Ophie
Salingerian Phony
I guess this is mostly for tiered battles? I mean you can't honestly expect a Girafarig to be in OU or something?
Most likely, Mr.Munchlax is referring to online battling in the regular games, not Pokémon Showdown. That is, Battle Spot, Victory Station, Union Room, etc. For the record, they're not tiered (except by players in Pokémon Sword and Shield's Ranked Battles, where players are segregated by win-loss history).
At that point, the early-game Bug Pokémon (and Normal Pokémon) were not really meant to be kept on the team for very long, let alone meant to be used in multiplayer. You were supposed to catch one, use it for a little while, and remove it from your team in favor of stronger Pokémon you'd find later.I just restarted Pokemon Diamond for the first time in like a decade. Really very disappointed in the early game bug pokemon. Kricketune is far worse than I remembered and not usable. It really needs massive buffs and probably an evolution. Technician is okay but that's not enough. Especially when you had great bug early bug pokemon in the last two games like Vikavolt and Orbeetle
Most monster collection games still work in this way. Capcom, for instance, doesn't really expect you to play through Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin and keep Arzuros on your team all the way to the endgame. Not long after you find Arzuros, monsters you'll find outclass it while having similar or even the same abilities as it, and you're meant to swap Arzuros out with something else. Those monsters, in turn, are to be swapped out with even stronger ones later on.
Pokémon is the only monster collection franchise to have established a strong competitive scene, and so it's the only one to have ways of taking early-game Pokémon and making them competitively useful. Even then, it's only a recent development. Generation IV was when Game Freak experimented with that with Staraptor, and it didn't really go full swing until Generation VI with Talonflame (and even then, you weren't getting Gale Wings Talonflame from early-game Fletchlings).
(To give an idea of how pronounced it is in MHS2, Nergigante is a late-game monster. If up against an Arzuros three times its level, Nergigante can still move faster than Arzuros and one-shot it. Needless to say, the MHS competitive scene is a complete joke. There are only maybe four to five monsters that are viable in head-to-head multiplayer; everything else just kind of falls to them. Nergigante...is one of them. Yo-kai Watch's multiplayer is also pretty much nonexistent due to how stale it became. These two franchises, as well as most others of this subgenre, were built for the single-player campaigns.)
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