Pokemon of the Week #36: Mareanie & Toxapex [And a little announcement]

#747: Mareanie, the Brutal Star Pokemon & #745: Toxapex, the Brutal Star Pokemon

Let me be honest -- when I first  saw Mareanie and Toxapex in leaked images a couple of days before I got to play Sun/Moon, I thought they looked kinda silly. Partially because of the low-resolution images of the sprites, but because they just looked like... well, silly domes with a little fleshy parasite within. They were kinda like a Ferrothorn-esque design, but less interesting. 

And then I actually saw one in motion in the game, with how cool the tentacles are, and how cool the flaps open and close for Toxapex, and I realize it's meant to represent a crown-of-thorns starfish... and I fell in love with Mareanie and Toxapex. We also got some rather dark backstory behind them, too, with multiple dex entries highlighting how Mareanie and Toxapex prey on Corsola and eat them. Hell, it's even an extended unskippable line of dialogue during the main story of Pokemon Sun/Moon in the Aether Foundation, where Wicke and Hau have a conservation about the cruel side of nature.

And I just kinda love it a lot, yeah? It's a Water/Poison type, obviously, with certain sea urchin facets to Mareanie and Toxapex's design. But it's not just, well, a starfish and they don't do much with it (looking at you, Lumineon). Mareanie and Toxapex is like this cute little main stalk-like body and the 'starfish' ends up being like tentacle hair around it. As Mareanie exolves into Toxapex, the main body becomes tiny and hangs suspended, while the tentacles end up forming kind of like this bulwark and looks so insanely tough. The Ultra Moon dex entry notes that the dome-shaped tentacle allows it to not be disturbed by the ebb and flow of tides, which is a cool detail. It's just a cool-looking design, and one of the standout ones in the seventh generation, I think.

Oh, and James has one in the anime! I haven't watched the seventh generation anime, but any Pokemon that Team Rocket uses tends to be charismatic and lovable.

Dex entries really highlight just how brutal Mareanie and Toxapex are. Mareanie attacks its prey, especially Corsola (which is a 'star banquet' to it), by stabbing it with poison spikes and brutally beating it up with its ten tentacles. And like most starfishes, Mareanie and Toxapex can regenerate their tentacles. Toxapex's poison will leave a person in pain for three days and nights, and after-effects after that. Toxapex's Sun entry is particularly insanely dark. "Toxapex crawls along the ocean floor on its 12 legs. It leaves a trail of Corsola bits scattered in its wake."

And Mareanie is pretty hard to find, too. First, to get Mareanie, you need to fish for Corsola... which has a 1% or 5% chance of appearing, depending on the area. And then you must get the Corsola to not die and call for help... and pray that its call for help is answered by a Mareanie that shows up to chow down on it. I actually spent like a couple of hours when I first tried to catch a Mareanie for a first time, and, well, mostly just because it looks cool.

Mareanie itself doesn't have much in terms of being spectacular in combat. It has balanced stats, and one of its abilities is 'Merciless', that causes all its attacks to become critical if the enemy is poisoned. Water/Poison is a typing everyone is familiar with thanks to Tentacruel, and Toxapex's learnset is pretty generic. Lots of poison-type moves, it learns liquidation at a high level, and a bunch of defensive moves like Recover and Wide Guard. By TMs, it learns a lot more water and ice type moves. 

But man, as Toxapex, that statline is pretty insane. Toxapex is just a bulwark, with a base 152 defense and a base 142 special defense, and it's just a pretty cool defensive beast that manages to be effective in battle by capitalizing on 100% critical hits as long as it can poison the enemy. Toxapex perhaps isn't a meta pick on Pokemon competitive battles (though I know jack-all about Generation VII competitive battles) but I do like it a lot. 

Toxapex and Mareanie are both based on the real-life Crown-of-Thorns Starfish, or Acanthaster planci for all you scientific-minded people out there. Which is actually pretty similar to Toxapex, sans little bulb-head. It really is a weird dome-like creature with tentacles and lots of spikes, and the crown-of-thorns is easily one of the biggest cause of destruction of coral reefs worldwide. 

It's perhaps most common in Australia and currently is trying to consume the Great Barrier Reef, but it's not just localized there as many of them are found in the Indo-Pacific and Hawaiian waters as well. The Crown of Thorns feed on the hard coral and while the extent of the destruction they cause might be over-dramatized by some reports, they do, well, leave a trail of coral bits in their wake. (Remember that while starfish look weirdly static and plant-like, they're still animals that very much move around and eat) Which is, of course, reflected in Pokemon with Toxapex preying on the only coral Pokemon out there, Corsola. 

And, well, the Crown-of-Thorns are pretty poisonous. These starfishes have spines that contain poisons that, when some foolish predator (or unwary human) touches the starfish, the spines will stab into their body and unleash chemicals called saponins into the prey's body. In humans, this will cause pain, bleeding, nausea and tissue swelling that tends to last from hours to weeks. If the spines actually snap off and get embedded in human tissue, surgery will be required. 

So yeah, Toxapex and Mareanie are based on a pretty cool real-life starfish, and in a franchise that perhaps has an over-abundance of water-type creatures, Mareanie and Toxapex adapts a creature with a pretty important impact upon the balance of the sea's ecology... while delivering one of the more memorable and perhaps most cruel creatures in all of the Pokemon franchise.

Also a bit of an announcement... Mareanie and Toxapex will be the final entry of our brief return of Pokemon of the Week. And it's going to be a far more final nail in the coffin... because it's not just going to be a hiatus. While working on these, I realized just how much I've missed talking about Pokemon, and playing both Pokken Tournament and Pokemon Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon has galvanized just the desire to really talk a lot more about it. And if my 'Lore of Hearthstone' series is anything to go by, doing a larger project like that isn't only just feasible, it's probably far more popular than singleton things like this.

So expect 2018 to be the year where I do these... reviews? Commentaries? Whatever you call it on every single Pokemon. We'll probably do like half-generations at a time and talk about evolutionary families as a whole, but I'll go through every single Pokemon in all seven generations, all alternate forms, all mega evolutions and maybe even go to important trainers and the like. I'm definitely super-pumped about the prospect of talking about every Pokemon (although I'm sure the first 151 is going to be a bit of a doozy).

So yeah. Pokemon of the Week is closed with a ribbon, and we're going to head into 2018 with the anticipation of... I've no idea what to call this. "Reviewing Every Pokemon?" Yeah, we'll go with that.