A big problem with remaking a Pokemon game to center around Bug types is the large number of Bug Pokemon with stats that are completely outclassed by the end of the game. A lot of this stems from the original design philosophy from the Red and Blue games. The first Bug Pokemon you could get in the game, Caterpie and Weedle, could fully evolve by an incredibly low level 10. This results in a Pokemon that generally will be stronger than anything else at that stage of the game, but at a terrible cost. If you wait just six more levels, your starter Pokemon's first evolution will already have higher stat totals than Butterfree and Beedrill and it only gets worse from there. In later games, such as Sword and Shield, they do a little better and let your Blipbug eventually evolve into a top 15 Bug type (by stats alone, anyway), but in the very next games Game Freak is back once again to slapping the super cool Spidops design with stats worse than Ivysaur, Wartortle, and Charmeleon. What gives?
In this hack, I want every single Bug mon to be viable in some way for a single player play-through. I could just slap a base stat total of 600 on everything and call it a day, but I still like the idea of some Pokemon being strictly better than others. If I'm putting in effort to catch a rare species in the back room of an underwater cave, what's the point if it is exactly on-par with my Route 1 Scatterbug/Vivillon? To that end, I developed a rough stat point system that divides every Bug Type into a general stat category based on when they are usually encountered in-game, their vanilla stats, and how tough it seems they should be in-universe based on Pokedex descriptions and other lore pieces. At the very bottom of that list, I put my "Route 1" Bugs. The type of Pokemon that you'll be finding early, evolving early, and quite possible replacing at some point when better options become available. The Bugs I arrived at were:
Butterfree
Beedrill
Ledian
Ariados
Beautifly
Dustox
Kricketune
Vivillon
All the mons in this category can have a base stat total between 425 at minimum and 450 at max. Looking at other Pokemon, 425 really seems to be the minimum stat spread you can have while still retaining some kind of niche in late game battles. Here you have Pokemon like Marowak, Dugtrio, and Quagsire. Nothing particularly strong, but with the right typing, stat spread, and abilities, these mons have the ability to perform very well in specific roles. Mostly for my own amusement, I set up all the Bugs in this tier with exactly 434 base stat total, with only the Gen 2 Ledian and Ariados getting a bump to 445 as a reflection on their later evolution. For this hack, I'll be changing up typings, abilities, and movepools extensively to make things more interesting and give players a reason to keep using these mons in the face of stronger options if they really like them. Since we're giving a lot of these mons pretty substantial bumps for stats, I'm also pushing back their evolution levels a bit so they can't carry the early game too hard. Can't go too crazy, though, because who wants to be using a Metapod any longer than they have to?
We have arrived at a nice set of Pokemon that are differentiated from later offerings through their tier and lower evolution levels. With the ground rules out of the way, in future posts I'll be digging into how I can make these mons all seem unique compared to each other. It is a bit of a task, since we have four butterfly/moth iterations already and we don't want to make them worse versions of the yet further butterfly/moth Bug Types to come!
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