Pokemon of the Week #12: Mantyke

Pokemon of the Week: #458 Mantyke, the Kite Pokemon

Happy little thing, isn't he?

Okay, this isn't a very interesting one, let me get this out of my chest first. Mantyke is a Generation IV Pokemon, a newly added baby Pokemon to pre-existing Generation II Pokemon Mantine. While I don't mind newer generations adding baby Pokemon (though they've stopped doing it in the last three generations, realizing that really not many people care for weaker versions of existing monsters) it's generally kind of superfluous. I mean, yeah, sure, we get smaller versions of Marill, Magmar, Pikachu, Clefairy, Sudowoodo, Snorlax and whoever... does anyone really care? I mean, they're cute and all, but we generally want our creatures to become stronger. I get that it's an incentive to breeding, to add several extra things to do to catch them all, but it's a rant I often have -- other than adding a couple of cute ones to sell plushies and show up in the anime, the baby Pokemon are often irrelevant. 

Take Mantyke, for one, who literally is just a smaller Mantine, with facial features rearranged a little, sans tail, with a smiley face marking pasted on its back. It's cute and all, that's for sure, but where a lot of Mantine's Generation II buddies got evolutions that made them relevant in Generation IV, Mantine got... a baby. Yeah. It's one of those annoying things where you needed to have Mantine hold a specific incense to get a Mantyke egg to plop out, too, which is always one of the least innovative things to do in Pokemon. 

Mantyke is at least abundant to find in the wild, so you don't have to go through the headache of breeding Mantine with an incense unlike nearly every single one of the baby Pokemon introduced post Generation II, which is definitely appreciated. Still, while seeing manta ray Pokemon as a relatively common encounter is a treat after three generations of nothing but Tentacools and Wingulls, it's still... eh.

Mantyke is Water/Flying, and it's just a small little manta ray that jumps out of the water. I honestly don't really know what to say here. Like Mantine, it's a big Specially Defensive tanky thing, which doesn't matter because it's still 4x allergic to electric, so no matter how big its special defense is, anyone with a Thunderbolt will murder this baby ray. 

The only real thing that makes Mantyke more interesting than his baby comrades is how it evolves. You see, Mantine's official artwork all depict it with a little Remoraid hanging off one of its fins, in reference to how remora fish like to hang around larger fish like sharks and manta rays. So to evolve Mantyke, you need to have a Remoraid in your party (it doesn't get consumed, don't worry), which is cool, a nice reference to the symbiotic relationship that they share.

Good luck figuring this out without a guide, though -- the same generation that they introduced Mantyke is the same generation they removed Remoraid from all of Mantine's in-game sprites. Oh, Nintendo, you're so weird sometimes.

Yeah, not the best-executed Pokemon... but honestly, none of the baby Pokemon really are. I think only Elekid, Mime Jr and Chingling are the ones I honestly like, while the rest range between ambivalent to 'fuck off'.