While they might not be anyone's Most Hated Pokémon you cannot deny that they are the all time OBJECTIVELY worst and most weakest Pokémon to use
Prove me wrong.
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While they might not be anyone's Most Hated Pokmon you cannot deny that they are the all time OBJECTIVELY worst and most weakest Pokmon to us...
I like the funny letters
they let me spell slurs
>catch all the unowns
>take unowns to a special NPC
>NPC knows the secret of unown fusion
>F I R E unknowns fuse together to create a fire type unown pokemon
>repeat for all types, except psychic
>to get the special psychic type unown, you have to spell out common questions or exclamations, like "Why?" or "Wow!"
>question unowns have high defense
>exclamation unowns have high offense
That would be interesting but doesn't make Unown itself better.
>OBJECTIVELY worst and most weakest Pokémon to use
Fully evolved? Yeah. It's closest competition would be Luvdisc, who at least gets Water/Ice coverage.
Counting NFEs? Then no. Unown's respectable 72 base attack (relative to it's competition of "worst pokemon") and access to whatever type you need for coverage would let it outcompete the likes of Caterpie, at the very least.
Lucky it only has a special attack move or it can enjoy -4 speed
Obviously I was talking about its 72 special attack.
If we were to stretch this thought experiment to it's limits, say, continuing Smogon's tier system, eliminating ~50 pokemon at a time until we have a tier with only the bottom 50 pokemon around, would unown be the worst?
I don't think so. 72 sp. attack and indifference to choice lock makes it probably among the strongest in the tier, and access to any type would make it incredibly unpredictable and hard to wall.
Taking a deep dive into the worst of the worst, the true worst is obvious: Cosmog, with Splash and Teleport as it's only moves.
Outside of the intentionally useless Cosmog, then next worst would likely be Kricketot. Painfully minimalist movepool, 25 base attack, and among the (most likely) common type in this hypothetical tier, without having any utility like Poison Chance from Weedle, Stun Spore from Scatterbug, Sticky Webs from Blip Bug, or raw 70 base speed and 2 STAB moves of Combee.
Again, this is comparing Unown to the bottom of the Not Full Evolved mons, which is saying something.
Very thought out reply and agreed though i kinda meant i thought it would be impressive that a caterpie could stand up to a unown under the right conditions/utility of its use, In my case speed control for PvE
>strongest in the tier
I'm not even sure anon, it's extremely slow and frail. I wouldn't be surprised that things like Azurill or Shuppet could actually oneshot it. If it'd ever be troublesome, Disable would likely become relevant too.
>Counting NFEs? Then no. Unown's respectable 72 base attack (relative to it's competition of "worst pokemon") and access to whatever type you need for coverage would let it outcompete the likes of Caterpie, at the very least.
Unown can out-compete Cosmog and Cosmoem.
New Ability- Victory Symbol
Ability changes based on the words spelled by Unowns in your party
ATTACK - Crit rate 100%
DEFEND - Magic Guard
SPEED! - +1 Priority on Hidden Power
LUCKY? - Boosts 2 random stats by 4 stages upon entering the field
>VICTORY in unown
SOVL card
They appear very early on in Johto. Since their only move is Hidden Power, a move that can potentially be any type, an Unown can give your team a type coverage that you wouldn't otherwise have until MUCH later in the game.
Not all Pokemon are about strength
Some are just cool
One letter doesn't do much but a few sentences flying at you would be a threat.
This anon gets it
Also
>At the time of Gens I & II, Pokemon wasn’t “the pokemon franchise as we know it,” it was “yet another RPG”
>Battling is the main gameplay loop, but multiplayer/metagame battling was literally not possible until Gunpei Yokoi’s game boy let kids each have their own screen on a portable system to play on their own then kick each others’ ass in the playground; most of the pokemon were designed with “how will a single player interact with them in the campaign,” not the bonus feature of battling friends
>One-and-done shitmons were designed to fill all sorts of niches; it makes them more memorable and pads out the RPG aspect, but sometimes it also makes them specifically frustrating in a way which makes the overall Gotta Catch’em All goal more rewarding for hunting down a handful of rare mons you’ll literally never use in competitive
>Unown’s gimmick is having one for every letter, and its own separate unowndex; Hidden Power is neat and all gameplaywise on other mons but designwise Unown basically has it so that it’s not 100% useless but also not strong enough that catching 26 of the same pokemon takes you too many trips back to the pokemon center; face it, most players would have hated it more if they had to spend that long hunting for that ONE LAST LETTER when every Unown encounter was a serious threat
>Onix has shitty stats because it’s a first boss designed to seem harder than it is in order to teach the player fundamentals about defensive stats/bide and boost their confidence; dunsparce has shitty stats because its just my mom’s tsuchinoko cryptid, super rare but also just a fat dopey snake; wobuffet has a shitty movepool because it’s one of the first gimmick mons locked into such a hard gimmick as “it can only counter lol”
>Lorewise, Unown are like atoms, or the data encoding the universe; a single one by itself is basically powerless and meaningless, but a few trillions of them can rewrite the properties of physics
>Inspiration-wise, the Ruins of Alph are modeled after/set in the pokemon world’s Hiroshima; Unown are the shadows on people who were close enough to the blast to get nuked but far enough for walls to remain standing (that’s a real thing, look it up). In this way, Unown are basically the souls of nuke victims; it stands to reason that the Ruins of Alph should be creepy and solemn, and that Unown should be present in high numbers with “wow it’s fricking nothing” stats
I love that multiplayer pokemon battling has become the juggernaut of online gameplay that it has, but I feel like a lot of anons solely base their concept of the value of a given pokemon on how well it performs in the meta, when the series predates online multiplayer, and in particular when it needed to design lots of mons to fill very specific weak but memorable roles for RPG tropes, single-player tutorials, and different types of risk/cost/reward for the amount of time and effort tracking a given monster down.
Then again, we live in a culture which teaches us to primarily base the value we place on human lives on how productive a given individual is, as opposed to an inherent appreciation for people or animals being inherently valuable by virtue of being alive and deserving to live, so I can’t fault people for going “Nooooo you can’t just have shitty stats” when their whole lives they’ve been taught to consistently look for what someone has to “offer” to society
The problem is pokemon actively invites the idea that Pokemon's only value being battles by having 99% or the content being battles and the small remainder that isn't is either given no attention, butchered or completely erased. As well as TPC as a whole using strength and viability as a means of shilling. Hence everyone on Galar screaming about Leon's UNBEATABLE CHARIZARD every 5 seconds.
Not helping that the Gen 2 dex already catches shit for being weak due to: baby pokemon, having many unevolving pokemon, the Johto starters having a terminal case of unloved middle child syndrome being born to late to reap to get stupid amounts of buffs and privilege that Kanto's get while being born just early enough to miss out of the minmaxed stats or broken gimmicks at every other starter gets, and Gen 2 pokemon as a whole barely getting a chance to show off what strength they do have due Gen 1 stealing so much of the spotlight in Gen 2 and many of the strongest gen 2 pokemon being trade evos, rare, and a few even being trapped in a different region (a problem no other game can even have due a technicality of their postgame's not taking place in a different region . Having Unown's (arguably on of the most important Pokemon in the lore of Johto), being so weak (no even just slightly below average which would be undertandble seeing as its just a letter) but one of the weakest Pokemon to ever exist just seems like a slap in the face. Especially since later gens introduce Pokémon like Wishiwashi and Zygarde that have gimmicks that would have fit perfectly with Unown.
>No horde battles with Unown's spelling out funny words
This franchise is just full of missed opportunities isn't it?
No the franchise is full of laziness
they really should have made a evo if you box all 26 (ivs evs ect is taken from the last one you put in)like you collected 26 of these useless frickers might as well get rewarded with a broken psychic type evo
>26
you be forgetting my boys
fair enough it still could work because there is 30 slots in a box
that would be cool maybe have stones tablets to tell you what order the unowns have to be put in to achieve different forms but i feel like some forms would be underused or unused
I mean almost certainly but that's how it always be.
It would be interesting if Unown had a few different evolution formes based on a few different iconographic languages with different stats, like Egyptian, Sumerian, Chinese, Mayan, and Linear A?
these pokemon literally cannot attack without struggle
Right but they evolve
>cosmog isn't weaker than unown if it's not a cosmog
okay, but cosmog is weaker than unown
But Unown can't evolve, so that makes it worse
At least these things and Magikarp will eventually turn into something much better
Unknown doesn't even have that
Start a playthrough of Gen 2.
After Violet, run directly to the ruins of alph.
Catch an Unown.
Use it.
Thank me later
Nah I agree with you OP. Conpetitive is in another world on its own, and you cant really judge pokemon's qualities on that alone. BUT, If stuff like HGSS Chikorita, Ledian, Onix, FRLG Paras, etc are unusuable shitters, Unown is fundamentally broken. 1 move it ever learns, SFMA, and every stat other than both attack stats are sub 50. There's nothing about the letter pokemon to naturally expand upon in their moveset. I really don't think there's anything worse combat wise