Omanyte

Seven and a half kilos spread over forty centimetres. The figure only makes sense once you understand that almost the whole thing is shell: the soft body is small, and what weighs it down is that calcareous spiral it drags everywhere. It’s an ammonite, with no attempt to hide it. A shelled cephalopod like the ones that filled the Mesozoic seas and disappeared without leaving any direct descendants, reconstructed here with ten tentacles and two large eyes perched above them.

Pokédex entries insist on two things. The first is how it moves: it swam through the primordial ocean by working those ten tentacles, and controlled its depth with the air stored inside its shell, rising and sinking without swimming. The second is that it wasn’t high up the food chain. Fossils turn up with bite marks, and the Pokédex points directly to Archeops as the culprit. When something attacks it, the response is the same as any mollusc with a home: crawl inside and wait.

None of this can be observed alive. The species is extinct, and every existing specimen is a regeneration from Helix Fossils found in ancient seafloor strata. Its official category is the Spiral Pokémon, and the evolutionary line ends as soon as it reaches Omastar.

355 base points distributed with very little grace. Defense 100 and Special Attack 90 are the two usable figures; HP 35, Speed 35, Attack 40 and Special Defense 55 are the dead weight. That 100 Defense backed by only 35 HP holds up quite a bit less than it looks on paper, and on the special side it holds up to nothing.

It has three abilities, and only one is good. Swift Swim raises its Speed in rain, which is the only way to fix that 35. Shell Armor blocks critical hits, useful if the plan involves stacking boosts. Weak Armor, the hidden ability, lowers its Defense whenever it takes a physical attack in exchange for raising its Speed: it destroys exactly the stat that defines it.

Rock and Water coverage hits a lot with two slots. Defensively, it’s another story: Grass deals quadruple damage, while Fighting, Ground and Electric also hit it hard. Scald and Ice Beam come from TMs; Hydro Pump at level 60 and Ancient Power at 30 are the two native attacks that matter. Shell Smash appears at 55, twenty levels after it could already have evolved.

That’s the fundamental problem. Everything it does, its evolution does the same but bigger, and level 40 arrives well before the good moves. Its real place is in a normal playthrough: it comes out of the Helix Fossil halfway through the adventure, works as an improvised sweeper with Rain Dance and Swift Swim, and Brine at level 35 doubles its power against any opponent below half HP.

It belongs to the Water 1 and Water 3 Egg Groups, which lets it breed with a good part of the Pokédex’s aquatic wildlife, including the other aquatic fossils. The gender ratio is skewed: 12.5% female, one for every seven males, so breeding one of your own almost always starts with a Ditto. Its 30 incubation cycles are on the long side, around 7905 steps.

The Egg Move list is surprisingly broad for a mollusc. Spikes and Toxic Spikes let it set entry hazards, something it can’t learn by level; Muddy Water gives it a 90-power attack without having to wait for Hydro Pump; Aurora Beam and Knock Off cover gaps, while Reflect Type is there more as a curiosity than a plan.

It evolves when it reaches level 40, with no stones, items or time-of-day or friendship conditions involved. That’s late, and it’s worth deciding beforehand whether delaying the evolution is worthwhile to learn Surf at 50, Shell Smash at 55 and Hydro Pump at 60, because the evolution learns them at different points.

Its recorded habitat is the sea, and its catch rate, 45, is that of a difficult species to catch. In practice, that figure is barely used: it isn’t found on routes, but regenerated from the Helix Fossil. It grows at a medium rate, without the penalties of the slow growth curves.