Pikachu and Mimikyu used sick burns, but were they effective?

In the most recent Pokémon games, Pikachu starts out with the Tail Whip and Thunder Shock abilities. As with all Pocket Monster species, though, he can learn new skills, too.

With experience, for example, Pikachu can learn how to attack foes with Electro Ball and Thunder Wave. But a new video shows the beloved Pokémon using a whole new way to take down an opponent: freestyle rapping.

The video opens with graphics from Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon showing a member of the nefarious Team Skull who wants to battle. The Team Skull Grunt unleashes his Mimikyu, while the hero counters by choosing Pikachu. But perhaps because they’re two of the most musically inclined Pokémon species, Mimikyu and Pikachu decide to settle the score with a rap battle.

Onstage at a club in front of a cheering/jeering crowd, Mimikyu strikes first, unleashing a fiery string of angry rhymes into the mic hanging from a gold chain looped around his neck. But while Mimikyu has rapped in human-coherent Japanese before, this time he sticks to normal Pokémon communication conventions and limits his vocabulary to various combinations of ga, gi, gu, and go (which appear onscreen in Japanese katakana script as ガ, ギ, グ, and ゴ).

But even as Mimikyu gets up in his face, Pikachu keeps his cool and waits for the younger Pokémon to finish. He’s clearly fired up for this fight, though, because when he spins around, he’s got a fiercely determined look in his eyes.

While there’s a scene in the newest Pokémon movie where Pikachu speaks in intelligible-to-humans dialogue, like Mimikyu he sticks with Pokémon sounds for his rap, working just with the syllables pi, ka, and chu (ピ, カ, and チュ). Pikachu’s counterattack quickly starts to win over the crowd, but Mimikyu fights back, apparently delivering such a sick burn that it has the crowd groaning that he’d go that far. Even Pikachu looks like he wants to make sure he heard right, flatly asking “Pika?”

Pikachu then launches into his rebuttal, which increases in intensity before finishing with:

“Pipikapi piikapipi pikapikapi pi pi pika pika pika pika pika pika pika pika pika pika pika pika pika pika pika pika pi!!”

It’s all the crowd needs to hear, and also all Mimikyu can take. As Mimikyu admits defeat, the gold chain and microphone slides off his neck, and the video cuts back to Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon footage telling us that the Team Skull Grunt has been defeated.

So let that be a lesson: Never try to take Pikachu on in a rap battle, because if you do, he’ll wreck you so hard that he’ll make you do the mic drop for him.

Source, images: YouTube/ポケモン公式YouTubeチャンネル