Numel

Ruby and Sapphire filled Hoenn with volcanic terrain, and with that backdrop came a fauna that Kanto and Johto didn’t have: creatures built around their own internal heat. Numel is the simplest of them all. A 70-centimetre, 24-kilogram yellow dromedary with a hump that stores magma at 1200 °C instead of fat.

The official category, Numb Pokémon, isn’t a translator’s joke. Pokédex entries keep coming back to the same point: it takes a while to register things and doesn’t even notice when it’s hit, although it notices hunger right away. The magma in its hump dwindles every time it uses a Fire-type move, so the lump on its back works as a visible tank. And if it gets wet, that magma cools and solidifies: the animal grows larger, gains weight and moves even worse. Few species have their own type weakness written into their Pokédex entry as a physical change.

Females have a more pronounced hump than males, one of the forms of sexual dimorphism that Generation III started spreading through the Pokédex. It occupies the first half of a two-stage line: at level 33 it becomes Camerupt, and its back lumps then turn into proper craters. Until that point, it’s a slow herbivore that people have used as a pack animal.

305 base points spread out without a single figure that looks scary. Its highest stat is 65 Special Attack; behind that come 60 HP and 60 Attack, followed by the drop: 40 Defense, 45 Special Defense and 35 Speed. With those numbers, no plan survives two turns.

The interesting part is the ability. Simple doubles stat-stage changes, and its movepool backs that up: Amnesia, learned at level 19, leaves Special Defense at +4 instead of +2; Defense Curl and Growth, both inherited, raise two stages where they would raise one; Flame Charge, learned by TM, adds +2 Speed with every hit. The problem is that the coin has a tails side. Simple also doubles whatever the opponent lowers, and Intimidate strips two Attack stages away as soon as it comes in, so setting anything up requires a turn its defenses rarely give it.

The Fire and Ground combination is genuinely good, and that’s down to the typing rather than Numel itself: only two weaknesses, an immunity to Electric and resistances to Fire, Bug, Steel, Fairy and Poison. The catch is that one of those two weaknesses is Water at ×4. Offensively, Earth Power at level 26 and Flamethrower at 43 cover almost anything put in front of it, with Earthquake at 40 if you prefer the physical side, although 60 Attack doesn’t get you very far.

Outside a normal playthrough, it has no place. Where it works is on the Hoenn journey: you find it early, it holds up on the volcanic routes and hits the Steel- and Rock-types in the midgame well, until it reaches 33 and stops being this much of a problem.

It belongs to a single Egg Group, Field, the most populated of them all, and can breed with half the Pokédex’s quadrupeds. The gender split is perfectly even, 50% female, so there’s no need to go through Ditto to start a breeding line. Its 20 Egg cycles come out at about 5355 steps, an average-to-high figure for such a common species.

The egg provides the tools its level-up movepool doesn’t: Yawn to force switches, Defense Curl and Stockpile to take advantage of Simple, Ancient Power, Heavy Slam and Heat Wave, which it would otherwise take a while to get. Growth is also an Egg Move, and with Simple it raises Attack and Special Attack by two stages each in a single turn.

It evolves into Camerupt when it reaches level 33. No items, no friendship, no time of day. It grows at the Medium rate, so it reaches that level earlier than almost any starter.

Its recorded habitat is the mountains, and its catch rate, 255, is the top of the scale: a basic Poké Ball is enough unless you get unlucky. Wild specimens sometimes carry a Rawst Berry or Charcoal, the latter an item that strengthens Fire-type moves and ends up being more useful than the Pokémon carrying it.