Wigglytuff

Its enormous, saucer-shaped eyes are always full of tears, and it isn't crying. It's a cleaning system: if anything gets inside, the Pokédex says, it comes straight back out on its own. Almost everything else works the same way, like a mechanism hidden beneath a plush toy.

Its body is soft and rubbery, and it swallows air to inflate itself — according to one of its entries, with no limit at all. Once inflated, it starts bouncing like a ball. It also puffs up when angry, which is the least cuddly part of the whole thing, and groups of them compete to see who can hold the most air inside.

Then there's the skin, which is why the species has market value. It's so soft that two of them cuddling together will never want to separate, and they shed their silky fur with the seasons; some people collect it to make luxury goods. One metre tall and twelve kilograms: it weighs quite a bit more than the word balloon suggests.

Its official category is Balloon Pokémon, and that describes half the design. The other half is the ears and snout, which come from a rabbit. It completes the line that starts with Igglybuff and goes through Jigglypuff, reaching this point while still keeping Sing among its level 1 moves.

The 140 HP is the misleading figure. Next to it are 45 Defense and 50 Special Defense, so that enormous reservoir empties as quickly as anyone else's would: plenty of nominal bulk, no real resistance. The rest of the spread is 70 Attack, 85 Special Attack and 45 Speed, for a total of 435.

What gives it a niche is Competitive, which raises its Special Attack whenever one of its stats is lowered. Against Intimidate or an opponent using Defog to clear away the Spikes, the punishment is immediate, and that 85 stops being mediocre for a turn. Its PU role is built around that idea: set Stealth Rock and punish anyone trying to remove it, with Hyper Voice and Dazzling Gleam for neutral coverage and Fire Blast or Focus Blast for whatever gives it trouble.

The Normal and Fairy combination is better defensively than it looks — immunity to Ghost and Dragon, and resistances to Fighting, Dark and Bug — but it leaves two very common weaknesses, Steel and Poison, and with those defenses either one tears through it. Offensively, Normal and Fairy overlap: almost everything that resists one resists the other.

The underlying problem is that Clefable does the same thing with better numbers and a better ability, and in NU the replacement is straightforward. In a normal playthrough, its role is different: 140 HP with Rest and Sleep Talk can withstand whatever a story trainer throws at it.

It belongs to a single Egg Group, Fairy, which makes breeding considerably narrower than it is for species in two groups. Three out of every four specimens are female, so the usual problem — getting the female for inheritance — doesn't exist here.

Ten incubation cycles, around 2805 steps, making them some of the quickest eggs to hatch. There are no Egg Moves: the line doesn't inherit anything it can't learn on its own, and the egg hatches into Igglybuff, not Jigglypuff.

The evolution is one of the old-fashioned ones, with no level or conditions: give Jigglypuff a Moon Stone and that's it. The previous step does have a requirement, with Igglybuff evolving into Jigglypuff by leveling up with friendship at 160 or higher. The amusing part is that a wild specimen may be holding a Moon Stone — its other possible held item is an Oran Berry — so the species itself is a source of the stone that evolves it.

Its habitat is the grassland and its catch rate is 50, almost as low as the 45 of a starter, a strange figure for something you can find out in the wild. It grows at a fast rate and yields 3 HP EVs, which fits the only thing it does well.