Pokedex Riddle

Every Pokemon has a Pokedex entry, and most of them have several, because nearly every game wrote its own. Here is one of them with the name blacked out. Read it, type your guess, and every miss makes the Pokedex leak a little more: the category, then the type, then the size, and finally a blurry sprite. Six guesses, one riddle a day, and an Endless mode for when one is not enough.

Keyboard: type a name, use the arrow keys to pick from the list, Enter to guess, Esc to close the list.

How do you play Pokedex Riddle?

You get one real Pokedex entry, copied letter for letter out of the game it came from, with the Pokemon's name blacked out. Type a name into the box (the list only offers Pokemon that exist in that game, so a Red and Blue entry keeps you to the original 151) and press Enter. Get it right and the name lights up. Miss, and the next hint unlocks: one miss shows the species category, two show the type, three show the height and weight, four show a heavily blurred sprite in its debut style, and five sharpen that blur a little. The six-guess limit is the same as the other famous daily word game, and so is the share line: a light shade for a miss, a dark shade when you guessed a member of the right evolution family (Raichu when the answer was Pikachu counts), and a full block for the win.

The Show category button hands you the first hint before you have missed at all. It is completely free, but your share line admits it, so everybody will know. The Daily is the same entry for everyone on the same UTC date and pulls from all five regions and every game, and Endless deals as many as you want, filtered by game and region.

Why does the same Pokemon have different Pokedex entries?

Because almost every game wrote new ones! The Pokedex text is not stored once and shared around, each game ships its own set, and the writers clearly had fun with it. Here is Pikachu, the same Pokemon in six games, and not one sentence repeats:

(Yellow, the game where Pikachu follows you around, is the one that warns you it bites. Noted.) Some details survive every rewrite, though. Slowbro's entry mentions the Shellder clamped onto its tail in all six of these games, from Red and Blue's "The SHELLDER that is latched onto SLOWPOKE's tail" to Black and White's "it seems to become inspired if the Shellder on its tail bites down." Other entries flip completely: Red and Blue call Snorlax "Very lazy. Just eats and sleeps," while Silver is busy telling you its stomach can dissolve any kind of poison.

Which games rewrote their entries?

Here is the count, straight from the game data. Red and Blue share one English set of 151 entries (the disassembly builds both games from the same text file, no version switches at all). Yellow rewrote all 151 of them. Gold, Silver and Crystal each have their own set of 251, and no two of the three agree on a single entry, so a Johto-era Pokemon has three completely different descriptions from one generation. Black and White went the other way: for #1 to #493 the two games share one entry each, but all 156 new Unova Pokemon get a different entry in Black than in White, which is why some riddles here say Pokemon Black or Pokemon White instead of both.

The Game Boy entries also had to fit a tiny screen. Every one of them is two pages of three lines, and no line runs longer than 18 characters, which is why so many of them have that clipped, telegram-like rhythm. The only oddball I found is Silver's Typhlosion, whose first page carries a stray empty fourth line in the source, a leftover nobody ever sees. Black and White had room to breathe, and their entries still average about 97 characters, almost exactly the same length as the Game Boy ones.

Did anything besides the text change?

Yes, and the hints in this game follow each version, so they can disagree with each other on purpose:

• Types. Magnemite and Magneton are pure Electric in Red, Blue and Yellow, then become Electric and Steel in Gold, Silver and Crystal, when the Steel type arrived. The Type hint shows whichever the entry's own game says. (Clefairy stays Normal all the way through Black and White, since the Fairy type did not exist yet.)
• Categories. Gold and Silver call Natu the LITTLEBIRD Pokemon and Teddiursa the LITTLEBEAR Pokemon, and Crystal adds the missing space. Rattata is the RAT Pokemon in the Red and Blue data, while the modern English category is Mouse.
• Sizes. Entei is 6 ft 11 in in Gold but 6 ft 7 in in Crystal, and Tyranitar is 6 ft 11 in in Silver and 6 ft 7 in in Crystal. Weights shift too: Red and Blue store Pikachu at a flat 13.0 lb, while the Black and White hint uses 13.2 lb, converted from its 6.0 kg.

How does the game decide which words to black out?

Automatically, with a hand-checked safety net. The redactor hides the Pokemon's own name in any spelling (MR.MIME and Mr. Mime are the same thing to it), plus possessives and plurals like MAGNEMITEs, every member of its evolution family (Porygon2's entry says "This upgraded version of PORYGON", which would be a bit of a giveaway), and any Pokemon whose name hides inside the answer's name, so Mew vanishes from Mewtwo's entry. It also hides words that the name is built from when they start the name, so slow disappears from Slowpoke's entries and shell from Shellder's. A short hand-made list covers the sneaky ones the rules cannot see, like miming and pantomime for Mr. Mime, magnetic for Magnemite, and milk for Miltank. An automated test runs the redactor over every one of the 1,860 entries in the game, because any of them can come up as a Daily. Other Pokemon's names stay visible on purpose: Shellder in Slowbro's entry is a clue, not the answer!

Your homework: beat today's riddle, then flip to Endless, pick Silver, and see how many Johto entries you can name without the category. If you like guessing games built on real game data, Size Up asks how tall each Pokemon really is next to you, and the Glitchhouse is where the Gen 1 weirdness lives. Spot a redaction that gives the answer away? Tell me about it and I will patch it.

Sources: every entry, category, type, height and weight for Red and Blue, Yellow, Gold, Silver and Crystal comes from the fan-made disassemblies of those games (pokered, pokeyellow, pokegold and pokecrystal). Black and White entries, categories, types and sizes come from PokeAPI's data, rolled back to their Generation 5 values (Black and White categories are PokeAPI's current English ones). Metric sizes are PokeAPI's. Sprites are the in-game front sprites, drawn in each Pokemon's debut style for the hint.