So, to break people into Pokemon theory without making heads explode with talk of EVs, IVs, Egg Groups and all that malarkey. To begin with I’ll briefly explain some basic things before I break into more advanced stuff, so let’s start off easy with an overview of a Pokemon’s statistics!
Each and every Pokemon has a bunch of statistics that describe how much damage they can dish out and take:
HP: Hit Points, commonly referred to as Health. This is simply how much damage a Pokemon can take before it faints.
Attack: This determines how strong any physical attacks performed by the Pokemon are.
Defence: This determines how much damage physical attacks do against the Pokemon.
Sp. Attack: Special Attack, determines how strong any “special” attacks performed by the Pokemon are.
Sp. Defence: Special Defence, determines how much damage “special” attacks do against the Pokemon.
Speed: Simply determines how fast the Pokemon is.
At a glance it’s pretty obvious how these interact, Attack is compared to Defence, Sp. Attack is compared to Sp. Defence and Speed determines who goes first.
Obviously the actual formula for deciding damage is far more complicated than that, different moves (and items) affect various stats for example, giving multipliers or affecting the precedence of stats. However, one thing might not be immediately apparent. What’s a physical and what’s a special attack and how are they different?
Let’s Get Physical
Physical and Special attacks have been defined differently throughout the various generations of games so I’ll quickly cover that here!
Generation 1 – 3 – Original Red and Blue (GB) – FireRed and LeafGreen (GBA)
Typically a moves type determined whether it was physical or special. If a move was Normal, Fighting, Flying, Ground, Rock, Bug, Ghost, Poison or Steel it was considered physical.
Whereas if a move was Water, Grass, Fire, Ice, Electric, Psychic, Dragon or Dark it was considered special.
In general, physical moves had the Pokemon make contact and special moves used a projectile or impacted the enemy in some non-physical way (psychically for example).
Generation 4 – 5 – Diamond and Pearl (DS) – Black and White (DS)
From generation 4 onwards the physical or special nature of a move became move specific, so you could have Ice attacks that were physical and not just lump every Ice move as special.
You can determine if a move is physical or special by looking at the move in-game. If it has a blue water-ripple like icon then it’s special, if it has a red starburst like icon, it’s physical. A grey circular icon with a blob indicates a status-affecting move, neither physical or special.
Next Time
That’ll do for this entry, these are the essential parts that make up how a Pokemon deals and takes damage. Following up this trail of understanding, next time I’ll cover Pokemon Natures and Characteristics which completes the information visible to you in-game along with a brief introduction to the hidden world of Individual Values (IVs), Effort Values (EVs) and Base Stats.
From there we’ll start exploring how to use this information to our advantage and start looking into breeding some competitive Pokemon!
