Pokémon

At the end of the Chikorita Community Day on 22 September 2018, Pokémon GO was flooded with a strange little Pokémon that fans had never seen before. It had a silver Ditto-like body with a hex-nut head. There was no information about this brand new Pokémon, no Pokédex entry, not even a name – it simply had question marks above its head. If you captured one, it always revealed itself to be a Ditto masquerading as this mysterious Pokémon – so some people actually thought it was a glitch or a placeholder.

Then, two days later, The Pokémon Company published a short video that formally announced the new Pokémon. It was called Meltan, from ‘melt’ and ‘metal’. When Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Eevee! launched around two months later on the Nintendo Switch, Pokémon GO introduced the Mystery Box. If you sent a Pokémon from GO to Let’s Go (or later, to Pokémon HOME, a cloud service for storing Pokémon), you received a Box in Pokémon GO that, when opened, made Meltan spawn around you for a limited time. At the same time, GO added a nine-step ‘Let’s GO, Meltan’ Special Research so that players who didn’t own a Switch still had a path to capture Meltan.

Meltan is a curious Mythical Pokémon that seems to show an interest in all things. It has a soft body made from liquid metal – gallium – that gives it a very fluid shape. Its tail looks like a power cord or a plastic-coated copper wire with an exposed end. Its head is in the shape of a gold hexagonal nut. The hole in the nut is like the white of an eye; its pupil looks like a ball bearing, but it is actually made up of a droplet of gallium that is capable of freely moving about within the hexagon and even changing shape. This eyeball can be very expressive and is a good way of telling Meltan’s mood. When provoked, Meltan will spin its hexagonal nut on its axis, producing a high-pitched, resonant sound that attracts others of its kind.

Meltan is attracted to metallic objects and can use its liquid arms to melt metals, particularly those in the subsoil, absorbing them into its body as sustenance. It can then circulate the assimilated metal within its body, allowing it to generate energy. The Pokémon can use this energy as an attack, firing it from its eye in the form of electricity.

Many Pokémon fans – myself included – fondly remember the good old days when new Pokémon would often debut in the anime before they appeared in the next generation of games. There was always excitement about what, exactly, this new creature was – what its type was, what abilities it had. These days, most new Pokémon tend to get announced in Nintendo Directs or on the official website, so a lot of that excitement, in my opinion, has gone. With Meltan, it seems that The Pokémon Company wanted to bring back some of that nostalgia, some of that unknown – especially since Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Eevee!, being remakes of the very first Pokémon games, would be calling back to the franchise’s earliest days.

Meltan (and its evolution, Melmetal) was born from The Pokémon Company’s desire to build a bridge between players of the core Pokémon series and players of Pokémon GO. ‘We had talked about in the early stages of Pokémon GO‘s development that we want to debut a Pokémon,’ says Pokémon: Let’s Go director Junichi Masuda, ‘and we worked with Niantic [Pokémon GO‘s developer] to kind of figure out that functionality. But the design, that was done internally at Game Freak. I gave some specific setting directions to one of our designers who was also a fan of the original games and played them as a kid, so he had a really good idea of what I was looking for, based on this kind of very simple metal nut design. He probably had the original Kanto Pokémon designs in his mind and tried to keep it as simple as possible. You know, they were more kind of basic back then compared to some of the more modern designs. He worked on that, and then once it was finished, we gave all the assets and everything to Niantic, we planned the event and had them execute on that, and it worked out.’

I can see what Junichi Masuda means – Meltan does have a simple design, a kind of Ditto-esque look. It looks quite strange, but at the same time, especially when you look at it more closely, it’s kind of cute. It’s based on liquid metal, particularly gallium, which is liquid at 29°C. That means it is solid at room temperature, but liquid at body temperature – which is why gallium will melt in a person’s hand. Gallium can also conduct electricity and react with many other metals to form amalgams. These amalgams can hold a specific shape far easier than the pure liquid metal itself, which is why Meltan’s body seems to be a viscous semi-liquid.

Meltan usually lives in groups, but when the time comes, one strong Meltan will absorb all the others and evolve into Melmetal – and that’s the Pokémon I’ll be looking at next time.