The Avian Solo Runs, Episode 4: Unfezant in Pokemon White 2

Welcome to the fourth chapter of my Avian Solo Run epopee, dear fellow gamers! The feathery 'Mon du jour is none other than Pidove, a bird as mocked, ridiculed and globally considered as crap as Pidgey and Starly are revered and beloved. Pidove is dismissed as a lazy knockoff of one of the most common birds ever known to man, and one must admit that there's a kernel of truth there — a mighty big kernel, mind you: while Pidove's final form Unfezant packs a modicum of personality and originality along with lovely plumage colours and patterns, his original form is, to all intents and purposes, a mere pigeon. A very grey, very realistic, very boring pigeon. Couldn't GameFreak come up with a fancier inspiration for the regional gen V bird than a species that's universally associated with the grime and dirt of big cities? Surely North-America has more local birds to offer, right? How about a Canada goose — or better yet, a bald eagle, the very symbol of the US of A itself? There are not nearly enough birds of prey in Pokemon games, if you ask me. But hey, what's done is done, and we have to make do with what we're given; and that's how I found myself yet again cruising Unova with a pigeon-turned-game bird.

While cruising alongside Pidove, I slowly but surely uncovered the real reasons why this bird is so universally vilified by Pokefans, and most especially by online meta aficionados. Those reasons can be summed up in a single, lapidary sentence: Pidove is a complete troll, the crème de la crème of trolly 'Mons. To see the full extent of GameFreak's trolliness when it comes to Pidove&evos, let's lay down the bird's specifics. Unfezant, Pidove's final evolution, has a base Attack Stat of 105 and a base Sp.Attack Stat of 65 — quite the gap, shall we say. This makes Unfezant a perfect Physical attacker; yet half of the Moves Unfezant can learn by leveling up, as well as nearly half of its TM Moves, are Special Moves. But there is worse: Pidove is, so far, the only example I've encountered of a 'Mon that cannot learn offensive Moves belonging to its own Type. I had no idea this was even a thing, and I swear I nearly choked on my own spit when I discovered my Unfezant couldn't learn bloody Sky Drop and Acrobatics. And what a coincidence, those are actually Physical Moves that would have taken perfect advantage of Unfezant's stellar Attack! Such a setting must have been intentional on GameFreak's part; they must have wanted Pidove to not live up to its full potential by severely restricting the bird's access to good Physical Moves, and I can only speculate about their reasons for doing so. My main guess is that they wanted to shake up the online meta my delivering a regional bird that was good for little beyond being a Fly slave. And if that's indeed the case, then they totally succeeded; because while Staraptor was gloriously perched on the heights of the OU tier in gen IV, Unfezant is pitifully nested in the depths of the PU tier, i.e. the absolute bottom of the barrel when it comes to competitive tiers.

Mind you, the glaring discrepancy between Pidove's Stats and its potential Move Pool is not its only shortcoming: the poor bird is also a complete regression when it comes to Move variety. GameFreak basically wiped the slate clean with Pidove, taking away all the subtle improvements made in gen III and IV in term of Move pool expansion for bird 'Mons and putting gen V's regional on the worst Move diet I've seen this side of Oricorio. The picture on the right shows the Move pool I used during the latter half of the game, and it fully showcases how utterly desperate I was to get my paws on offensive Moves for my Unfezant. I went as far as to give him an HM, which is something I usually never do in solo runs; and I had no choice but to slap two Special Moves on him just to be make sure I got Moves with high power, high accuracy and a decent amount of PP. (I know he can technically learn Steel Wing and U-Turn; but the former is not a TM in the gen V games, and the former would have been useless before I reached the Pokemon League and got rid of my HM slaves — not to mention that it's a pain to obtain.) And mind you, things would have been even worse if not for the awesome Move Tutor in Driftveil City who taught my Unfezant Uproar — i.e. one of the most amazing Normal Moves I've ever had the honour of handling. Uproar is basically a three for one discount, with each PP delivering three turns of intense action — perfect for restroom breaks. On top of that, it's a Special Normal Move, which is a configuration rare enough to deserve a bit of notice and praise — despite the fact that said configuration was not the best suited for my run. Uproar was a breath of fresh air by sheer virtue of being a Move I never used before, and its use was basically a bet every time: I could never be sure the next 'Mon in line wouldn't be resistant or immune to Normal Moves, and it made the use of Uproar widly entertaining.

The weird thing is that despite Pidove's huge limitations, cruising Unova with him was actually kind of a breeze. He was more than able to hold its own on the battlefield right from the beginning; and from the halfway point, he actually became overleveled enough to one-shoot opponents with Special Moves Air Slash and Uproar. Having these Special Moves was actually an ace in the hole all things considered, because it allowed me to reprise the strategy I used in my Pidgey solo run and dispose neatly of Rock and Steel 'Mons, and more generally of all 'Mons with a less-than-stellar Sp.Defense. That's the weirdest thing ever, really: for all intents and purpose, Pidove&evos is a crappy 'Mon and the shittiest regional bird ever created, and yet he is perfectly decent solo run material in practice. I'd be tempted to attribute this unlikely performance to Black&White 2 being shamelessly easy, if not for the fact that my Snivy solo run of Black 2 was far from being a cakewalk. How my Pidove-turned-Unfezant managed to perform so amazingly well despite his obvious limitations is quite a mystery to me, and I'll just chalk it up to a perfect combination of overleveling, fitting Moves and sheer luck.

With that fourth Avian Run under my belt, this feature is slowly but surely coming to an end, with just one more feathery solo run to tackle. I'll see you soon with the run that wraps it all up, dear fellow gamers; and I sure hope it will be the most glorious closure of them all. Until then, thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!