Staryu

It looks like a brooch lost in the sand: five brown arms, perfectly symmetrical, and in the centre a golden setting with a red jewel embedded in it. The jewel is the only thing that cannot be replaced. Pokédex entries have repeated the idea since the first generation — if it loses an arm, it regenerates it without trouble as long as the core remains intact — and one from Sinnoh adds that Lumineon attacks it precisely because of this, without getting much out of the attempt.

By day, it is a motionless object. It appears in groups along the shore, 34.5 kg spread across 80 centimetres of flat body, with no face and no articulated limbs. At night, it changes. The core lights up with a red glow, and in late summer the beaches fill with those glowing points; the old descriptions compare them to the stars in the sky, and another goes further, claiming that it blinks to communicate with them.

Its official category is the Star Shape Pokémon. It is the base of a two-stage line, with Starmie above it, and has no alternate forms or regional variants: the one that comes out of the sea in Kanto is exactly the same as the one that comes out in Sinnoh.

A total of 340 points does not get you very far, and to make matters worse, they are badly distributed. Speed, 85, is the only figure that stands out; Special Attack stops at 70, and both defences tie at 55. The real hole is its 30 HP. With that base, any neutral hit takes half its bar, and no amount of defence makes up for it. Its 45 Attack is no use either, because almost everything it learns hits from the special side.

Of its three abilities, the one that matters is Natural Cure: when it is withdrawn from battle, poison, burn or paralysis disappear, and it comes back in clean the next time. Illuminate does nothing inside a battle, only increasing the rate of wild encounters. Analytic, its hidden ability, powers up its attack when it moves last, which is the exact opposite of the only thing it does well.

Being pure Water leaves no surprises on the attacking side: Fire, Ground and Rock take double damage, while Grass and Dragon shrug it off. Defensively, it does better, resisting Fire, Water, Ice and Steel, with only two weaknesses: Grass and Electric.

In a normal playthrough, it carries you through well over half the game. Brine comes at level 28 and Psychic at 40; Recover, at 48, removes its reliance on potions, and Rapid Spin, which is already there at 12, is useful for clearing a field of Spikes. Hydro Pump does not show up until 56, quite a while after the Water Stone is within anyone’s reach.

It has no gender. There is no female percentage because there is no male or female here, so the Day Care only produces eggs if there is a Ditto beside it. Its only group is Water 3, the one for marine invertebrates, and the egg-move list is empty: it inherits nothing from anyone. What it knows comes from levelling up or from a TM.

Twenty incubation cycles are about 5355 steps. Its growth rate is slow, the one that requires the most experience for each level-up, and that does not sit well with having its three best attacks at 44, 48 and 56.

Evolving, on the other hand, depends on nothing: a Water Stone, whenever you feel like using it. It is worth checking Starmie’s list first, because all its moves are listed at level 1 and after the stone it does not learn another one by itself. Shellder presents the same decision with the same stone.

It lives in the sea, close to the coast. Its catch rate is 225, one of the highest figures there is, so an ordinary Poké Ball at half health is almost always enough. Wild specimens carry Stardust or a Star Piece, and defeating them gives one Speed effort point.