Skitty

Eleven kilos for a sixty-centimetre cat. The figure is baffling until you look at the tail: an appendage as thick as its body, ending in three points with yellow balls on them. That seems to be where much of the weight is.

And that tail is at the centre of everything the Pokédex has to say about it. There are no entries about hunting, marking territory or defending anyone: there are entries about chasing moving things, including its own tail, until it gets dizzy. “It loves playing by chasing its own tail until it gets dizzy,” says one of them. Another adds that, in the wild, it lives in the hollows of tree trunks in the forest, which fits both the habitat recorded by the games, Forest, and a small animal that needs somewhere to hide. The same entry ends by saying that it is a popular pet because of how sweet it looks.

Its official category is Kitten Pokémon. It is not trying to be anything else.

Its line has two stages, and neither depends on level: all it takes is a Moon Stone to turn it into Delcatty. With no minimum level or friendship condition involved, a Trainer can leave it as a kitten forever or evolve it in the same minute they catch it.

None of its six stats reaches 51. HP and Speed stop at 50, Attack and Defense at 45, and both special stats at 35, for a total of 260 points. A flat spread with no peaks and nothing worth building around.

Being pure Normal-type means that, offensively, it hits nobody for super effective damage, while Rock and Steel take half damage and Ghost ignores it completely. Defensively, it has only one weakness, Fighting, along with that same immunity to Ghost. A clean defensive profile that is useless when there are only 45 points of Defense behind it.

The genuinely unique thing about it is Normalize, which it shares only with Delcatty: all its moves become Normal-type and, since Generation VII, also gain 20% power. The known use is Thunder Wave, which becomes Normal-type and can therefore paralyse Ground-types, which are immune to Electric in any other circumstance. The price is steep: with Normalize active, any Ghost-type Pokémon shuts down its entire moveset, Shadow Ball included.

The other two abilities are second-rate. Cute Charm can infatuate anything that makes contact with it; Wonder Skin, its Hidden Ability, makes it harder for status moves to hit.

Its own level-up moves include Double-Edge at level 40, with 120 power and recoil that a 50-HP body cannot afford to take twice; Play Rough at 46, with 90; and Facade at 31, which doubles its power if it is burned or poisoned. With 45 Attack, none of them deals the damage those numbers promise.

Where it does its job is at the start of a normal playthrough: Sing at level 7 and Attract at 10 give it cheap control while opponents still have no way to punish it properly. Defeating it yields 1 Speed EV and 52 base experience.

Field and Fairy are its Egg Groups, so it can breed with almost anything terrestrial as well as the Fairy branch. The gender ratio is three females for every male, or 75%, and that detail matters more than usual: its two infatuation tools—Attract, learned at level 10, and the Cute Charm ability—only work against the opposite gender, which in its case is usually male.

Fifteen incubation cycles work out at around 4080 steps, putting its eggs among those that hatch quickly.

It gets twelve Egg Moves, and two of them are mainly valuable for what they do in other hands: Wish, which restores half the user’s maximum HP one turn later, and Baton Pass, which transfers stat changes to the teammate that comes in afterwards. Last Resort, with 140 power, is the highest number this species will ever see, although it only works once everyone else has already moved.

It evolves with a Moon Stone and nothing else: no level, no friendship, no time of day. It is the same stone Clefairy needs, so in games where they are scarce, you have to choose who gets it.

It lives in the forest, often carries a Pecha Berry or a Wiki Berry, and has a catch rate of 255, the highest possible: one ordinary Poké Ball and half a bar of HP are usually enough. It grows on the Fast experience curve, so it levels up sooner than most of its teammates.