39. Jigglypuff

I always get stuck on these... popular pokemon. Really, what hasn't been said about Jigglypuff.

Perhaps the most important thing Jigglypuff can teach us is the danger of bro culture. Don't pass out when there are markers about.

The anime brought it to stardom as the dopey, but lovable sidekick type, a character trait it hasn't made use of about fifty million times or anything (but then what is the anime known for, if not distinct personality traits), but I think Jigglypuff really came into its own when it somehow made it into the first Super Smash Bros. Masahiro Sakurai, apparently helplessly drawn to pink circular things (comic relevant),

might have nerfed it obscenely in comparison to Kirby for the entire duration of the series, but y'know what? It's okay. Because being able to beat people with Jigglypuff becomes its own sort of game. Even if you fail, you earn respect just by trying. Better than Fox Only'ing everyone.

But still, I have some complaints. Does Sing really need to have the range of like, Jigglypuff's diameter? Sing is its main attack! In the anime, it has this creepy, Pied Piper ability to send entire cities into bouts of narcolepsy, but in SSB you have to basically be on top of a person for it to work, and then they wake up before the attack even ends. And they never bothered to buff this. You might as well just go for the Rest hit if you're that close to someone. Also, Rest should slightly reduce your damage %. I mean, it's the least they could do. I will say though, once it gets Rollout from Melee onward, Jigglypuff gains a whole new layer of awesome. That attack is amazing.

So, how about Jigglypuff in actual Pokemon games? Well, it suffers from a lot of the same problems as Clefairy (which its design overlaps with, slightly), except it's not put out to be some rare, magical thing. You get 'em in that patch of grass right before Mt. Moon. I distinctly remember carrying a Jigglypuff in my party just to make use of Sing, as my “closer” in wild pokemon catch attempts. Though looking back, I'm not sure why I didn't just have a Butterfree with Sleep Powder. Jigglypuff shows up again early in Gold and Silver, in Route 46, that tiny one that goes nowhere. For some reason they all but cut it out of HeartGold and SoulSilver though; you can only get it in Kanto. I guess Nintendo was suffering from Jigglypuff fatigue.

And what about it's design? Well, Jigglypuff is clearly based on a... rabbit... cat... hamster... alright, it's basically just a balloon. Which is cool! But it's not my favourite balloon pokemon, sadly.

The Winner:
HeartGold and SoulSilver

Aww.

Gold and Silver's sprites are pretty good, and D/P's has a portly energy, but this one has Jigglypuff looking its most bashful and come-hither. Which is misleading, because what it's actually doing is coldly sizing up what resonant frequency its voice needs to strike in order to steal your wallet. Which is, I'm serious, the canonical explanation of Jigglypuff's powers, as per its Ruby pokedex entry. However improbable, that's always more interesting to me than “Uh, it's magic.”