Thursday, February 17, 2011

#001 - Bulbasaur

BULBASAUR


IN SHOW
In the T.V. show, Bulbasaur was a badass protector of a woman and her group of pokemon that she found injured or abused and nursed back to health. He didn’t like Ash at first, but then when Ash protected the pokemon of the forest/clearing from Team Rocket he decided Ash was pretty okay guy. Okay enough to leave his post, anyway, leaving the pokemon totally defenceless, which even though everyone told him was okay I still have trouble agreeing with. The only stipulation was that Ash challenge him to a fair fight, which he did, so...still pretty badass.


Later on in the series it was revealed that Bulbasaur could become an Ivysaur, but simply didn’t want to. Hell, he could’ve even probably become a Venusaur at some point. But he thought being a Bulbasaur was good enough, and to be fair Bulbasaur was one of Ash’s strongest pokemon. The coolest part was that there really wasn’t any need for any of this to be included, it was just actual character growth which was better than the forced character growth that the other characters were getting...



REASONS WHY YOU WANT A BULBASAUR
I think the main reason people wanted Bulbasaur was because every kid believed it would be as awesome as Ash’s. We were wrong, but I’ll get to that later. Its evolutions were cool, and hell it was number one in the pokedex, so you’d never have that slot empty. It was pretty strong against Brock and Misty and since they’re early on in the game that was helpful. PLUS Bulbasaur could learn cut so you wouldn’t have to catch a whole new pokemon in order to get that one move that has insisted on being an HM in every single game even though you only ever really need to use it once just so that the game designers can have an example to point to and say ‘yep, there’s why cut needed to be there’ and the rest of it is for pointless items which you pray will be a master ball or rare candy but always ends up being HP-Up or something...

REASONS WHY YOU DO NOT WANT A BULBASAUR
Remember when I mentioned that thing about bulbasaur being as cool as Ash’s and how we were dead wrong? Now I’m getting to it. Our bulbasaur, at least in the first games, was destined to look like a weird blob. It didn’t look remotely loveable. It wasn’t that tough either. And your opponent always, without fail, would pick the much better looking Charmander and there was a good chance you would regret your decision instantaneously and restart the game. Plus the only HM it could really learn was cut, and as I mentioned earlier, cut kind of sucks. Squirtle could also beat Brock, and Misty wouldn’t be that much more difficult either, so there goes his gym leader points.



IN SUMMARY
Bulbasaur in show > Bulbasaur in game. It felt almost cruel as a kid when they made Bulbasaur so much more interesting in the show and then took him away from us in the game. We wanted so much to have that cool Bulbasaur protecting our forest pokemon and beating down bad guys with vine whip and cutting steel cages with razor leaf that it nearly broke our hearts when he was reduced down to a few pixels that you couldn’t wait to evolve into Ivysaur. How sad.

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