Pokemon of the Week #19: Rhyhorn

#111: Rhyhorn, the Spikes Pokemon


So this week we're going to look at one of the original 151, Rhyhorn. Well, the randomizer actually picked Marshadow this week, but that thing doesn't actually have much lore yet. Rerolling the dice gave me another one of those damn elemental monkeys, and I'm not going to talk about them. So, Rhyhorn.

What's Rhyhorn, really? It's this awesome-looking rhinoceros-protoceratops beast made out of rocks. Rocks arranged in the shape of armour plating. Among the denizens of the first generation, I've always found the likes of Rhyhorn and Nidoking to be strangely far more complex than the 'animal with a particular element' that a good chunk of the generation had. And honestly, at the risk of sounding like a Genwunner, it's the right balance of complexity that makes Rhyhorn's design busy enough to look like what they wanted him to look -- an armoured rock dinosaur rhinoceros -- without adding superfluous details that distract from the spirit of the thing.

It's a pretty cool looking beast, that's for sure. It evolves into Rhydon, a bipedal fat theropodal dinosaur thing with a fucking drill for a horn.  The less said about Rhyperior, the better -- what an ugly-ass creature. Though I did love the arm-cannons as a concept, and he's undoubtedly a powerful beast in the metagame, Rhyperior isn't a design I'm terribly fond of.

hurrrrrrr

Rhyhorn, though, is one of those rare cases where I think that the basic stage of an evolution line is actually the coolest-looking out of the three. And I'm not saying that because I'm obligated to talk about Rhyhorn. It's just cool, okay? At a glance it's simply a rock rhinoceros, but the shape of the head resembles that of ceratopsian dinosaurs so much, and a combination of the shifting armour plates and the angry look it has on its face just makes him look so dang badass.

I have to confess that I never really paid much attention to Rhyhorn in the original generation one games -- it had an ugly-ass sprite, it's one of the many Rock/Ground types that feel really weak because Grass-types and Water-types sneeze on them and they die, and my biggest memory of Rhyhorn is when this whole epic battle with Giovanni in his gym gets set up only for him to throw out this weak-ass tail-whipping Rhyhorn. It's nowhere as cool-looking as it looked in the anime or the TCG.

I did have the TCG as a kid, with a pretty cool art, though. That's something. But my main exposure was still the games, which I still treat as the 'main' canon, so the lack of Rhyhorn representation -- it's an uncommon find in the frustrating Safari Zone that I only catch to turn itno a Rhydon and put into my box -- means that Rhyhorn completely flew under my radar until well into Generation III. I'm not sure Rhyhorns ever played a super-important part in the anime or the manga, either. Rhydons were, I remember, but Rhyhorn? There was one in the first Mewtwo movie, I think?

Rhyhorn in Generation III was still a Safari Zone encounter, but I remembered it being far more common there, given with a far more impressive-looking sprite that looked truer to the Ken Sugimori art. Generation IV made him an uncommon cave encounter, and Generation VI made him an integral part of the plot, with Rhyhorn being one of the very first Pokemon you meet in the game as an overworld 3D model -- the Generation VI protagonist's mother was a fucking Rhyhorn racer, and you can ride around in a Rhyhorn! I'm pretty sure that's the biggest relevance Rhyhorn has ever gotten in the games beyond his role as Giovanni's first fodder Pokemon.

For all my griping about Rhyhorn being under-represented, despite showing up relatively late in the games, Rhyhorn's actually a pretty shit Pokemon battle-wise. It's an insanely physical Pokemon, with more than half of its stats lumped into physical attack and defense. Which is probably great before the physical/special split, but is absolutely atrocious now. Rhydon isn't super-special either (though he looks cool) and Rhyperior's a pretty cool metagame bruiser, but Rhyhorn himself is burdened with the same weaknesses that all Rock/Ground dual types had -- four times weakness to two of the three available starters. You don't need Solarbeams or Hydro Pumps to kill a Rhyhorn, a simple Bubble will do. Again, a high physical defense statline is probably a great compensation for its 4x weakness to Grass and Water back in Generation I, but now? Yuck.

Disclaimer: Team Magma never
used a Rhyhorn in the games

Offensively Rhyhorn's actually insanely diverse, not helped by Generation I's hilariously unbalanced TM distribution. Naturally Rhyhorn learns almost exclusively physical attack moves, mostly just Rock and Ground with Megahorn added to Rhyhorn's repertoire in the third generation. He gets absolutely insane shit like Fire Blast, Thunderbolt and Blizzard from TMs... which probably hits less than Tackle on Rhyhorn's statline.

Lore-wise, all the Pokedex entries talk about how Rhyhorn's a dumb, charging battering ram. It has a one-track mind! It can't turn when it starts running! It won't stop charging until it falls asleep! It has bones 1000 times harder than human bones! It's brain is small! It can topple buildings!

Rhyhorn's honestly a really cool design that's near-unusable in the games thanks to its horrid stats and weak types. I mean, yeah, sure, Rhyperior's awesome and all, but this is about Rhyhorn. But that's honestly the weakness of many of the first two generations. It's just a shame that this cool design is never really going to see much use in the games. Like, I'm kind of tired of the Gen I love they've been showering us throughout the sixth and seventh generation, but if they really wanted to show Generation I love, update the statlines of the first two generations to match with the physical/special split!

TL;DR, cool rock rhino.