Are they ever going to stop making new Pokémon? To date, there are about 650 species of critters in one of Nintendo’s most popular franchises. With the upcoming release of Pokémon X and Y, that number will probably get a boost of 100-150. Just think about that for a second. There could be 800 Pokémon.

As much as I love the games, my plot hole alarm is going off. In the games and the TV show, they initially said that there were one hundred and fifty species, “maybe more”. That means, as far as we know, the people in the Kanto region for all of their recorded history thought that this handful of species were the only ones in the world, and that somehow in the last few years they’ve discovered hundreds more. Oh, silly me, I never looked across the pond to Johto where they’ve got a nasty Hoothoot and Sentret infestation.

Some of the new Pokémon I really like. For instance, one of the critters we’ve known and loved for years, Magneton, is able to evolve into Magnezone only when it is leveled up in a specific area in the Sinnoh and Unova regions, so it makes sense that no one in Kanto has ever seen the thing.

Others, like Umbreon or Espeon, make no sense at all. They evolve when they’re leveled up with high friendship, into either Espeon during the day or Umbreon during the night. So I’m supposed to believe that no one in the first game was good friends with their little Eevee?

Then there are the ones that are just plain stupid. Chandelure is a Chandelier. That’s right. A Pokémon that’s a Chandelier. But it gets worse. There’s Vanillux, which is, in fact, an ice cream cone. They’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas there. Of all the species on earth for them to base Pokémon on, they decided to start going with objects now.

Now, here’s my theory on why Professor Oak lied to you as a child and told you there were only 150 to catch. He probably believed it! Maybe at the time, there wasn’t much communication between the different regions, or travel. After all, in the second generation of games they only just built the magnet train, and everyone was so excited to finally be able to travel between Kanto and Johto.

And maybe if they did have communication, they just got stuff mixed up. Like maybe some guy in Hoenn was like ‘hey, there’s this worm Pokémon over here that turns into a cocoon and then a butterfly’. Professor Oak then said ‘oh, we already know about that, we’ve got tons of those over here’. What they thought were the same family of Pokémon n were actually two: Wurmple-Silcoon-Beautifly and Caterpie-Metapod-Butterfree. Or maybe new Pokémon really are coming out of the woodwork. Who knows? There’s a sixth generation on the way and no sign of the series stopping there, so maybe Nintendo will think of some brilliant way of filling in their plot hole.