As a whole, video game logic is spurious at best. Even the most realistic of video games don’t hold up all that well to scrutiny in that regard. There are some genres that play faster and looser with logic than others, and few require more suspension of disbelief than role-playing games. Couple that with a role-playing game about a world full of literally hundreds of unique magical monsters that can each be captured– largely by children– in balls no bigger than a pineapple, and any semblance of logic goes completely off the rails.
As the Pokémon franchise has gradually expanded from just a pair of Game Boy games and a half-hour anime series to being a massive multimedia franchise encompassing dozens of games, multiple TV shows, a whole series of feature-length movies, and more, the things about that universe that are completely absurd have increased at the same rate. While many of the logic holes in Pokémon can be applied to video games and anime in general, the franchise certainly has its fair share of head-scratching elements that couldn’t be found anywhere else.
Whether you’ve remained an avid fan since the ’90s or have kind of jumped in and out over the years, you’ll no doubt shed a few tears laughing at this collection of memes that call out the many, many inconsistencies in the logic of the Pokémon universe.
Here are 25 Memes That Show Pokémon Makes No Sense.
Can’t I have just a little head start?
Let’s be clear here: Professor Oak has helped Ash– and by proxy, Pokémon players– out a ton over the years, since his appearance in the original Pokémon Blue and Pokémon Red games for Game Boy. He generally serves as both a gameplay guide as well as someone who helps out trainers within the context of the world of the games/shows/movies, giving advice, offering hints, and just generally being there for trainers/players whenever they need him.
Maybe it’s ungrateful to be so hard on Professor Oak for the way he forces us to start the game, with a Pokédex that is completely empty. After all, you don’t become a great trainer without putting in the work. Still, the game sets things up so that Professor Oak is giving Ash his own personal Pokédex, and Professor Oak’s Pokédex should basically be the Encyclopedia Britannica– or Wikipedia for those too young to understand the previous reference– of the Pokémon world and have all of the info on all of the creatures. Since it doesn’t, we can only be led to believe that Professor Oak specifically clears out his Pokédex before giving it to Ash, which seems like an unnecessarily severe way to make Ash start earning his way.
Just because Ash has the information on all the creatures doesn’t mean he can’t still gain the experience of actually catching and trainer them himself. Let us crawl before you force us to walk, Professor.
Riddle Me This
In Pokémon Emerald, there is an infamous scene where the player is asked a question and is given the option to respond with either “yes” or “no.” It is a setup that has appeared literally hundreds of different video games. Why is it so special in this case? Because you aren’t being asked a yes or no question.
After suffering an injury, your character is only able to answer questions with either a “yes” or a “no,” no matter the question. We aren’t sure what unique kind of brain injury one can suffer that limits their question-answering abilities to just “yes” and “no” without the option to say “I don’t know” or something to that effect, but whatever.
What’s especially silly about the scene in question is that the guy asking where you came from thinks he’s hilarious and gives a joke answer to whatever you say.
Tell him “yes,” and he replies “Yes Town? I’ve never heard of a place like that.” Say no, and he says, “No? That doesn’t make any sense. You have to come from somewhere.” Then makes some crack about us coming from the bottom of the sea. Huh?
You are super funny, dude. Way to mock a person who just suffered a serious injury, which is pretty obvious given that person’s inability to answer your question in a way that makes any sense at all.
If I Only Had A Brain
It boggles the mind that the folks behind the Pokémon franchise have now come up with over 800 different creatures (including evolutions). Sure, they aren’t all winners from a design or creativity standpoint– we’re looking at you, Trubbish, Binacle, Jynx, and Klefki– but there is no denying that they have thus far succeeded in creating what may very well be the largest collection of made-up creatures in any single fictional world, ever.
Of course, to say that all Pokémon are 100% invented might not be entirely accurate, as many are just some sort of appropriation of a common character archetype, pre-existing animal, or something else from the real world. For instance, the aforementioned Kleki is, embarrassingly, a tiny little creature on a literal key ring. There are many Pokémon that are little more than Poké-ized version of a real-life animal or object, or are hybrids of multiple real-life things. Such is the case with Cacturne, who is essentially a cactus mixed with a scarecrow.
What is funny about the fact that Cacturne is modeled after a scarecrow is that he is weak against flying creatures, of all things. A scarecrow’s entire job is to scare off birds– so if anything, Cacturne should be the bane of flying creatures’ existences. To be fair, even though scarecrows are supposed to intimidate birds, doesn’t mean they are actually capable of taking any on. Maybe scarecrows are just the weak but tough-talking bullies of the bird world.
The brightest blackout ever
As we’re going to end up addressing more than once in this list, the Pokémon games are full of ridiculous and completely arbitrary barriers that are designed to stop you from progressing farther into the world than the game has decided it is ready for you to see yet. To be fair, that annoying trope is far from exclusive to Pokémon, with entire genres of games being built around that very notion– a whole category of titles commonly called “Metroidvania” games are all about hitting artificial roadblocks that require you to go back and find the necessary switch, key, power-up, or defeated boss necessary to topple said roadblock.
Like many RPGSs, the barriers in Pokémon are sometimes so absurd that they completely take you out of the game.
It just comes off as lazy when the designers of a game can’t come up with a more convincing way to block your progress than tall grass or elevated terrain that your character should just be able to step up onto. This meme demonstrates one such seemingly nonexistent impasse, with you being informed that you are unable to proceed due to a supposed blackout– even though much of the area behind that character appears to be a well-lit street lined with windows with light emanating from them. If you can’t trust a man in a vest and hard hat, who can you trust?
Kratos Just Got A Little Less Impressive
The whole conceit of Pokémon is “Gotta Catch ‘Em All,” with the underlying goal of each game being to catch every creature there is to catch in said game– and then link up with your friend who bought the corresponding opposite-color version and trade for the ones unique to his game, - assuming, of course, you didn’t just buy both games yourself. Nobody would ever do that, right? Ahem.
Anyway, what the people who design and come up with the origins and abilities for each individual Pokémon need to keep in mind is that every creature may ultimately be captured by Ash or some other juvenile trainer.
Things start to get a little bit dicey from a logic perspective when they start creating Pokémon that are essentially gods, as is the case with Arceus who made his debut as an “Event” character in Pokémon Diamond/Pearl.
Arceus is described as possibly being the creature who created the entire Pokémon universe, which basically makes him a god. Te fact that he is still able to be captured be a mere mortal child ends up feeling pretty ridiculous. It also means that Kratos, protagonist of the PlayStation God of War series, with his destruction of many gods over the course of his games, had to work entirely too hard to best a deity when Ash has the ability to just capture one in a device that fits in the palm of his hand and then make said deity do his bidding.
How to name your dragon
We recently did another article about Pokémon and made an off-handed remark about Charizard being a dragon, and were corrected in the comments by a fan who very constructively pointed out that Charizard is not, in fact, a dragon. He is a flying, lizard-like creature with fire attacks, and is a dragon in his Mega Charizard X form– but yet, Charizard himself is not technically considered a dragon type even though he checks pretty much every box that would be on an “Am I a dragon?” checklist.
As it turns out, the world of Pokémon is filled with a number of creatures who fly, attack with fire, and have a lizardlike appearance but aren’t officially considered dragons. It wouldn’t be so weird if dragons just didn’t exist in the world of Pokémon– that would make sense. But there is an official “dragon type” in Pokémon– as was mentioned, Mega Charizard X is one– it’s just not always what you would imagine a dragon to look like. That would make entirely too much sense, after all.
If you were to look at the picture above and had to identify what was a dragon and what wasn’t, you’d likely be wrong on all of them. The only one that is a dragon, is the one that looks the least like a dragon. We’re just as confused as you are, Jackie.
Well, it is a pretty special bike…
Much has been made about Ash’s bike in Pokémon, and we could’ve probably done an entire list just of memes about the bike. Many of them focus on the fact that his bike can somehow magically fit into his bag, while others mock the fact that you are forbidden from riding bikes indoors because it is deemed too dangerous– but then you can also ride your bike up and down stairs and through certain types of water.
We decided to go a different way with our representation of the Pokémon bike on this list. Another joke about the bike is how outrageously expensive it is as compared to other items in the game, basically costing the equivalent of a million dollars. At that point, it almost makes more sense to just pay with a basket full of gold than trying to amass that many “pokedollars.” Especially since, as we all know, gold is just lying around everyone in video games and isn’t at all difficult to gather in large numbers.
A bike that can easily fit in a backpack– a backpack that also contains a fishing pole– would definitely be worth paying a little extra money for.
Maybe not a million bucks, but an armful of gold nuggets? Sure, why not.
Masters of Disguise
Disguises in fiction are weird. For example, all Superman needs to do is put on a pair of glasses and wear regular human clothing and suddenly everyone believes he is a completely different person named Clark Kent. Recently, the Netflix adaptation of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events sees Neil Patrick Harris’ Lemony Snicket fool everyone– except for the Baudelaire orphans, that is– into not realizing who he is with completely lazy costumes that barely hide his identity.
When you really unpack it, though, there is a logical reason why disguised characters are never fully disguised: because the audience needs to know who they are. The disguises are typically only for the other characters, and seldom are we, the viewer/player/etc also supposed to be fooled by said disguise. The alternative would be to have a character disguised so well that even we don’t recognize them, and there would have to be some kind of onscreen text or voice over narration cluing us in - which is a far less elegant solution than half-baked disguises.
That having been said, Team Rocket’s disguises in Pokémon are a joke. It’s tough to suspend our disbelief that nobody recognizes tally, bright purple-haired Jessie just because she puts on a hat and fake mustache. Although, if you ask us, she pulls off a mustache much more convincingly than James does.
Stealth +100
Bottom line: a character in a video game isn’t going to become “aware” of your presence until the game wants the character to do so. Games specifically designed to be “stealth games”– like your Metal Gear Solids and your Splinter Cells– not withstanding, it doesn’t matter how much of a ruckus you make on your path to a certain NPC. They aren’t going to know you’re there until it is officially time for them to know you are there.
This is an especially strange phenomenon in games that involve you doing battle with other characters in the game. There is never the vibe as you’re coming into a new area that people are looking at you like, “Hey, isn’t that the guy we heard about that has been massacring hundreds of monsters across the countryside? Maybe we shouldn’t go up and warmly greet him, ask him if he’s willing to go find our daughter’s lost kitty cat, and then let him sleep in our spare bedroom.”
In the world of Pokémon, the people would probably eventually become desensitized to monster battling since it is apparently happening all around them at all times.
Still, there is only so much that a person can tune out– and a battle that involves a giant monster causing a literal earthquake should make a person at least glance over their shoulder at the source of it.
Just deserts
Having a volleyball-sized contraption that is capable of holding hundreds of creatures ready to do your bidding should offer you a lot of special advantages. Flying Pokémon should be able to take you airborne. Fire Pokémon should be able to help you start a fire in the wilderness. Electric Pokémon should be able to help you jolt a malfunctioning electric device. Water Pokémon should be able to give you a freaking sip when you’re dehydrated in the middle of the desert!
Apparently, though, all trainers ever really think to do with their Pokémon is have them fight. Not that we advocate for animals being forced into servitude, but it’s hard to imagine having access to sentient animals that can understand basic commands and not live a Flinstones-esque life of having creatures that serve as dishwashers, vacuums, garbage disposals, lawnmowers, babysitters, and so on. Honestly, it would be less cruel to them than forcing them to fight all the time - and would be better on the environment because you are using less electricity and waste.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Forget about using Pokémon to do your chores or to help you be lazy. For it not occur to you, or anyone in your group, to summon a water Pokémon and hydrate before passing out from heat exhaustion is just a lack of basic common sense.
It’s mostly book smarts, apparently
One major source of inconsistency within the Pokémon universe is how smart– or not smart– Pokémon actually are. Various signs would point to them having a fairly high level of intelligence, beyond most real-life non-human animals. They can not only follow commands, but seem to understand fluent human language. You don’t need to just bark orders like “attack” or “bite” at a Pokémon; you can tell them what to do in plain human language, and they comprehend just fine.
Point of fact, Pokémon even have IQs listed as part of their statistics in various versions of the games, and that IQ can be leveled up along with other basic stats. Various Pokémon can earn IQ scores well into the 300s and beyond, with some eventually being able to reach four-digit IQ scores. By comparison, a person need only have an IQ score of 140 to be considered a “genius.”
If the scores mean the same for Pokémon and humans, then many Pokémon are at a level of intellectual genius that make history’s smartest people look like toddlers.
What is less clear is what Pokémon do what all those brains– because it certainly isn’t put to use in battle. Even the absolute most brilliant Pokémon can’t seem to learn more than a handful of moves. Well, maybe they can, they just don’t want to. If you had a four-digit IQ, would you take orders from a human of vastly inferior intellect?
Don’t bite what you wouldn’t eat
For all the ways that Pokémon are intelligent, magical creatures who can do complex attacks, cast spells, and spew forth various natural elements, they are also still largely animal-based. As such, when they aren’t using magic or spitting fire, their basic attacks consist of the types of attacks that animals would use– scratching, tackling, kicking, and of course, biting.
Like in real life, though, biting shouldn’t be used as an all-purpose attack that can be applied to any enemy. No, we aren’t talking about how you shouldn’t try to bite a lion or a bear. What we’re referring to is that some Pokémon aren’t just regular animals or creatures, and moreover, aren’t built from normal material. For instance, Muk is essentially just a pile of amorphous sludge.
If you really think about it, you wouldn’t be able to effectively use any sort of physical attack on a crawling sludge blob– but what you absolutely should not do, under any circumstances, is try and bite a Muk. The results of this if real-life logic were applied to the interaction are pretty flawlessly illustrated in the above meme.
A mouthful of Muk isn’t an experience you’d be able to forget anytime soon, nor is it a taste that would easily wash out of your mouth. Maybe save the biting for enemies that are actually, you know, bite-able.
Someone call Ty Pennington
RPGs have always played fast and loose with the size, layout, and dimensions of buildings. A longtime trademark of the genre is having huge castles and entire towns be represented on a world map by miniaturized building icons barely bigger than the characters themselves. Inside the towns was seldom much better, as buildings in towns all apparently have the same technology as the TARDIS from Doctor Who - they are often much bigger on the inside than the appear on the outside.
Things further fall apart under closer logical scrutiny when you start exploring the interior of buildings within RPG towns. The vast majority of them– whether they are homes, inns, taverns, or shops– are just one giant room. Typically, the only way a building in a classic RPG has multiple rooms is if it has multiple floors, with each floor acting as one additional room.
By and large, Pokémon has adhered pretty closely to this trope. It’s probably not something you’ve ever really given much though to. Consider Ash’s house: two floors, pretty standard. It’s fairly well-established that the entire second floor is Ash’s bedroom. The problem is, he lives with his mother– so that can only mean that his mother sleeps in the kitchen.
Ash’s mother certainly doesn’t share a bedroom with Ash, as that room only has one bed and couldn’t possibly fit two people.
Plus, it’s less weird to just assume she sleeps in the kitchen than that her and Ash share a twin bed…
Misty’s extreme sports
Oh hey, check this out– Pokémon trainers apparently do know how to utilize their creatures for practical purposes beyond just fighting. Well, don’t we feel silly for saying they all lack common sense a few entries back. After all, here we have a perfectly good example of a problem that needed to be solved, one that was best served by utilizing Bulbasaur’s vine-like tentacle things, and Ash decided to sensibly use Bulbasaur’s special ability to solve the problem.
Except the issue here is that Ash didn’t use Bulbasaur’s vines in a sensible way. In fact, he used them in the most needlessly complicated way he could’ve possibly used them. Apparently a Togepi needed rescuing, and instead of doing the obvious thing of having Bulbasaur reach up, grab the Togepi with his vines, and lower him to safely, Ash instead decided that Misty should walk across a dangerous, narrow ledge to where Togepi is stuck and have Bulbasaur steady her with his vines. Huh. That’s one way to do it– one really stupid way. Maybe the Bulbasaur had a devious grudge against Misty and wanted her to risk her life to save the little Togepi. Or maybe it was Ash’s evil plan all along.
Slow and steady wins the race
It often seems like there are two different teams that design Pokémon characters– one that just draws them, and another that actually sets about coming up with their abilities and stats. That’s the only possible explanation as to how often the look of Pokémon are completely at odds with the stats of Pokémon.
We aren’t saying that there aren’t big animals that are fast, and small animals that are slow. Some of the slowest creatures on earth are also some of the smallest– snails, sloths, most kinds of turtles, and so on. Some of the fastest animals on earth are pretty sizable given their speed, like cheetahs and various large birds. In other words, it shouldn’t just be a given that big Pokémon are slow and small Pokémon are fast– even though size does tend to be the signifier in video games as a whole when differentiating slow characters/vehicles/weapons/etc from quick ones.
Look at the chart above.
Nothing about the speed comparison of those three Pokémon makes any sense at all, from the perspective of their body type or style of character.
There is no reasonable way to explain how a short, fat frog with stocky legs is significantly faster than an athletic, tiger-like character, or how said tiger character’s speed is comparable to what basically amounts to a sumo wrestler Pokémon.
Now that’s some high-quality H2O
Anyone who has been playing video games for a long time is already used to the phenomenon of restoring health by simply eating food or drinking water. Ultimately, it’s all arbitrary whether a watermelon found in a garbage can refill your health meter or a briefcase with a red cross on it does the same thing– we don’t actually want games to be so realistic that you need to take your character to an in-game doctor every single time they need medical attention.
One thing that most games with consumable health items that include food have in common is that the amount of health restored is dependent on what the food item. An apple should only restore a small amount of health, while a whole chicken should restore much more– if not all– for example. Most games that mix food as health items with synthetic health power-ups almost always favor the power-ups vs the food and drink. Almost universally, water accounts for only a tiny bit of health refill, typically amounting to nothing more than just enough of an increase to keep you hobbling along for a couple more minutes until you can health up properly.
Pokémon says, to heck with that tradition. Not only is water good for a pretty hefty health boost, but it’s nearly double the effect of specially-designed Pokémon medicine.
Beauty = power
Despite the fact that all of the creatures in Pokémon are technically monsters– though Nintendo very quickly backed off of and no longer acknowledges the fact that the name was originally a portmanteau of “pocket monsters”– many of them are downright adorable, especially in their original, non-evolved forms. One Pokémon that typically finds itself on most lists of the cutest characters in the franchise is Shinx, the cuddly, cat-like creature seen above.
We all know that it’s never wise to underestimate a Pokémon just because of their cuteness– after all, adorable Pikachu is capable of producing lighting attacks that would make Thor envious. But that shouldn’t suggest that a Pokémon’s actual cuteness level would ever be one of its benefits on the battlefield, unless you count having an opponent not take you seriously because of how adorable it is and then letting their guard down.
Which makes one of Shinx’s offensive maneuvers all the more baffling. Despite being one of the cutest fictional creatures you’ll ever lay eyes on, Shinx has the ability to intimidate her opponents in battle. Yes, we said intimidate.
It seems weird that they wouldn’t have just called it something like “distract”, suggesting that Shinx is using its actual cuteness as a weapon, rather than going with intimidate.
Literally no creature on earth could possibly be intimidated by a Shinx.
It’s a valid point
One of the things that made the least amount of sense in the entire Pokémon franchise is how obsessed Jessie and James of Team Rocket were with catching Ash’s Pikachu, while not seeming to care one bit that they had the only Pokémon in the entire universe than could talk like a human rather than only being able to say its own name. The Pokémon really is always greener on the other side of the field, isn’t it?
As a way to poke fun at Meowth’s rare ability to speak, this meme re-purposes the famous meme where people are having a board meeting and a member is thrown out of the window after making a ridiculous suggestion of some kind. Here, Meowth is that board member, asking the seemingly valid question of his fellow Pokémon of why don’t they all just speak normally rather than babbling their names over and over again– a question which found himself on the wrong end of Pikachu’s rage and crashing through a high rise window.
If you dig deeply enough, perhaps you will find the suggestion in this meme that other Pokémon actually could talk if they wanted to, and Meowth is teetering on exposing some kind of vast conspiracy by suggesting they reveal that secret about themselves. Or maybe we’re just reading entirely too much into a one-note meme.
So take… these broken wings..
As we addressed in the entry concerning the inconsistencies between how many Pokémon look versus how quickly they move, the teams that draw the Pokémon and the teams that flesh out their abilities don’t always seem like they communicate with each other very well, if at all.
If you give a Pokémon sharp claws, you should probably make sure it has some kind of slashing ability.
If you design a Pokémon to look like a fish, it should probably be a water type. If you give a Pokémon armor, it should have high defense. And if you give a Pokémon a set of very clearly-defined wings, you should probably give it the ability to fly.
Yet, here we have a winged Pokémon that can’t learn the fly ability. Unless you’re going for an emu Pokémon or some other kind of flightless bird, it’s pretty nonsensical to make a point to draw wings on a Pokémon but then not have it fly. Even if you initially design it that way, perhaps intending on it to have a flying ability, once you meet up with the other team and find out that isn’t going to be the case, then go back to the drawing board and take its wings away– or convince the other team to add that ability in.
Kick some grass
The battles in Pokémon are built largely around a rock-paper-scissors type of system that sees each Pokémon have a “type,” with other types that they are either weak against or strong against. As many games do when they adopt such a system, Pokémon goes for elemental types: earth, wind, fire, water, and other things that weren’t necessarily called out in the theme song for Captain Planet.
The strengths and weaknesses in the system are mostly pretty obvious - water beats fire because water can put out fires, for instance- but when you’re dealing with over 800 Pokémon, sticking with the usual handful of elemental types is going to get stretched pretty thin eventually.
The designers started to branch out a bit and include other types, such as grass. In some ways, grass fits in pretty easy with the more common types– fire beats grass because fire burns grass. Common sense, right?
Things also begin to get a little strange once you move beyond the more obvious ones. Who should be the more powerful type in a fight between a grass type and a water type? Apparently the answer is grass because– well, we don’t really know why. It just is.
