The List
10 Pokemon You Don't Want to Become Real
by Jacob Chapman,
One week after the release of Pokémon Go, I think it's safe to say we're all living in a Pokémon world. Everyone's walking around town trying to complete their Pokedex now, from your littlest cousin to your great-grandma, and the incredibly unity this game has brought to Pokémon lovers everywhere has been refreshing! It feels like the closest we'll ever get to becoming real Pokémon trainers, and that's probably a good thing, because reading the Pokedex for too long makes you extremely thankful that these magical monsters don't actually exist. With links to their Pokedex files for every entry, here are just ten Pokémon that might not make our world a better place.
10. Houndoom The biggest problem with Houndoom is that much like any adorable puppy dog, everybody will want to own one. Sure, maybe that little baby Houndour is cute when it's all chubby and yippy, but once you've got a full-grown Houndoom on your hands, you've got a series of mistakes coming that you can never undo. See, Houndoom has a hair-trigger temper and breathes cursed poisonous fire that doesn't just hurt like crazy when it first burns you, it will never stop hurting until the day you drop dead. The fire can go out, the burn can heal, but it'll still sear like crazy, and there's nothing you can do about it. Accidentally step on Houndoom's tail? You better be prepared to live with neverending pain in that leg! What's the matter, are you a dog lover or not?
9. Muk I don't even know where to begin with this one. This critter is so devastatingly poisonous that even its footprints will make you sick on contact, and a brush with its actual body will give you a horrible fever. Any plant it oozes past withers and dies, and the ground it slithers over will be barren mud for three years. One drop of its constantly leaking body is enough to turn a clean pool of water completely rancid. To make matters worse, Muk and Grimer are social creatures, so they like to party with their fellow toxic slushpiles, preferably in highly populated metropolises with lots of discarded waste. If just one Muk is enough to ruin your day, imagine a couple dozen of those hot messes.
8. Cacturne Hey, this little guy doesn't seem so bad. He's a desert plant, so he's basically guaranteed to keep to himself, provided you're not foolish enough to try petting his spiny body, right? Apparently not, because Cacturne travel in groups and hunt at night. What do they hunt? Travelers. For some reason, these innocuous four-foot flora like to feast on the flesh of people who get lost in the desert, and they don't even have the decency to get the job done quickly. They'll follow you for days while you wander around the wasteland, until your strength gives out, night falls, and they finally close in to claim their prey. They won't even wait to kill you until you're already dying of heat exhaustion! I've never heard of serial killers with such prickly personalities!
7. Drowzee It feels weird to say that children could become an endangered species if we lived in a Pokémon world, but the more you pick Dexter's brain, the more obvious it becomes that pocket monsters and grade-schoolers just don't mix. If Banette and Drifloon don't drag the kid off screaming into the night, they'll have all their good dreams eaten up by Drowzee, a psychic-type based on the mythological Baku who steals your nighttime fantasies by sucking them out through your nose. Of course it mostly eats the dreams of children, and like many of its weird spooky relatives, Drowzee isn't above kidnapping if it decides a kid's dreams are just too delicious to share. What a terrifying tapir!
6. Magcargo Magcargo's internal temperature is 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Even taking into account that a much smaller fraction of that heat would come into contact with the rest of the world thanks to Newton's law of cooling (so maybe we wouldn't all start boiling alive if we ran into one in the wild), that's still an entire species of 120 lb snails with the kinetic energy of a lightning bolt just slugging their way around the world unimpeded. Maybe they wouldn't melt skyscrapers or kick off catastrophic forest fires on a good day, but what if somebody pours salt on it? What if one of them explodes? It's a white-hot disaster waiting to happen, and the only consolation is that it's pretty easy to outrun this living powderkeg.
5. Glalie On the opposite end of things, there's Glalie, whose powers are both as terrifying and baffling as its appearance. It can instantly freeze all moisture in the surrounding atmosphere, which means it can freeze the very air you're breathing before you can say "lungsicles." Oh, but "Glalie wouldn't do that!", you might think. You're right, who could distrust that face? Sadly, Glalie uses its air-freezing powers as a hunting technique all the time, and it explicitly enjoys consuming its victims while they're still alive. It only freezes its prey enough to immobilize it, then takes its sweet time nibbling away at the meat-filled shaved ice that may or may not still be squealing in protest. If Pokémon ever become reality, I'm moving to the tropics!
4. Victreebel ...Or not, because the humidity-loving Victreebel devours its victims in an equally gruesome fashion. Actually, the number of Pokémon who like to take their food down kicking and screaming is pretty vast, from Golbat to Gorebyss, but even in those cases, you can hold out hope that they're not interested in sucking out the fluids of humans. In Victreebel's case, we know darn well that these giant-sized pitcher plants love stuffing people into their gaping pieholes, thanks to the ongoing suffering of James from Team Rocket. So what's in store for you when these monsters decide to swallow? It takes a full day to melt you into mush with its stomach acids, of course! Is it too late to pick Glalie instead?
3. Chandelure I could fill an entire top ten list with Ghost-type Pokémon you would never want to exist for all number of reasons. Cofragigus will turn you into a mummy! Haunter will lick you with his gaseous tongue and send you into a shivering fit that kills you! But none of these compare to Chandelure, who lingers around hospitals pretending to be an innocent flickering lamp, right before it swoops in to burn up the souls of its deathbed victims. That's right, it doesn't consume your body or your life energy, it eats your very soul. At least if most other Pokémon take you out in some gruesome fashion, you'll have an entertaining story to tell in the afterlife. But if Chandelure finds your spirit scrumptious, not even your ghost will be able to escape this Poke-dystopia as it floats through the world, nothing more than ectoplasmic waste.
2. Yamask On the other hand, getting your soul burnt up to feed a Chandelure might be preferable to passing on peacefully and waking up a Yamask. These sad little wall-eyed drifters retain all the memories of their human lives, but cannot express their regrets to others, reduced to saying their names like every other Pokémon out there. When they're not being treated like pets and servants by their fellow man, Yamask often stare at the masks they carry, imprints of the human faces they used to own, and cry big tears of existental despair. So are Yamask the only reincarnated dead people, or are all Pokémon dead people, and only Yamask retain the memories of their former lives? These are the questions you have to ask yourself when you start getting jazzed up about being a Pokémon trainer. One day, you might be the one getting trained!
1. Yveltal Frankly, almost every Legendary Pokémon has the power to spell apocalyptic disaster in one way or another. Groudon could bake our world into a crumbly dead biscuit, while Kyogre could send everyone to sleep with the fishes, and either one of them could do it just because they had a little hissy fit with the other one! But even if we all decide we can trust these behemoths not to destroy human civilization, one Legendary Pokémon comes packaged with a promise to be the last thing mankind ever sees. It's definitely in our best interest to make sure this eldritchian phoenix stays healthy, because it's going to take every living thing with it when it dies, rising from the ashes to a barren world that I guess Arceus will have to fill with life again. In a Pokémon World, we would finally have an answer for when the world was going to end, but we'd live and die knowing our fates rest on the well-being of a giant neon vulture. I think I'll just stick to playing Pokémon Go.
The old poll: What is your favorite game in the Final Fantasy main series?
- Final Fantasy VII (20.9%)
- Final Fantasy VI (14.8%)
- Final Fantasy X (12.6%)
- Final Fantasy IX (11.4%)
- Final Fantasy VIII (9.0%)
- Final Fantasy IV (5.0%)
- Final Fantasy XIII (4.9%)
- Final Fantasy XII (4.6%)
- Final Fantasy XIV: Online (3.2%)
- Final Fantasy X-2 (2.0%)
- Final Fantasy (1.9%)
- Final Fantasy V (1.8%)
- Final Fantasy III (1.1%)
- Final Fantasy II (0.4%)
- Final Fantasy XI: Online (0.4%)
- Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings (0.2%)
Jake is Anime News Network's assistant editor, he's been an anime fan since childhood, and he likes to chat about cartoons, pop culture, and visual novel dev on Twitter..
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