Pokémon: Dialga
Ability
Pressure
Roles
Hazard setter, Steel-type wall, physical wall, artillery, Trick Room setter
Assessment
Dragon really was a powerful fictional type. Whenever a concept was hard to give concrete form to, you could just slap the Dragon type on it.
Compared with the two dragons from Generation V, the masters of time and space from Diamond and Pearl felt far less attractive. Even though I got into Pokémon with Diamond and Pearl, nostalgia could not earn them any bonus points. I supposed their complicated designs just did not appeal to me. In terms of presence, though, the three dragons of Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum certainly had that imposing, inexplicably formidable air about them... Even so, surely that was no excuse to lazily give them Pressure without even changing the name. Their base stat distributions also made me suspect Game Freak of cutting corners. The Tao Trio and the Diamond and Pearl dragons had practically identical distributions, aside from Palkia putting its base 100 into Speed. That left these dragons with much the same appetite for carnage in Ubers. Fortunately, their secondary types were all different, and in Ubers, these dragon gods mostly earned their keep through those secondary types. Dialga's secondary type was Steel, and it got Stealth Rock to match, which tragically condemned it to hazard-setting duty while Groudon completely suppressed it in terms of typing. Thankfully, Steel really did provide plenty of resistances, and its Ground and Fighting weaknesses were reasonably easy to work around in Ubers. Most legendary Pokémon struggled to OHKO it; non-STAB Fighting and Ground moves generally could not finish it in one hit. Once it avoided Groudon, Ground Arceus, Marshadow, and Lucario, Dialga could rely on its Steel resistances to slug it out with the other dragon gods and Psychic legendaries, as