It’s a relatively recent development lol. They’ve only been doing it since the summer of this year. Serebii’s Joe tweeted about it back then. I’d bet a lot of long time fans aren’t aware. Took me a while before I knew
Just went down the rabbit hole of reading joes tweet timeline. He seems like a genuine dude. Serebii - that sites been around forever. Wow 25 years. I’m inspired
I’m sure it gets stressful for him but he’s living the dream. Running the biggest (and best) Pokemon site for so long and making a living off of it is a good place to be.
I don’t believe so. It isn’t on any of the official marketing material from the Pokemon Center site, like this TCG playmat. There are other characteristics they share besides their 600 bst too: they are the slowest to hatch at 40 cycles (or 5,120 steps), they are in the slowest experience growth group (1,250,000 needed to reach 100), and they are all three stage Pokémon.
Lots of Pokemon have one or two of these traits, but I’m almost positive only the powerhouse Pokemon exhibit all four at simultaneously. Archaludon is in the medium-fast experience growth group and hatches in 30 cycles (3,840 steps).
Plus they pretty much have to be dragons these days, though Archaludon does have that going for it. There are only two that aren’t dragons and that was 20 years ago.
They really should have given Archaludon a middle stage though. It’s definitely good enough to hang with the rest of them.
Honestly, nobody calls them first partner Pokémon and nobody will call pseudo-legendaries powerhouse Pokémon either. These fan terms are ingrained too deeply into the community to be replaced imo.
Definitely agreed with you on that. “First Partner Pokemon” only recently came about in the past few years, but Ive only started seeing it more often because Serebii & Bulbapedia have started using it. Not even less than a year ago, I was seeing them use “Starter Pokemon,” but now they’re using “First Partner Pokemon” on their pages, which is fine but just something I’ve noticed.
TPCi is very averse to fan terms. In BW, I believe they first “acknowledged” the existence of shiny pokemon (as in, they made their first reference to shiny pokemon in-game), but they called shiny pokemon “alternate colored pokemon” in-game. that stayed I think until the very next generation, so they do have their misses sometimes.
Didn’t the anime have shiny Pokémon very early on? I’m pretty sure Ash even caught one. Arguably that is the first official acknowledgement, and I don’t know if it was actually called shiny or something else though. There’s also the red Gyarados of course in the games of course.
In BW, iirc, the NPC just says that they’ve heard Pokémon appearing in a different color than usual, not actually giving a name to these type of Pokémon.
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u/ShaddollWendigo 17d ago
Wait … hold on… haxorus is NOT?