Thought you knew a lot about Pokemon? After visiting Zabba 2's 'Did you know?' thread on our Pokemon forum you may be forced to think again. This amazing thread is a mine of information for Pokemon fans and is packed with hundreds of interesting facts.
With over 3,200 posts to read through, there's a lot to get through so Zabba has picked the very best Pokemon facts from the thread to share with you.
1. Who Is Your Rival?
After many years of speculation, an online event for HeartGold and SoulSilver revealed that your red-headed rival is in fact the estranged son of Giovanni, the infamous leader of Team Rocket.
In Pokemon Red and Blue, a woman standing outside Rock Tunnel complains that the Pokemon are too chunky, and wishes there was a "pink one with a floral pattern". Fast forward a whole twelve years later and the Generation V Pokemon Munna fits that exact description. Coincidence? It would seem so at first, but that's not all.
3. Spinda's Spots
Each time you encounter the Pokemon Spinda, you may have noticed that the spots on each one are different. What you may not know is that there's actually a total of 4,294,967,296 unique spot patterns! This is because of something called a Personality Value. This hidden 32-digit number that all Pokemon have is generated when a Pokemon first appears, but in Spinda's case it also calculates the co-ordinates and size of each of its four spots.
4. Gotta Catch 'Em All
The slogan "Gotta catch 'em all" has not actually been used on the game boxes since Gold, Silver and Crystal! It was dropped from Ruby and Sapphire onwards.
Each Pokemon region is based on real life regions. This is fairly common knowledge, but what people may not know is that the connection to real-life locations goes a bit deeper. For example, Saffron City is considered Kanto's largest city and centre of commerce according to its description in the earlier Pokemon games. If Kanto was mapped on to the real-life Kanto on which it is based, Saffron City lies roughly where Tokyo is.
pfft. I knew all that already.
As for the "Silver being Giovanni's son", in FireRed/LeafGreen, some Rocket dude says "Wow, you're powerful, are you the boss's son? No, wait, you can't be, he has red hair." or something like that, OBVIOUSLY SILVER.
And in HeartGold/SoulSilver, after you get the GAME Celebi, you actually see Silver shout at Giovanni and call him "Dad". Yeah, a real secret.
Considering you are the Oracle Of Pokemon, I'm not surprised that you know all these facts.
That Munna thing is amazing! But also quite creepy in a way.
Amazing just how much effort goes into the games, just a shame that most people will never notice it.
This article needs to be in the next issue of the mag, the Pokémon section of the forum needs more attention :D
Yeah, good point.
Still, while the Rotom/Pulseman and Munna facts may be not well known, the "Gotta Catch 'em All", and Hitmonlee/chan ones are just plain obvious. Some newer players may not have even heard of "Gotta Catch 'em All", the last time I ever heard it used officially was on the TV advert for Platinum. (If there's some newer use, I've probably forgotten it.)
As for the real life regions, if you look at Japan in an atlas, Sinnoh is an exact replica of Hokkaido, down to Mt. Coronet, and Hoenn is some other island on the west, but rotated 90 degrees clockwise.
OracleOfPokemon, just because like me you know a lot about pokemon, it is still interesting for a lot of people, and a lot of effort has obviously gone into this article by Tom, so why dont you think twice before knocking his work?
The Generation 4 Pokemon games ran on a lower frame-rate than the Generation 3 ones.
good article. especially for passing the time.
they are good facts, though i think the munna one is just a coincedence.
Wow, You Learn Something New Every Day. I Already Knew About The Pokerus And Rival Son Thing But Thats Quite Intresting...
These are really cool! Can't believe pokerus is so rare feel quite privileged to have got it!!
wow, intresting facts, I didn't know about Giovanni's son but the others are more inside jokes between the developers.
that was really interesting. That stuff about the locations was amazing.
I have the pokerus in black and white! i didn't realise it was that rare though! i feel very lucky. I have never found a shiny pokemon but i got pokerus! i have been using it for ev training and have given it to a fair few of my pokemon and have stored it in the pc, so it isn't wasted on me! I have shared it too, by trading infected pokemon.
Random, but oh well. Me and my mates now refer to each other exclusively as Pokémon. I am "Rory the Red Gyarados." I got a pretty good deal- we named one guy Caterpie xD
Anyway, these were actually quite interesting. Despite being a long time fan of the series, many of these were news to me!
guys, go on the link to the forum above. it literally has 3000 comments. and the majority of them are interesting. 129 pages... dear god, how did you trawl through this stuff?
some really interesting pokemon facts here that i never knew about i give kudos to the people who managed to find them out
So more than an entire year after 'Did you know?' was created, it gets a feature. Still, better late than never.
I knew about some of these like Silver being Giovanni's son but there's some interesting facts there. I think the munna one might just be a coincidence though.
Munna one might be the fact they decided to actually make a Pokemon like that after talking about it, but it was still the most interesting fact to me. Made me go all gooey thinking about the old monocrome GameBoy screen!
I love that the developers have added little details like this in cause it's allways the small details that turn a great game into a fantastic game
I knew like, 8 of those.
"The Gotta Catch 'em all!" one is one of the many giveaways that my Sapphire is fake. Never buy from eBay.