Totodile

Gold and Silver opened the second generation with three Poké Balls on the table in Professor Elm’s laboratory, and one of them held a 60-centimetre, 9.5-kilogram bipedal crocodile. The official category doesn’t beat around the bush: Big Jaw Pokémon. The whole design is built around its jaw, and the rest of its body — short legs, a thick tail, a red crest of spikes — exists to support it.

The Pokédex entries have repeated the same warning since 1999. It’s small but violent, and won’t hesitate to bite anything that moves nearby. Its well-developed jaws can crush anything, and its Trainer must be careful. The third entry adds a qualification: sometimes it thinks it’s giving a little nip and leaves fairly serious injuries. There’s no bad intention behind it, just a youngster that still hasn’t worked out how much force it has.

It’s Johto’s Water-type starter and the first link in a three-stage line that passes through Croconaw and ends at Feraligatr. All three are the same animal at different scales, with no type change or surprises along the way. Its recorded habitat is the riverbank: the boundary between water and land where any real crocodile lives.

314 base stat points and none that stand out. Attack, at 65, is its best figure, with 64 Defense right behind it; the two special stats sit at 44 and 48, Speed at 43 and HP at 50. The game treats it as what it is, a youngster, and only awards 1 Attack effort point when it’s defeated.

Torrent, its standard ability, powers up Water-type attacks when things get rough. The one that changes anything is its hidden ability, Sheer Force: it raises the power of any move with a secondary effect and removes that effect in return. It fits what Totodile learns naturally. Ice Fang, at level 19, and Crunch, at 27, lose their chance to make the opponent flinch and gain raw power. TMs give it Swords Dance and Dragon Dance, while it inherits Aqua Jet from its Egg Moves, the only priority move available to it.

Being pure Water-type gives it nothing when attacking — most of the Pokédex takes neutral damage from Water attacks — but defensively it resists Fire, Water, Ice and Steel, and only gives way to Grass and Electric.

What holds it back is obvious. With 43 Speed, it moves last against practically any opponent, and with 50 HP and those Special Defense stats, it can’t take a fully charged hit. In a normal playthrough its useful life ends at level 18, because from that point on it’s another Pokémon. Ice Fang, in fact, arrives one level after that evolution: only its base form gets to see it if the player presses B to cancel the evolution.

It belongs to two Egg Groups, Monster and Water 1, the usual split for reptilian starters, opening up breeding with both amphibious wildlife and the larger monsters on the list. Its gender ratio is seven males for every female — 12.5% — so setting up your own breeding line starts with finding that female or relying on Ditto.

Its 20 incubation cycles work out at roughly 5355 steps. From the Egg it inherits five moves it can’t learn any other way: Aqua Jet, Counter, Ancient Power, Swagger and Block. Only the first is genuinely worth a slot, because 40 power with priority goes a long way on a creature that will never win a Speed duel.

Its evolution has no trick to it. It evolves into Croconaw at level 18 and Feraligatr at 30, with no stones, items, friendship or time requirements. Its growth rate is Medium Slow, the kind that lags behind during the first third of the game and catches up later.

Its catch rate is 45, the figure for a difficult-to-catch Pokémon — a somewhat theoretical number for a species that is almost always received as a gift before you even have a Poké Ball of your own.