The Pocket Monster (Pokémon)
This article is sequel to my entry for the onyx July data challenge. Here is a brief history about Pokémon. You can also participate by visiting this link.
Pokémon, from the name “Pocket monster”, is a role-playing game which debuted in Japan in 1997. This game was invented by a Japanese man called Satoshi Tajiri and his friend, Ken Sugimori, who is an illustrator. Back then in 1982 before the invention of Pokémon, Satoshi and his friends only wrote about games in a magazine called Game Freak. However, in the1990s, he pitched his idea about Pokémon to Nintendo after he was inspired by his childhood experience of picking bugs and tadpoles in the forest.
In the game, players will assume the role of a Pokémon trainer, obtaining cartoon monsters and developing them to battle another Pokémon's. More interestingly, the games are on cartridges, and they can be connected via a cable to another player’s Gameboy to enable them to complete the final stage of the game where the final Pokémon of each player battles it out with the other.
At inception, only the Red and Green Pokémon games were released. However, it has seen great acceptance among players and there are now several generations of the monsters–from Gold and Silver to Ruby and Sapphire; Diamond and pearl; Black and White; X and Y; Sun and Moon; and the new one, Sword and Shield.
Pokémon's come in diverse types–for example, water and fire–each with different strength attributes. The fight between them can be likened to the popular rock-paper-scissors game. Take for example, if a Pokémon cannot beat his current opponent due to its weak character, it can be substituted with another Pokémon of preferred strength against the current opponent. With experience, they grow stronger and gain new abilities.
Infact, Pokémon is said to be the highest gross media franchise according to Wikipedia. The Pokémon video game series is the fourth bestselling video game franchise of all time, with over four hundred million copies sold. The franchise has expanded into other areas of the market such as creating Pokémon trading cards, action movies, anime series, comic books, and a temporary theme park.
Okay, all that being said, do you want to be the next Pokémon champion? Then my analysis should help you select your next unbeatable team. Let’s go!
The Pokémon dataset consists of 801 Pokémon's of different abilities. The data is clean, as I did not have to do a lot of data cleaning using Power BI. The features available include the base stats; the type of Pokémon; the performance against other Pokémon's; height; weight; attack; speed; special defense; special attack; hit points; the generation to which the Pokémon belongs; name; and finally, whether the Pokémon is legendary.
This last feature–is legendary–is needed if we want to build a classification model on the data. However, in this case, we won’t, as I am only going to perform exploratory data analysis and bring out actionable insight from the 801 Pokémon's.
It is observed that Pokémon belongs to different generations, and there are 7 in all. The 1st and 5th generations have the highest number of Pokémon's in total, with 151 and 156 Pokémon's respectively. The sixth generation has the lowest at just seventy-two. In addition, each subsequent generation keeps getting an additional type1 Pokémon.
An interesting trend was observed regarding the Pokémon skill in each generation. For example, there is an upward trend in skill level from the earlier generation to the latter, with fourth generation Pokémon's having the strongest level of each skill. In general, it is seen that there were remarkable increases in abilities in the 4th and 7th generation Pokémon's.
Using Tree map of Power BI, I visualized the number of Pokémon's that belong to each of the type1 Pokémon's. There are about 114 Pokémon's that belong to the Water-type1, making it the highest group in terms of the number of Pokémon's. The flying group has the least number, with just 11 Pokémon's belonging to the group.
It is not surprising to see that WATER-type1, which contains the largest number of Pokémon's has the overall highest abilities such as defense, special defense, attack, special attack and hit point compared to all others; and the NORMAL-type1 being the next coming close to it.
Base Statistics of the best Pokémon to use in any combat are:
- Deoxys has the highest speed of all Pokémon's, and it belongs to the 3rd generation Psychic-type1.
- Aggron has the highest defense score of 230, and it belongs to the 3rd generation Steel-type1.
- Shuckle has the highest score special defense ability, and it belongs to the 2nd generation Bug-type1.
- Heracross is rated the best in attack score, and belongs to similar generation and type1 as Shuckle.
- Mewtwo has the best score for special attack with a score 194. It belongs to the 1st generation and the Psychic-type1.
- Blissey has the highest hit point score, even though it has very poor defense and attack. It belongs to the 2nd generation of Normal-type1.
Click here for the interactive dashboard.
Next Task
The next task for me is to take a deeper look at the data and build a team of the 6 strongest monsters. Hopefully, I will update you all when I am done.
Thank you for reading.
