Pokemon of the Week #2: Bisharp

Pokemon of the Week: #625 Bisharp, the Sword Blade Pokemon

Cue the inevitable Checkmate joke.

Pawniard and Bisharp are Dark/Steel Pokemon based on chess. Pawniard is obviously modeled on a pawn, and Bisharp on the bishop piece. It's a very cool concept -- chess is cool -- but they decided to go full-on edgy with these two and have them be made up of 90% blades. So Bisharp has spiky legs, spiky hands, spikes out of his elbows, a spike on his helmet, and from his chest and his abdomen are a pair of nasty ribcage-sickle things. You do not want a hug from this dude.

Also, I have never, ever pronounced Bisharp's name correctly. You're supposed to read it like bee-shahrp, to have the pun with bishop... but I've always read his name as BUY-sharp. I know it's wrong, I know the pun lies on the 'bishop' and not the 'sharp', but man. Old habits. They don't change easily.

Bisharp is a very cool design nonetheless, though. He's got a great paint scheme of black, silver and maroon, with gold highlights on his face and head-blade, and he does look like a pretty cool-looking knight. Well, bishop. I'm not quite sure why he's part-Dark. The Steel type is obvious, he's made up of blades, but the Dark-type? Don't get me wrong, an evil blade sentient chess monster is cool, but the evil bit apparently comes from Bisharps leading gangs of Pawniard and beating up 'prey'. All eight games over two generations have all emphasized on how Bisharp lets his Pawniard minions soften up the prey before the Bisharp finishes it off. A brief bit of research leads me to discover that apparently Bisharp's visual design, in addition to resembling a chess piece, also resembles rogue samurai that go around robbing people like bandits. So yeah, he's kind of evil. Which is actually a bit surprising to me because I've always found Bisharp's knightly design pretty heroic-looking. 

Bisharp is cool, though, and decently strong. Dark and Steel are very good typings in the metagame, and Bisharp's base stat total of 490 isn't anything to sneeze at. Bisharp is a very physical attacker and defender, with half-decent speed and a pretty awesome movepool with multiple Dark and Steel stab moves like Night Slash, Iron Head and access to Swords Dance to become utterly destructive. With TMs Bisharp gains access to many other types, including Poison (Poison Jab), Flying (Aerial Ace), Grass (Grass Knot), Rock (Stone Edge), Ghost (Shadow Claw), Fighting (Brick Break) and Psychic (Psycho Cut). Those are all very respectable physical moves. Plus, with Bisharp's own access to Swords Dance and Sucker Punch. Bisharp can be a pretty awesome sweeper and Smogon tells me that he's one of the best sweepers in the OU.

I don't really know that much about the smogon metagame, but I have used a Bisharp or two in some of my runs -- a Bisharp named Checkmate hung out in my team for a couple of gyms before I ended up swapping him out for something more useful. I did muck around with Bisharp for a bit in VI, but I just... never got to supertraining him. Bisharp's still one of my favourite Generation V Pokemon and honestly if I didn't have other dudes I just like more than him, he would've stayed a member of my party for a longer time. I dunno why I replaced him. I guess I just wanted to have a dragon in the party and Haxorus is just a bit more stabbier than Bisharp. 

In the lore itself, I don't think Bisharp really figures into it a lot. Elite Four Grimsley uses a Bisharp and thanks to his part-Steel type he's a bit harder to take down than the rest of the team, but not by much because, well, poor Bisharp is 4x weak to Fighting. Pawniard debuted in Unova, and appears in Route 9 (which is filled with Psychic and Poison types) and Route 11 (which is a bit of a random river). In Kalos Pawniard hang out in the Lost Hotel, which always baffled me until I wrote this article and realized that the Pawniard are gangsters that hang out with the punks there.

Bisharp's just cool, man. He's a evil-samurai-chess-blade monster. And he manages to not look too busy or ugly, he's actually a monster in battle, and I'm still waiting for the inevitable King/Queen/Rook/Knight expansion we get into the thing. Come on, at least give us a Stage Two evolution!