It's All About The Types!

 

     "A type (Japanese: タイプ Type) is a property for Pokémon and their moves. Each type has three properties: which types of Pokémon it is super effective against, which types of Pokémon it is not very effective against, and which types of Pokémon it is completely ineffective against. There are 17 types, each of which is listed to the right. In Generation I, types are sometimes referred to as elements"
     -Bulbapedia

 The Main 17

     Yep, there are that many types for all 649 pokémon. All 17 types have their own advantage on the battle field, though some types have been proven to be more reliable than others. Pokémon themselves can have a single type, or be duel typed, and all pokémon moves are single typed.

     As you can see by the type chart above, the attacking type is the type of the move used, and the defending type revolves around the type of the pokémon. Here's a link to a type chart with all the combinations of types used so far for pokémon in the games:

http://www.serebii.net/games/type.shtml
(It's waaaaay too long to post on here!)

There Were Only 15 To Begin With

     I'll state this now: There are a lot of different changes within the generations. Most notably, changes between first generation and second generation, and second and third. A major change though between the first two generation is additional types. The two types, Steel and Dark, were originally nonexistent in generation one.

     In generation one, there were some balancing issues within the types. The Psychic type had a superior advantage among the other types, only being weak to the type Bug back then. Of course, Electric type pokémon are only weak to Ground types, but back then there were powerful Ground type moves like the ever-famous Earthquake, and Electric types couldn't even damage Ground types. In generation one, there were only three attacking Bug type moves, and they were all relatively weak(the highest being a multiple hit move with a power of 25). Also, Ghost types were unable to hit Psychics, which seems to be a glitch, due to in-game and out-game guides stating Ghosts are strong against Psychics(like that mattered, there was only one Ghost type move: Lick!). Also, the Fighting type was considered unbalanced. In generation one, Fighting was only strong against Normal, Rock, and Ice types, which were pretty unused in battling back then. Dark and Steel types brought a balance to both types.

     Here is a type chart in generation one:



What Dark and Steel did to balance the types:
-Dark are immune to Psychic, yet weak to Fighting
-Steel resisted Psychic, yet weak to Fighting

Changes from Generation One type chart to current type chart:
-Ghost is super effective against Psychic
-Bug and Poison were super effective against each other, now Poison does normal damage against Bug, and Bug is not very effective against Poison
-Ice is not very effective against Fire opposed to normal effective against the type.

The 18th and 19th Type

     In generation two, a move came out called Curse. It was a ???-type move, and the only of it's kind. No pokémon had this type, except for the pokémon Arceus(since his ability is multitype, letting it change into other types). However, this was only in fourth generation, and to prevent the fourth generation games to crash because of hackers, so there's no legitimate way to get the form of Arceus with the type. By fifth generation, the ???-type was removed from the coding, and the move Curse became a Ghost type move.

     The ???-type appears to have strengths or weakness to any of the other types, if a process happened to let an attacking move to be the ???-type. Also, in fourth generation, if any pure Flying type pokémon used the move Roost(which takes away the Flying type of the pokémon for the duration of the turn after the move is executed), their type would be the ???-type for the rest of the turn. This is useless, because there are no pure Flying pokémon until fifth generation(and Arceus's Flying type form couldn't learn the move). This changed in fifth generation for the pure Flying pokémon to turn into a Normal type.

     In the third generation side games, Pokémon Colosseum and Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, they both had an exclusive type called Shadow. Shadow pokémon were suppose to be more ruthless, brutal, disobedient, ect., ect. than other pokémon(no shown bloody violence on the games, being rated E of course). The Shadow type would be the third type to duel type pokémon. If Shadow type moves were allowed in battles and tournaments, it'd be the best type, due to the type being super effective against all other types, and only weak to it's own. Sadly, the Shadow type isn't allowed outside those two games, because all Shadow pokémon have to be purified before being allowed in anything(since they're basically corrupt versions of themselves).

Glitch Types

     Generation one and two are full of glitches, since so much was edited before the games were finished, and so much was left within it. One of the most famous glitch types is the Bird type. Basically it's the ???-type, and a prototype for the Flying type. Honestly, the Flying type was often misthought as Bird type, to even an in-game misstatement by an Non-Playable character in Firered and Leafgreen.

     There are many different glitch types within the coding of generation one games, but most are just a bunch of glitched up characters with no type advantages or weaknesses. However, there's one glitch type in generation two, called, "') m) ZM"(Ya, a lot of messed up characters), that's identical to the Steel types, giving the impression it was a test version of the Steel type.

     I guess that's enough spam about pokémon types, so I'll leave it off with a question: What's your favorite type?