Pokémon: Most Ominous Pokédex Entries In The Original Games

The Pokémon franchise has made many changes over its 28-year history, but the mainline games have always put a big focus on “catching ’em all” to complete the Pokémon encyclopedia known as the Pokédex. The Dex has been there from the very start, debuting in the Japanese versions of Pokémon Red and Green, and later getting revamped entries in Pokémon Blue and Yellow. It was a great way to add worldbuilding to a group of games that really didn’t have the space for a big story. A lot of these entries took advantage of how little the games could actually show, making it easy to believe grandiose claims like “Wigglytuff can inflate itself to an unlimited size,” since there was nothing in-game that disproved them yet.

While later games weren’t exactly consistent between what certain Pokémon could do in-game and what the Pokédex said they could do, Generation I’s Pokédex had no preexisting series standards or lore to try and adhere to yet. The original 151’s deeper details were only limited to the text the programmers could fit on the Pokédex’s screen. As a result, some of the Kanto Dex entries are pretty wild, if not outright disturbing. While some of these entries would be disproven or forgotten in later games, there was nothing to contradict them at the time of the originals’ releases. If one imagines Generation I of Pokémon in a bubble, these 10 entries are pretty disturbing.

Note: The original Japanese version of Pokémon Red as well as the Japan-exclusie Pokémon Green had different Pokédex entries from Pokémon Blue and later Pokémon Yellow, so any entries from the Japanese version of Red and Green will be listed as being from just “Green” while entries from the international version of Red and Blue will be listed as being from “Red and Blue.” Green’s Pokédex entries were properly translated and used in the English version of Pokémon FireRed, so FireRed’s English entries will be used when referring to Green’s Pokédex.

Charmander’s Tail Bears Great Importance In Pokémon Green

pokémon: most ominous pokédex entries in the original games

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From the time it is born, a flame burns at the tip of its tail. Its life would end if the flame were to go out.

It’s never been explained why starter Pokémon are so rare, but the Green Dex entry for Charmander gives a plausible explanation for why it’s an unlikely sight in the wild: it can be killed with just a light breeze, so human intervention to keep the species preserved is the best option. Gameplay pretty clearly contradicts this one, though: the player’s Charmander can get hit point-blank by Surf in any game and only end up fainting. Maybe it’s a special flame or something that’s actually much harder to put out than regular fire?

Despite being a separate continuity from the games, the anime played the fear factor for all it’s worth in Charmander’s debut episode. Ash meets a Charmander with an abusive trainer, who leaves the Lizard Pokémon in the rain for being too weak. Ash and his friends end up having to race to rescue Charmander while protecting its tail from going out. This wasn’t brought up again after Charmander evolved into Charmeleon, so at least in the anime, the tail flame stops being an issue after evolution. It’s not ever mentioned in any of Charmeleon or Charizard’s Pokédex entries in the games, either, so at least the cute little lizard is safe after a point.

Pokémon Yellow Reveals Kabutops Is A Fierce Hunter

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A slim and fast swimmer. It slices its prey with its sharp sickles and drinks the body fluids.

The Pokédex has never shied away from describing the Pokémon circle of life, but Kabutops’ Yellow entry is definitely one of the more brutal hunting methods described in Generation I. While fainting is the worst thing that can happen to any of the Pokémon that the player meets, the Cubone incident will have already taught the player that Pokémon can die. Kabutops’ favorite hunting method is just one of many ways it can happen.

Describing what exactly Kabutops’ sickle hands were used for is a lot darker than saying something vague like “It fights using its arms.” The average kid wouldn’t want to imagine Pikachu getting filleted. The term “bodily fluids” is a pretty transparent attempt at mentioning blood in a violent context, too. Since Pokémon are usually portrayed as much more intelligent than any real-world animals, the idea that the wild still has predators and prey can be quite chilling.

Victreebel Is Described As A Carnivorous Plant In Pokémon Yellow

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Lures prey with the sweet aroma of honey. Swallowed whole, the prey is melted in a day, bones and all.

Victreebel’s entry is similar to Kabutops’ in that they’re both brutal predators, but Victreebel is higher on the list for the sheer torture it must be to get melted alive over such a long time. “Swallowed whole” implies that Victreebel’s victim might not always be dead by the time it’s eaten. If that’s the case, the real cause of death for Victreebel’s prey would be its digestive system. Victreebel’s meal could be completely conscious while helplessly waiting to be melted alive over an excruciating 24-hour period.

It’s a good thing that there weren’t any third-stage evolutions in the wild back in the Generation I games. Red in the Pokémon Adventures manga wasn’t as lucky as the Red from the games, though; on manga Red’s trip to the Safari Zone, he was almost eaten alive and dissolved by a wild Victreebel as part of an evolution ritual for other Bellsprout and Weepinbell. Does this mean that in the Adventures manga, members of the Victreebel line are intelligent enough to have established a culture around killing and eating their prey?

Haunter Drains Life Force In Pokémon Yellow

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By licking, it saps the victim’s life. It causes shaking that won’t stop until the victim’s demise.

In Generation I, Haunter learns Lick at Level 1. It’s essentially a default move. This means that most Haunters the player encounters will already know Lick. Every time a Haunter in Pokémon Tower uses Lick on the player’s Pokémon, it implicitly shortens that Pokémon’s life and induces uncontrollable shaking that the player’s loyal partners will never recover from. Good thing Generation I didn’t have anything like Pokémon-Amie where kids could see their permanently disabled pets suffering from Haunter’s tongue.

In Pokémon Yellow, Agatha of the Elite Four uses a Haunter with Lick. She also has two Gengars on her team, so why would one of the top 5 trainers in Kanto keep a second-stage Pokémon with only a 30 power move? Maybe she’s playing dirty. Gengar may be stronger, but its tongue doesn’t suck out life force or handicap the opponent by making them shake. Agatha’s Haunter could be the way she wears her opponents down before Gengar goes in for the win. Still pretty mean of her to do that to ten-year-olds, though.

Lapras Is A Gentle Soul On The Brink Of Extinction In Pokémon Red, Blue, AND Yellow

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A POKéMON that has been overhunted almost to extinction. It can ferry people across the water.

A gentle soul that can read the minds of people. It can ferry people across the sea on its back.

Lapras’ entry in Red and Blue says that it’s endangered due to overhunting. In a series as idealistic as Pokémon, it’s sad to think that there are still issues like endangered species. It only gets worse when one takes the Yellow Dex entry into account. Lapras can read human minds, meaning it’s being killed in record numbers despite it being scientifically proven that it’s a “gentle soul” and smart enough to understand people. The gameplay makes sure to reflect Lapras’ endangered status by making it impossible to find in the wild: the player gets it as a gift from a Silph Co. employee.

Thankfully, Lapras’ tale has a happy ending. In Pokémon Moon and Pokémon Ultra Moon, the Pokédex reveals that Lapras preservation efforts have been so successful that they’ve gone from endangered to overabundant. Unfortunately, the higher Lapras population has caused its own ecological issues: the Ultra Moon entry reveals that “The fish Pokémon population has declined in waters with too many Lapras.”

Pokémon Red And Blue Features A Highly-Intelligent Alakazam

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Its brain can outperform a super-computer. Its intelligence quotient is said to be 5,000.

Marilyn vos Savant has an IQ of 190, the highest recorded in history. That’s less than 1/25th of Alakazam’s. It must be either very benevolent or very lazy to not capture trainers and use them to battle. Owning an Alakazam is less like owning a super-smart dog and more like owning 25 clones of Marilyn vos Savant merged into one. It’s not just basically owning a human; it’s basically owning the most powerful human to ever live. While it’s not the only one to create some moral quandaries, Alakazam is by far the most egregious non-legendary example of a Pokémon that probably deserves rights on the level of humans.

Maybe Alakazam’s problem is that while it can understand human speech, its vocal cords aren’t properly shaped to allow it to pronounce human languages, limiting its communication abilities. Maybe it’s just so smart that it’s realized that regularly getting fed and getting to fight in cool anime battles can actually be a pretty cool life if they’re owned by the right trainer. Poké Balls are also designed to be comfortable for the captured Pokémon, so maybe it’s just so nice in there that Alakazam feels it owes its loyalty to its trainer for giving it such a nice place to live. Still, with that kind of intelligence, it’s pretty rude that Alakazam doesn’t do things like curing diseases. Then again, maybe that’s the trade-off humanity agreed to when turning it into a pet.

Cubone Is Infamous For Its Tragic Backstory In Pokémon Yellow

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Wears the skull of its deceased mother. Its cries echo inside the skull and come out as a sad melody.

Cubone’s is one of the most infamous Dex entries out there. The story is sad and really morbid: not only is Cubone’s mother gone, but its only keepsake of her is a part of her corpse. Imagine if Simba did that after Mufasa died in The Lion King. Cubone losing its mother stands out because, in the otherwise very simple stories of the Generation I games, it’s a plot point. Once the player reaches Lavender Town, Mr. Fuji will tell them how the Cubone living with him lost its mother, a Marowak, when she was killed by Team Rocket. The Marowak appears in Lavender Tower as a unique “Ghost” encounter that the player can’t battle until they use the Silph Scope.

As neat a detour as this was for a 1996 Game Boy game, the fact that this backstory was applied to all Cubones going forward caused quite an amusing continuity error after Pokémon breeding was introduced. The player can have a female Marowak lay all the eggs they want, but her children will always hatch with a skull helmet already on, and the mother will never have any issues. Before breeding became a mechanic, though, Cubone was a chronically orphaned species: Cubone can be caught in Pokémon Tower and the Safari Zone, so theoretically, there’s an unlimited number of Lonely Pokémon in Kanto that all had their mother die somehow.

Parasect In Pokémon Yellow Bears Resemblance To A Real-Life Parasitic Fungus

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The bug host is drained of energy by the mushrooms on its back. They appear to do all the thinking.

Imagine losing your sapience as you grow. Fungi turning bugs into “zombies” is actually a real-world phenomenon that occurs with the ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus, also known as cordyceps. Cordyceps infects bugs like ants and consumes all the nutrients in the host’s body while also filling the body with its own spores. In order to reproduce, the fungus makes the bug climb to a tall height from which it spreads the spores to other nearby bugs. Just because it’s based on something that happens in real life doesn’t make it any less creepy for Parasect, though.

Paras doesn’t have it much easier, to be fair. While the Generation I Dex entries don’t mention mind control for the younger bug, they do state that its back mushrooms also take most of its nutrition. If it’s a choice between being hungry more often and losing your sense of self, though, most people would probably choose the former. With that in mind, evolving Paras could be considered an act of outright cruelty.

Mewtwo In Pokémon Green Is Famously One Of The Most Powerful Pokémon

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A Pokémon whose genetic code was repeatedly recombined for research. It turned vicious as a result.

In the Kanto games, the journals in the Pokémon Mansion describe the events leading up to Mewtwo’s creation. The original games, their Game Boy Advance remakes, and the Japanese versions all say that Mew “gave birth” to Mewtwo. Since Mewtwo is the result of genetic experimentation and wasn’t a pre-existing species, it’s fair to assume that if it weren’t for the genetic splicing, it would’ve been just another Mew. This would mean that its experimentation turned Mewtwo into an entirely new species.

There’s also the phrase “repeatedly recombined.” Mewtwo’s DNA wasn’t mix-and-matched just once; it was done multiple times. If the DNA had to be recombined multiple times, that implies that some of those attempts weren’t successful. In real life, editing the genome is possible in theory, but things can get painful for the subject if the genes don’t express themselves right. Since Mewtwo was a baby, and possibly before it was even born, its very genetic makeup was cut to pieces and stitched back together by scientists more interested in Mewtwo’s potential power than its well-being.

Ninetales Warns Of A Curse In Pokémon Red And Blue

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Very smart and very vengeful. Grabbing one of its many tails could result in a 1000-year curse.

As over the top as this claim is, without going too far into spoilers, it’s canon in the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series. Ninetales is based on the Japanese kitsune, a shapeshifting fox spirit that would often take human form to trick humans. If it shares a trickster nature with its mythological inspiration, it’s quite a hypocrite for handing out punishment curses when it’s already quite the prolific identity thief.

Jokes aside, the only games to elaborate on Ninetales’ curse are the aforementioned Mystery Dungeon entries, but as those are in a separate continuity, it’s not clear what Ninetales’ curse does in the mainline Pokémon world. If it lasts 1,000 years, though, it probably involves unwilling immortality. The best case scenario would be Ninetales simply making the victim immortal, forcing them to watch everyone they know die while they have to wait at least a millennium before they can join them in the afterlife. Interestingly, the Yellow Dex entry says there’s a legend that “9 noble saints” were reincarnated together as a single Ninetales. What could have caused “noble saints” to become so vindictive that they started cursing people for touching them?

Ash and Pikachu smiling excitedly in Pokemon the Movie: Secrets of the Jungle

Pokemon

Expanding across a multitude of media, including TCGs, video games, manga, live-action movies and anime, the Pokémon franchise is set in a shared world of humans and creatures with a wide variety of special abilities.

Created bySatoshi TajiriFirst FilmPokemon: The First MovieLatest FilmPokmon the Movie: Secrets of the JungleFirst TV ShowPokemonLatest TV ShowPokmon HorizonsFirst Episode Air DateApril 1, 1997Video Game(s)Detective Pikachu Returns, Pokmon: Let’s Go, Eevee! , Pokemon Red and Blue, Pokemon X and Y, Pokmon: Let’s Go, Pikachu!, Detective Pikachu, Pokmon Scarlet and Violet, Pokmon Diamond & Pearl, Pokmon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, Pokmon Legends: Arceus, Pokmon Sword and Shield, Pokmon GO