Pokemon’s most terrifying Legendary isn’t as big as you think

Legendary Pokemon have a reputation for being the most powerful and feared beings in the franchise, yet some of them aren’t much bigger than humans.

It’s often surprising what the in-game Pokedex says about Pokemon sizes. Pokemon generally need to be scaled down to the size of trainers, especially in older games due to the hardware limitations that plagued the series for so long.

This isn’t helped by other forms of media, which are free to depict Pokemon as giants or ants. The Pokemon anime was doing this as far back as the Indigo League, with the giant in “Tentacool & Tentacruel” that terrorized a city.

The video games sometimes play with this, as was the case with Pokemon Ruby & Sapphire, where Groudon, Kyogre, and Rayquaza were all depicted as gargantuan in the cutscenes yet were shrunk down when the player encountered them.

Groudon is a big example of this, as discussed in a thread on the Pokemon Subreddit. In animated Pokemon projects, Groudon is depicted as a Godzilla-style monster, yet it’s only 11’6″ in the games.

That’s not to say 11’6″ is small, but it’s not exactly befitting the master of the earth, creator of volcanoes, and mover of mountains.

Groudon is so small because it needed to scale with the characters in a Game Boy Advance title. Only the later games have handled bigger Pokemon, such as Dynamax creatures or Wailord in Pokemon Sword & Shield, as they have access to better hardware.

Pokemon fans are often surprised by how big/small their favorite ‘mons are, but it’s all down to the source material. Groudon can be a giant in the anime, comics, and movies, as well as in the imaginations of players, who use the basis of the Game Boy Advance’s graphics to fuel the image of the battle against the giant Legendary Pokemon in their minds.