Victreebel

Vileplume reaches the same destination by another route: a Kanto plant that closes up with a Leaf Stone and ends up with an enormous flower on top. There’s no flower here. There’s a pitcher.

Its body is that of a carnivorous pitcher plant from the Nepenthes genus: a modified leaf that rolls in on itself to form a reservoir of digestive fluid, with its lid on top and its two side leaves serving as arms. The Pokédex entries don’t dress it up. Anything it eats dissolves instantly, no matter how tough it is, and prey trapped inside its mouth disappears in a day, bones included. The vine growing from its head isn’t decorative either: it waves it around as a lure and releases a sweet, honey-like scent so that the unwary come closer on their own.

It is 1.70 m tall and weighs 15.5 kg. For its height, that’s almost nothing — a bag of leaves and juice, not a solid animal. Its official category, Flycatcher Pokémon, describes the job quite literally.

It closes out the Bellsprout line, the most aggressive of Kanto’s three starter plant lines, and carries an entry that the game itself admits it can’t confirm: supposedly, it lives in large colonies deep inside jungles, although no one has ever managed to verify it.

490 base stat points with a fundamental problem in how they’re distributed: 105 Attack and 100 Special Attack, almost identical, without either one standing out enough to decide which route to take. The rest is underwhelming. 80 HP, 65 Defense, 70 Special Defense and 70 Speed.

Chlorophyll fixes that halfway. In sun, its Speed doubles, and those 70 go from mediocre to outspeeding almost anything not holding an item. That’s the whole plan: its own Sunny Day or a teammate setting it up, Solar Beam with no charge turn, Sleep Powder — which it already gets at level 1 — to put anything that survives to sleep, and Sludge Bomb or Poison Jab for Fairy-types. On the physical side, it has Swords Dance and Leaf Blade, learned at level 44, although sun doesn’t help there. Its other ability, Gluttony, makes it consume its held Berry sooner.

On offense, Grass and Poison overlap: Grass covers Water, Ground and Rock, while Poison adds little beyond Fairy. Defensively, it’s worse. Four weaknesses — Fire, Ice, Flying and Psychic — on 65 Defense and 70 Special Defense mean that almost anything can take it out in one hit, and any Ice-type priority move kills it before it can move. As soon as the sun goes down, it’s slow again.

Smogon has analysed it in PU, where sun is a viable strategy and Victreebel is one of the few Pokémon that can make use of it. Above that level, Venusaur overshadows it: it’s just as fast in sun and can take much more punishment. In a normal playthrough, it does its job without any fuss: Sleep Powder opens, and Leaf Storm closes with 130 power at the cost of dropping its Special Attack by two stages.

It belongs to a single Egg Group, Grass, which cuts down the list of possible partners quite a bit. The gender ratio is 50%, so breeding doesn’t depend on finding a female. Twenty hatching cycles come to about 5355 steps, which is (20+1)×255.

The Egg Moves provide what it can’t learn any other way. Power Whip, with 120 physical power, is the strongest hit it can aim for and fits those 105 Attack points. Sucker Punch gives it the priority its Speed doesn’t. Strength Sap heals based on the opponent’s Attack and lowers it at the same time.

The evolution is straightforward: Weepinbell becomes Victreebel when exposed to a Leaf Stone, with no minimum level or extra condition, and Bellsprout evolves into it at level 21 beforehand. There’s no need to rush the stone. Victreebel’s level-up learnset has six entries, and five of them are at level 1 or earlier; the only move it learns by levelling up is Leaf Blade, at 44. Leaf Storm appears the moment it evolves. Everything else comes from Weepinbell or TMs.

Its habitat is the forest, and its catch rate is 45, putting it among the difficult ones to catch, although that rarely matters: normally, it arrives already evolved from lower down the line. It grows at a Medium Slow rate.