Insights into the Pokemon World
Growing up I spent many hours playing Pokemon. As I grew older I couldn’t keep up with the game due to school. There are currently eight generations of Pokemon and I am only familiar with the first five. I wanted to learn more about the new generations as well as see if I could predict a few things. I found a dataset that includes all Pokemon along with information such as their type, status, height and many more. There were no data quality issues within this set.
To start off my research I came up with a few questions:
- What is the most prevalent type (Fire,Water,Grass) in each generation?
- Does the weight and height of the Pokemon affect its catch rate?
- Do the Pokemon with the highest stats have something in common?
- How has the number of Pokemon per generation changed over time?
The Most Prevalent Type in Each Generation
Before I started this I guessed that the most prevalent would be fire in all generations because fire type Pokemon were always the coolest in my opinion.
My guess was incorrect and Fire was not the most common type in any generation. Water and Normal type were actually the most popular type within the first few generations. After seeing this data I went and found the totals shown here:
What interests me is that Fairy has more than Flying type. Fairy type was introduced in generation 6 while flying has been in the game since the beginning. However, many Pokemon have dual typing and flying is seldom used as a main type. Here are the charts for secondary typing:
As we can see, Flying is much more used as a secondary type rather than a primary type.
The Affect of Weight and Height on a Pokemon’s Catch Rate
All of the Pokemon have a weight and height associated to it and something that I wondered was if the weight and height of a Pokemon affects the catch rate. I assumed that a Pokemon that was taller or weighed more would have a lower catch rate. The catch rate is one of the factors that go into if a Pokemon is caught. The higher the catch rate the higher likelihood that a Pokemon will be caught. Here are my findings:
As I predicted, lighter and shorter Pokemon have high catch rates compared to their heavier and taller counterparts.
Common Ground Amongst Pokemon with High Stats
Something I wanted to explore was if there was anything in common with the strongest Pokemon. I used the sum of the stats as a basis for how strong a Pokemon is. I only used the top 20 Pokemon and then I did a sum of their status and type. A Pokemon can have a status of Legendary, Sub-Legendary, Mythical or Normal. Legendary Pokemon are the ones on the cover of the newer video games and I assumed that a majority of the strongest Pokemon would be these legendaries. In terms of type I hypothesized that Dragon would be the strongest because when I played Dragon types felt strongest to me. Here are my findings:
Legendary status and Dragon type Pokemon made up most of the top 20 Pokemon in terms of stats. After this I decided to look at the bottom 20 Pokemon shown here:
Bug type and Normal status Pokemon made up most of the bottom 20. Pokemon.
Number of Pokemon per Generation
Since Pokemon has been around for over 20 years, I wanted to see if the number of new Pokemon has increased over the generations. I assumed that the number would go down over time because the company would want original designs so as they create new Pokemon originality becomes an issue. Shown here is the number of Pokemon released per generation:
My prediction here was correct, the amount of Pokemon drastically decreased since the first generation.
Closing Thoughts
Doing some data analysis on the Pokemon was fun for me. After seeing some unfamiliar Pokemon I got to learn more about the newer generations. I think the most interesting part is that the creators of Pokemon made heavier and taller Pokemon harder to catch. As I went through the analysis new questions popped up and I had fun exploring them.
