It’s generally a hard call whether I prefer Kantonian Raichu or Alolan Raichu, but once you factor the shinies in the Alolan form easily gets the edge. It isn’t a color scheme I’d expect to love, but I think it’s actually one of the prettiest shinies in the franchise. It’s not a color you often see on pokemon, and it’s legitimately beautiful. Kantonian Raichu’s shiny is unfortunately pretty unremarkable – just a darker shade of orange – but Alolan Raichu’s shiny is this wonderfully rich, dark brown. It’s been almost two decades now, so we can still safely say real animals don’t exist in the pokemon world, right? But then Sun’s dex mentioned Raichu’s ability to knock out Indian elephants again, 12 years later, in 2016! That wasn’t even a full five years ago!!!! What’s going on? Do Indian elephants exist in the pokemon world? Or is the dex just written for us, the players, and is simply breaking the fourth wall? Takeshi Shudo, the main writer of the original anime series, once claimed real animals once existed in the pokemon world but are now extinct – could the dex just be talking about Raichu’s ability to defeat an extinct animal? But like, nobody else has ever made that claim, and apparently he’s dead now? aaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA It’s just one game, right? A game from 2004, even. The FireRed writers actually added references to Indian elephants, not only to Raichu’s dex entry, but Gastly’s as well! That’s two acknowledgments of Indian elephants in a single game! Crazy!!!! But okay, let’s calm down. Except….the original games never made any mention of Indian elephants. That dex entry is apparently from FireRed, which is a Gen I remake, so they probably just didn’t change it when they were touching up the text. One of Raichu’s dex entries mention how its electrical discharges are powerful enough to cause an Indian elephant to faint, which is something I had always dismissed as just another example of that Gen I weirdness. The Pokemon franchise is generally very careful to avoid acknowledging real-world animals, with almost all references to them dating back to Gen I before the series had really established pokemon as the only noteworthy forms of life in the setting. But alas, the damage to our buddies Sneasel and Raichu has already been done :(Īnd now we arrive to the real elephant in the room: Indian elephants. Even Game Freak seems to agree with me that this approach to gender differences is dumb, since they stopped doing new ones after Gen IV, reserving the concept for only the most extreme instances of sexual dimorphism like Meowstic and Frillish. If the angle of the slice were parallel with the lightening bolt, this wouldn’t be as aesthetically disastrous, but as-is it just looks so bad. See, female Raichu just has a piece of its tail inexplicably sliced off. I briefly mentioned this issue in Sneasel’s review, and while Sneasel’s situation is unarguably tragic, it almost feels worse in Raichu’s case. Because society, it’s also usually female pokemon that get the worse design. They’re usually either totally inconsequential or have one design being just slightly worse. In the majority of cases, these are subtle and often hard to notice. Gen IV introduced “gender differences”, with many pokemon having visual distinctions determined by whether they’re male or female. Unfortunately, only half of all Raichu actually have that tail.
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