Pokemon of the Week #8: Clauncher

Clauncher, the Water Gun Pokemon

Delicious when served with mayonnaise

My first roll for this week's Pokemon of the Week actually gave me Marshadow, Pokemon #802, but very little is known about the little mythical bugger beyond the fact that it exists and its stats and whatever, so I'm not going to talk about it. A second reroll gave me Clauncher, so here we go.

Clauncher is a Pokemon based on a lobster introduced in Generation VI, making it a relatively recent entry into the Pokemon lore. We've had several Pokemon representing the Crustacean sub-phylum before, with Kingler representing crabs and Crawdaunt representing crayfish, but we didn't exactly have shrimps or lobsters until generation VI's XY. Clauncher is based on the Alpheidae family, better known to us non-Latin speaking folk as the snapping shrimp, or the pistol shrimp. They're basically shrimps with asymmetrical claws (Clauncher and especially Clawitzer exaggerates this, of course, but it's true in nature) with the characteristic ability in real life to produce snapping sounds with their modified pistol-esque pincers, and some species are actually able to make a real-life underwater Bubblebeam to stun prey and scare off predators. No, quite literally! There's a crude hammer-pistol mechanism that allows snapping shrimps to launch a wave of bubbles at high forces. It's actually pretty cool, check out youtube for a video or something.

Shit, after Paras last week, these 'Pokemon of the Week' episodes end up being me preaching about the weird side of nature, yeah? Maybe next week we'll roll like Vanniluxe or something -- with that, I sure as hell ain't talking about the history of ice cream.

Anyway, before we get too Discovery Channel on this dude, I'm just going to say that, well, I quite like Clauncher. I could probably get more mileage talking about his evolution, Clawitzer, and his insane competitive uses and the disproportionately and awesomely gigantic cannon-claw... but let's talk about Clauncher. Which admittedly isn't much, but it's New Year's and I'm not going to sit around writing fifteen paragraphs.

Clauncher's Pokedex entries all talk about it, well, behaving like a shrimp, and having the ability to launch compressed water strong enough it can shatter rock like a pistol shot. Because, y'know, it's based on the pistol shrimp. It's exclusive to Pokemon X, with its counterpart being the more defensive Skrelp/Dragalge line. I played Y, so I had to import one from the Global Trade System, but Clauncher's a pretty cool little dude. Stats-wise Clauncher is pretty much your average Basic Pokemon, not quite having the powerful base 120 Special Attack that its evolution has.

It's pure water and learns mostly just pure Water-type moves, in addition to a bunch of Normal-types... but from TMs it can learn a lot more like Ice Beam, Sludge Wave, Flash Cannon and... Rock Slide? It's actually not as much as Clawitzer, but since Clauncher has a relatively normal-sized claw as opposed to Clawitzer's gigantic tank of a claw, it's actually reasonable.

It's a pretty cool little shrimp dude. There's really not much to talk about it because it evolves into Clawitzer, and that's where all the fun is at, with its powerful aura/pulse-boosting ability (Dark Pulse! Aura Sphere! Heal Pulse!) being unexpectedly powerful, and it being a relatively awesome sweeper if handled well. Clauncher himself might seem a little boring, but hey.

Also, Shiny Clauncher is red. Like a cooked lobster. I really like lobster, and shiny Clauncher makes me hungry. Clauncher is like half a meter long... you can feed a family with that! Jeez.

Anyway, yeah. I'm phoning it in a bit for this article. I mean, there's not really much to say about Clauncher. He's cool, but it's all in his evolution. We'll see if we can land someone more interesting next week.