Most of the time in Pokémon games whatever starter you pick will give you an advantage in at least a few gyms or major battles. Except for Chikorita. Let’s go over the gyms in Johto.
The first 2 are both types that have an advantage against her(I’ve always referred to Chikorita as a girl), the third gym is neutral but Bayleef can’t really help in a fight against Miltank. All of the 4th gym Pokémon are part poison so that’s also bad for her. The 4th has a Poliwrath so hey that’s an advantage against half a gym so we’re making progress. But then she has no advantage for the steel gym so where back to being useless. The ice gym she can do super effective damage but do can the Pokémon there so that’s not really any help. And finally the last, as your probably used to by now, has no Pokémon she can help against. So out of all the gym Pokémon, she has an advantage against literally 1 Pokémon.
But don’t worry, it gets better for her at the Elite 4. Where she has an advantage against… 2 Pokémon. That’s not a joke. The only Pokémon she can do super effective damage to are Will’s Slowbro and Bruno’s Onyx which are obviously extremely powerful Pokémon everyone struggles against but to make matters worse if you look at the move pools of the Pokémon in the Elite 4, 17 out of the 25 Pokémon they use can do super effective damage.
Ignoring the type match ups, her move pool isn’t even good enough to make up for it. She’s a support based Pokémon and the base games are almost never hard enough to need to use those types of strategies and her typing kind of negates the defensive utility she could offer because of how many Pokémon do super effective damage to her.
I really hope Legends ZA finally gives Chikorita a place to finally be useful because I love design but it’s been so long since I used her in a johto playthrough cause of how her match ups are.
by AutomaticTap3004