#flyingtypes

Oricorio’s English name references the orioles, a family (or rather, two unrelated families, one native to the Old World and one to the New) of brightly-coloured insectivorous songbirds.  Her names in other languages are more generic references to birds and dance, and her actual design probably draws, if anything, not on the orioles but on Hawaiian honeycreepers – another family of brightly coloured songbirds, most of them in various shades of yellow and red.  Like “Darwin’s finches” in the Galápagos Islands of Ecuador, Hawaiian honeycreepers are famous for having rapidly adapted from a single basic form to fill a wide variety of different ecological niches.  Some have short, thick beaks that can crush seeds, some have long, thin beaks for spearing insects, and others have curving beaks for sipping nectar from flowers, hence the name “honeycreeper.”  The technical name for the phenomenon is “adaptive radiation,” and it’s particularly common on remote islands, like the Hawaiian archipelago, where there may be a large number of unoccupied ecological niches for a species to diversify into.  Oricorio, accordingly, has four forms, which individuals can switch between by feeding on the sweet nectar of special flowers that are unique to each of the four main islands of Alola.  The different colours of the flowers correspond to the meanings of each of the islands’ names in Hawaiian: yellow flowers on Melemele, pink on Akala, red on Ula’ula, and purple on Poni.  Wild Oricorio can be found wherever the flowers grow, and mimic their colours, but also gain different costume-like features that evoke a distinctive style of dance from the real world, characteristic of particular regions, with personality traits to match.

Each form has a different type: Electric/Flying for yellow, Psychic/Flying for pink, Fire/Flying for red, Ghost/Flying for purple.  The yellow, Electric-type, Melemele Oricorio is energetic and cheerful, with puffs of feathers like a cheerleader’s pom-poms on the end of her wings – a North American style of dance, associated with giving energy to others.  The pink, Psychic-type, Akala Oricorio is laid-back and relaxed, with a long skirt and crown of pale feathers that bring to mind a Hawaiian pā’ū skirt and lei, the paraphernalia of hula dance, which is linked in modern pop culture with tropical relaxation.  The red, Fire-type, Ula’ula Oricorio is proud and passionate, with frills of feathers like a flamenco dancer’s long dress, and white curlicue feathers that evoke hooped earrings, evoking the intense traditional dances of southern Spain that are now a shorthand for burning, desperate love.  Finally, the purple, Ghost-type, Poni Oricorio is calm and quiet, with fans of feathers at the ends of her wings like the sensu fans used by geisha in old-fashioned Japanese dances that still evoke tradition and ceremony.  We’re also told that the purple sensu Oricorio’s style of dance famously reminds immigrants from Kanto of the traditional dances of their homeland, just to push home that these styles are meant to have geographical and cultural resonance, as well as emotional connotations.  Their different styles of dance are said to have corresponding effects on onlookers; the pom-pom style dance giving energy to friends, the pā’ū style dance lulling and slowing enemies, the baile style dance “causing its enemies to combust in both body and mind” (ouch), and the sensu style dance “sending the minds and hearts of its enemies to another world” (ouch?).  Those four distinct personalities and the magical effects associated with the dances link Oricorio’s core theme of dance with the characteristic traits of her four possible elements – Fire-types are passionate, Psychic-types are sedate, and so on.  This is quite important, since Oricorio otherwise has relatively few connections to those elements (as we’ll see later).

The point of all these different styles is probably to emphasise that Alola is multicultural, like the real Hawai’i, where American, Japanese and Polynesian (and to a lesser extent Iberian) culture are all important parts of the regional identity.  We should probably imagine that, for the people of the Pokémon world, all those styles of dance and their paraphernalia are based on Oricorio’s dances and plumage (in the same way as, for instance, the Roman alphabet actually comes from the Unown).    There is something a little bit odd going on here, though.  Hawai’i’s multiculturalism is essentially a legacy of colonialism, of American, Iberian and East Asian interference in, and immigration to, the islands.  The real-world dance styles that Oricorio is based on – with the exception of the Polynesian pā’ū style – are relatively modern imports to Hawai’i.  But Oricorio is not native to Kanto, Unova, or Kalos (the closest region we have to Iberia so far); to our knowledge, she is found only in Alola, and her different forms have specific niches that relate closely to the floral ecology of the four major islands.  It seems reasonable to think that the four forms all originated right here, in the Alolan archipelago, and that the resulting dance styles were also adapted by humans in Alola.  Should we turn it all on its head and imagine that in the Pokémon world Alola was not colonised, like Hawai’i, but a coloniser – an ancient maritime power whose kings had a ship in every port and a finger in every pie?  Did Alolan sensu dancers introduce the forms they learned from Oricorio to Kanto and Johto centuries ago?  Does the stamp of Oricorio’s intercontinental influence represent the last remaining trace of an ocean-spanning empire that left different shards of its cultural heritage all over the Pokémon world?

…or is this just the kind of subtle nonsense that happens when you create a particularly anthropomorphic Pokémon without thinking through what it would imply about human culture in the Pokémon world?

Such a question, dear readers, this meagre blog is hardly adequate to answer.

We are, however, reasonably equipped to answer the less speculative question of whether Oricorio is actually any good.  Oricorio seems at first to be a pretty rubbishy fast and frail special attacker.  And… well, in singles, she kind of is.  She’s got good, but not excellent, speed and special attack, average defences, and a movepool that makes me sad.  To elaborate – with one exception, the only special attacks she learns are Flying attacks and Hidden Power, and of the Flying attacks, Air Slash is below average in power and Hurricane is below average in accuracy (barring appropriate weather support).  Heck, she doesn’t even have any attacks of her own secondary types on her move list – except for her signature move, Revelation Dance.  This is a respectably powerful special attack with no secondary effects, but one interesting property: its type changes to match the type of Oricorio’s dance style, Electric, Psychic, Fire or Ghost.  In principle it’s a cool little trick that links Oricorio’s in-game tactics to the central features of her design.  In practice, it means that, although Oricorio technically has Electric, Psychic, Fire and Ghost attacks, she can’t have them at the same time, which is what she would actually like, because there’s no way to change her style mid-battle.  In some ways, Oricorio would be better off without Revelation Dance, since it would force Game Freak to give her actual attacks from each of her possible types.

The support options are a bit more inspiring.  Oricorio has Baton Pass, respectable speed, and a few useful set-up moves, including Agility, Calm Mind and Swords Dance, and she probably wouldn’t be terrible at passing buffs, although her defences leave something to be desired.  With Calm Mind, Baton Pass, Revelation Dance and either Agility or a Flying attack, she can help out a more competent team member without being totally helpless herself, although there are probably better Pokémon out there for the job.  She can use her speed to Taunt other support Pokémon, and she can heal herself with Roost.  U-Turn lets her dart out of danger, although it’s largely superfluous on a Baton Pass set, and probably not much good on a more straightforwardly aggressive set either, since Oricorio pretty much needs a turn or two of Calm Mind setup before she can do a worthwhile amount of damage.  There’s not much else to give her more variety.  Even Swords Dance can’t really enable a proper physical attacker set, since Oricorio’s base score is not impressive and her movepool basically extends to Acrobatics and Steel Wing.  But don’t worry – the best is still to come.

Oricorio’s most interesting feature is the unique Dancer ability, which immediately copies any “dance” moves used by another Pokémon (Oricorio still gets her regular turn).  In singles, this is situational at best; mostly it makes Oricorio an interesting switch-in to some Dragon Dance or Quiver Dance sweepers, since they won’t be able to outrun her.  In doubles, on the other hand, this ability allows Oricorio to really shine and do all kinds of ridiculous stuff.  You see, Oricorio will also copy her partner’s dances, letting her piggyback off their setup moves, particularly Quiver Dance.  Strictly speaking you could also try this trick with Swords Dance, but again, Oricorio’s poor attack stat and physical movepool advise against it.  Special mention here goes to Volcarona, who can buff Oricorio with Quiver Dance and give her free attacks with Fiery Dance, or to a pair of Oricorio (if you’re allowed two Pokémon of the same species on a team, which you often aren’t) who will copy each others’ Revelation Dances.  Lilligant is also an interesting option here – with her Own Tempo ability, she’s immune to confusion, so you can get Oricorio to disrupt your opponents with Teeter Dance without harming Lilligant, and Oricorio will copy both Quiver Dance and Petal Dance off her.  Practically the only downside is that you have to actually use Lilligant.  Some credit should also go to Pheremosa and Ribombee, who, along with Volcarona, learn Quiver Dance and are faster than Oricorio, ensuring that she gets a special attack boost before her own first attack.  In any case, if you can set Oricorio up to get a free Quiver Dance, she rather suddenly becomes an extremely threatening special attacker with quite solid special defence.  Her movepool is still weak, with just Air Slash or Hurricane, Revelation Dance and an appropriate Hidden Power (Ice for a pom-pom Oricorio, Grass for a baile Oricorio, or Fighting for a pā’ū or sensu Oricorio).  However, she’ll now have the power to bludgeon enemies into submission even through resistances, and with the right partner she may also be able to cheat out a bunch of extra Fiery Dances or Petal Dances.  In any turn-based game, the power to just get extra turns for free, even in such a limited way as this, can be tremendously game-breaking, to the point that I actually sort of understand how limited Oricorio is in other ways.  She’s rubbish in singles, and I don’t think there can be any changing that, but a good dance partner in doubles can let her steal the whole show, and with better defences and a good movepool she might become downright unstoppable.  Take her for a spin and see if you can make her work – just remember that Cresselia’s Lunar Dance kills her instantly.

Pikipek and Trumbeak could be loosely based on any of several species of North American woodpecker with black and white plumage and red crests; the pileated woodpecker is the largest and most iconic of these, and one of the most common.  Toucannon is pretty clearly a toco toucan, likewise the largest and most iconic member of the toucan family (if you didn’t know there were different species of toucan, this is probably the one you were thinking of), which is native to Brazil.  That in itself deserves some comment: it’s odd that Game Freak didn’t choose Hawaiian birds to fill the requisite early-game generic Normal/Flying-type “slot.”  Many other Alolan Pokémon are designed in reference to the unique wildlife of Hawai’i, and the islands would have provided a wide variety of interesting and colourful songbirds to any designer who felt so inclined.  Neither woodpeckers nor toucans, of any species, are endemic to Hawai’i at all (notwithstanding the ‘akiapola’au, a species of honeycreeper which is sometimes known as the “Hawaiian woodpecker” but has more in common with Oricorio than Pikipek).  I’m inclined to think that Game Freak may have been sitting on Pikipek’s design, or something like it, for a while, perhaps since before they decided to set a game in a Hawai’i analogue (this would imply that they may have several of these godawful Normal/Flying generic bird Pokémon saved up, just waiting for the right excuse to deploy them, which may be my most depressing realisation of the entire week).  Having said that, expecting them to make literally every Pokémon in Alola a reference to Hawaiian wildlife would be a bit of a stringent requirement, which I would never have demanded from Unova or Kalos, and a toucan Pokémon at least fits the “tropical” theme of the region well enough.

A woodpecker evolving into a toucan makes more sense than you might at first realise, since the toucan family, the Rhamphastidae, are some of the closest relatives of the woodpecker family, the Picidae.  Both are known for their beaks, so there’s a useful thematic similarity there as well.  The toco toucan lends Toucannon a nicely distinctive and visually striking appearance, which draws attention to the part of his body associated with his most unique abilities – the toucan’s massive beak, which is the largest and heaviest relative to its body size of any bird in the world.  There is a danger here that he winds up being just literally a toco toucan, and there’s not much in his art to stave that off except for a truly masterful side-eye, which conveys a level of Skrelp-esque sleep-deprived surliness that no real toucan quite manages.  The physical design just isn’t all that imaginative, which has to count as a fairly significant strike against him, even though a toucan is already an interesting animal in its own right (props to Nature and Evolution on that one).  Toucannon does twist the function of a toucan’s oversized beak in a fun way, though.  People are somewhat split on what a toucan’s beak is actually for.  In at least some species, it probably does have display purposes, which was what Darwin thought when he saw toucans in South America, but today we also believe that they play a pretty important role in heat regulation.  Toco toucans are quite large birds that live exclusively in tropical climates, so having a huge beak with lots of blood vessels and bright colours that can dump a lot of excess heat quickly is a fairly significant advantage.  Toucannon takes this a step further, by dumping that excess heat directly onto his enemies, burning anyone that comes too close during battle and igniting his seed projectiles to create explosive blast attacks.  It makes sense, it’s creative, and it’s badass, which is all good news.

Speaking of explosive blast attacks, Toucannon’s unique powers are represented in the game by his Beak Blast signature move.  This looks at first like a two-turn move in the vein of Sky Attack or Solarbeam, but actually functions more like Focus Punch, with the “charging” phase happening at the beginning of the turn, before the opponent’s move, followed by the attack firing at the end of the turn, after the opponent’s move.  It can’t be interrupted like Focus Punch, and in fact, any enemy who hits Toucannon with a contact move while Beak Blast is charging will suffer a burn.  The attack itself does some fairly hefty Flying-type damage too, and Toucannon has an excellent physical attack stat to back it up.  So the good news is, you have a very powerful Flying-type move to serve as your primary attack, you can burn enemies insolent enough to attack you (even if the attack actually knocks out Toucannon), and you were probably going to move last anyway against a lot of Pokémon, because Toucannon is pretty slow.  The _bad _news is, Beak Blast is still less powerful than Brave Bird, which Toucannon can get as an egg move, and his defences are decidedly on the average side, so going last does leave you vulnerable.  Probably the biggest issue with Beak Blast is that very few of the attacks Toucannon is most afraid of will actually trigger the retributive burn effect.  The best Ice and Electric attacks are special, and although Rock primarily has physical attacks, almost none of them actually make contact.  Just playing normally against Toucannon will probably be all it takes for most Pokémon to avoid suffering burns from Beak Blast.  The fact is, it’s not a great move, but it’s a move with a hell of a lot of personality, and I have to love it for that.

All this being the case, I can see basically two ways you could go with Toucannon.  You could dedicate his training to attack and speed, trying to help him outrun as much as his stubby wings will allow, then slap Brave Bird on him and use him as a fairly conventional sledgehammer Pokémon.  Toucannon gets the Skill Link ability, which guarantees five hits with moves in the “hits 2-5 times” category and turns the normally unreliable Bullet Seed and Rock Blast into top-notch Grass and Rock attacks with the added perk of being able to pierce Substitutes and the Sturdy ability (Fury Attack is also improved, but is still too weak and too inaccurate to be worth using, which just goes to show how terrible Fury Attack is normally).  Sheer Force, Toucannon’s hidden ability, is available as an alternative to Skill Link, but although it’s normally a fantastic ability (giving a +30% damage bonus to moves with a secondary effect, at the cost of removing the effect), Toucannon learns very few moves that benefit from it – pretty much just Steel Wing, so you’d basically be taking the ability just for an edge against Fairy-types.  Skill Link is better; Keen Eye is garbage.  For a fourth move, you could pick up a Normal attack like Return, but Normal attacks are mostly redundant with Flying in terms of type coverage, and you’ll be leaving Toucannon dead in the water against most Steel-types.  Brick Break loses out to Steel Pokémon with a secondary type that resists Fighting, which many of the best ones do (Metagross, Skarmory, Scizor).  Your other option is Overheat.  Toucannon’s special attack stat is, at best, fine.  However, Overheat is extremely powerful, and Toucannon won’t much care about the special attack penalty that the move inflicts on its user.  Brick Break is still better against some Steel-types with good special defence, and really does a number on Bisharp, but Overheat is probably a better general-purpose move, and is nicely thematic (bonus style points for using it with a Z-crystal).  U-Turn is always a move worth considering, but is probably not great for Toucannon specifically, for much the same reason as Gumshoos – he’s a super-heavy hitter who’s very hard to get into play in the first place, and is better off just bludgeoning enemies into submission than trying to play tricky.  The most glaring absence from Toucannon’s movepool here is the absence of Agility – or indeed any way of increasing his decidedly mediocre speed, aside from Flame Charge or Tailwind, which I hesitate to actually recommend.  Any kind of sweeping strategy is more or less out of the question; Toucannon is here strictly to blow things up and open the path for an actual sweeper.

The alternative path is to reason that Toucannon isn’t going to outrun much of any importance anyway, just dump his speed completely, and instead try to spec him as a sort of blasty tank, with a bunch of points in HP.  Take Beak Blast over Brave Bird, both to spare yourself Brave Bird’s recoil and to cripple physical attackers with burns.  Take Roost for healing.  Consider Feather Dance, then stop because Feather Dance is silly.  Other than the main Flying attack, you probably want to think about most of the same attack options for this Toucannon, since he doesn’t really have a support movepool other than the aforementioned Tailwind (a short-term global speed bonus for your team).  Finally, I suppose I should at least mention Swords Dance, because the very notion of a Swords Dance Toucannon is a little bit terrifying, but it’s an iffy proposition for much the same reasons as I hesitated to recommend Swords Dance on Decidueye or Incineroar: he’s just too slow and doesn’t have the bulk or resistances to compensate (Alola seems to really like slow Pokémon for some reason).

If you pay any attention whatsoever to this blog for any length of time, one of the first things you discover is that I like Grass-types.  The Grass-type has been my go-to starter for my first playthrough (and most subsequent playthroughs) of every generation since the first.  Rowlet’s fate was bound to mine by destiny long before I ever laid eyes on him.  And I’m basically okay with this.  Rowlet isn’t really in contention to unseat Bulbasaur and Turtwig as my favourite starter Pokémon, but he’s fine.  He’s easy and fun to use in a playthrough, we’ve never had a birdlike Grass-type before, it doesn’t hurt that he’s just objectively adorable, and in abandoning his Flying-type Decidueye becomes the very first Ghost-type starter Pokémon ever, which is neat.  Rowlet and Dartrix are clearly barn owls, with the barn owl’s distinctive pale heart-shaped face, whereas Decidueye is maybe more of a hawk owl, although I wouldn’t read too much into that.  Comparisons to Hoothoot and Noctowl, who seem to be horned owls, are in order, as one of my usual criteria for evaluating new Pokémon is “is this actually new?” and I think the answer there is… probably???  Part of the problem there is that Hoothoot actually has a much more clearly-defined and interesting “personality” than Noctowl, with his heavily stylised cuckoo-clock aesthetic and metronome-like rocking from side to side (actually though, as long as we’re here, why doesn’t Hoothoot get Metronome?  I mean, I get that Metronome was still super-exclusive when Hoothoot was introduced, but they gave it to Snubbull and Chansey as an egg move).  Noctowl is kinda just a big owl that does owl things.  Rowlet, Dartrix and Decidueye are a bit deeper than that, which I generally tend to think is good.  Decidueye’s arrows and archery are an odd touch, but as with Talonflame, you can link birds and arrows conceptually via feathered fletching, so that makes sense.  What might not immediately makes sense to some of us is the switch from Flying to Ghost when Dartrix evolves, and this gives me an excuse to begin one of my patented Bull$#!t Lore Digressions™, so let’s learn some more about owls.

Owls are associated with the spirit world in several different and unrelated cultures, and there are some pretty good reasons for this.  Owls are night hunters, but more than that, they’re silent hunters – owls’ feathers are softer and smoother-edged than those of other birds, so the flapping of their wings is much more difficult to hear, giving them a ghostly, ethereal quality.  Also, like many nocturnal animals, their eyes reflect light and seem to glow in the dark in a disconcertingly eerie manner.  Not for nothing are owls omens of death in sub-Saharan Africa, of sickness and bad luck in the native cultures of the American southwest, or of catastrophe in ancient Rome.  In ancient Greece, of course – mainly in Athens – owls had a more ambivalent role as the sacred birds of Athena and symbols of wisdom (an association that persists today and gives us Noctowl’s famous intellect and minor psychic abilities).  Even there, though, the sinister scops owl was seen as a creature of the underworld, and the owl’s reputation for knowledge subsequently made it the familiar of witches and warlocks in mediaeval Europe.  In New Zealand, where I come from, the small brown hawk owl known as the morepork or ruru is believed to be an oracle of the future in Maori culture, its different cries portending either good fortune or disaster.  Finally, and perhaps most relevant for us today, on several of the islands of Hawai’i a species of short-eared owl called a pueo is one of the more common shapes known to be taken by ’aumākua, the spirits of a family’s honoured ancestors, who return to serve as guardians and as a link to the spirit world (sharks, lizards and turtles are also common; families must show respect and deference to all animals of a similar form to their ’aumākua).  An owl Pokémon thus becomes an intermediary between this world and the next, a sort of warrior-shaman that protects its trainer from spiritual threats using powers of its own that are more than a little dark and sinister (we see a similar theme with Hoothoot in the anime, where he has the unique power to force hidden Ghost-types to reveal themselves with Foresight).

This “mystic guardian” aesthetic is conspicuously undercut by what Rowlet and Dartrix seem to be doing, because they have more of a “dapper gentleman” style in play – consider the Pokédex line that describes Dartrix as “a bit of a dandy” obsessed with keeping his wings groomed, or their leafy bow-ties (in Decidueye, that evolves into something more like a brooch or the clasp of a cloak, which has a more mediaeval-fantasy feel to it).  It feels like a very odd fit for the direction that Decidueye moves in.  If you had just given me Rowlet and Dartrix, and told me to come up with ideas for a final evolution, I might, after substantial umm-and-ahh-ing, have pitched a kind of James-Bond-esque super-spy-in-a-tuxedo concept.  That seems like a more natural continuation, but easily could have turned out looking rather stupid without some very clever way of unifying the design elements (and if there’s anything this blog should teach us, it’s that I’m not quite that clever).  The self-important “dandy” aesthetic, after a bit of thought, is oddly reminiscent to me of the vain, professorial Owl from Winnie-the-Pooh, genuinely wise (…relatively speaking) but perhaps just as much concerned with the appearance of wisdom as with wisdom itself, and eager to look the part of the sober, intellectual scholar of the arcane.  Decidueye’s own description from the Pokédex tells us that this wise Pokémon is nonetheless easily startled and flustered (try slapping him awake in PokéRefresh and you’ll see what they’re getting at).  It’s still incongruous with Decidueye as mystic archer and night hunter, but it is at least giving me a common aesthetic thread to follow through all three evolutionary stages, something that’s quite important for a starter Pokémon to maintain.  Which is enough for the purposes of this review, I think.

Stats-wise, Decidueye seems to be built as a mixed attacker, with strong offensive skills, but isn’t very fast.  That doesn’t bode particularly well, since he can’t really afford to not max his speed in training, leaving less to split between attack and special attack.  There’s a passable physical movepool here, which includes Leaf Blade, Brave Bird, Sucker Punch, U-Turn, and… I guess Steel Wing if, like, you really hate Alolan Ninetales or something?  There’s also Decidueye’s signature move, Spirit Shackle, which has several advantages.  It’s a reliable Ghost-type physical attack, which a) is a rare sort of attack for anyone to have access to, and b) is something Decidueye clearly needs, c) it traps its target in play with Decidueye (unless the target is a Normal-type or Ghost-type, or has some escape mechanism), limiting your opponent’s options, and d) it fires a spiritual arrow that nails the target’s soul to the ground, which is super badass.  This move is easily Decidueye’s biggest edge; you want to use him to set up critical moments where you can switch and your opponent can’t, then pressure their weak points with one of Decidueye’s teammates, or try to Swords Dance while they’re off balance.  Leaf Blade and Spirit Shackle are actually a pretty solid combination; neither Grass nor Ghost gets a lot of super-effective hits, but Ghost has strong neutral coverage, so basically you’re resisted by all the Normal/Flying birds and a bunch of Dark dual-types.  Sucker Punch is mostly redundant with Spirit Shackle in terms of type coverage, but it’s also Decidueye’s only priority move, and he’s fairly slow and doesn’t have any speed buffs, so at least considering it is sort of obligatory (just remember that it only works on targets preparing a direct attack, so be careful using it against support Pokémon).  U-Turn is just generally a good move, because the free switch-out gives you a lot of flexibility in responding to your opponent’s actions (and especially switches), and it covers your ass against Dark-types, whom Decidueye tends to have trouble with.  Trapping something with Spirit Shackle and then bouncing out with U-Turn is a decent little combo, if you like that sort of thing.  Brave Bird adds a bit more of a sting than Decidueye’s other options, but lacks their utility.  Some combination of four of these, or three plus Swords Dance, should probably be the default go-to.  Decidueye’s kit lends itself to switching in and out a lot, and he doesn’t really have the speed to try and sweep a significant chunk of an enemy team, so I’d be more inclined to slap a Choice item on him than bank on Swords Dance, but to each their own.

Decidueye’s special attack stat is pretty solid, so in theory you can use that to mix things up a bit.  Unfortunately, basically his only worthwhile special attacks are Shadow Ball and Energy Ball/Grass Knot, and if you cut Spirit Shackle for Shadow Ball then you’ve sort of forsaken one of the most compelling reasons to use Decidueye in the first place.  That’s not quite the end of the story; you might be gunning specifically for some big chunky physical tank with a Grass weakness like Hippowdon, who gets stung much harder by Grass Knot than by Leaf Blade even with minimal special attack training on Decidueye’s part.  Also, most human opponents are going to assume Decidueye is a physical attacker, so if you can grab him a free turn to set up with Nasty Plot (which he also learns), you might just be able to catch someone with their pants down.  I’m not sure this is particularly a good plan, and again I’m not encouraged by the fact that he essentially has no third special attack, but the possibility theoretically exists.  Decidueye does have a support movepool of sorts, but you can probably find better Pokémon for any conceivable support role he might try to fill.  Like, Baton Pass is there as an egg move (via Togetic or Oricorio), and again, Decidueye does get both Swords Dance and Nasty Plot, so he has perfectly sound options for using it, but he just looks so unlike my idea of what a Baton Passer ought to be (poor speed, average defences) that my mind sort of recoils from the notion.  Alternatively you could try to ply Roost and Light Screen with some HP training into some kind of weird tanky Decidueye – give up trying to outrun things, since he’s slow anyway, and focus on your defences.  Just don’t tell anyone it was my idea.

As well as a signature move, Decidueye has a unique ability; it’s his hidden ability and isn’t currently obtainable, but I think we’ll probably get it eventually, so we ought to talk about it before we finish up.  This ability is Long Reach, which lets Decidueye treat his “contact” attacks as ranged instead, bypassing enemy effects like Static, Rough Skin, Beak Blast’s retributive burn, and so on.  This… ehhh, I’m not really sure what this is for.  I mean, I understand conceptually why Decidueye has this: he’s an archer, so he should be able to make what would normally be close-range attacks from a distance.  But that aspect of the design is already expressed by his signature move, and by the fact that he can use ranged special attacks effectively.  Most contact effects aren’t that big a deal, most Pokémon that get them have better abilities to choose from, and even when they’re likely to turn up, Decidueye would often prefer Spirit Shackle to Leaf Blade anyway.  I think Long Reach would probably give Decidueye an extra edge against… Wigglytuff, Electrode, Parasect, Bewear, Stunfisk, and (lord help us) Delcatty.  Being able to one-shot Bewear with Brave Bird after a Swords Dance is not nothing, but I suspect the more general Grass-type damage bonus from Overgrow would probably still be more useful, even once Long Reach becomes available.

So, all in all, this is a decent start to generation VII.  Rowlet, Dartrix and Decidueye are nothing amazing; they have a couple of conflicting ideas in their design, and other than Spirit Shackle there’s not a whole lot to be impressed by in their skillset.  They’re still interesting, though; as fighters they are at the very least passable, with an interesting niche courtesy of that neat little signature move, and I cannot stress enough that pinning a foe in place by the shadow is a very cool gimmick.  I got my cool new Grass-type starter, all is right with the world, and I can now review the rest of the seventh generation joyfully and optimistically, without a hint of malice or discontent in my heart.

  Admittedly, bats with sonic powers is… not exactly a fresh idea, although in fairness it’s something of an obvious and logical route to take, and whereas Zubat and Woobat mainly have sonic powers as a form of navigation like real bats do, Noibat and Noivern weaponise it – fittingly enough, seeing as they belong to the Dragon type, the element of unbridled destructive power.  Sound can do surprisingly nasty things to physical objects if its frequency matches the ‘natural’ or ‘resonance’ frequency of the system it’s acting on; vibrations induced by the sound stack up with natural vibrations in the material, storing more and more energy until something ridiculous happens – we’ve all heard of singers who can shatter wine glasses by wailing at precisely the right pitch (the same pitch produced by the glass itself when struck).  The somewhat more sobering equivalent is the violent shaking or even total collapse of huge bridges and towers (most famously the first Tacoma Narrows bridge in the northwest United States) due to resonance created by wind, the engines of vehicles, or even (in one particularly memorable case in downtown Seoul) a group of seventeen middle-aged Koreans performing aerobics to the rhythm of 1990 Eurodance hit The Power – which is my private imagining of what Noivern and Exploud’s Boomburst technique sounds like, and now yours too.  Making effective use of such attacks to, for instance, pulverise boulders implies that Pokémon with sonic attacks, including Noivern, possess not only extremely loud voices but also tremendous range and flexibility – destructive, but also finely tuned and precise.  This is exactly what Noivern is; the Pokédex describes her as an opportunistic ambush hunter, swooping down from the night sky to snatch up and carry off the unwary.  With no need for light to see by, Noivern can move and hunt in total darkness – this is a frightening Pokémon.  Noibat, by contrast, is more than a little on the derpy side, and more interested in defending herself with nauseating ultrasonic pulses than in blowing apart rocks with resonant sound waves or stalking unsuspecting prey as a lethal hunter of the night.  Are we surprised, though?  A traditional trait of Dragon-types is their tendency to be less-than-inspiring in their infancy, and then transform dramatically when they evolve.  Noibat is phenomenally useless, with a base stat total just barely higher than Combee’s, and she stays that way until as high as level 48, when she abruptly becomes the unholy terror that is Noivern.  It’s not quite a Magikarp-to-Gyarados metamorphosis, but it’s a pretty impressive change, and entirely in keeping with what we should expect.

  To continue with what makes these Pokémon dragons, the name Noivern, which keeps the –vern ending through Japanese, English and French, seems pretty clearly meant to reference the word ‘wyvern.’  This is a term for a dragon-like creature whose exact shape and powers vary, though it’s used most often and most consistently in heraldry, and the common thread seems to be that wyverns have serpentine lower bodies and only two legs, while dragons tend to have four (they also tend to have spiked or barbed tails not unlike Noivern’s, though western heraldic dragons regularly have these too).  Significantly, Noivern is the only winged Dragon Pokémon apart from Altaria with only two other limbs – the others (Dragonite, Flygon, and so on) have both arms and legs as well as wings, but Noivern’s wings are arms, like a real bat’s.  It makes sense – although the typical depiction leaves much to be desired from an anatomical standpoint, the leathery wings seen on most modern European dragons are commonly described as ‘bat-like,’ and it’s hard to imagine what else could have been the original inspiration for wings in that style (illustrated Mediaeval bestiaries actually seem to have no shortage of dragons with feathery birds’ wings as well, but the leathery ‘bat-like’ style is common too).  In a way, Noivern brings that full circle.  It’s probably no coincidence that she is, at present, the only Flying dual-type in the game who’s listed as Flying first and something else second – mechanically it makes no difference how a Pokémon’s types are ordered, but it sometimes seems like Game Freak intend to place emphasis on the primary type; consider Aggron (Steel/Rock) and Bastiodon (Rock/Steel), for instance.  This follows on from Tornadus, the first straight Flying-type, in generation V, and might indicate that they’re still putting serious thought into what they think Flying should be and how they want to treat it as a type.  For Noivern, the implication seems to be that they want the emphasis of the design to be on her “flying animal” elements rather than her “mythical reptile” elements – she’s a bat with draconic features, not a bat-like dragon.  Comparisons to pterosaurs are perhaps inevitable, though it’s hard to say whether any resemblance is intentional – take a bat and add reptilian features, and you’re bound to get something that recalls popular depictions of real winged reptiles.  It certainly adds another layer of badass to what’s going on here, though.

  Noivern is built for speed.  She enjoys a cool little niche as the fastest Dragon Pokémon in the game by a significant margin, leaving even the Eon Twins in the dust – a niche that she pays for by having less raw strength than most of the other top-tier Dragons.  With a special attack score that’s good, but not brilliant, Noivern needs to rely on powerful techniques to make up the shortfall.  Luckily, she’s a Dragon-type, and Dragon-types, by definition, get to learn Pokémon’s great kill-it-now button, Draco Meteor.  Hurricane doesn’t hurt either, although its accuracy leaves much to be desired unless you’re using Noivern on a rain team – likewise Focus Blast (which can’t even get help from the weather).  Another helpful option is Noivern’s almost-signature move (she shares it with Exploud, Chatot and, for some reason, Swellow), Boomburst, a catastrophic blast of sound intended to level anything that isn’t resistant to Normal attacks.  This move has its problems – because it doesn’t get Noivern’s same-type attack bonus, Hurricane and Draco Meteor are both stronger; Normal is also a bad offensive type at the best of times.  On the other hand, it’s 100% accurate and doesn’t cut your special attack in half the way Draco Meteor does.  It’s probably worth noting that Boomburst is a sonic attack, which means that it can’t touch Pokémon with the Soundproof ability (not that this is likely to come up, since arguably the only Pokémon with Soundproof who doesn’t have a better option is Electrode), and more importantly that it can bypass Substitutes.  However, this isn’t really a big deal for Noivern since she can do that anyway with the Infiltrator ability, which also lets her bypass Reflect and Light Screen, and her other choices are less than inspiring (checking opponents’ items with Frisk, or avoiding allies’ area attacks in double and triple battles with Telepathy).  Since Noivern is extremely fast already but lags behind some of the other Dragons in power, the natural item choice for her is Choice Specs, to wring every last drop of power you can out of that special attack stat.  As always, this makes perfect sense with Draco Meteor, since they’re both options that like you to switch often, and it also fits well with another of Noivern’s cool toys, U-Turn – with the free switches it offers, it’s very easy to get a sense for what your opponent’s go-to answer to Noivern is likely to be, and how you might anticipate it in future, mitigating the inflexibility caused by your Choice item.

  That’s the basics of what Noivern does.  The frills include a couple of ways to seriously mess with defence-, setup- and support-oriented Pokémon.  Noivern is one of the fastest Pokémon in the game to learn Taunt, behind maybe a dozen others, several of them high-tier legendary Pokémon, making her extremely efficient at blocking support techniques – obviously you’ll want to forgo the power of Choice Specs if you pick this technique.  The alternative that does work with Choice Specs for a similar goal is Switcheroo, which is an absolute pain to get onto her because it comes from Malamar, via Crawdaunt, via Archeops (which… is certainly among the stranger lineages out there, courtesy of Archeops’ somewhat incongruous membership in the Water 3 family).  It’s a tried-and-tested way of crippling supporters, though – make use of your Choice item as you normally would until you see a Pokémon who would absolutely hate to be locked into a single attack, then make the switch and stick them with your painfully restrictive spectacles.  Less aggressive versions of Noivern may enjoy the healing offered by Roost, while Dark Pulse and Flamethrower sacrifice power but win her some nice coverage (Flamethrower in particular provides a more reliable alternative to Focus Blast for dealing with Steel-types).  Air Slash, similarly, is there if you dislike the poor natural accuracy of Hurricane, but the difference in power is so great that it’s almost not worth it, particularly given that Noivern needs all the power she can get.  Finally, I think it deserves mention that Noivern can learn Super Fang, because it’s quite an unusual move.  She’s not really the kind of Pokémon that jumps to mind when you think of Super Fang – the ability to chop a foe’s health in half works wonders for stuff like Pachirisu, but Noivern can do that to a lot of stuff anyway.  Still, it’s an extremely nasty surprise for any Fairy- or Steel-type planning to soak a Draco Meteor, and deserves to be added to Switcheroo and Taunt on the list of reasons why you can’t necessarily ignore Noivern just because you have a special wall like Blissey or Umbreon or whatever.

  Fighting Pokémon tend to be based on human martial artists, warriors or athletes: Sawk is a karate master, Throh is judo, Hitmontop is capoeira, Cobalion and friends are the three musketeers, Medicham is some kind of monk, and so on and so forth.  Hawlucha continues the trend, but picks an especially recognisable and outlandish sport – the style of Mexican wrestling known as lucha libre, which is literally Spanish for “free fighting” or “free wrestling.”  Hawlucha’s flight feathers flare out behind her like a cape in some elaborate costume (I, at least, can’t help but recall Jack Black in Nacho Libre), and the green pattern on her head with her eyes outlined in orange recalls the luchador’s trademark face mask; the orange feathers sticking out behind her head might also be meant to suggest the knotted ends of a cloth mask tied at the back of the head (also, YES, Hawlucha’s design parses as feminine to me for some reason; NO, I have no idea why).  Lucha libre is regularly described as exemplifying a “high-flying” style of wrestling that incorporates many leaps, somersaults, and other so-called “aerial” moves – flashy, impressive moves that require great physical agility – hence Hawlucha’s secondary Flying type, birdlike features, and emphasis on speed and acrobatic techniques.  In North American professional wrestling, this kind of style is favoured by smaller wrestlers to leverage their agility against the greater power of their bulkier opponents – just as Hawlucha uses it to compete with the likes of Hariyama and Machamp.  The lucha angle also kind of plays into my personal vague nonsense about Fighting-types, which is that many of them are distinctively preoccupied with the idea of fighting, and often with honour or glory, in a way which most other Pokémon aren’t.  Luchadores have, or claim to have, their own peculiar code of honour in which their masks hold particular significance, and the whole sport is curiously ritualised in a similar manner to North American professional wrestling, with fighters taking on ‘heroic’ or ‘villainous’ personas to give their matches symbolic meaning, but to an even greater extent, helped by the sense of mystery and drama created by the ubiquitous masks.  Overall, it’s… certainly out of left field for a Pokémon design, but it’s undeniably clever, and it’s one of those designs that just manages to be so damn weird I almost can’t help but like it, in spite of my normal aversion to Pokémon based on modern subcultures.  The blending of the Fighting and Flying elements works very nicely, and the fact that many luchadores actually base their ring personas on animals – including hawks, quite often – makes the whole thing even smoother.

  Some people also link Hawlucha’s raptor-like appearance with the costume of an Aztec eagle warrior, and while I’m not sure there’s any obvious tip-off there it would certainly make sense, since lucha libre and the history of the Aztec empire are linked by both being distinctive parts of Mexican culture.  Jaguars and eagles, both powerful totemic animals in Aztec culture, are for that very reason among the most common animal inspirations for luchador costumes and identities.  There’s another connection in that a lot of people say the luchador mask actually has its roots in Aztec ritual masks; as far as I can tell that’s not actually true (more likely they’re just derived from masked North American professional wrestlers), though the Aztecs certainly did produce a dazzling array of these things from a wide variety of often precious materials, some intended to be worn, others purely ornamental, and – as in many cultures – putting on a mask could be symbolic of taking on a new or changed identity, just as it is for the luchadores.  Even Hawlucha’s red and green colour scheme might conceivably be meant to recall the red and green of the quetzal, a bird held sacred by the Aztecs, who used its feathers to decorate their rulers’ headdresses.  Again, I don’t really think there’s anything about Hawlucha that definitively says “yes, they were looking to the Aztecs as an additional source of inspiration” because everything about the design makes sense without them, but there’s enough that it would hardly surprise me, and it makes for a cool extra dimension.  There’d also be some neat material in that to introduce a Mega Evolution in future generations, if Game Freak were so inclined…

  Like a luchador, Hawlucha is agile, relying on her incredible speed to outmanoeuvre and destroy her enemies.  There’s precious little that can outrun her, and with the Unburden ability she can further raise her speed to ridiculous levels by using a consumable item – like, say, a Liechi Berry to make her attacks stronger as well.  Throw in Swords Dance, and you’ve got a damn threatening physical attacker in there, with a lethal Hi Jump Kick.  Probably Hawlucha’s most obvious flaw is that she lacks any powerful Flying attacks aside from Acrobatics, which is weak when used by a Pokémon holding an item but very powerful otherwise and therefore requires Hawlucha to be played in a certain way – fortunately, the potential of mixing this move with Unburden is obvious.  When and if elemental gems become a thing in generation VI, a Flying Gem/Acrobatics/Unburden combo is something of a foregone (and devastating) conclusion.  For now, though, the options are to have no item at all (suboptimal, but straightforward), use a Power Herb with Sky Attack (gives Hawlucha one extremely powerful shot, but basically leaves you with a dead moveslot thereafter), try to ensure that her item gets used up somehow, probably a Substitute/Liechi Berry combo (a bit awkward since she really needs the Swords Dance boost – a Liechi Berry just isn’t enough since her attack stat is good but not brilliant), or do what Game Freak was probably intending and use her signature move, Flying Press.  Flying Press… isn’t actually a Flying attack at all, but it kind of acts like one – it’s the first and currently only dual-type attack, which functions as a Fighting move for all intents and purposes (gets a damage bonus from a Black Belt but not from a Sharp Beak, only gets a single STAB from Hawlucha’s Fighting type, etc) except for calculating type effectiveness, where it acts as both a Fighting attack and a Flying attack.  Weaknesses and resistances stack – in theory, this means it can get a x4 or x¼ damage multiplier against a single-type Pokémon, though in practice the only time this is likely to happen is when Hawlucha is hit by Electrify and it becomes a Flying/Electric attack, since Fighting and Flying don’t actually share any offensive strengths or weaknesses.  In case there are more moves like this in future, I’m pretty sure the damage formula doesn’t allow for the weakness/resistance multiplier to stack any higher or lower than that, so we don’t have to worry about, say, Parasect getting hit by a x16 damage Fire/Flying attack in generation VII (…wait, actually that sounds awesome).  To be honest, Flying Press isn’t really a great move – by its very nature you’re going to get coverage that’s redundant with Hi Jump Kick and its power is only decent, but it does behave in some ways like a Flying attack, it’s just weird enough to potentially confuse a few people, and hey, it’s Hawlucha’s signature move, so what the hell.

  Fighting/Flying is actually damn good on its own, but potential coverage moves of note that Hawlucha can learn are Stone Edge, X-Scissor and Poison Jab.  Rock-type coverage is generally good, but not particularly useful on Hawlucha; Bug and Poison are generally poor but get super-effective hits against Psychic- and Fairy-types, respectively.  Pick your poison.  Um.  But not literally.  Unless you want to.  Uh… anyway.  Hawlucha gets U-Turn as well, but despite having a good stat profile for it, her reliance on boosts, and particularly the volatile nature of Unburden, make her less than ideal since there will often be times she just doesn’t want to switch out.  Of course, you could just not use Unburden: her hidden ability, Mold Breaker has plenty of universal utility for circumventing defensive powers like Sturdy, Unaware, Solid Rock, or Dragonite’s Multiscale.  Hawlucha doesn’t benefit from it as much as some of its other users do, since she doesn’t use Ground attacks, or really anything else for which there’s a common ability that grants immunity, and some kind of Unburden combo is probably going to be the better pick most of the time, but if you want Hawlucha to use a Choice Band or something, or just don’t like any of the ways of triggering Unburden, it certainly isn’t a bad ability.  Taunt or Encore could see some use for keeping heavy defensive stuff like Hippowdon from healing, and Baton Pass is in there too if you want something else to make use of Hawlucha’s boosts, although she’s really pretty good at doing that for herself anyway and there are better Baton Passers out there.

  The question here is, how far does a different type go?  Fletchling, Fletchinder and Talonflame still share a lot of traits with Pidgeot et al. – does the fact that they also have fire powers make that okay?  And what does that say about how we look at elements in Pokémon?  Most Pokémon have supernatural powers of one sort or another, and as I’ve recently discussed, it is to an extent the powers that make the Pokémon, but if the essence of Pokémon design is just giving elemental traits to an animal, the Normal-types who mostly lack such traits are damned from the start.  Part of designing these things is matching up the powers to the creature in a clever way.  Birds with wind powers are very straightforward as Pokémon go, since wind and flight ‘go together’ intuitively, while birds with fire powers are a little more interesting, and Talonflame doesn’t just take the obvious phoenix angle, which Moltres and Ho-oh have already done to death anyway.  On the other hand, what makes attaching fire-related abilities to a falcon particularly insightful?  The most interesting Fire Pokémon aren’t just “this animal, but on fire;” they’re ones that play with the idea of fire, either by combining it with another element (like Magcargo, whose body of lava hardens into a stone shell, or Chandelure, whose ghostly lights lead wanderers into another world), or by focusing on an unusual aspect of fire (like Torkoal, who mines and burns coal for energy).  If I like Fletchling and his evolutions, then I’m going to have to dig a little deeper than “new type” – I need to find the flourishes.  Let’s have a look at them.

  Fletchling, obviously enough, is a robin, while Talonflame has made the transition to peregrine falcon, while keeping the distinctive red colouring of his juvenile form that also evokes his fire powers.  There doesn’t seem to be any consensus on exactly what Fletchinder is, but he reminds me very much of the hoopoe, a medium-sized bird common throughout most of Eurasia who shares the red colouring of his head, as well as the striking black-and-white striped pattern of Fletchinder’s tail.  The hoopoe is also a larger and more powerful bird than a robin, but not a major predator like a falcon, so he’d be a sensible intermediate.  All three stages incorporate arrows into the design as well, in the form of the distinctive shape and stripes of their tails, like the fletching of an arrow – perhaps making their beaks serve metaphorically as the arrowheads.  The swept-back posture of Talonflame’s wings in the official art might even be meant to recall the shape of a bow, with an ‘arrow’ nocked and ready to fire, formed by the line from his beak to his tail… but maybe that’s getting a little far-fetched.  The famed 310 kilometer per hour dive of the peregrine falcon (which Talonflame insistently one-ups, at 310 miles per hour) is reminiscent of a falling arrow too, particularly in its effects on the health of whatever stands at its destination.  As generic bird Pokémon go, this is already quite a good one, without even mentioning the fact that it’s on fire.  What’s more, Fletchinder and Talonflame’s fire powers do relate in some ways to the rest of their design, adding a little depth to them.  Fletchinder supposedly flies faster the hotter his fire burns, for instance (linking the Fire and Flying elements, the way I talked about with Chesnaught), which makes a good tie-in to the presence of Flame Charge on his level-up set.  The assumption of fire abilities as the Pokémon ages could also be linked to his taking on a more predatory ecological niche as he becomes more powerful, and indeed Fletchinder hunts by starting fires to drive his prey out of hiding.  Flaming arrows, of course, were also a staple of a wide variety of ancient and Mediaeval armies, so giving fire to a Pokémon whose name and appearance are intended to evoke arrows makes good sense.  I actually would have liked to see a greater focus on the arrow motif, which is neglected in the English and French translations of Talonflame’s name, because that’s one of the cleverest things in terms of tying the whole design together.  In balance, though, I think it works.  Talonflame is far from a masterful Pokémon, but I can certainly appreciate the effort to do something unexpected with a highly standardised form, in a manner which integrates the new and different features with the common traits of the traditional early-game Flying-type.

  Another common thread with Pokémon from the Pidgeot mould is that they are not normally very powerful.  Staraptor excepted, none of Talonflame’s predecessors have ever been important Pokémon for the competitive scene, though Swellow is a persistent dark horse.  The difficult thing about Talonflame, of course, is the double-weakness to Rock associated with his otherwise strong Fire/Flying type combination, because Stealth Rock is showing every sign of continuing to be a thing.  Like all Pokémon with this trait, Talonflame needs diligent Rapid Spin support to keep him from dying painfully, and also needs something pretty special to make him worth that support.  Good news: he’s got an amazing hidden ability.  I don’t want to knock Flame Body, because the combination of Flame Body and Fly makes Talonflame one of the best solo Pokémon to keep with you while hatching groups of eggs, like Volcarona on Black and White (Flame Body causes eggs in your party to gestate at twice their normal rate), but Gale Wings is where it’s at.  This ability gives all of Talonflame’s Flying-type attacks priority, which means, combined with his already excellent speed, that almost nothing will ever be able to outrun his devastating Brave Bird attack – he can beat higher base speed, he can beat Choice Scarves, he can beat Agility, and he doesn’t even care if you paralyse him (but he can’t beat Extremespeed, so watch out for that).  In flavour terms it’s an odd ability because Talonflame doesn’t really have wind powers (‘Gale Wings’ sounds like something Pidgeot should get), but it also happens to make him one of the game’s best revenge killers – Pokémon whose job is to take advantage of the free switch you get after losing a Pokémon to come in and destroy a powerful aggressor – as well as just a frightening thing to face in general.  Flare Blitz provides a secondary attack just as powerful which turns out to combine quite well with Brave Bird; stay away from Rock-types, Heatran, Lanturn, certain legendary Pokémon you shouldn’t be tangling with anyway, and toasters, and you’re golden (you can always take Steel Wing for the Rock-types, but the low power combined with Talonflame’s merely average attack score may disappoint).  Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention that Talonflame still enjoys the one really spectacular feature shared by most bird Pokémon: U-Turn, which has been called ‘the best move in the game’ for allowing a player to postpone a switch until after seeing whether the opponent will switch that turn, and even doing damage into the bargain.

  So, what’s the bad news?  Talonflame’s other stats are mediocre all around; his attacks lack punch by the standards of offensive Pokémon, and he’s not tough either.  However, these failings are not as significant for Talonflame as they are for most of his ancestors.  The ease with which Talonflame can outrun his foes using Gale Wings, for instance, means that he doesn’t actually need the maximum possible training investment in his speed, and can afford to spend more time shoring up his defences than most offensive Pokémon (focusing on HP will make Flare Blitz and Brave Bird recoil sting less too).  Furthermore, it’s worth bearing in mind that Roost enjoys Gale Wings priority too!  This bird can be much tougher than his mediocre defensive stats suggest.  He also has options to boost his own attack power – Bulk Up and Swords Dance – which Pokémon like Unfezant, Pidgeot and even Staraptor lacked.  Talonflame really has to work for his power, though; a Choice Band makes Roost infeasible, and Life Orb recoil takes too heavy a toll when combined with Brave Bird and Flare Blitz, so things like a Sharp Beak, Expert Belt or Muscle Band will often have to do, supplemented by Swords Dance and the naturally high power of Talonflame’s main attacks.  Remember that his attack stat is only average, and make sure you look for opportunities for him to switch in and scare something away for a free set-up turn.  Other options… well, Taunt could be neat, to make Talonflame into a total nightmare for defensive and set-up Pokémon, especially with Roost to back him up in a more drawn-out fight, and Will’o’Wisp is weird on such an aggressive attacker but between the attack penalty from a burn and a potential Bulk Up boost Talonflame would actually be pretty hard for a physical attacker to take down.  Talonflame’s special attack is actually not far off his attack, but sadly his special movepool sucks – it’s pretty much just Fire attacks plus Solarbeam and, critically, no special Flying attacks to spam with Gale Wings.  In short, don’t go there.  Finally, and bizarrely, Talonflame is said to prefer devastating kicks when striking finishing blows against its prey – bizarrely because Talonflame has no kicking attacks.  A line like that seems tailored specifically to justify the inclusion of Blaze Kick on Talonflame’s level-up list, but the move fails to make an appearance, an odd lack of nuance for an otherwise quite carefully put-together Pokémon.