Term · Pokemon
Poke Ball
The most successful piece of imaginary hardware in the world, and it is a ball with a button on it.
In Otakana the clue reads: Red and white sphere used for catching
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- Term
- Series
- Pokemon
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- 8 · Normal
Throw it and the creature inside the beam turns to energy, folds into a sphere the size of a fist and stays there. Whether it stays is a calculation the games have never hidden: current health, status conditions, the species' own catch rate and which grade of ball you used. Weakening something first and putting it to sleep is not flavour text, it is arithmetic.
The grades run upward from the plain one through Great and Ultra to the Master Ball, of which most games give you exactly one, a decision that has caused more paralysis in more players than any boss fight. Later titles added dozens of specialist variants keyed to time of day, terrain, weight and turn count.
The shape comes from a capsule toy machine, and the collecting habit underneath it comes from Satoshi Tajiri, who spent his childhood catching insects around Machida and turned the habit into a game once the fields there were paved over. That origin explains the whole design. It is a container built for keeping things you found and showing them to a friend afterwards.
Spelling POKEBALL
The tiles want POKEBALL as a single word with no accent, which is not how the franchise prints it. Officially it is Poke Ball, two words, with an acute accent over the E to stop English readers rhyming it with joke. In Japan it is not called that at all: it is the Monster Ball. Eight letters, a double L at the end, and the middle E is the one that goes missing.