I am rather ashamed to say that, at the request of a friend, I have plunged back into the giant commercial black hole that is the Pokemon series. Anyways, as is standard practice with me as soon as I start playing a game I start thinking of things I would have done differently in the game. Part of this weirdness got me thinking about Eevee, the evolution pokemon.
The following is paraphrased from a post on Pure, which is kind of like poke-central for the ZC community. I figured I'd discuss it here too because AGN has a vastly different community format and I think the answers here will be more practical.
Gamefreak has the opportunity to explore something their system was never capable of executing before: user-defined mixed types. I'll start with an example:
You've got an Eevee and you evolve it with a thunder stone, turning it into Jolteon. Following this, you decide to give it a water stone. Jolteon turns into Everee, who in this instance is a combination Electric/Water type.
Let's look at a different example: You start with an Eevee and evolve it into Umbreon. Later, you meet the conditions to evolve an Eevee into Glacion, but you subject Umbreon to these conditions. Umbreon turns into Everee, who in this instance is a combination Dark/Ice type.
In short, as a player you have the option to create any dual-type combination from the types available to an evolved Eevee. This type of flexibility wasn't possible in older generations but would be academic to implement in a modern game.
In essence, it's an exploration in divergent and convergent evolution. Despite the fact that these essentially adolescent creatures change form to adapt to their environment, eventually they attain their 'optimal' configuration: the inevitable end-state Everee (Yeah, it's a pun on ever, every, and eevee. I apologize for my terrible sense of humor). What's significant about this though is the evidence of vestigial features. While two Everee might look identical they could be completely different based on how they evolved to reach that state. I guess the Compound Eye evolution is sort of responsible for this mindset: two completely unrelated species have very similar eye structures because that is the optimum solution to an environmental hazard (light detection), but one is hindered by the lingering misstep of its antecedents. Within the Pokemon RPG this creates the potential for not only careful player customization but also the prospect of a completely unpredictable fight. Since players cannot see the types of their opponents directly, an Everee poses tremendous risk to even a veteran team.
Thoughts?
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