X – XP

A high level of nostalgia means that this year my chosen theme for the 2016 A to Z challenge is Pokemon. Whether you yourself have a similar level of sentimentality or you’ve never really gotten into it, I hope that you enjoy this month of posts as I indulge myself.

XP! Or experience (possible even experience points) if you want to use the full word, but considering I need to hit all the letters, I don’t!

XP is very important in Pokemon. It’s how Pokemon get more powerful, causing them to level up, and levelling up can cause such things as evolution and learning new moves. How do you get XP? Mostly, it’s battling your Pokemon agaisnt another Pokemon, whether a trainer or wild. As long as your Pokemon does not faint, then it will gain XP, and there will generally be a little bar at the bottom that fills up, so you can tell how far it is until your Pokemon will hit that next level.

There are a whole bunch of complicated equations that determine how much XP a Pokemon will gain when it wins a battle. It depends on your level, the opponents level, and some items can effect this.

Levelling is effected by the experience group that the Pokemon falls into, of which there are six in the current generations: Slow, Medium Slow, Medium Fast, Fast, Erratic and Fluctuating. This basically describes how much XP a Pokemon needs to gain it’s next level. I won’t go too much into it, because it gets very maths based, and although I like maths and graphs, I know that a fair few people don’t 😛

The maximum level a Pokemon can achieve is level 100, after which point they just stop gaining XP. Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten that high, because it takes a heck of a lot of work. The highest I ever got was high 80s, I think, and that was my Pikachu in Pokemon Yellow, because I used it for everything.

The last thing to mention is XP sharing. If you start the fight with one Pokemon, and then swap out halfway through, then as long niether of those Pokemon faint, they will split the XP of the fight between them. It’s a good way to fast level up slightly lower level Pokemon on your team, and I do it all the time. It gets a lot easier when you pick up an item called XP Share, which you give to a Pokemon to hold, and any battle that you fight, they will get a fraction of the XP from it. And the best part about this item, it that it doesn’t take any XP away from the Pokemon that actually does the fighting. I always look forward to getting it in the games.

 

Pokemon of the Day

X is for Xerneas

A blue and black stage-like Pokemon, it has eight sets of antlers, four extending from each side of its head. In active mode, these horns are pale gold in colour and the tips is adorned with a glowing colour, changing for each set of horns (orange, red, purple and blue). In neutral mode, the horns are a pale blue, matching the colour of it’s upper body. It has x shaped pupils, and markings on it’s bodys, along with it’s horns, form a large x shape. Xerneas is a legendary Pokemon which is said to have the power to share eternal life, denoted by the horns on its head shining in seven colours rather than four. At the end of its lifetime, it releases all of its life energy into all living things around it, transforms into a tree, and then sleeps for 1,000 years. It also has the power to create trees and forests, making it a very benevolent and powerful force for nature.

So there are only two Pokemon that begin with X – Xerneas and Xatu. But I’m actually impressed that there are Pokemon that begin with every letter of the alphabet, even if there’s only a couple. So, today, you get my pick of the two X’s, which is Xerneas, the mascot of Pokemon X, and one of three legendaries in generation 6. It’s kind of cool, it actually resembles the letter X, and it’s got this awesome forest god things going on. I didn’t use it much, but I like the fluff from it.