>>56684562Lucario is shit in her home region of Sinnoh.
Lucario in later gens is a good mon, I’ll give it that. Being pre-Cheren in BW2, getting an Adaptability Mega in XY, sure, whatever. It’s buffed in Renplat and available pre-Roark, I know, I know…
But in Vanilla Gen 4, Lucario is a fucking unplayable pokemon.
By the time you receive it, for one, hatching the egg is just as tedious as it always is. You’re at / past Byron so your team is around level 40, lord knows that’s a hell of a grind.
If you magically manage to get its friendship high enough for an early evo, which is intended to be an extra bonus for doing your homework, you’re rewarded with Bone Rush, which gives you coverage against - you guessed it - Rock and Steel types, which you already hit, and Fire and Electric types.
With 85% (Edit: 80???) accuracy and it being a multi-hit move, so on average 75 non-stab base power, which means Close Combat hits harder on the same Fire and Electric types. They realistically still just outspeed and kill you.
That brings me to the first fundamental flaw of Gen 4 Lucario: it’s disgustingly misplaced base stat allocations. 90 base speed is fast, but not fast enough. 70/70/70 base defenses is not glass-cannon level, but still frail in a vacuum, and its typing does little to absolve it from that, but I’ll get to that in a second. And then 110/115 attack stats is good for a Gen 4 pokemon, but still not spectacular, and that also means for most playthroughs, at least 110 points worth of base stats go completely unused.
Lucario’s unique typing is a complete joke. It’s still just a Fighting type at its core. The only Steel type move in its levelup set is Metal Claw, and you have to use the move relearner to get access to that. Byron gives you TM Flash Cannon, but that has only 80 points of base power, and hits only Ice and Rock for supereffective damage, which Fighting already hits.
1/3
