How to Raise Your Pokémon: Lillipup

It took me forever to realize
I was spelling Lillipup wrong.

Lillipup. Nice and straightforward. I know just from the fact that this is a normal type on route 1 that a lot of people are just gonna deem him regional poochyena and ignore him. Those people are missing out. Lillipup is a great pokémon to have all the way though the game. He hits hard, has good abilities, gets good moves and nice type coverage early on. 

You can find lillipups almost everywhere early on, but you definitely wanna get him as early as possible. Ie route 1. One thing you wanna watch while getting your lillipup is that he has two abilities, each of which being good in it's own respect. 


First one's vital spirit, which sucks right now, due to the fact that by the time anyone will try to put your pokémon to sleep in this game, Lillipup will most likely have evolved and lost this ability. When he does evolve however, this ability changes into intimidate, which lowers the opponents attack by one stage on the turn he's sent in. 

He's staring into your soul.

The second one, pickup, is great early on. With it, Lillipup has a 10% chance to be holding an item after each battle (provided he doesn't already have an item). When he evolves however, it turns into sand rush, which doubles Lillipup's speed whilst in a sandstorm. Both of these abilities effect lillipup's play-style a bit, so I'd check it's ability once you catch it. 

In terms of attacks, Lillipup learns odor sleuth at level 5, which you want to get rid of as soon as the opportunity presents itself. At 8 he learns bite. Bite is a dark type move, and the main reason we won't be using odor sleuth. Level 12 gives us helping hand which you may not use much do to how scarce double/triple battles are, but I think you should replace odor sleuth with it for now at least. 


After you beat the Striaton gym, you should teach Lillipup work up with the TM you get and replace leer with it. At level 15 he learns take down, which does a broken amount of damage at this point in the game, but also has only 85 accuracy, and hurts Lillipup when he uses it. Fair trade-off if you ask me. 

Herdier's the big one.

At level 16 Lillipup evolves into Herdier, and grows a lovely mustache. After you beat the Nacrene City gym, you can teach Herdier Retaliate, which is just a bit weaker than take down in most situations, but also has none of the recoil and accuracy issues. However retaliate also only has 5 pp. I would stick with take down for now. You can however replace helping hand with retaliate for finishing off weaker pokémon without missing, and hitting pokémon when your low on health. 

At level 24 Herdier learns crunch, which is basically bite 2.0. You definitely want this. And at level 29 he learns roar, which sucks in my honest opinion, don't get it. At level 32 Herdier makes a majestic transformation into Stoutland, and his mustache reaches monumental lengths. At this point you can go to the move relearner to teach him fire fang, ice fang, or thunder fang if you want to. Keep in mind the moves are pretty weak when they're not super effective though. 

And this is Stoutland.

At level 42 Stoutland learns reversal, which is a fighting move, and really improves his type coverage, allowing him to hit rock types and steel types. It's only good if you're low on health, but take down can help out in that department. At level 51 Stoutland learns last resort, which does enormous damage, but requires that use your other 3 moves before you use it. I wouldn't teach him this, but it's up to you. And finally, at level 59 stoutland learns the mighty Giga Impact, which deals a whopping 150 base damage, plus same-type-attack-boost, at the cost of not being able to do anything after using it. 

Stoutland also has a few good TM moves. First there's return, which can easily replace any of the normal type moves I've mentioned so far. It has a max base damage of 102, and no drawback other than having to keep Stoutland happy. (If your pokémon hates you that's your fault.) You can replace crunch with payback, but I think crunch is better, as stoutland is faster than quite a few of the pokémon your going to run into. 


He can learn thunder wave, instant paralyzer and all around awesome move, and wild charge, an electric recoil move with solid base damage. One last thing to keep in mind with stoutland, don't teach him any special attacks. Sure teaching it surf or thunder may sound good, but he has no special attack whatsoever. You wouldn't use a gun with no bullets would you? 

And that concludes this issue, I'll be keeping up with the early pokémon theme most likely, we won't be covering patrat any time soon though so don't worry (unless you want me to do patrat). Stay tuned for more How to Raise Your Pokémon, and other things!