Tentacool

Jellyfish Pokémon, and the label undersells it in one respect: a real jellyfish doesn’t shoot lightning. This one does. Pokédex entries describe a crystal-like organ above its eyes that absorbs sunlight, refracts it through the water inside its body, and sends it back out as a beam of energy. The rest of its body is water and very little else.

That shapes its entire behavior. It doesn’t so much swim as let itself be carried along: it drifts through the shallow waters near the shore, which is where it crosses paths with people. Its tentacles are poisonous enough that the Pokédex itself recommends running to the hospital after a sting, and anyone who catches one by accident gets a dose of stinging acid for their trouble.

Dehydration is its weak point in the literal sense. Away from the sea, it dries out and becomes stiff, and sometimes shrunken specimens turn up in the sand, coming back to life as soon as they’re returned to the water. At 0.9 metres and 45.5 kilograms, much of that weight is liquid it can’t afford to lose.

It occupies the smaller half of a two-stage line, below Tentacruel. It has no alternate forms or regional variants: a single design, with no branches.

The spread of its 335 points is deliberately lopsided. One hundred Special Defense against 35 Defense and 40 HP: it can take a beam and folds to a headbutt. Attack sits at 40, Special Attack at 50, and Speed at 70, the only vaguely decent offensive figure on the sheet—and it still doesn’t decide anything by itself.

Its most useful Ability is punitive rather than defensive. Liquid Ooze reverses draining effects: anyone trying to steal its HP with Giga Drain or Drain Punch takes the damage back instead of getting the recovery. Clear Body, the other option, only prevents its stats from being lowered, while Rain Dish, its Hidden Ability, requires setting up Rain Dance before it’s worth anything.

Water and Poison give it a comfortable defensive profile—it resists Water, Fire, Ice, Fighting, Poison, Bug, Steel and Fairy—in exchange for four weak points: Electric, Grass, Psychic and Ground. On offense, the pairing is one of the most redundant around, because almost anything that resists one resists the other as well.

In Little Cup it has a confirmed job, and it’s support: Toxic Spikes by TM to poison anything that switches in, Rapid Spin as an Egg Move to clear its own hazards, Knock Off to remove items, and Sludge Wave at level 44 as a hit with some actual substance. In any higher-level format it has no place: 50 Special Attack doesn’t KO anyone, and its evolution does the same thing with 335 more points of muscle.

In a normal playthrough it serves as a taxi. It learns Surf at level 40, covering travel across the sea without using a moveslot on anything better.

It belongs to a single Egg Group, Water 3, the most restrictive of them all: it can only breed with crustaceans, molluscs and the occasional marine fossil. The gender split is perfectly even, 50% female, so finding a mother is no problem.

Its 20 Egg cycles work out to roughly 5355 steps, in the middle range of the Pokédex. Nine Egg Moves can hatch from the Egg, and three make the effort worthwhile: Rapid Spin, which it can’t learn any other way and is its only hazard removal; Mirror Coat, to bounce back the Special Attack its 100 Special Defense lets it take; and Aqua Ring, the only passive healing it can access without relying on the weather. Aurora Beam and Acupressure round out the list without adding much.

It evolves into Tentacruel upon reaching level 30, with no items, time restrictions or strange conditions. It grows at the Slow Exp. rate, so reaching that 30 takes more experience than usual, and its base Exp. yield of 67 doesn’t help anyone training it by defeating it.

Its habitat is the sea, and its catch rate of 190 puts it among the trivial catches: almost any Poké Ball will do on the first try. In the wild, it may be holding a Poison Barb. Defeating it yields 1 Special Defense EV.