Shroomish

It looks like an egg forgotten among the leaf litter. Its colour, size and that rounded shape on top make it easy to mistake for a real one until it moves, because it has two short legs underneath and walks. The official category, Mushroom Pokémon, makes clear what it really is: a fruiting body with legs, 40 centimetres tall and weighing 4.5 kilos.

Pokédex entries always describe it in the same place and doing the same thing. It lives in the damp, dark parts of the forest, staying still beneath fallen leaves, and feeds on the compost they produce as they rot. A decomposer, quite literally: it eats what the forest throws away.

The other half of the portrait is less peaceful. When frightened, it shakes its body and releases poisonous spores from the top of its head; the entries insist that inhaling them hurts badly, and that the dust can make trees and weeds wither. A creature that spends the day motionless and yet has one of the most aggressive chemical defences attributed to a small Grass-type Pokémon.

It is the first half of a two-stage line. Starting at level 23, it evolves into Breloom, trading stillness for a boxer's arms and gaining the Fighting type. Shroomish itself remains pure Grass.

Its 295 base points are distributed with a strange symmetry: 60 HP, 60 Defence, 60 Special Defence, followed by 40 Attack, 40 Special Attack and 35 Speed. It can take a hit. It cannot give one back. With those two 40s, none of its moves are frightening, and 35 Speed means moving last against almost anything its size.

The interesting part is its abilities. Effect Spore poisons, paralyzes or puts to sleep anything that hits it with contact, a passive 30% toll that punishes physical attackers. Poison Heal does the opposite of what you would expect: instead of suffering from poison, it uses it to restore HP every turn, and in the process makes it immune to burns, paralysis and sleep because the status slot is already occupied. The classic combination is to poison it deliberately and rely on Facade, which doubles its power when the user has a status condition. The problem remains the same: 40 Attack. A boosted Facade coming off 40 Attack does not KO anything. Quick Feet, its hidden ability, raises its Speed when it has a status condition, but that does nothing to solve the fact that it has no real way to hit hard.

Pure Grass is a poor defensive type — weak to Fire, Ice, Flying, Poison and Bug — and offensively it only covers Water, Rock and Ground. The Kebia Berry it sometimes carries in the wild exists precisely to soften a Poison-type hit.

It does have a use in a normal playthrough, and it gets that use early. Leech Seed at level 8 and Stun Spore at 5 let it wear opponents down and slow them without needing to deal damage; Giga Drain arrives at 26 and Spore, the infallible sleep move, at 40. That 40 is far beyond the 23 at which it evolves, so seeing it put opponents to sleep in this body means pressing B for seventeen levels.

It shares the Fairy and Grass Egg Groups, an unusual pairing that opens up breeding with a good part of the Grass types and the small creatures in the Fairy group. The gender split is clean: 50% female, so breeding your own line does not depend on luck or a Ditto.

Fifteen incubation cycles come to about 4080 steps, among the shortest there are. It hatches with four moves: Worry Seed, which lowers the opponent's Attack, and three of debatable utility in Charm, Helping Hand and Fake Tears. Worry Seed is the only one that offers anything substantial, and it fits the nuisance role it will have for its entire life if it is not evolved.

Its evolution has no unusual conditions: at level 23 it becomes Breloom, with no items, friendship or time of day involved. It grows at the Fluctuating rate, the curve that rises quickly at first and gets bogged down at high levels.

Its habitat is the forest, and it has been there from the start: in the third generation, it can be found in Petalburg Woods, while in the Sinnoh versions it appears in the Great Marsh once the National Pokédex has been obtained. Its catch rate is 255, the highest possible. A normal Poké Ball at half health is enough. In the wild, it may be carrying a Tiny Mushroom, Big Mushroom or Kebia Berry.