Pokemon X & Y: Sylveon, Nintendo’s Newest Eevee-lution

Following the Monday night CoroCoro reveal of a new Eevee-lution from the upcoming Pokemon X & Y games due this October, Nintendo finally released the official English name of their newest genetic mess (which I had grown accustomed to calling Bow-Dog) to be Sylveon. Unfortunately, Nintendo left us in the dark on the important information, like what type it is and how it evolves. Luckily for you, my dear readers, Ray is my name and speculation is my game, so I’m here to feed you that sweet, sweet deductive analysis you have all been craving.

The Design

For most of the other Eevee-lutions, you can very simply figure out which of the 17 elemental types it represents:

Vaporeon is blue and has fins, so it must be a Water-type.

Leafeon is green and has leaf ears and a leaf tail, so it’s probably a Grass-type.

Jolteon is yellow and has yellow and white spikes, so it would have to be an Electric-type.

With Sylveon, however, we have pink and we have bows. There isn’t too much to extrapolate here based on the previous trends. There doesn’t appear to be a glaring affinity for any of the possible types it could be, which leads me to believe Sylveon is a Normal-type, the Ann Veal of Pokemon types. The majority of the other existing Normal-type Pokemon usual bear no resemblance to a specific elemental type, so I figured this to be a fitting type placement.

The Name

The previous format of affixing the “-eon” suffix to the name of an Eevee-lution is adhered to, much to the content of Pokemon fans. Imagine if Nintendo had not followed this standardized naming convention for Sylveon. It would be complete and utter anarchy, inciting the rage of both Pokemon enthusiasts and people with OCD.

Up until now, the prefix of an Eevee-lution’s name is typically a dead giveaway for its type:

Vaporeon is clearly “vapor”, implying water.

Espeon contains the acronym ESP (Extra-Sensory Perception), implying psychic.

Glaceon contains “glac”, the prefix of the word “glacier”, implying ice.

The problem I see here, however, lies in the prefix of Sylveon’s name. “Sylv”, or “sylvan” is latin for “the wood”, which you might think would make it a Grass-type Pokemon, contextually speaking. Unfortunately this cannot be the case, since we already have a Grass-type Eevee-lution in Leafeon, and it doesn’t look like a Grass-type Pokemon to begin with. My next guess was that Nintendo swapped some letters around to give it a prefix similar to that of “silver”, possibly referencing Sylveon to be Steel-type, but it doesn’t look metallic in any way, so it likely isn’t a Steel-type. Again, it would seem that the only type that fits Sylveon is Normal.

The Attacks

Along with the English name-drop of Sylveon, Nintendo also released in-game footage of Sylveon demonstrating 4 different attacks:

The first attack (0:12) is quite puzzling. My first thought was Aura Sphere, but that’s usually blue in color. I also figured it to be a graphical upgrade of Giga Impact, but I thought that was a bit of a stretch. It actually looks the most like Final Gambit, which is a Fighting-type attack.

The second attack (0:15) would have to be Trump Card, as there aren’t any other “card-based” attacks in Pokemon (as of yet). Trump Card is another Normal-type attack.

The third attack (0:17) doesn’t seem to be an actual attack, but some kind of buffing move, but I honestly have no idea what attack this is, as it could be a brand new attack.

The fourth attack (0:21) is very obviously Swift, the poster-child of all Normal-type attacks. There isn’t any other attack it could be.

The Verdict

My dear readers, it would appear that we have come to the following conclusions:

Sylveon does not physically resemble any specific elemental type.

Sylveon’s name does not resemble any specific elemental type that we don’t already have an Eevee-lution for.

Two of the four attacks Sylveon used in Thursday’s game footage were Normal-type attacks, and one of them was a Fighting-type attack.

Sylveon is probably the Normal-type Eevee-lution we have all been waiting for, barring the unlikely possibility of Nintendo introducing new elemental types to the game. Despite using a Fighting-type attack, the reason I would not classify Sylveon as a potential Fighting-type Pokemon is because even though Final Gambit is a Fighting-type attack, it doesn’t calculate super-effective damage. Unfortunately, we probably won’t know how Eevee will evolve into Sylveon until around the time the game is released, unless it gets published in a future issue of CoroCoro or released directly from Nintendo. Either way, I’m hoping for more information from Nintendo at E3.



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