My favourite Pokémon is Linoone. A raccoon (?) who can only move in a straight line (bless him). He seems to be your typical early route normal type Pokémon who isn’t especially strong or noteworthy. I like these Pokémon though! They’re cute and have a wide movepool!
Look at how many moves Linoone can learn!
Even amongst this crowd Linoone stands out. Gen 3 introduced abilities and Linoone brings one of my absolute favourites, pick up! There are other Pokémon with this ability like the admittedly cuter Lilipup but Linoone is the only fully evolved Pokémon to have it, with the exception of the ugly Ambipom but I’m not going to use a hideous Pokémon like that. pick up allows Linoone to pick things up, namely potions and rare candies which makeup for it’s somewhat lacklustre stats. When I discovered this I was intrigued. It frankly sounded broken which I found exciting. I wanted to see how far I could push the mechanic so I decided to do a solo run of Pokémon Emerald, only using a Linoone. This ended up being really fun! Despite not being as broken as I thought it might be it really endeared me to Linoone. Now I make sure to catch Linoone every playthrough. Even if I’m not going to use it on my team they can full up the empty slots and passively pick up potions for me.
This is all great from a gameplay mechanic standpoint but Linoone also does a great deal for the story and themes of Pokémon Emerald. On Route 109 there is an old man on a beach with a Zigzagoon who says “The water around these parts is clean but my Zigzagoon still picks up litter from the shoreline at times. Dirty water becomes rain and joins our rivers, which we drink from… if we pollute the sea, it all comes back to haunt us eventually”. This is such a great little piece of dialogue that most people completely ignore but it foreshadows and gets the player thinking about the environmentalist themes of Pokémon Emerald. The whole game does a great job of incorporating its gameplay mechanics into the story like this. Your Pokémon help the environment by picking up litter, you plant berries to grow more which you can use in battle, you battle terrorist organisations who want to disrupt the balance of nature, it’s all fun stuff.
I actually did ignore this dialogue for years. I only really noticed it when I watched An Exhaustive Look at Pokémon Omega Ruby by Shoogles. This is a phenomenal video that looks at every part of the game and I’m always going to associate Zigzagoon and Linoone with this video and how I’ve gotten so much enjoyment out of the Pokémon fandom. Shoogles analyses the old man’s dialogue better than I ever could, stating that “This old man is making the world better not through grandiose ideals but by shouldering a small responsibility”.
The lore continues in their Pokédex entires. Zigzagoon’s Ruby entry describes it as “very curious” which is super cute! It’s regional form on the other hand is described as “aggressive” in it’s Shield entry. I’ve never actually used Galatian Linoone (yet) but based just on its design I really like this version too and it evolves the environmentalist theming that Emerald established using the line. The Galatian line has a punk rock aesthetic and are the primary Pokémon used by the equally punk rock Team Yell. Environmentalism is super punk rock! A great example of this is the Japanese Cyberpunk movie Burst City, where the punk rockers protest against the building of a nuclear power plant. Similarly to how Team Yell helps you invade Chariman Rose’s dodgy energy plant.
Linoone and its line just works for me on every level. It’s design, mechanics, lore, it’s just the best Pokémon and I love them!
References
Pokémon Generations Episode 9: The Scoop (The Official Pokémon YouTube channel, 2016)
Pokémon Emerald (GBA, 2004)
An Exhaustive Look at Pokémon Omega Ruby (Shoogles, 2017)
Pokémon Ruby (GBA, 2002)
Pokémon Shield (Switch, 2019)
Burst City (Ishi, 1982)
Leave a Reply