Raikou

Gold and Silver, 1999. The second generation put three creatures in Johto that the player didn't find waiting inside a room: as soon as they were seen in the Burned Tower, they ran off and scattered across the map. Raikou was the fastest of the three.

The animal is 1.9 metres tall and weighs 178 kilos. Yellow with black stripes and long upper fangs, it's halfway between a tiger and a sabre-toothed cat. What it carries on its back isn't just fur: the purple mane imitates a storm cloud, and lightning bolts come out of it. The tail ends like an electrical discharge.

Pokédex entries keep insisting on three things. The rain clouds it carries overhead let it fire lightning at will, and it appeared with a lightning bolt. It stores energy in its body and releases it as it moves across the ground. And its roars emit shock waves that vibrate through the air and shake the earth.

It doesn't evolve from anything or into anything: the line starts and ends here. It forms a trio with Entei and Suicune, and its official category is the Thunder Pokémon.

580 points with an obvious bias. Up front, 115 Special Attack and 115 Speed. Behind that, 100 Special Defense. Then everything else: 90 HP, 85 Attack and roughly 75 Defense, which fold to almost any neutral physical hit.

Pressure, its standard ability, costs the opponent 2 PP for every move that hits it instead of 1. It helps extend battles against defensive opponents and not much else. Its Hidden Ability, Inner Focus, prevents flinching and stops Intimidate from lowering its Attack, which a special attacker doesn't care about anyway.

Pure Electric is easy to read: one weakness, Ground; resistances to Electric, Flying and Steel; and one immunity on the other side, because none of its attacks can hit a Ground-type. In Scarlet and Violet, Smogon places it in NU, with Calm Mind—which it learns at level 18—as the centrepiece of the set: it raises Special Attack and Special Defense in the same turn, and with that starting Speed, every turn it survives counts twice. Volt Switch keeps momentum against anything that comes in to stop it. Scald is its answer to Ground-types, Swampert included, although it only truly threatens them if it gets the burn.

The checks are in the same list. Shadow Ball hits weakly, special walls can take the boosts and answer with Earthquake, and any opponent with a Choice Scarf outspeeds it and takes it down before the boosts matter. Against a well-positioned Grass-type, the only way out is to switch.

It can't breed. Its Egg Group is Undiscovered and the species is genderless, so the 80 Egg cycles listed in its data—about 20,655 steps—are a figure that never gets used, because no egg can produce one. The Egg Move list is empty. So is the Tutor Move list.

It all comes down to catching it, and there the number that matters is the catch rate: 3. It's among the worst in the Pokédex. A 45 is already considered difficult and a 255 means throwing the Poké Ball and calling it a day; with 3, even at 1 HP and asleep, most attempts disappear into the void.

In Gold, Silver and Crystal, the difficulty was different. After the Burned Tower incident, it fled and wandered around Johto's routes, changing location whenever the player entered a new area, so the hard part was finding it, not weakening it. HeartGold and SoulSilver repeated the same approach.

Then came the fixed variants: Trackless Forest in Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, with Ho-Oh or Lugia in the party as a requirement; the Max Lair in The Crown Tundra expansion for Sword and Shield; and the slates in Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. In Scarlet and Violet, it appears in West Province (Area One), and only after obtaining the treat that unlocks it. The habitat assigned to it by the Pokédex is grassland; its growth rate is slow.