poison, paralysis or burn back to whoever inflicted them, while Early Bird only halves the time it stays asleep.

Psychic and Flying make a good offensive pairing; few things resist both at once, but defensively they leave it with five weaknesses: Electric, Ice, Rock, Ghost and Dark. In return, it completely ignores Ground and takes Fighting at a quarter damage.

It doesn’t measure up in serious battles, and the problem isn’t the movepool: Psychic at level 35 and Future Sight at 45 are legitimate attacks, Wish heals with a one-turn delay and Calm Mind raises both Special stats at once. The issue is that it arrives with 40 HP in a place where any neutral hit is enough. Where it does perform is in the middle stretch of a normal playthrough: Confuse Ray at level 15 to disrupt anything it can’t KO, and U-turn from a TM to hit and leave without giving away the turn.

Its only Egg Group is Flying, which pairs it with the birds in the Pokédex and not much else. The gender ratio is 50%, so finding a female costs nothing, and the 20 incubation cycles come out to about 5355 steps: (20+1)×255.

Eight moves come from the Egg, and two matter more than the other six. Sucker Punch strikes first whenever the opponent is going to attack, giving a fragile creature a way to finish something off before going down; Zen Headbutt provides an 80-power physical Psychic-type attack, although the 50 Attack makes that number misleading. It also inherits Drill Peck, Quick Attack, Feather Dance, Haze, Simple Beam and Ally Switch.

It evolves upon reaching level 25, and that is where the line ends: no stones, no friendship, no time of day. It grows at the Medium rate and gives 1 effort point in Special Attack.

Its habitat is the forest, although in the games it mostly appears around ruins and in Safari Zones. Its catch rate, 190, sits on the easy side of the scale — it isn’t the 255 of the trivial cases, but an ordinary Poké Ball at half health will usually do the job.