Pokemon of the Week #30: Lairon

#305: Lairon, the Iron Armor Pokemon

God damn, I really love the Aron-Lairon-Aggron evolution line. Generation III is when the Pokemon company starts to make everything a bit more complex thanks to the hardware update from the Game Boy Color to Game Boy Advance. The result is that the amount of detail generally reserved for legendary Pokemon ends up being showered on many non-legendaries, with more greebles and details all over the place and it led to some Pokemon that feels a bit too cluttered. While it's not quite as bad as some Generation V designs, I've always felt that the Aron line had the right amount of having lots of details that still worked with what the core of the design wanted to do.

With Aron, Lairon and Aggron? A group of armoured dinosaurs. We go from the tiny Aron to the large quadrupedal Lairon, to the T-rex-esque Aggron. Honestly, if you were to tell me that Aggron was the pseudo-legendary of Hoenn by simply showing me the design, I would've totally bought it. Aggron looks so badass! This armoured Godzilla creature with spikes and that cool jaw, and, come on. The line just looks badass.

Too bad it's actually not as powerful as I'd like in-game. Sure, a fully-evolved Aggron has a very respectable 530 stat total, with a mammoth 180 physical defense stat and a considerable base 110 physical attack stat, but a combination of its pretty slow speed and its somewhat unflattering 4x-weakness to two of the most common types in competitive -- Fighting and Ground -- meant that despite his tremendous defense, a simple Earthquake is enough to topple the mighty Aggron. 

That's not to say Aggron is crap, though, oh no. I've played through Generation III a fair amount of times and while he's not as frequent as some other Gen-III staples, I've once brought a mighty Aggron and swept the Elite Four almost single-handedly. Once you know how to get Aggron out of things he can't handle, the amount of TMs that Aggron can learn (his natural moveset only gives him Rock and Steel moves, with a smattering of weak Ground and Normal moves) makes him a tremendous powerhouse. He's one of those Pokemon that can unleash Ice Beams, summon Thunderbolts, shoot Solarbeams, unleash Earthquakes, breathe Flamethrowers, even do things like Surf and Aerial Ace! After Generation IV introduced the physical/special split, the whole TM thing might not be that viable, but still, the dude's pretty cool.

But we're not talking about Aggron here,  but the middle child of the family,  Lairon. While Aggron's like a mix of a theropod and Godzilla, Lairon's origin is a bit less clear. He looks like a stocky, armoured rhinoceros, with armour plates on his head and body and around his legs, as well as holes through it. He could also probably be based on a dinosaur from either the Ceraptosian or Ankylosaurian families. 

Lairon (well, its evolution Aggron, at least) is one of the Pokemon that the mainly Steel-type specialist and champion of Hoenn, Steven, uses, so there's that. Lairon is also pretty prominent as one of Sapphire's main fighters in the Pokemon Adventures manga, which was something I read the hell out of as a kid. 

Let's see. Pokedex entries wise, Lairon shares the whole family's lore of being a glutton that really, really likes to eat metal, which is why it makes its homes in caves where iron ore is plentiful -- and indeed, in Hoenn, the Aron family is found in caves, with Aron being plentiful in Dewford Cave while Lairon can be found in Victory Road. It's also one of those species that ram their heads onto each other to fight for territory, and apparently loves to drink fresh springwater. Honestly, not much more lore beyond that.

I really like the whole Aron line as a whole, though. There are a fair amount of evolutionary lines which I feel that the transformation felt abrupt or poorly conceived, but not so for Lairon's line. And as our representative of the Steel type in Pokemon, I really think Lairon's a pretty good example. High defense, tough-looking, armoured and wins by tanking a hit and dishing out something equally heavy.