Gen 6 Fairy Fiesta
So.
Last I spoke about Pokemon, we were discussing why the Generation 1 video games (Pokemon Red, Green, Blue, and Yellow Versions) were both a vital step in the existence of Pokemon but not the Holy Grail that diehard, old-school Pokemon fans say that that particular generation is. Some of the weirder, off-the-wall, and just messed up stuff in those games was a result of breaking new ground and establishing some ground rules for a pretty fun franchise, and a lot of the people saying that Pokemon was perfect in that state does the later games a disservice to pretend that Gen 1 was where Pokemon peaked.
Now, we’re going to be discussing something equally contentious but something that I think really wound up breathing some interesting dimensions into the series going forward — the introduction of the Fairy-type in the Generation 6 games, Pokemon X and Y. It was not the first time a new type has been introduced to the franchise, but the nature and timing of this change had huge, positive ramifications for the series going forward.
This is sort of a companion to the Gen 1 article in that we are going to be looking at the design angles in Pokemon that built up & necessitated the Fairy-type’s introduction. As the Gen 1 article was, this isn’t intended to be a teardown of Pokemon as a franchise. In fact I’m making a point of using this article to try and make sure that I’m properly addressing why this works from a more positive perspective than the last one.
Still going to be making a bunch of jokes though! Wouldn’t be a Sean article without those.
Much like the last article, I’ll be providing some Pokemon fundamentals for people who aren’t familiar with the series, and my focus is mostly on the casual & single-player experience, not so much the competitive scene — so if you have talking points that refute any of my observations here, I’d rather you not include the competitive meta. Some of this information may seem redundant if you’re already deeply into Pokemon, but I’d rather give everyone an equal understanding of issues over assuming everyone knows what I’m talking about already.
The information I use comes from cross-references of Generations 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 information from Bulbapedia and Smogon, and there will be spoilers for these games, so please be aware of that.
For future clarity, when I refer to a particular generation of games, the breakdown is as follows:
Gen 2: Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal
Gen 3: Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald and FireRed/LeafGreen
Gen 4: Pokemon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum and HeartGold/SoulSilver
Gen 5: Pokemon Black/White and Black 2/White 2
Gen 6: Pokemon X/Y, Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire, Sun/Moon, and Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon
Prologue) So What’s This Type Stuff Anyway?
Generation 1 of Pokemon introduced 15 Types to the franchise: Normal, Fighting, Flying, Ground, Rock, Bug, Ghost, Poison, Fire, Water, Grass, Ice, Electric, Psychic, and Dragon. All Pokemon can have up to two innate associations with each type. Gen 2 added the Dark and Steel-types in, but those changes and what they were a response to are basically worth their own article so we won’t discuss them too deeply here.
Pokemon can know and use up to 4 individual moves for battles. Each move has an assigned type from the ones above, though Pokemon don’t have to share a type with a move in order to use it. Each type has specific strengths and weaknesses against other types (e.g., Fire beats Grass, Grass beats Water, Water beats Fire), causing double damage if you hit a Pokemon with a type it’s weak against and half damage if you hit a Pokemon with a type it’s strong against, with further modifications depending on what the attacked Pokemon’s second type is (if it has one). Moves also get a boost in damage when used by a Pokemon of a matching type (Ember used by a Fire-type, Bubble used by a Water-type, etc), known as the STAB (Same-Type Attack Bonus).
Now, the primary reason for the introduction of the Fairy-type is a response to how much stronger Dragon-type Pokemon became after Gen 1, which accounts for about a decade and change in the games and how they play. We’ll discuss two of the most salient points from that time before we talk about how Fairies shook things up.
1) Dragon-types got hella buffed after Gen 1.
Dragon-types were powerful but underwhelming in Gen 1 for many reasons: the simplest summation is that they only had one very difficult line of Pokemon to get (Dratini, Dragonair, Dragonite) with a severe weakness to the only type (Ice) that could really damage Dragons in Gen 1. Dragons also had literally one move of their own type, and it didn’t get STAB at all (and didn’t even do super-effective damage to other Dragon types like Dragon-type moves were intended to). Each generation after Gen 1 gradually improved the practicality of the type in various ways, though, and it was kind of like kicking a snowball downhill as time went on.
First, the Dragon-type gained 12 new moves over the course of Gens 2 through 5, 10 of which could be learned by a broad variety of Dragon-types through various means. Of those 12 moves that did damage, none of them had a base strength under 40, making them moderately dangerous at worst up to Completely Devastating when thrown at an enemy, especially when factoring STAB.
New Dragon Pokemon also took the stage throughout the generations: some, like Kingdra, used an incredible type pairing to remove the Ice-type move weaknesses that check most other Dragon-types. Others, such as Salamence, Flygon, Haxorus, Hydreigon, and Garchomp (and there’s a story about Garchomp, but we’ll get to that later) had extremely flexible movesets and/or high enough stats to pose a threat to most Pokemon, even with severe weaknesses to Ice-type moves still intact. This only got more noticeable as many Legendary Pokemon — explicitly powerful, and extremely difficult to catch — also wound up with Dragon-type as part of their primary or secondary types, resulting in skewing the balance of power toward dragons as a whole.
The advent of Abilities in Generation 3, specialized traits unique to specific species of Pokemon, only helped this along, as some of these Pokemon gained or were given some troublesome ones to contend with. Garchomp, for instance, could come with an Ability that made it more evasive in sandstorm weather conditions (which can be set up fairly easily mid-battle), while Gen 1’s Dragonite gained an immunity to being flinched out of its attacks.
Most notably, some Legendary Dragon-type Pokemon chopped and screwed some of these advantages together, mixing statistical supremacy with even more drastic power differentials: Palkia, for instance, retained Kingdra’s typing but with a bigger movepool as well as an Ability that forces enemy Pokemon to burn more PP on their attacks, while Rayquaza is an offensive powerhouse akin to Salamence that negates all weather effects as long as it’s on the field, drastically affecting some strategies.
Where this REALLY took off at running speed was one of the most critical system changes in all of Pokemon — the Physical/Special split of Generation 4.
Before this split, damaging moves that a Pokemon could use had their damage calculated by one of two statistics: Attack (for Normal, Fighting, Flying, Ground, Rock, Bug, and Steel) or Special Attack (Ghost, Poison, Fire, Water, Grass, Ice, Electric, Psychic, Dark, and Dragon moves). However, a Pokemon’s stats weren’t always suited to the moves it could learn — for instance, Hitmonchan was famous for learning moves poorly suited for its terribad Special Attack stat, like Thunderpunch. The Physical/Special split solved this problem by having each individual move make its own distinction as to whether it was a Physical move (calculate damage by Attack), Special move (calculate damage by Special Attack), or a Status move (something supportive, like boosting Attack, Defense, or attempting to put an enemy to sleep, etc.).
This split turned Dragon-types, especially Attack-favoring ones, into a tour de force; powerful Dragon-type moves like Outrage and Dragon Claw were now far better suited to Attack-oriented Pokemon than before, letting them hit Pokemon with terrible Defensive stats a lot more easily with more STAB to back up their power, and with the hard balance that many Dragon types had toward exceptional stats overall to complement their rarity…this opened up some avenues for some bruisers to come out swinging.
In Gen 4, the most infamous beneficiary of this change was Garchomp. Already a fast and strong Dragon-type by nature, the Physical/Special split gave Garchomp the ability to run a terrifying movepool of Physical attacks of varying types without worrying about its Special Attack, capitalizing off of its Attack and Speed stats for maximum carnage and being able to boost its Attack and Speed even *further* with the use of the move Dragon Dance. Anyone that remembers Gen 4 will shiver at the sound of a certain sequence of piano notes because it was the prelude of your untimely demise being imminent, repeated, and drawn out.
This also winds up coinciding with another equally important note:
2) Direct counters to Dragon-types became increasingly difficult to field against Dragon-types as Dragon-types got stronger.
As I noted earlier, Dragon-types are weak to Ice-types, and certain Dragon Pokemon have particularly striking weaknesses to Ice-types (Dragonite, Salamence, Flygon, Rayquaza, and even Garchomp all share a 4x weakness to Ice-type moves, because their secondary types are *also* weak to Ice-type moves). However, Ice-type Pokemon are generally extremely fragile, not just statistically but in terms of typing. They’re weak to Fire, Fighting, Rock, and Steel-type moves, tend to have middling Speed stats, are oftentimes paired with types that double their natural weaknesses or open them up to other common ones, and usually have average or low Defense and/or Special Defense stats.
Most Dragon-types can easily learn “coverage moves” (moves that can be used to defeat Pokemon that would otherwise hold the advantage) from Ice-type’s major weaknesses, especially Fire-type moves, and while non-Ice type Pokemon can also learn Ice-type moves, Dragon-types’ natural power scaling made it difficult for these non-Ice-type Ice-type users to actually stay the course, especially because these non-Ice types don’t get STAB for using Ice-type moves.
The Physical/Special split exacerbated this issue in certain ways, too, as it became easier to hit at the weaker defensive sides of specific Ice-type Pokemon. Ice-type Pokemon didn’t become completely obsolete per se as a result of this, but at the same time running Ice-type Pokemon directly against a Dragon became a riskier proposition to take in as a critical anti-Dragon measure.
This also dovetailed with the fact that the only other direct counter to Dragons aside from Ice-type Pokemon or Ice-type moves…were Dragon-types or Dragon-type moves. Though certainly doable, gambling on a Dragon-type to beat a Dragon-type was a lot like playing tag with rockets — fast, exciting, and likely to end in a mess for at least one of the parties involved. Using Dragon-type moves with non-Dragon type Pokemon carried the same risk as Ice-type moves on non-Ice-types: high, but not maximized, damage potential.
Defensively, not many Pokemon resisted Dragon-type moves either. Only Steel-types could pull it off, and pretty much every other type took normal damage from Dragon-type moves unless they also had a Steel subtype, making it fairly easy for pure force from Dragon-types to overpower non-Steel-types in most situations and leaving few options to wall out Dragon-type moves.
Interlude) The Part Where Fairy-Types Actually Show Up
So, while it isn’t the case that Dragons were impossible to counter (they weren’t), the best options for doing so carried a bit more risk because they were occupying a similar but less pronounced niche as Psychic-types did in Gen 1 of Pokemon: reasonable direct counters were difficult to pull off safely because of amazing coverage for a Dragon-type defender and the overall strength of the type based solely on stats.
Thus, when the Fairy type was introduced in Gen 6, it was primarily set up as a direct counter to the Dragon type in order to answer this problem. We’ll talk specific strengths and weaknesses in the next two sections, but know for now that the following adjustments happened in-game, similarly to the Gen 2 introduction of Dark and Steel types:
- New Fairy-type Pokemon (mono-type and dual-type) and Fairy-type moves were added to the game.
- Select older Pokemon species were either partially or completely reclassified as Fairy-types, and some moves were reclassified as Fairy-type moves.
This wasn’t without its share of controversy, as people thought that just dumping a new type in was done primarily without considering its effects on the type ecosystem, and that Fairy-types in turn became extremely overpowered and just became “another set of Dragon-types” — but this take doesn’t consider the two major factors in play with Fairy-type’s introduction.
So let’s talk about the 3rd and 4th scoops in our overall discussion, the flavors of “Fairy types weren’t that bad actually”.
3) Fairy-typing gave specific Pokemon a resurgence or a prominent boost.
One of the things Pokemon struggles with as the games go on is the sheer amount of extant species in the game. As of Pokemon Sword and Shield, there are 898 Pokemon in existence, and oftentimes even if one limits their competitive attempts to the single-player postgame facilities (Battle Tower, Battle Frontier, etc), the strengths and weaknesses of certain Pokemon types still play out as they do in the normal game, with the added difficulty of contending with the peak of the game’s difficulty.
Because of this, it’s inevitable that many, many individual species dropped off the face of the earth aside from novelty purposes, even playing casually. Some Pokemon just…weren’t good. And while it was kind of inevitable given the scale of the Pokemon universe, it’s never fun to have a Pokemon that’s completely “useless” when you’re battling to win the toughest parts of the game.
Reclassifying some Pokemon as Fairy-types, though, completely turned this on its head, as when Fairy-types were introduced, they gained a complete immunity to Dragon-type moves (disregarding any interactions from dual-typing) and Fairy-type moves do double damage to Dragon-type Pokemon (again, disregarding any interactions from dual-typing).
Take, for example, Azumarill, the final evolution of the Pokemon Marill. While cute, fun, and oftentimes a great pick when you needed a Water-type early on in Gen 2, Azumarill itself was often and later vastly outpaced by other Water-type Pokemon for one reason or another (for example, Kingdra and Gyarados). Even when Marill gained a baby form (and thus a chance to learn some more moves and slightly tailor its raising early on), and Marill gained the defensive Ability Thick Fat to reduce Fire and Ice-type damage (and later, could potentially instead get the offensive ability Huge Power to double its Attack power), Azumarill wasn’t really useful in any meaningful way against certain challenges.
Then, Gen 6 arrived, and Azurill, Marill, and Azumarill all gained a Fairy-type sub-type. Addtionally, Marill and Azumarill gained access to the Physical Fairy-type move Play Rough, which has a base 90 power rating on a scale where 100 and over is reserved for moves that usually deal enough damage to knock out their targets in one hit or come damn close.
I invite you, dear reader, to look at Huge Power’s description again. Imagine, if you will, what an Azumarill, despite Attack being a moderately low stat for it in most cases, can now do to Dragon-types when given the chance to hit them with Play Rough while using a doubled Attack stat, plus the power boost from STAB.
Consider also the Steel-type Pokemon Mawile, which gained a Fairy subtype in Gen 6. Steel-types, when the Fairy-type was introduced, lost their resistance to Dragon-type moves, which would have normally ruined Mawile’s survivability against them. However, it not only gained outright immunity to Dragon-type moves thanks to its Fairy typing, but it also picked up Play Rough (as well as a much, MUCH higher Attack power to utilize with it than Marill’s line), and also has the new Gen 6 mechanic of Mega Evolution to utilize for a temporary power increase turning it into a potent check against Dragons and other Fairies. Prior to these changes, Mawile, while not completely useless, was not a firm pick on a lot of teams, but with both its typings and the ability to have STAB-boosted Play Rough in its movelist, Mawile’s viability even in casual single-player settings jumped up dramatically.
This even extends back to Gen 1 Pokemon lines like Clefairy and Jigglypuff; though somewhat versatile, their typing wasn’t anything special on its own, but as Fairy-types they immediately gained presence on anti-Dragon teams, especially with Fairy-type moves like Moonblast available to them with Gen 6’s release that took advantage of their stronger Special Attacking stats.
Now, our final point of call is a really important one, because it also helps show where Fairy-types getting introduced didn’t just wreck the typing scales but also re-leveled them a bit.
4) Fairy-typing gave specific Types a resurgence as well.
You may notice that in the Interlude section up there I didn’t say much about the actual weakpoints of the Fairy-type, right? That’s because this section’s going to cover all of that, specifically the fact that Fairy-types are weak to Steel and Poison-type Pokemon and that Fairy-type moves only do half damage to Steel and Poison-type Pokemon (excluding any dual-type interactions).
Now, Steel-types were generally in the bucket of “really strong defensively and saw a fair bit of use, but didn’t get to flex much offensively” for a long time: prior to Gen 6, pure Steel-types took half damage from every type of move in the game, with the exception of Fire, Fighting, and Ground moves being super effective and Poison-type moves being completely nullified. The only types that took double damage from Steel-type moves, though, were Ice and Rock-types.
Steel-types getting to be the primary offensive and defensive line against Fairy-types is important because it keeps the thematic trend of the Steel-type being the strongest defensive pick you can scout for a team, and lets you basically measure twice and cut once as far as team-building goes; you now have a tank that can also pinch hit against Fairy-types while also maintaining a strong defensive option against most options in the game. This is especially evident with, again, Mawile; as a Steel/Fairy-type Pokemon, now it is a potent check to other Fairy-types too in addition to Dragon-types.
As for Poison-types, they’d gradually been getting stronger and stronger from their lackluster showings in the early games. At first they mostly had indirect damage moves with few power hits, only really had super-effective damage against Grass-types, and had limited type pairings and representations, primarily paired with the Bug type and very vaguely with the Water and Ghost types. Over time, though, Poison-types gained stronger and more varied Pokemon to represent them, like Drapion, and began to see an uptick in good direct damage moves such as Sludge Bomb, Poison Jab, Cross Poison, Poison Fang, and Poison Tail, many of which benefited from the Physical/Special split too.
All of this on top of Poison-types becoming the other major check to Fairies positioned them toward having a stronger, more favorable aggressive presence in the meta going forward. Being that Dragon-type Pokemon were, and still are, relatively powerful despite Fairy-types being a very dangerous threat, some teams inevitably had room for a Fairy-type set aside, allowing Poison-types in turn to find their niche and strike hard against teams weighted toward using the Fairy-type as their anti-Dragon strategy.
Now, the introduction of Fairy-types was not perfect — for example, Mega Mawile that I was alluding to earlier? Hilariously, frighteningly busted in most type matchups in Gen 6 without very deliberate planning around it — but as is often the case, no one really expects the first go at something to be perfect, and Gen 6 introducing Fairy-types in the first games of its generation, X and Y, allowed future games and even the current Generation 7 of Let’s Go Pikachu/Eevee and Pokemon Sword/Shield to further iron out those issues in turn to further refine the Fairy type and their niche in the Pokemon ecosystem.
The last time I ended a Pokemon article, I was talking about how iteration is the heart of game design, and how Generation 1 was the bedrock that many of the other games have built on and reassessed as the series has continued. I also spoke about how Gen 1 being that bedrock means that it’s unfair, perhaps even insulting, to suggest that the start of Pokemon was its best point because it leaves no room to appreciate the growth, no room to make changes.
I end this article now by saying that Generation 6 is one of the strongest proofs of how good and natural that process of iteration is, in two ways — one, that Pokemon’s own iterative improvements gave it the longevity that ensured that there would even be 5 generations prior to Gen 6, and two, that not even the most established franchises can or should be afraid to change themselves if the developers feel it’s necessary.
There’s no reason (in most cases, anyway — we’re deliberately not examining work that decides to just be terrible on principle w/no critical thought) to be afraid of a game choosing to change its expression in order to shape its experiences in the way that designers intend. It will not be perfect, not the first time. And you do not have to like the changes — it is OK if they make you to decide to move on. But rather than assuming the changes the result of incompetence, think of them as the growth of the creators in tandem with the growth of the game.
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