Ditto turns into multiple things over the span of seconds, but in the games, Ditto can only transform once per turn - and only into the enemy it’s facing. When Ditto is thrown into the air, it just turns into a flying Pokémon. Throughout the battle, Ditto seamlessly transforms into behemoths like Charizard and Machamp, which can wreck anything in their paths. And as it turns out, it’s completely bonkers to have a Ditto use its ability to the fullest. Near the end of the movie, when Tim Goodman, the protagonist, and Pikachu are trying to stop Rime City from falling into chaos, they have to fight a Ditto two-on-one. What I love about how Detective Pikachu uses Ditto is that it perfectly captures how wild it would be for a Pokémon to shapeshift in a battle. It’s not just that Ditto made for a good sleight of hand in Detective Pikachu. “From early on, that was a perfect twist and reveal moment, just built into a Pokemon.” “You have a Pokémon who can disguise itself!” Hernandez says. Given that Detective Pikachu is a mystery, Ditto seemed like a perfect fit for the story according to screenwriter Dan Hernandez. Those eyes are so weird and it was sort of a cool idea that kept growing.” “It’s a very unique Pokémon character, so that was fun to just drop it in. “It was a fun misdirect,” says Rob Letterman, Detective Pikachu’s director. And we know that Ditto can turn into things too, because when it goes to sleep, it shifts into a rock to avoid enemies. We’re also told that Ditto can maintain the disguise if it doesn’t laugh, and that if it’s transforming into something based on memory, it might get some details wrong.

Ostensibly, Ditto can turn into other animals - or perhaps other human beings. The entry for Pokémon Y states that Ditto can “recombine its own cellular structure to transform into other life-forms,” which means that the power isn’t limited to other Pokémon. When it’s a Pokémon enemy, Ditto becomes a perfect copy. The Detective Pikachu movie, on the other hand, makes such good use of Ditto’s powers that I literally yelled in the movie theater as the moment was unfolding.īased on Ditto’s Pokedex entries, we know that the pink blob can transform into anything, living or inanimate. The idea may sound scary on paper, but most of the time, players just use Ditto as breeding stock to make more of their favorite monsters. In the Pokémon video games, the shape-shifting Ditto can transform into its enemy, right down to having an identical moveset.

Ditto detective pikachu