Anyone who’s seen or read One Punch Man knows that Saitama loves three things: sales, an actual challenging fight, and occasionally helping people. What they may have missed is that the titular caped baldy also enjoys some Pokémon training from time to time.
A Reddit user by the name of u/qumair_rasool must have been reading the One Punch Man manga recently, as they posted a scene of Saitama playing Pokémon on Game Boy. The scene seems to take place in the middle of the story, after Saitama has met most of the greater hero community. Potential SPOILERS for anyone who isn’t caught up on the anime as of the second season, but the panels in question depict a Pokémon battle between Saitama and King.
King and Saitama strike up a friendship after Saitama discovers that King is a hardcore gamer. Saitama will often borrow King’s portable game consoles and challenge him, only to lose every time. This pattern seems to continue in Pokémon with Saitama’s whole team getting one-shotted.
Later panels explain that Saitama fell prey to the bane of many first-time Pokémon players: type advantages. The hero might be able to defeat any monster with one punch, but he can’t seem to grasp that a “full-on pure Earth type” is weak to the “Wind” type.
With that said, this has to be some alternate One Punch Man-universe version of Pokémon. There is no “Earth” or “Wind” type in actual Pokémon. Even considering the fact that this might be an off translation from the manga’s original Japanese, the type matchup doesn’t make sense. The “Earth” type could either mean Rock or Ground, while “Wind” is probably a stand-in for Flying-type. Rock-types actually beat Flying-types, so that matchup would have been in Saitama’s favor. Ground-types do have an attack disadvantage against Flying-types, but aren’t vulnerable to Flying-type attacks. Saitama would have had trouble there but shouldn’t have been one-hit KO’d.
The truth of the matter is probably that it was meant as a cute reference and nothing more. And it is fun to see Saitama go through the struggle of learning Pokémon’s complicated type matchups. Many current Pokémon GO players can relate. Let’s just hope for the sake of One Punch world that Saitama doesn’t spend too much time at home grinding up a new team.
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