Pokemon of the Week #21: Gastrodon

West Sea (left) and East Sea (right)

#423: Gastrodon, the Sea Slug Pokemon

(Puts mental note to do a piece on Pokemon form differences for later on)

So, because the fourth generation has been the least-represented generation in my Pokemon of the Week articles, this week's randomizer is solely in the fourth generation, with Gastrodon being the lucky fellow who gets the pick. I completely forgot that Gastrodon is another Water/Ground Pokemon last week when I was talking about Whiscash, but Gastrodon's a far better-stat-distributed Water/Ground. Still outclassed by Swampert, though.

Anyway, Gastrodon's biggest gimmick is that there are two variants of Gastrodon, the East Sea (green) one, and the West Sea (pink) one. As their names probably tell you, the version of Shellos and Gastrodon that you get depend on which side of Sinnoh you catch the Shellos/Gastrodon in. As a brief refresher, the gigantic mountain range of Coronet splits Sinnoh into two, which gives us this pretty cool bit with Gastrodon where apparently for some reason evolution (the Darwinian kind, not the Pokemon kind) has split both Gastrodon into visually distinct species. It's something that's going to be visited in the seventh generation with Alola regional variants and the four Oricorio variants in the four Alola islands, but unlike those, the two Gastrodons are virtually identical in all but appearance.

I'm pretty sure that Gastrodon is the first permanent non-gender-based 'alternate form' Pokemon after Unown, but Unown sucks and doesn't really make much sense (despite all the story potential that Unown brings,  but that's a rant for another day), whereas Gastrodon's the first to get a proper evolutionary explanation -- the allopatric speciation, if we're being fancy. Other than the two subtypes of Gastrodon still being able to breed with each other (though Pokemon does allow inter-species breeding so eh) the two Gastrodons have transformed thanks to their different habitats. I'm not quite sure why the West Sea Gastrodon is so pink, because I don't really remember any particularly pink patches of swamp or sea in Sinnoh, but there you go. I like Sinnoh a lot, and I actually didn't mind Gastrodon that much. A pink one briefly hung around my team as a low-levelled capture assister, but ended up being cut out of my final team.

I do think I prefer the pink-brown Gastrodon somewhat. Both Gastrodons have a similar body shape, a similar number of leg-growths,  three eyes, and the same streaks of yellow, but the pink Gastrodon has cooler dual-horns and some rocky growths on her back, whereas the male Gastrodon looks a bit more aquatic with the seweed-esque body and the more fin-esque growths.

Gastrodon's pokedex entries, strangely, doesn't really say anything about its two variants, only talking about its regenerative abilities (something several types of invertebrates have IRL), the shell that it lost over years of evolution, the purple fluid it oozes when attacked, and its favoured habitat of shallow pools. It's not until the newest generation, VII, of having separate dex entries for the East and West Sea Gastrodons. The West Sea's entries basically repeats parts of its older dex entries, as well as emphasizing its plankton diet. The East Sea's entries, on the other hand, talks about scientists looking for other colour variants of Gastrodon, as well as experiments of raising Gastrodon outside the sea it's born in.

Which, actually, is a fairly good point. Gastrodon and Shellos has been available in all generations after Generation IV, but only in Sinnoh are they especially populous. Particularly in Platinum, Gastrodon and its pre-evolution Shellos can be found in a helluva lot of the fresh-water and grass that dot both sides of Sinnoh. I'm pretty sure that as soon as you get surf, Shellos and Gastrodon is one of the more frequent encounters I've met. In all subsequent games, though, even if you can obtain Shellos, it's always via trading events (B2W2), hidden Pokemon (ORAS), or stuff that don't exactly count as 'native' Pokemon like Friend Safaris in XY and Pokewalkers in HGSS. In Alola, you can only exclusively find East Sea Gastrodon in Poni Island, which is pretty interesting. I'm slightly disappointed that they didn't introduce a third variant of Gastrodon, especially in a game that highlights how other Pokemon adapts to Alola's climate differently -- really, a huge shame that only the Generation I Pokemon got that treatment.

Oh, interestingly, several sources note that Shellos and Gastrodon were Pokemon that were originally going to be included in Ruby and Sapphire, but were cut out. Which probably is a wise decision, considering the sheer amount of Water-types that Hoenn already has, including last week's Water/Ground Barboach and Whiscash. Plus, the whole Sinnoh-split-into-two-by-a-mountain thing works so much better for Gastrodon's lore anyway that it all turned out pretty well, I'd say.

How does Gastrodon fare in actual combat? Not very well, I'm afraid. The champion of Diamond and Pearl, the mighty Cynthia, does use a (pink!) Gastrodon in her team, but there's a reason she swaps it out for a far bulkier and more dangerous Togekiss in the Platinum remake. Mind you, it's not like Gastrodon is a pushover -- like Whiscash last week, Gastrodon's pretty tanky if you don't have a Grass move ready,  and it does lean ever so slightly towards being more specially offensive, which is why it gets Mud Bomb naturally instead of Earthquake (you can breed a physical Gastrodon if you really want, though). It obviously learns water-type moves as well, including the previously exclusive-to-Swampert Muddy Water. The whole 'able to regenerate lost parts' is reflected with the ability to Recover. Gastrodon gains a fairly large movepool through TMs, though, getting poison-type moves like Sludge Bomb and Sludge Wave, as well as rock-type moves like Stone Edge and Rock Slide. He's not super-viable in actual proper competitive I don't think, but then I'm not an expert in those sort of things.

A member of the Opisthobranchia order

Let's talk about the origin of Gastrodon. Obviously, he's based on a sea slug, with Bulbapedia crediting the order of Opisthobranchia as Gastrodon's inspiration. I don't really know a lot about the orders and genera of sea slugs, but brief google image searches do show that many members of Ophisthobranchia do look similar to Gastrodon. Colourful, has growths on its 'back', and likes to rear up their front part. Just as Gastrodon's dex entries note, the prehistoric predecesors to Opisthobranchia do have shells that they lost over thousands of years of evolution. To note that another member of the Opisthobranchia order is Clione limacina, otherwise known as sea angels to laymen, the tiny sea slugs that Manaphy is based upon. Bulbapedia also speculates the Anaspidea clade, known to laymen as sea hares, as the inspiration for pink Gastorodon due to their distinctive dual-paired frontal spine-things.

Also, as a brief bit of awesomeness, while Gastrodon's name is pretty appropriate (gastropod + don), his Japanese name is the far more awesome Tritodon. Like, Triton? The sea god? Gastrodon might be a snail, but he aims high -- a fucking sea god! He certainly deserves to be the god of the sea slugs, far better than that silly Manaphy.