Building the Pokédex Trivia game meant reading a lot of Pokédex entries. Hundreds of them. Most are fine. Some are lovely little bits of writing. And some are completely unhinged, in a way that only becomes obvious when you sit there with the text in front of you trying to write a hint for it.
Here are ten that I kept coming back to. None of this is a complaint. The weird ones are my favourites.
1. Magcargo, hotter than the sun
Ruby says Magcargo's body temperature is about 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The surface of the sun is roughly 10,000. So this snail is nearly twice as hot as the sun, and it lives on a mountain, and you can catch it with a rock and a Poké Ball.
Later games walked this back a bit and just said it is very hot. The original number is still sitting there in Ruby though.
2. Wailord, the floating whale that weighs nothing
Wailord is 14.5 metres long and weighs 398 kilograms. A real whale that size weighs tens of thousands of kilograms. Do the maths on Wailord's volume and its density comes out lower than air in places.
The generous reading is that it is mostly inflatable and full of gas, which is why it can breach so high. The less generous reading is that someone picked a number that looked big without checking it.
3. Slowbro's tail keeps getting bitten off
The entries say that if the Shellder on Slowbro's tail lets go, it reverts to being a Slowpoke and forgets how to use its psychic powers. So the entire evolution is contingent on a clam not getting bored.
Also, Slowpoke fishes with its tail, and its tail grows back if bitten off, and the tail is apparently delicious. There is a whole side plot in the Kanto games about people selling them.
4. Cubone is wearing its mother's skull
This one is well known but it is worth saying out loud. The Pokédex states that Cubone wears the skull of its dead mother and cries at night, and that the skull hides its face, which is streaked with tears.
It is in a children's game. It is the fourth or fifth entry you read as a kid. Nobody warns you.
5. Drifloon carries children away
Diamond says Drifloon tugs on the hands of small children to take them to the afterlife, but it is too weak to actually carry them, so instead the child drags it around.
The failure is the joke, which almost makes it worse. It is trying its best and it is bad at it.
6. Porygon lives in cyberspace, in 1996
Porygon is described as a Pokémon made entirely of programming code that can travel through cyberspace. This was written before most people had used the internet, which is why the entry reads like a press release for a modem.
It still holds up as a concept. It just sits oddly next to the rest of the Pokédex, which is otherwise mostly about animals eating each other.
7. Alakazam's brain never stops growing
Its IQ is stated as 5000, which is not how IQ works, and its brain grows continuously, which is why its head is so heavy that it needs psychic power to hold it up.
So Alakazam is permanently spending energy on neck support. Take away its psychic ability and it faceplants.
8. Gengar's shadow, your shadow
Several entries suggest that on a moonlit night, if your shadow moves on its own, it is Gengar, and that it steals warmth from anything nearby. One entry says it is a former human.
Nothing about this is explained further, ever. That is probably the right call.
9. Parasect is not really Parasect
The mushroom on Paras grows into the mushroom on Parasect, and by that point the entries say the mushroom is in charge and the bug is basically a shell being driven around.
Its eyes are drawn blank white for a reason. Once you know this you cannot unsee it.
10. Kadabra and the boy who disappeared
The entry claims a boy with psychic powers woke up one morning transformed into Kadabra. Not that he caught one. That he became one.
If you take that literally, then somewhere in the Kanto region there are parents whose son is now a level 16 encounter in a cave.
Why I like the messy ones
The entries were written by different people across three decades in two languages, and nobody was checking the physics. That is exactly why they are interesting. A tidy, internally consistent Pokédex would be much more boring to read and much harder to build a guessing game out of.
If you want to test how well you actually know these entries, Pokédex Trivia gives you one with the name redacted and six guesses. The weird ones are usually the easy ones, because you remember them.