Slakoth

The curved claws growing from its forelegs belong to something that hunts. Its diet is three leaves a day, and that is enough to leave it satisfied. The whole design is built around that mismatch: a 24-kilogram, 80-centimetre armed animal that barely spends any energy, with its heart beating once a minute and more than twenty hours a day spent lying down without moving.

The reference is the sloth, and the borrowing goes as far as the hanging posture, brown fur and expressionless face. Pokédex entries insist on a detail that is not biological: looking at it makes whoever sees it feel sleepy. It is not just slow; it is contagious. The official category, Slacker Pokémon, merely says out loud what the silhouette already tells you.

It occupies the first rung of a three-stage line built as a joke about growing up. At level 18 it evolves into Vigoroth, which cannot sit still even while sleeping, and at 36 into Slaking, which lies back down but with twice as much muscle on top. The middle stage is hyperactive and the two extremes are asleep. Few evolutionary lines say something so specific through the mere sequence of their three forms.

280 base stat points, split into 60 HP, 60 Attack, 60 Defense, 35 Special Attack, 35 Special Defense and 30 Speed. It is a poor spread, though not ridiculous for a creature found in the first wooded area of the game. That is not where the problem lies.

The problem is Truant, its only Ability, with no hidden variant to replace it: it cannot attack on consecutive turns. One turn on, one turn off, and the lost turn cannot be used for anything — it neither heals, sets a screen nor changes the weather. The opponent gets half the match for free. With 30 Speed on top of that, those dead turns come after it has already taken the hit.

When attacking, Normal-type moves do not hit anyone super effectively, Rock and Steel resist them, and Ghost types ignore them entirely. Defensively, it has only one weakness, Fighting, and the usual immunity to Ghost, which with 60 HP and 60 Defense lasts about as long as you would expect.

Its best attacks are not its own type: Throat Chop at level 25, with 80 power, and Play Rough at 38, with 90. Encore, learned at 6, is the only thing that makes the rest turn tolerable, because locking the opponent into a useless move does not require attacking on the following turn. Covet, at 22, has only 60 power.

Outside a battle against another trainer, its role is as a stepping stone: catch it, raise it to 18 and stop using Slakoth. It gives 1 HP EV when defeated and only 56 base experience points, so it is not even worthwhile as a training dummy.

It belongs to a single Egg Group, Field, the most populated of them all, which opens up breeding with almost any land-dwelling quadruped in the Pokédex. The gender split is even, 50% female, so two wild specimens are enough to get started without resorting to a Ditto.

The 15 Egg cycles equal roughly 4080 steps, an average figure that does not force you to ride around on the bicycle forever.

Two Egg Moves are worth the trip. Superpower, a Fighting-type move with 100 power, is stronger than anything it learns by levelling up and is the answer to the Rock and Steel types that Normal cannot touch. Curse, on a Pokémon that is not Ghost-type, raises Attack and Defense in exchange for Speed: a trade that costs little here, because 30 Speed is already below almost everything. Crush Claw, Slash, Tickle and After You also come from breeding.

Evolution has no trick or special condition: simply level it up to level 18 to get Vigoroth, and to 36 for Slaking. No items, no friendship, no time of day.

It lives in forests, and its catch rate is 255, the highest possible. A Poké Ball at half health catches it. The difficult part is raising it afterwards, because its growth rate is Slow and it needs more experience than average to reach those levels 18 and 36.