Character · Pokemon
Snorlax
Eats four hundred kilos a day, then sleeps in the middle of the road until somebody plays it a song.
In Otakana the clue reads: Enormous sleeping creature that blocks roads
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Pokemon
- Letters
- 7 · Normal
In Red and Blue two of them lie across routes you need, and no amount of fighting moves them. The solution is the Poke Flute, which you get only after clearing a haunted tower and a criminal hideout, so the sleeping animal is really a lock on the back half of the map. Players who found it without a guide remember the detour.
As a Pokemon it is a wall with a stomach. Enormous health, respectable attack, and a set of moves built around Rest, which restores everything at the cost of two turns asleep, then Curse to raise its attack while it slows down further. It has been a competitive fixture since the first generation and has never really left.
The Japanese name is Kabigon, and the story attached to it is that it came from a nickname for a member of the Game Freak staff. Whether that flatters him is between them. The design has since acquired a spin-off of its own in Pokemon Sleep, which asks players to track their actual bedtimes and rewards them in the currency of a creature that does nothing else.
Spelling SNORLAX
SNORLAX is snore plus lax, seven letters, and the snore loses its E on the way in. The X at the end is the letter that closes the row the moment it appears. None of this survives translation: in Japan it is Kabigon, which shares nothing with the English at all. One word from two, spelled SNORLAX, with an O in the middle and no E anywhere.