Pokemon of the Week #24: Dragalge

#691 Dragalge, the Mock Kelp Pokemon

This week, we're going back to the region of Kalos, the sixth generation, to talk about Dragalge (otherwise known as Draglglgrlgrlgl), which is actually a Pokemon I'm pretty excited to talk about. If you've seen any of my other Pokemon of the Week articcles, I get pretty geeky when I have to talk about marine animals, bugs and their ilk, as well as mythical creatures, and Dragalge is two of those, so I'm super-pumped to talk about her. 

(I mean, I could write a half-assed article about freaking Bonsly, the original pick for this article, but there's so little to talk about him. So.)

So Dragalge is Pokemon's first, and at the time of writing, only dual Poison-Dragon Pokemon, introduced in a generation that also introduced the Fairy type, a type designed to counter the overwhelmingly powerful Dragon-types. Dragalge is a dragon, sure (more on that later)... but also a Poison type, one of the types that Fairies are weak to. Poison/Dragon is such a cool type and while Dragalge might not look particuarly draconic, it's still an interesting type to have. The combination of the naturally-defensive Dragon-type and the rather... odd Poison-type means that Dragalge doesn't have any glaring 4x weaknesses like a lot of other common dual-Dragon types like Dragon/Flying, Dragon/Dark and Dragon/Ground. Dragalge ends up being weak only to Ground, Ice, Dragon and Psychic, but even against those Dragalge's statline helps to give it an intense amount of Special Defense, 123, to counter the normally-specially-offensive Psychic and Ice types. Hell, it's even one of the mascots for XY's Special Defense super training minigames. Earthquake still fucks Dragalge up, though. It's not the best specially defensive Pokemon (that honour is still held by Shuckle, crazy motherfucker that he is) but it's still well-balanced enough to work, since Dragalge doesn't really lose much, being reasonably offensive specially as well as having a... not-crappy speed. 

Dragalge is obviously based on a seahorse. Or, more specifically, the seadragon, members of the Phycodurus genus. It's like a cousin of regular seahorses, only it has these leafy appendages that allow it to better camouflage itself in the seaweeds of the ocean. The seadragon has led to the general pun that Nintendo loves to use so much, giving the far-earlier-released Kingdra the Dragon type as well thanks to this. The fact that seahorses are called "tatsu-no-otoshigo", or literally the children of dragons, in Japan, is probably yet another factor to make Kingdra and Dragalge into Dragon-types. It's hella punny, but Pokemon has always worked on puns. And just like the seadragons it's based upon, Dragalge has a lot  of growths that resemble sea leaves and even has its body bent, possibly in mimickry of the seadragon's attempts to mimic how plants sway in the sea currents. Oh, and seadragons (and seahorses), despite their strange configuration, are still fish! They are relatives of the pipefish that have their head bent perpendicularly. Despite Dragalge being introduced in a region/generation based on France, seadragons are exclusively found in the wild in Australia.

Drargalge and her pre-evolution Skrelp is the exclusive Pokemon to Y, which was the version I played, and for a while I did have Dragalge as my main surfer becasue, shit, Dragalge is just pretty dang cool-looking. It's nothing super-amazing, it's just a seadragon with brown leaves and red eyes (though Skrelp does have that hobo feel to her) but I like it nonetheless.

Dragalge is, also, the only poison-type introduced in Generation VI's relatively small amount of Pokemon, and the most memorable user of Dragalge would be the Dragon-using Elite Four member Drasna who's going to fuck up anyone who thinks they can sweep her with nothing but Moonblasts.

Dragalge's a pretty cool Pokemon too. Pokedex entries talk about how Dragalge are highly territorial, shooting poison blasts that can eat through the hull of a tanker. And, to quite the Y dex entry, "tales are told of ships that wander into seas where Dragalge live, never to return". Yep, Pokemon might not have a kraken-based Pokemon, but that doesn't mean that they're lacking a sea monster that murders ships that stray into their territory. And between Dragalge and the equally-horrifying Jellicent, the seas of the Pokemon world are pretty fucking horrifying.

Moveset-wise, Dragalge obviously is able to do a lot of Dragon and Poison-type moves. Thanks to the darker Pokedex entries that paint Dragalge as being, well, territorial assholes, they also get a couple of Dark-type moves naturally. And since Skrelp is a Water/Poison (Skrelp loses the Water subtype when evolving into Dragalge), Dragalge is also able to naturally unleash a crapton of water-type moves, albeit without STAB. Though the coverage thanks to Dragon-types naturally having a relatively wide TM pool means that Dragalge is able to do pretty cool stuff like Thunderbolt, Shadow Ball and stuff.

Overall, while not super-duper exciting, I've always loved Dragalge among XY's selections. I'm a big fan of a lot of generation VI's pokemon, mind you, and Dragalge's unique type combination certainly lands it in one of the more creative and cooler-looking pokemon.