Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about Pokémon. I like Rowlet because the character design is basically “AQ in bird form”, and I’m watching Griffin McElroy’s Nuzlocke Challenge because I’ll watch or listen to anything Griffin does, but that’s the extent of my exposure. Anything that’s accurate here came from knowledgable friends, Bulbapedia or Serebii.net, and anything that’s incorrect is my fault.
According to enthusiastic reports from online (thank you Sahoni, dog with glasses & nodnash, among others), we now have a Werewolf Pokémon Situation. Here’s what I’ve been able to put together, step-by-step, for Poké-nitwits like me.
- The upcoming 3DS games Pokémon Sun and Moon – out on November 18th – are debuting a ton of new Pokémon, including a canine-like Rock-type called Rockruff. According to ComicBook.com, a preview of Sun and Moon characters from a few months ago “hinted that Rockruff’s evolved form had a ‘secret’ separating it from other types of Pokémon”.
- Serebii.net got ahold of the October issue of CoroCoro, a Japanese children’s magazine which has exclusive rights to release little Pokémon sneak peeks. The magazine reveals that Rockruff evolves into a wolf-like Pokémon called Lugarugan – a name sure to set off alarm bells in any werewolf fan’s head.
- Lugarugan’s aforementioned “secret” seems to be that its appearance depends on whether it evolved during the game’s Day or Night periods. As depicted in Serebii’s scans of CoroCoro, Day-evolved Lugarugan looks like a quadrupedal wolf, but those that evolved at night look like a bipedal humanoid wolf – e.g. a werewolf. No further details about the difference between forms were given.
So there you have it – everything I’ve been given to know about Lugarugan, the werewolf Pokémon that’s blowing up Twitter, Tumblr and seemingly every other corner of the Internet. For a closer look at the CoroCoro scans and an English translation, visit these two Serebii.net posts. It would be disingenuous of me to say that I’m going to get into Pokémon because of Lugarugan, but I can’t deny feeling a twinge of FOMO at this news.