Glossary: Characteristic

Characteristics are a trait that individual Pokémon can have. They were introduced in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl and have been present in every main game since.

These provide a bit of flavor text to the Pokémon and two separate Pokémon will likely wind up with completely different characteristics. You might see something like “Somewhat of a clown” or “Impetuous and silly” in the summary screen.

While characteristics don’t actually do anything, they can be used, to some extent, to help determine the Pokémon’s Individual Values (IVs). This is because the characteristic a Pokémon has reflects what the last digit of the Pokémon’s highest IV is. It doesn’t directly change anything, but just indicates what it is.

How Characteristics Work

As mentioned earlier, characteristics are based on the last digit of the highest IV. If you aren’t familiar with IVs, characteristics won’t make as much sense to you, so reading about IVs is a good starting point so you can become familiar with what they are and how they work.

For each of the six stats, there are five possible characteristics that it could show if that stat is the highest stat. Each of those characteristics are determined whether the highest IV ends in either one digit or another digit. For instance, for “Alert to sounds”, that means that the Pokémon’s highest IV is Speed (or it’s tied) and that the last digit of the IV is either 1 or 6. It could be the perfect IV, 31, which is the most desirable; it could also be 26, 21, 16, or any other number ending with a 1 or a 6.

If, instead, it’s “Impetuous and silly,” that means that its highest IV is Speed (or it’s tied) and that the last digit of the IV is either 2 or 7. This means it cannot be 31 and, by extension, it also means that none of your other IVs are 31. If any were 31, its characteristic would indicate it because characteristics reflect the highest IV. In the case of it being “Impetuous and silly,” you know that the highest IV is Speed and it ends in either 2 or 7, meaning it could be 27, 22, 17, or worse, and, on top of that, all of your other IVs are confirmed to be lower than that (or, at the very least, tied with it).

As you can see, it doesn’t always give you an accurate representation of the Pokémon’s IVs, but at least gives you a bit of insight to what they could be. Ideally, if getting perfect IVs is something important to you, you’ll want to keep an eye out for the “possibly perfect” characteristics (where the last digit ends in 1 or 6). If a Pokémon doesn’t have at least one of them, you know it doesn’t have any 31s; even if it does, you can’t be certain it has a perfect 31 until you check it with a Judge or run it through an IV Calculator—it could be 26, 21, 16, etc. instead!

Lastly, in the case of ties: it’s entirely possible that two IVs might be the same. This is especially true if you utilize proper IV breeding tactics, where you’ll breed for Pokémon with multiple perfect (31) IVs. Should this happen, the characteristic is essentially chosen at random from any IVs (in reality, it’s not truly random, as it is determined from the Pokémon’s personality value; however, for the player, this is essentially random). So, if you’re using characteristics to determine your strongest IV, it’s entirely possible that another IV would be equal to the one the characteristic would indicate.

List of Characteristics

Below, you’ll find a list of different characteristics. It’s broken up by each stat, and then with the characteristic and the last digits that it represents.

HP

It’s important to note that, in Generation VI (Pokémon X and Y) onwards, two characteristics for HP had their names changed. You can see these changes listed below.

Attack

Defense

Sp. Atk

Sp. Def

Speed

Alphabetical List of Characteristics