#721 - Volcanion
Fire/Water
Our final Mythical Pokemon of Generation VI, and numerically the final Pokemon officially available, though not the last one for the purpose of this thread, Volcanion to put it nicely is a rather underwhelming Mythical Pokemon. While the previous Generations saved the best Mythical Pokemon for last---a robotic weaponized ancient bug, a shape-shifting alien virus, and the God of Pokemon perhaps---Generation VI finishes off with what could best be called the Mythical equivalent of Heatran, but even Heatran I think has more lore connected to it than Volcanion. That's not to say I think Volcanion is a bad Pokemon, quite the opposite I think its design is actually pretty neat and it has a Type Combination that everyone has been waiting for, but it just feels shoved into the end of the PokeDex without much thought. Diancie was a cool little pseudo-evolution of a Kalos Pokemon and Hoopa served an interesting role gameplay wise in explaining how all the Legendary Pokemon could be found in Hoenn, but Volcanion has no in-game presence whatsoever and one really has to wonder if this is another casualty of the disappointingly short Generation VI. Given its design and inspiration, as we'll go into detail more later, it honestly seems like Volcanion would've fit much better into the Alola Region and I was actually wondering if it was gonna unlock something by transferring it from Generation VI to Generation VII but, alas, so far it doesn't seem like Volcanion is getting any role in Sun and Moon.
Like with Genesect The Pokemon Company pushed Volcanion's reveal up a bit (though of course it'd been leaked way back in 2013), usually the Mythical Pokemon have their films revealed around December, sans the actual Mythical Pokemon, and then the Mythical Pokemon themselves are revealed early next year but for Volcanion they revealed it alongside the initial announcement of its feature film in December 2015. In retrospect this was obviously done due to the fact that the new Generation VII Mythical Pokemon Magearna was the actual star of the film, and that the Sun and Moon hype would be well underway by the usual reveal period for Volcanion if The Pokemon Company had followed the usual schedule, and they wanted to give Volcanion some chance to shine before it got buried under all the Gen VII hype. I'd say they pretty much failed as no one really seems interested in Volcanion now, and even poor Magearna has basically been forgotten about since it's barely been involved in the Sun and Moon media and appears to have a rather underwhelming role in the game as a (seemingly) storyless Event Pokemon.
At the time of this post Volcanion is still a fairly rare Pokemon to obtain legitimately, Japanese players who pre-ordered tickets to the 19th Pokemon film, "Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel", being able to obtain it via serial codes starting in April thus the majority of legit ones being the Japanese "Nebel Volcanion". PAL just got access to Volcanion at the beginning of October through a simillar method, though the serial codes will be distributed at various stores instead of through tickets, and North America can't obtain their serial codes from GameStop/EBGames till October 10th. I usually don't really bother with distributions that aren't simple WiFi Events, and even then I tend to forget about them quite often, but I kind of want to make sure to swing by GameStop this time around to pick up Volcanion since I plan to finally complete the PokeDex in Sun and Moon. I probably won't go through with it, I've got a lot of distractions and despite being really into Pokemon a small fraction of my love is spent actually playing the games, but it's a goal I have now that I've "talked about 'em all". Anyway Volcanion is just given to you via serial code and has no in-game event in XY or ORAS, and I'm gonna guess probably won't have any special event in Sun and Moon either because they probably would've mentioned it by now to sell more tickets to the film like how they advertised the Zoroark film's Shiny Beasts link bonus as one of the first reveals in Black and White's coverage.
Volcanion is a rather ho-hum Mythical Pokemon who doesn't really fit neatly into any category that Mythical Pokemon usually fall into. Though Generation VI's other Mythical Pokemon are also somewhat unique, they fit neatly with pre-established Mythical roles I think, Diancie seeming like an expansion of the Meloetta-style that has since been taken up by Magearna as well while Hoopa serves double-duty in both of its Formes as acting like a cute Mew-style Legendary and a more vicious Deoxys-style Legendary. Volcanion on the other hand just seems like his own thing, a 600-BST Mythical Pokemon with a unique Type Combination in Fire/Water, one of those "paradoxical" Type Combinations that some fans believed would never happen because it "didn't make any sense", even though that seemed like a flawed mindset to have when dealing with Pokemon. It also means that Water, along with Flying, has now officially been paired with every Type at least once and that's neat for completion's sake and not too surprising when you consider how many Water Pokemon there are. Fire/Water is a surprising Type Combination because while many fans associate Water Pokemon with being Super Effective against Ground and Rock Pokemon, they aren't advantageous against them defensively and thus Volcanion's Fire-type makes it weak to both of those Types in addition to Electric. It's one Type Combination I never really considered in terms of weaknesses and resistances and I was rather surprised when I looked them up as they aren't too intuitive, like it resists Bug and Fairy (oh yeah Fire resists those) and doubly resists Fire, Ice, and Steel.
Outside of being the first Fire/Water Pokemon Volcanion is rather restrained for a modern Mythical Pokemon due to having no gimmick, when that has become a trademark of Mythical Pokemon since Deoxys. Excluding Darkrai, we've had a sea angel obtained through a spin-off that can breed, a hedgehog that learns to fly, a God who can become any Type, a Pokemon that exists as #000 in the Unova Dex, a legendary swordsman who can power up (aesthetically), a dancer that can switch styles through the use of a song, and a robotic bug that can equip various discs to access different elemental attacks. Volcanion has none of that, and I do wonder if at one point it was planned to just be a regular Legendary Pokemon with a minor role till Game Freak decided to trim down the in-game Legendaries to a mere three. I wondered if we'd see a new form for it in the movie that would appear in Sun and Moon, a Legendary Pokemon not having an alternate Forme feels weird in this day and age, but that didn't happen. It doesn't get a crazy Ability either, just ending up with Water Absorb which, while useful, isn't necessarily special or amazing. Imagine if it had some Ability that switched Fire attacks to Water attacks and vice-versa, or caused every Water-type attack it used to have a chance of burning the foe. That'd be pretty interesting.
In the competitive scene Volcanion is at least a pretty powerful Pokemon in no small part thanks to its awesome offensive STAB and access to its Signature Move Steam Eruption, a more powerful version of Scald with the same deadly 30% chance of causing a Burn which can bring physically-oriented Pokemon to their knees. Though its weaknesses hurt it as you'd imagine, being weak to Stealth Rock and Earthquake is never a good thing, and it's rather slow, it's an all-around solid Pokemon with Water Absorb granting it a great immunity. And considering how otherwise "meh" it is in terms of how people react to it it should be lucky that it's got a nice competitive niche going for it. That aside being a Mythical Pokemon means that using it in certain situations is either banned or frowned upon and I imagine most fans would love to see this Type used once more on a non-Legendary Pokemon that would have more in-game usage, it's always nice when a previously reserved-for-Legendary Type is given to a regular Pokemon. Once more I don't think Fire/Water, or Water/Fire, is necessarily a difficult concept to realize either though a steam-based Pokemon is good choice for its debut.
All this aside I cannot reiterate that I do actually consider Volcanion to have a fairly neat design, a nice blend of an organic creature with some mechanized elements that for me personally hits a nice sweet spot, though I'm aware many disagree and it's yet another Pokemon that fans can't help but compare to a Digimon. The cool design makes me wish that it wasn't a Legendary Pokemon at all, rather I think its design would've worked well as a single-stage non-Legendary Pokemon because I'd love to see more single-stagers that embody a cooler, more ferocious appearance rather than looking cute like many single-stage Pokemon tend to aim for. I feel like Generation I had the best mix of single-stage (many of them now multi-stage though) Pokemon that embodied both aesthetics and to me it feels like there's been a noticeable shift since Generation II towards making non-evolving Pokemon mainly cute and tiny, though we still have some exceptions here and there. Alongside Furfrou, Dedenne, Carbink, Hawlucha, and Klefki Volcanion would've served as a nice palette cleanser and if it was available to use in normal gameplay as a regular Pokemon I would probably consider giving it a shot especially with its unique Type Combination. But, alas, for whatever reason it was chosen to be a Mythical Pokemon with virtually no "mythical" qualities surrounding it.
And that's not an exaggeration, as far as I know there's no information about this Pokemon hinted at in any Generation VI game, and the PokeDex barely tells us anything other than it can use the arms on its back (which in the art are connected together as a ring, though they can freely separate and move independently) to expel steam that's extremely pressurized and it lives in dense fog hidden in a remote mountain far away from humans, though no such mountain in Kalos or Hoenn fits this description well enough to be considered a possible home for it. For awhile it was believed it was actually connected to Lumiose City, due to people thinking that the NPC mentioning a "Lava Dome" Pokemon in Jaune Plaza was referencing it (actually a weird mistranslated line about one NPC mimicking Heatran's voice), or resided in the locked parts of the Lumiose Power Plant but that doesn't seem to be the case. Why does it seemingly dislike humans? It's never really explained, but I wonder if perhaps humans in the past attempted to use Volcanion's steam powers for their own benefit causing it to resent humanity---that's just my head-canon though, there's nothing to support that. Just kind of feels weird to me that such a mechanized-looking Pokemon's main piece of lore is "mistrustful of humans" when it looks like one who'd probably have a connection to them.
Outside of the obvious steam pump motif, Volcanion appears to possibly be inspired by the lion-dog Shisa statues popular in the Ryukyuan Islands of Japan as it somewhat resembles one in form and color, the circular pump perhaps meant to loosely resemble a traditional Japanese archway though that's admittedly a bit of a stretch. I'm not sure why they decided to link the Shisa with steam pumps either, it's kind of an odd mix, but that's the best explanation I've seen explaining why Volcanion looks the way that it does. This also once more makes me think it would've worked far better as an Alolan Pokemon since Alola has quite a lot of Pokemon that are based on animals from other notable islands outside of Hawaii, such as a koala from Australia and a lemur from Madagascar, and thus a Pokemon based on statues found primarily on Japanese islands would be a logical fit---it's believed that Togedemaru is based on the Ryukyuan spiny rat, for instance, so we already have one Ryukyuan-based Pokemon appearing. Plus, you know, a Fire/Water Pokemon with "volcano" in its name is the most obvious Pokemon to use in a Hawaiian-inspired locale that you can imagine. Maybe Game Freak will surprise me and they'll give Volcanion a surprise role in Alola that finally fleshes out its lore, but I'm not too optimistic even though Sun and Moon has been delivering quite a lot of nice surprises and picking up elements seemingly dropped in XY.
So, Volcanion starred in the 19th Pokemon film but as that only recently came out in Japanese theaters I've yet to see it and thus I can't say much about it, other than it looks honestly like a pretty fun movie and it was a nice surprise to see all of Ash's Pokemon contributing for once since a big problem I have with recent moves is often it seems like the main cast forgets about their own Pokemon even when they'd be useful. From what I've read Volcanion is a misanthropic Pokemon that lives in plateau for abused Pokemon and sets off to rescue the mechanical Pokemon Magearna, with Ash in tow after the two end up getting literally connected to one another by a strange magnetic advice. Spoilers, but Volcanion learns that not all humans are bad and everything works out in the end for the good guys. I don't mean to sound dismissive of this film because I'm honestly interested in seeing it for myself, it looks like a decent enough romp judging from the trailers and might end up being the best of the Generation VI films.
But oh boy, much like Volcanion itself The Pokemon Company just left this film to die basically as it released on the same day as Finding Dory hit Japan, and Pixar movies do just as good over there as they do domestically, and even more of a death sentence it released on the day Yokai Watch 3 hit Japan. Ouch. From what I've read they didn't try and market this movie at all basically compared to the previous films, with little merchandise appearing in Japanese 7-11s around its premiere (One Piece Gold merchandise taking its place instead) and Volcanion not receiving any extra special episodes like Diancie and Hoopa did. The team didn't take a vacation for location scouting either, and as Dogasu notes on his site this film received far less interviews and behind-the-scenes features on the official site. It also lacked a Pikachu Short, apparently because the last one with all the Pokemon singing was quite a challenge for the team to create, though perhaps those extra minutes for the main film helped its plot? Regardless of the movie's actual quality in the end it did even worse than the Hoopa film, which by Pokemon standards was a flop, and many believe the movie was hurt by OLM saving their budget for next year's 20th Anniversary Movie. I'm actually looking forward to seeing Sun and Moon's style of animation given a movie-size budget, and I hope them taking a year off of sorts with this film will allow them to deliver a legitimately nice experience for Pokemon Fans.
