Kings of the Cambrian: Kabutops and Armaldo

 

 Some of the first arthropods to ever exist, part of the explosion of life in the Cambrian period, the Kabutops and Armaldo lines represent a time when bugs ruled the known world. Trilobytes were everywhere and diversified into every niche available while anomalocaris ruled the seas as apex predators. Too bad the same can't be said for their Pokemon counterparts, but we're going to fix that in this hack. I want the player to reap some serious rewards for tracking down the respective fossil, bringing it back to life, and leveling it up at a time when most of their team would be much higher leveled. 

Looking at Kabutops first, it's no surprise why its not doing much in the base games. 495 as a stat total is decent on paper, but it's just not able to utilize them very well. 80 Speed is pretty forgettable, and while its Defense is good, 60 HP and 70 Sp. Defense mean it is pretty easy for a faster Pokemon to immediately send Kabutops packing. It has Swift Swim and Weak Armor as its only options to patch speed outside of a Choice Scarf, and they're honestly pretty bad. It's weak to Water, so while it can complement some rain teams with strong Rock coverage it is also ensuring that any Water move sends it straight to the bench. Weak Armor is inconsistent and even when you can pull it off it leaves Kabutops incredibly vulnerable to priority moves that can revenge KO it. It would much rather boost with something like Shell Smash, but alas, it is one of the only shelled Pokemon out there that still doesn't get access to the move.

Fortunately, I think there are a lot of small tweaks that can vastly improve Kabutop's effectiveness in battle. First off, we're buffing its stat total to a very respectable 535, making it more on par with your typical Starter Pokemon and a much better reward for the latter half of the game. This comes with buffs to HP, Defense, and Speed to improve its survivability and offense. Next, we're absolutely throwing some better abilities in here. Sharpness and Anger Shell will be your two options if you want your Kabutops to be offensively oriented, with the former boosting moves like Razor Shell, Slash, and X-Scissor to dangerous levels. Anger Shell, meanwhile, lets you pull off a high risk high reward scenario to boost its offenses to prime sweeping levels. You could trigger it with Substitute, or Endure, or just play recklessly and hope a move brings you down to half HP without knocking out Kabutops outright. Finally on the defensive side, we're making a huge buff to Battle Armor to not only block critical hits but also halve damage from Rock and Steel moves. I think this fits very well thematically (isn't the whole point of armor to protect you from swords and clubs?) and it makes a forgettable ability actually worth considering.

In summary, we now have a Kabutops that can actually out-speed any defensively oriented Pokemon while either hitting harder or taking hits better than it could before depending on what ability you're utilizing. I may end up giving back Swift Swim to replace Anger Shell again, as it is nice to give the player options for weather-based strategies. We'll see how Anger Shell feels in practice once I get some play-testing in. Next, Armaldo!

I was probably one of five kids in the world when Gen 3 was released that was super hyped to find out they included a badass Bug type based on anomalocaris. Like the absolute nerd I still am, little baby me was watching hour long documentaries on how they reconstructed anomalocaris after several identification blunders from their bizarre fossils. What a thrill to see the archaeologists reconstruct a model of it with working mouth parts in order to bite a clay trilobyte and finally get a matching bite mark to real fossils they were examining. Too bad nowadays that whole experiment has been thrown under the bus and now the scientific community is pretty sure that they never hunted trilobytes because of their mineralized shells that would be too hard for anomalocaris mouth-parts to pierce. Boo, lame. Oh well, even if they weren't chomping trilobytes, they were still absolutely an apex predator that terrorized the seas for animals with softer bodies, and we can make sure Armaldo stays king in our game.

While Anorith is pretty much a straight anomalocaris copy with its design, Armaldo changes it up with legs and huge arm/claw things and a very dinosaur-esque feel complete with a long tail. This thing is big, it's tough, and you should be scared if you see it back from the prehistoric grave. Starting with stats, forget a base 75 HP. Look at this huge thing, we're buffing it straight up to 105. And forget this blundering 45 speed stat, we're taking the rest of the investment and pouring it all into Speed. Hello 100 speed tier, heaven knows Armaldo needs it. Just these two changes bring Armaldo's base stat total up to an incredible 580, so we don't need to adjust anything else. Armaldo is the true king of the Cambrian, and I want that to be reflected in game.

For abilities, Armaldo can of course opt for the newly buffed Battle Armor to pad its incredible defenses even more. Or for offense, it can utilize Compound Eyes to fire off incredibly powerful moves like Stone Edge and Iron Tail with near perfect accuracy. As an apex predator at the time, anomalocaris had some of the most advanced compound eyes ever evolved at that period of history so I think it makes perfect sense to give Armaldo some of that action. For moves, not much needs to change. Stone Edge, Iron Tail, and Megahorn are all added as some very late level up moves that will let it devastate foes that dare go up against it. It already has access to Swords Dance or Rock Polish if you'd like to boost up, and Leech Life can allow it to stay healthy against foes that don't resist it. All in all, a terrifying package that will be a fantastic reward if a player sticks with Anorith into the late game.

And there you have it, some terrifying fossils that just became worth using on your team. We still have one more prehistoric-inspired Bug in Yanmega, and of course everyone's favorite futurized fossil with Genesect. But for these classic find a fossil and resurrect them Pokemon, I think a player will be pretty happy choosing either one of these in Mirage tower.