It was a pretty classic tale for most of the Pokemon games I've played through at this point. I see a Bug type, love it, catch it, and then have to watch it struggle HARD after the first two gyms are wrapped up. Kricketune flipped this experience on its head by being near completely unusable during every single point of the game. It's wild, Kricketot is a nightmare to level up and then when you finally get it to evolve there is nothing that this guy can do competently. I thought maybe I just didn't put much time into figuring out an optimal strategy when Gen 4 first came out, but even a quick look on Bulbapedia gives you the tragic info. Out of all standard fully evolved Pokemon, Kricketune is dead last in stats. Only Shedinja, who doesn't even use three of its stats, has anything lower. Kricketune is slow, frail, and can only hit as hard as a Watchog. Ouch. What possessed Game Freak to trample all over this bug and his weird mustache? Diamond and Pearl remakes have even come and gone and Kricketune got zilch. It's up to us to give it the love it deserves.
Looking at this mon again all these years later, nothing even stands out to me for any kind of vision that the developers had for this bug. Design wise, it has a cool mustache and is very reminiscent of a conductor, but it only gets Sing and Perish Song for out of the box sound based moves. It has sword arms that get brought up in its Pokedex entries a lot, and I guess that's why Attack is its highest, but still very bad, stat.Even with the extra 50 stat points I'm giving it, I cannot for the life of me find a way to make any of them matter. Short of a complete rework with min-maxes stats, this Pokemon is not going to be threatening anything in battle, and I don't want to just give it a bunch of fantastic coverage or status moves that don't make any lore-sense. Of course, and I'm sure you know what's coming if you've read my other posts, this means the only way forward is making some awesome, custom abilities. As Kricketune would say, "SCREE-DENENENE"
In this hack, Kricketune will now have the ability Fermata. In music, this means to hold a note longer than normal, often twice as long but at the discretion of the conductor. That's right, our mustachioed friend is now a conductor extraordinaire. Fermata causes all damaging sound moves from Kricketune and its allies to hit a second time at 25% power. Yes, we're talking a Parental Bond boost that also applies to your teammates. I'm very much not worried about balance, however, because not only is this limited to nothing but sound based moves, but you also have to run Kricketune on your team. And even with these stat buffs, it is not looking pretty.
Wow, 50 stat points don't go far when you're starting at Kricketune's floor. I could have very easily swapped Attack and Sp. Attack around, but most of its Pokedex entries specifically talk about its physical prowess with its sharp, stabby arms. Likewise, the player will have options for heavy-hitting sound move users, I don't want Kricketune to fill that same role but worse. No, Kricketune is a maestro, not a virtuoso. Its role in a battle is to survive, disrupt, and boost moves for its much more battle savvy partners.
Let's look at moveset now in the lens of Fermata and the philosophy of a support mon. Kricketune does not have the offensive capabilities to make use of something like Hyper Voice, but imagine the likes of Snarl, Howl, Metal Sound, and Screech hitting twice. If you've got a Mothim on the field against a special wall and the opponent eats a doubled Metal Sound while Mothim Protects, suddenly that wall is looking at -4 Sp. Defense against a Hyper Voice at 25% extra power. And what other mon can sharply raise its ally's attack? This gives it a pretty special niche even if your aren't using any mons with sound moves. We'll also throw in Echoed Voice as a scaling offensive option since that synergizes well with the Metronome item that Kricketune carry on the wild.
I'll be honest, I loved Kricketot as a kid but hoo boy did that love ever NOT apply to ugly old Kricketune. But with these changes, even Kricketune haters like me have a darn solid use case for nabbing one for their team, and that sounds pretty good to me.
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