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Pokémon · Clues from Past Puzzles
Skim the opening clue - the hard, oblique one worth the most - from every Pokémon puzzle that has already run. Spot one you like and jump in to play the whole thing. The answers are not shown here; that is what the puzzle is for. Come back to play the latest.
- Pokémon #1 Its Pokédex entry has it gathering in numbers under a full moon on one particular mountain, and the original games actually stage the scene - there is a chamber up there with a stone at the centre and a small crowd around it. It is also, unusually, something you can simply buy: the Celadon gambling parlour sells them for tokens.
- Pokémon #2 Its Pokédex entry is unexpectedly preoccupied with age and rank: the tail, it says, darkens over the years, and the state of it is read as a mark of long life - the sort of detail the original text almost never troubled with anywhere else.
- Pokémon #3 Its Pokédex entry mentions, almost in passing, that the growths on its back are harvested and sold as a valuable medicine - which means the games are quietly describing something that gets farmed. It is also one of very few things you can meet in the first cave of the first game that is partly a plant.
- Pokémon #1 The animated series gave it to the one member of the main cast who never much wanted to be a competitive trainer in the first place, handed over by a breeder who decided, more or less to his face, that he would look after it better than she would.
- Pokémon #2 In the animated series, arriving at this form is the precise moment the protagonist's version stopped obeying him. It changed shape mid-battle, won the fight, and then spent the better part of two seasons ignoring every instruction it was given.
- Pokémon #3 Its Pokédex entry puts an actual figure on the strength of its oversized claw - ten thousand horsepower - and then immediately undercuts itself by noting that the thing is so heavy the creature has real trouble aiming it at anything.
- Pokémon #1 Its Pokédex entry has it shedding its skin repeatedly as it grows, and claims the species was thought to be mythical until a single specimen was found underwater - which is the games making a quiet joke at the expense of their own rarity system, since finding one is genuinely difficult.
- Pokémon #2 There is exactly one cave in the original games whose entire encounter table consists of a single family - nothing else lives in there at all - and it exists mostly as a shortcut letting the player skip a long stretch of the map. This is the rarer of the two things you will meet inside it.
- Pokémon #3 The sequel generation built an entire tower around this one creature: a wooden pagoda with a central pillar that sways, staffed from top to bottom by monks who use this species and nothing else whatsoever. It remains one of the odder pieces of worldbuilding the series has ever committed to.