Skeleton Salad

I haven't talked about Fossil Fighters: Champions a lot here. Although I think with a few tweaks (mainly having an Escape Zone in the middle) it would contain the greatest battle system in videogame history, almost everything around that is either meh, or actively worse than the original. Also, I simply have not played it anywhere near as much. However, one thing we have to talk about is Salada. First off, Salada is on-cart DLC. Everything exists on the cart, but you need to connect to the (now-defunct, officially) Nintendo Wi-Fi servers to make it edit your save file and have the quest show up. Seeing as the whole process was free, there was literally no point to that, and just screws over later generations for no reason, not to mention people at the time with no/bad Internet. Moving on, we have the fact that Salada is a "boneysaur." The whole idea of skeleton vivosaurs in a game already about raising the dead is hilarious. Like, it basically means they were too lazy to actually bring back the muscle and everything, so they just reanimated the fossil bones and went "eh, good enough." Furthermore, none of the boneysaurs...actually look like skeletons? Instead, they look more like skeleton costumes you wear on Halloween. It's hard to tell with Salada, though, so here's my beloved B-Lambeo*:

It's definitely one of those things where, from a 3d-modeling perspective, I know why they did it, but that doesn't mean it's not funny. Anyway, so Salada is not just a skeleton, it is also, somehow, a salad. It was specially created by Ryne, a BareBones (BB, get it?) Brigade member who does not appear anywhere in the game, but only in the FFC manga. Which was literally never officially translated into English, so anyone going through the DLC quest would be very, very confused. On principal, I am not going to look up how Ryne managed to infuse a reanimated skeleton with a salad, and instead assume it involved sprinkling the bones with a special dressing containing his blood. Anyway so now we have this goofy salad vivosaur, surely it's a meme and it sucks right? Wrong! Salada is the...24th-best vivosaur in the game!** Okay, I could have sworn it used to be higher, but that's still quite the achievement! Why is it this good you ask? Well, it has Charge, which is batshit all by itself. For a mere 50 FP, the vivosaur's next move will deal 2.5x as much damage. Combine that with either Thousand Islands, or better yet Salada's team skill, Basilico Sour (yes, its moves have salad-themed names, it's incredible), and you can potentially nuke the entire enemy team in one shot. If that ever happens to you, well, just be grateful the devs never made use of Gold Charge, which makes moves deal 5x as much damage.

*B-Lambeo is the best due to its first move, Boney Chomp. Despite the name, it has the exact same animation as regular Lambeo's first move, Sliding Ram, where it rams into you. This is not the only move in FFC like that, but it's the only one I knew about before joining the Fossil Fighters Discord, so it holds a special place in my heart.

**Unlike the original, FFC has online play, and thus it has a true tierlist.