#46: Tyranitar

Yup, that's my previous 'thing for dinosaurs' coming up again, just like Rampardos at number 47: at number 46 in my list of favorite Pokémon you can find Tyranitar. It's probably useless to say it's based on a Tyrannosaurus rex ('tyrant lizard king', commonly abbreviated to T-rex), but for the ones who don't think that's obvious I'm saying it anyway. When Pokémon Gold and Silver came out, I caught myself a Larvitar, added it to my team (back then, my team consisted of only my high-level starter Pokémon and some useless HM slaves), raised it to a Tyranitar and swept the floor with the entire Elite 4 and the Champion again. Yeah, I was a real fan of Tyranitar, but now I think it's a real letdown you can only catch a Larvitar until after you've obtained 16 FREAKING BADGES!!! That's right, you have to finish the entire main storyline first! You can catch it in Mt. Silver, where the highest-leveled wild Pokémon reside (mid-40s), but Larvitar is low-leveled (late-10s). By the time you reach Mt. Silver, you have already completed the main storyline, so it's kind of useless to use a Tyranitar in your team, except when you want to crush the Elite 4 and the Champion over and over again (remember that the levels of their Pokémon won't change in the original Gold and Silver games). If that wasn't the case, Tyranitar would have ended up higher in my list of Pokémon, but it is still a strong Pokémon to use nonetheless. It has a great attack stat and it has good defenses as well. It's a little slow, but many strong Pokémon aren't that fast, anyway, so that shouldn't matter. So yeah, when I think back about the days I used only my starter Pokémon and Tyranitar to defeat the Elite 4 over and over again to raise my Pokémon up to level 100, I think Tyranitar deserves a spot in my list!