What are your game headcanons?

[KirbyBulba737]

Interesting! Based on that design, it could work... but then the UBs are supposed to have prime numbers in their base stats, and the poison dragon thing does have some stat numbers that can be divisible...

We've barely seen 10 different species of Ultra Beasts, who says there isn't a species whose stats can be divided?

 

[BackSet]

@KirbyBulba737 I thought Solgaleo and Lunala WERE Ultra Beasts, but they called them legendaries for marketing purposes.

Nope. Beast Ball doesn't work on them. Legendaries.

ANd you can also only get 1 per game legitimately.

By your logic, Spiritomb could be considered a legendary. Your argument that Sylvally changing types makes it a legendary doesn't hold up either, since DItto can use transform, something that only Mew should be able to do (also Keclion can change types but he can't do it at will).

 

[KirbyBulba737]

Nope. Beast Ball doesn't work on them. Legendaries.

Game Mechanics: can't have one type of ball have a 5x cacht rate while all others are worthless to cacht X. They are pretty much confirmed to be Ultra Beasts.

By your logic, Spiritomb could be considered a legendary. Your argument that Sylvally changing types makes it a legendary doesn't hold up either, since DItto can use transform, something that only Mew should be able to do (also Keclion can change types but he can't do it at will).

Yea, there isn't really a lot of things to support the "Silvally is a legendary" except for the fact that it's most likely based on Arceus, since he is thought to be God. Though Silvally can change type through a held item specific to it, the same way as Arceus does, and Ditto's transformation is kinda his whole thing. Kekleon's more chaotic.

 

[Nitro Indigo]

We've barely seen 10 different species of Ultra Beasts, who says there isn't a species whose stats can be divided?

Naganadel's speed stat is a composite number, 121.

 

[BackSet]

Game Mechanics: can't have one type of ball have a 5x cacht rate while all others are worthless to cacht X.

Why not? The Beast Ball is designed for catching Ultra Beasts. If it can't catch something (that is, if it has its normal sucky catch rate of 0.1x) then that thing is not an Ultra Beast.

Granted, by the time you reach Sogaleal/Lunala you shouldn't have any Beast Balls without hacking them in but that's besides the point.

 

[KirbyBulba737]

Why not? The Beast Ball is designed for catching Ultra Beasts. If it can't catch something (that is, if it has its normal sucky catch rate of 0.1x) then that thing is not an Ultra Beast.

Granted, by the time you reach Sogaleal/Lunala you shouldn't have any Beast Balls without hacking them in but that's besides the point.

Yea, for catching Ultra Beasts, not Legendary Ultra Beasts. Besides, as you already said, you shouldn't have Beast Balls, so why bother programming the cover legendaries to not only have a 5x catch rate to a type of poke ball you shouldn't have, but also make all other types useless? Dunno you, but it seems just a better idea from a design perspective to not care about Beast Balls for the light trio.

 

[Esserise]

I'll never understand why Silvally is called a legendary, though.

You mention marketing, and that's pretty much why. Silvally "shouldn't" be a Legendary for the same reasons that Mewtwo "shouldn't," in that they're not really figures of legend of any sort, but "Legendary" is really only used as a marketing term to indicate a sense of high status among common Pokémon and an artificial scarcity.

We've barely seen 10 different species of Ultra Beasts, who says there isn't a species whose stats can be divided?

While it's obviously true that there's nothing stopping Game Freak from breaking that trend (as they slightly did with Naganadel and DM/DW/Ultra Necrozma's speed stats, and with how they similarly abandoned the whole shtick in regards to the UBs' learnset levels in Gen 8), when you're trying to determine if something does or doesn't fit into a certain category, deliberate design decisions like all Ultra Space-related Pokémon having majority prime stats, as well as that specific echo in their cries, can be informative. Eternatus doesn't have those things, and while it's a hypothetical possibility that this is them surreptitiously redefining the criteria for what counts as a UB, the balance of probability rather suggests that Eternatus just isn't one, especially since the term "Ultra Beast" is never once put in its conceptual orbit by the games themselves. Perhaps it's also worth noting that Pokémon HOME's "Register Ultra Beasts" task only counts those that have the ability Beast Boost. No Cosmog family, no Necrozma, and definitely no Eternatus.

(Personally for my part, I don't think Eternatus even shares that many of the same creative/aesthetic key points with the UBs. There's no irony in the design, there's no comic charm - it's just a straight-up alien monster, designed to be intimidating.)

By your logic, Spiritomb could be considered a legendary.

Spiritomb can be bred to create more on a single save file.

Granted, by the time you reach Sogaleal/Lunala you shouldn't have any Beast Balls without hacking them in but that's besides the point.

Technically you can in USUM - Beast Balls are made available for purchase at Aether Paradise before you're invited to go catch Nebby at Mahalo Trail.

 

[KirbyBulba737]

(Personally for my part, I don't think Eternatus even shares that many of the same creative/aesthetic key points with the UBs. There's no irony in the design, there's no comic charm - it's just a straight-up alien monster, designed to be intimidating.)

The problem is that he doesn't look like a pokemon, which is what an Ultra Beast is meant to do in the first place. Also, where is supposed to be the irony in the designs of Ultra Beasts?

 

[BackSet]

Yea, for catching Ultra Beasts, not Legendary Ultra Beasts.

I can, and have, caught most legendaries in Ultra Balls including Eter-freaking-natus who is way more alien than most Ultra Beasts, assuming it isn't one itself. Heck, in XY I caught Mewtwo in a frikken Quick Ball. And if I tried hard enough I bet you I could use a standard Pokeball to catch most legendaries.

If a device designed to catch normal Pokemon can catch a legendary normal Pokemon, then a device designed to catch Ultra Beasts should be able to catch legendary Ultra Beasts (ignoring the fact that Ultra Beasts are pretty much Legendaries anyways).

 

[KirbyBulba737]

I can, and have, caught most legendaries in Ultra Balls including Eter-freaking-natus who is way more alien than most Ultra Beasts, assuming it isn't one itself. Heck, in XY I caught Mewtwo in a frikken Quick Ball. And if I tried hard enough I bet you I could use a standard Pokeball to catch most legendaries.

If a device designed to catch normal Pokemon can catch a legendary normal Pokemon, then a device designed to catch Ultra Beasts should be able to catch legendary Ultra Beasts (ignoring the fact that Ultra Beasts are pretty much Legendaries anyways).

Ultra Beasts are effectively just pokemon from another dimension. Though I can agree on the fact that if a ball can catch an Ultra Beast, you should be able to catch a Legendary one. Quick Balls have a 5x catch rate multplier if used immediatly, and Ultra have always a 2x one. Problem is, the Light trio are capable of opening Ultra Wormholes, which no other pokemon has been able to do, so I'd argue that that makes them Ultra Beasts.

 

[BackSet]

But Ultra Beasts themselves can't open portals.

Edit: I now realize how stupid this argument is (that is, the argument I just made not the argument we're having). Nevermind.

 

[KirbyBulba737]

But Ultra Beasts themselves can't open portals.

Yes, and not all pokemon can teleport, not all can control time. Opening Ultra Wormholes could be a thing exclusive to Legendary Ultra Beasts. Though the only confirmed Legendary Ultra Beast is Necrozma, since in almost all medias he's an Ultra Beast.
EDIT:

Edit: I now realize how stupid this argument is (that is, the argument I just made not the argument we're having). Nevermind.

I don't understand: what do you mean?

 

[RK9]

If a device designed to catch normal Pokemon can catch a legendary normal Pokemon, then a device designed to catch Ultra Beasts should be able to catch legendary Ultra Beasts (ignoring the fact that Ultra Beasts are pretty much Legendaries anyways).

Ultra Beasts aren't Legendaries. They are regular Pokémon from their own Dimension akin to how we got stuff like Golduck, Primeape. It's just that their dimension is different taht their stats and such are different.

Solgaleo and Lunala aren't UBs but also not Legendaries. They're implied to be a weird hybrid mix.

 

[Esserise]

The problem is that he doesn't look like a pokemon, which is what an Ultra Beast is meant to do in the first place.

But surely there can be more than one way of reaching an aesthetic goal? The UBs accomplished that through bucking specific design "rules," with a willingness to do things like being faceless and/or having wildly disproportionate or counterintuitive bodies, and as a group, they display a lot of contrasting diversity. They each have very strong profiles that I think work to complement one another. I would argue that Eternatus is more of a standalone thing, designed without relation to anything else, and on its own terms. Anatomically, it's really not that unreasonable; it's pretty directly comparable to a lizard skeleton, which is a kind of realism and graphical detail that even the UBs don't really have, in my opinion. It stands out from regular Pokémon more because internal anatomy like that is something that the series doesn't typically acknowledge, so seeing a creature that's stripped down to just bones feels more visceral and alarming.

Besides that, the idea of what a Pokémon "looks like" has mutated tremendously over the years as new artists and ideas have cycled in.

Also, where is supposed to be the irony in the designs of Ultra Beasts?

Most of them kind of have their own spin on it. Buzzwole is obviously based on a mosquito, which are usually frail and thin, but Buzzwole subverts that expectation by being ludicrously buff. Pheromosa is a clean, pure, elegant cockroach, which are normally thought of as dark and disgusting. Nihilego is an aquatic creature, but its made of hard glass and is classified as a Rock type. And so on. There's a bit of lovable absurdity to each one, whereas I find Eternatus a lot more straight-laced in its presentation. Like, the Eternamax form for instance, it doesn't read as ironic or silly to me. It's a raw force of nature; a gyre of indecipherable spikes filling the sky and spitting out a tendril with a massive, daunting, uncompromising hand at the end. To my mind, it honestly has more in common with a tornado than it does with any of the UBs' design philosophies, which all still tried to be approachable creatures even if they followed different rules from most Pokémon.

 

[Esserise]

Ultra Beasts aren't Legendaries. They are regular Pokémon from their own Dimension akin to how we got stuff like Golduck, Primeape. It's just that their dimension is different taht their stats and such are different.

Solgaleo and Lunala aren't UBs but also not Legendaries. They're implied to be a weird hybrid mix.

Solgaleo and Lunala have been explicitly called Legendary Pokémon on multiple occasions, but as my other post says, that's not really a meaningful "category" outside of marketing purposes. There's no shared characteristic that all "Legendary Pokémon" have in common, so it's not like an actual subspecies or anything.

UBs on the other hand are a subspecies that do have some clearly defined shared traits. They all have the Beast Boost Ability. Most of their stats are prime numbers. They all have that chime in their cry. Under normal conditions, they are all most effectively caught by Beast Balls, and not by other Poké Balls. So we know we can include Nihilego, Buzzwole, Pheromosa, Xurkitree, Celesteela, Kartana, Guzzlord, Poipole, Naganadel, Stakataka, and Blacephalon, all of which have been explicitly referred to as UBs by the games and by other sources.

The only question is what happens when some Pokémon - in this case, Cosmog, Cosmoem, Solgaleo, Lunala, and Necrozma - share several of those traits (the stats, the cry chime) but are lacking in some others (the Ability, the Beast Ball catch rate).

And I think there's just not really a sufficient answer to that question, at least from official sources. Much like Phione's status as a Mythical, it's nebulous and there has been internal contradiction. For instance, the TCG labels Dusk Mane, Dawn Wings, and Ultra Necrozma as UBs, but not the regular Necrozma, nor any of the Cosmog line. Meanwhile, the games at least compare them to Ultra Beasts, saying that the Aether Foundation theorizes that Cosmog is one (but never confirms or denies this), and having the Pokédex and Dulse say that Necrozma is "like" an Ultra Beast.

Honestly it kinda makes me think that the game creators purposefully kept it ambiguous, and that other arms of the franchise were left to make their own decisions based on whatever they felt was appropriate for their needs.

(Personally, my take is this: We're told that Ultra Necrozma's light wasn't just shared with Ultra Megalopolis, but with other worlds as well. Its Pokédex entry also says that its light affects nature and living things in various ways. The Beast Boost Ability, in my opinion, is an adaptation by creatures that developed in environments that were saturated with this light - they've learned to use it to their advantage. It's also this quirk of their biology that causes problems for regular Poké Balls. Necrozma, in this sense, is kind of like a "progenitor" of the UBs, which is why they inherited its traits like the prime number stat spreads and the chime in their cry. Solgaleo and Lunala are probably "cousins" of Necrozma, similarly existing before the proper UBs. Admittedly, they're probably the most difficult thing for me to rationalize within this framework. Of course, we're also told that the aura of Totem Pokémon is essentially the same thing as the aura of the UBs, so this begs the question of why Alola didn't develop its own UBs? I can only speculate based on the details available, but my guess is that the worlds where UBs were born might be ones that Necrozma personally inhabited, whereas Alola only received some of Necrozma's light via the Ultra Wormhole, what with Solagleo and Lunala punching through for the occasional breeding session, so maybe there was significantly less long-term exposure for the Alolan Pokémon.

Curiously, by the way, Naganadel is the only UB that defies the prime number stat rule, specifically in regards to its speed stat... which is the same stat that DM/DW/Ultra Necrozma disregard for the pattern. Also, Naganadel and Necrozma share a secondary Dragon type. Maybe this has something to do with Ultra Megalopolis being Naganadel's homeworld and also the setting with the closest association to Ultra Necrozma?

Also, there's Guzzlord, which probably merits discussion, since its "homeworld" is a destroyed Alola, which challenges my original thesis about Totem Pokémon. However, there are some key differences between the Ultra Ruin's version of Alola and ours - namely that the Ultra Ruin Alola seems to have been more technologically advanced prior to its destruction. They were developing a new power source, and they also had information cards that could store extremely high amounts of data. This reminds me of the technological proficiency that the Ultra Megalopolitans were able to secure thanks to the constant presence of Ultra Necrozma's light. So perhaps the Ultra Ruin Alola was visited directly by Ultra Necrozma, whereas our Alola only received Necrozma's light indirectly. Now, that still doesn't quite explain Guzzlord, and it's clear based on the remnant of a malasada shop in the Ultra Ruin that "regular" Pokémon did still exist (the Slurpuff logo is still there). The thing about Guzzlord though is that it seems to have some kind of connection with the power plant that is implied to have caused the destruction. After all, the lone survivor wears a hazmat suit with a visual similarity to Guzzlord, which follows on from previous Ultra Spaces where UBs were shown to have a degree of morphic resonance with their environment - Nihilego is a glass jellyfish, and the columns in its world look like jellyfish polyps; the buds on the trees in the Ultra Forest resemble Kartana's head, etc. - which leads me to suspect that maybe it was the power plant's experiments that led to the creation of Guzzlord. Maybe they were experimenting with using Necrozma's light as a source of power, and something went wrong, and that's why the lone survivor's parents and grandparents felt uncomfortable talking about the power plant - because it gave birth to the Guzzlord creatures that went on to ravage the land.

Morbid bonus: Perhaps Guzzlord are actually transformed and mutated from humans who were wearing those hazmat suits during the catastrophe. This could explain why Guzzlord's numbers seem to be dwindling, as there would only have been a certain amount of humans in those suits at the time. Furthermore, it's interesting to me that Guzzlord's concept art mentions that its skin feels like rubber. Hmm.

tl;dr - I think of only the proper UBs as Ultra Beasts, and Cosmog/Necrozma more like "Ultra Spacians" or something that precede the UBs' evolution, and are in fact partly responsible for it.)

 

[Nitro Indigo]

Mewtwo "shouldn't,"

Touché.

It's worth noting that the term "legendary" didn't seem to have its current definition until Gen 3, and the terminology wasn't strict until the end of Gen 6. Groudon is called a "mythical Pokémon" in one line of dialogue in the original versions of Rescue Team, but a "Legendary Pokémon" in the remake, with those capitalisations.

 

[Morningstar]

Touché.

It's worth noting that the term "legendary" didn't seem to have its current definition until Gen 3, and the terminology wasn't strict until the end of Gen 6. Groudon is called a "mythical Pokémon" in one line of dialogue in the original versions of Rescue Team, but a "Legendary Pokémon" in the remake, with those capitalisations.

I still condense Legendary and Mythical under the same umbrella. But I do think that the distinction was muddied by mistranslations. It also likely didn't help that the original Mythical Pokemon was originally meant to be a bit of lore/backstory (specificllay for Mewtwo) rather than a trainable mon with its own stats, design and movepool.

On that note I'd liek tothink that a certain tidbit from the Anime (that being that Fuji wanted to clone his lost daughter and that was the reason he took on Rocket's "clone Mew" plan) also happened in the games

 

[TechSkylander1518]

It's called a legendary because he can change type exactly like Arceus, so I guess that at least from a lore perspective he's a legendary. ANd you can also only get 1 per game legitimately.

Yea, there isn't really a lot of things to support the "Silvally is a legendary" except for the fact that it's most likely based on Arceus, since he is thought to be God. Though Silvally can change type through a held item specific to it, the same way as Arceus does, and Ditto's transformation is kinda his whole thing. Kekleon's more chaotic.

Special abilities really aren't what determines a Pokemon to be legendary or not. The birds and beasts didn't have any kind of signature moves or abilities when they were introduced, but that didn't mean they weren't legendaries.

You mention marketing, and that's pretty much why. Silvally "shouldn't" be a Legendary for the same reasons that Mewtwo "shouldn't," in that they're not really figures of legend of any sort, but "Legendary" is really only used as a marketing term to indicate a sense of high status among common Pokémon and an artificial scarcity.

I do feel like there's a case to be made about the origin of Mewtwo, though, since it was made from the DNA of Mew. Sort of like how you might say that you could put demigods and gods into one category while leaving out other Greek figures like Odysseus.

Buuut, at the same time, Magearna....

 

[nickdt]

It's called a legendary because he can change type exactly like Arceus, so I guess that at least from a lore perspective he's a legendary. ANd you can also only get 1 per game legitimately.

And Ditto can transform like Mew, but Ditto isn't a Mythical. So your explanation doesn't hold.

 

[KirbyBulba737]

And Ditto can transform like Mew, but Ditto isn't a Mythical. So your explanation doesn't hold.

Yea, as I already said. Honestly Legendaries are which pokemon GF decides to be as such.