I know that these Interesting Specimen posts of mine have become rather irregular. That’s mainly because it’s become harder for me to find a good time to work on them. For right now though, I’ve deiced to do a post about a family of Pokemon that I really should’ve covered in this series a long time ago.
Presenting the classic evolution line of Cleffa, Clefairy and Clefable.
I have no idea who the girl in the above picture is supposed to be. This was simply the best picture of these three Pokemon that I could find on Zerochan. Anyway, it’s rather astounding that I haven’t covered the Clefairy evolution line much sooner, since they’re actually quite fascinating Pokemon. This is especially true since the Generation 6 games when Cleffa, Clefairy and Clefable went from being simple Normal-type Pokemon to Fairy-type Pokemon.
They weren’t even made into dual Normal and Fairy Pokemon. Instead, the three all became pure Fairy Pokemon. I do recall there was some pretty mixed reaction when this type change to the Clefairy line was first revealed. One of the downsides is that if they ever remake the Generation 2 games again, they’ll have to change the Pokemon lineup of the Goldenrod City Gym Leader, Whitney, since she uses all Normal-type Pokemon. On the other hand, it is pretty cool that Clefairy and Clefable can now take on Dragon Pokemon like Hydreigon. There is another reason besides the massive type change that Cleffa, Clefairy and Clefable have landed in the Interesting Specimen category, but I’ll get to that in a bit.
In the Games: For the first three generations of the Pokemon games, the only place to find Clefairy was in the Kanto Region’s Mt. Moon. That was not one of my favorite locations in the first generation games, though I did like how they revamped Mt. Moon in Gold, Silver and Crystal; made it smaller and put in that clearing with the little shop and that meadow where a pack of Clefairy would come out to dance every Monday night. Anyway, in the Generation 4 games, Clefairy could be found at Mt. Coronet in the Sinnoh Region. The place to find Clefairy in the Generation 5 games was at the Giant Chasm, home of the legendary Kyurem. Finally in the Generation 6 games, Clefairy could be found in Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire at Meteor Falls and on Route 115. As for Cleffa, the only way to get it in most of the games is to breed Clefairy, though in the Generation 4 games Cleffa can be found in the wild at Mt. Coronet and the Trohpy Garden. Clefable can meanwhile only be obtained in most of the games by evolving Clefairy, though it can be found in the wild at the Giant Chasm in the fifth generation games.
Evolution: The only way to get Cleffa to evolve into Clefairy is through happiness-based evolution, which in my experience can take a lot of time. Clefairy meanwhile evolves into Clefable upon being exposed to a well-known item in the games known as the Moon Stone. The thing about most stone-based evolutions is that the Pokemon in question stops learning new moves by leveling up after it evolves. That’s why I’d usually train the heck out of most of the Clefairy I’d use in the games before finally using the Moon Stone on it. In the Gold, Silver and Crystal games I’d usually wait until Clefairy was in the mid-fifties before finally using the Moon Stone.
Space Pokemon: The main reason that Cleffa, Clefairy and Clefable have landed in the Interesting Specimen category is because these three Pokemon happen to be from space. Cleffa are said to have come to the planet on small meteors, and have been known to gather together during meteor showers. The anime has also shown that Clefairy are capable of building spacecraft, even going as far as stealing various odds and ends from people in order to repair their ships. Of course we don’t seem to see any of the wild Clefairy living at Mt. Moon or the Clefairy owned by trainers trying to build their own ships to travel the stars, but it could be that those Clefairy have been living on the planet for so long that the knowledge needed to construct such spacecraft has been lost over many generations. In a way, one could think of the “earth born” Clefairy as cute versions of the aliens depicted in H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. It’s kind of a shame that the anime never really explored Clefairy’s nature as an extraterrestrial Pokemon any further. One interesting thing they could’ve done is to have a group of Clefairy come into conflict with a group of Elgyem, another extraterrestrial Pokemon connected to a UFO crash site in Unova.
That pretty much covers it for this post. I don’t know when I’ll do the next Interesting Specimen post or what Pokemon I’ll cover next, but I do have a few ideas.
