Patricia is the former editor-in-chief of Kotaku, where she spent a decade writing and editing. Prior to that, she served as the Culture Editor at Polygon, and as a reporter at The Verge. Hernandez specializes in Pokémon TCG, Nintendo, and offbeat internet culture stories.
Despite beloved monsters like Butterfree and Heracross, this Pokémon type has struggled for 30 years now
Every Pokémon type has its own fandom, but the least popular element has to be bug-type. No offense to any self-described Bug Catchers out there, but a category of monsters based on insects — which many people fear or loathe in real life — was never destined to be a community favorite. When you factor in the monster type’s many weaknesses, and what you get is an underappreciated class of Pokémon.
Enter Pokémon BugLime, a new pocket monster game built on Pokémon FireRed that overhauls the worst monster type in the entire series. The focus is entirely on bug types — even the starters are insects — but the ROM hack has been tuned to make all of its monsters interesting and viable. 94 bug-types from the series at large make an appearance, and their ranks are bolstered by a number of monsters reclassified as bugs. Many of the returning bug types have been rebalanced with new elemental combos, stats, movesets, and even evolution methods — all in the name of redeeming the unpopular set of Pokémon.
Bugs here, there, everywhere
This means all the NPCs and gym leaders use bug-type Pokémon. In the latter case, dual typing allows those gym bosses to still be technically aligned with their previous elemental focus. Though the ROM hack is based on an old version of Pokémon, it incorporates mechanics from newer generations, like shiny charms, while also introducing a number of its own quality-of-life improvements. For example, TMs are unlimited and HMs can be deleted. Players can also obtain the Experience Share item midway through the game rather than near the end. As for the three starters, players have to choose among Tarountula, Surskit, and Sizzlipede.
“The objective is to make all Bug-Types fun to use, not necessarily ‘realistic’ changes,” creator spearmintz wrote in a Pokémon forum.
You can check out the game here. Don’t worry: if BugLime starts to feel like too much, you can always just use Repel.