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ITT: Rage against the Empoleon
I'll bite
First, let's talk typing. Empoleon gains a secondary steel typing. While it does gain a weakness to ground type and a neutrality to fire, it also gains resistances to several key attacking types, including psychic, bug, and dragon. Overall I would say this benefits it greatly, as it is able to switch into physical attackers such as Salamence and laugh at their attempts to damage it. In game, this typing is phenomenal. AI isn't very smart and won't switch out, allowing Empoleon to use it's typing to come in for easy kills. Also, the steel STAB is nice, although it doesn't add much offensively. Speaking of which...
Dat special attack.
Empoleon has the highest special attack of any starter, which ensures it doesn't play the role of a sitting duck. While it doesn't gain many useable moves until later in it's evolutionary line, neither do many other starters. Using Totodile as an example, it learns water gun and bite early on, similarly to how pipliup learns bubble and metal claw. While steel isn't great offensively, as it it resisted by water, electric, ground, and fire, fire types with the exception of ponyta are not found in game, and ground types are hit hard by its STAB. This does leave difficulty with electric and opposing water types, but at least electric pokemon are hit for neutral damage, so this leaves only water types as truly problematic pokemon.
