There’s gross… and then there’s gross.
By which I mean, some things are disgusting and others are just nasty.
On the one hand, you have Pokémon like Muk, who is literally made of toxic waste, Weezing, who can cause lung cancer at fifty paces, Gloom, who is constantly surrounded by the stench of rotting meat, and Lickitung, who… well, I think we can all agree; the less said about Lickitung, the better.
On the other hand, you have Pokémon that wear their own cast-off skin as trousers and hoodies.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet Scraggy and Scrafty. Continue reading “Scraggy and Scrafty”
Excuse me for a moment. I need to do the cutesy baby-talk thing.
…now, don’t get me wrong. These three don’t even hold a candle to Trubbish and Garbodor, who are my new empirical standard for awfulness; I now measure everything bad in my life in terms of how much less appalling it is than Trubbish and Garbodor, and the effect on my morale has been nothing short of miraculous. However, the fact that Gothita, Gothorita and Gothitelle even exist tells me something very disturbing about Game Freak’s creature design department. It tells me that one day, during the development of Black and White, one of the creature design guys stood up and said to his friends, in all seriousness,
Today I get a tantalising glimpse of something I really wish the Pokémon games would spend more time on: the history of the Pokémon universe. There are a fair number of ancient ruins in the Pokémon world left behind by some now-defunct civilisation and there’s not a whole lot we know about them – personally I put this down to the fact that the archaeologists of this world are (speaking as an archaeology student) even more frighteningly incompetent, if that’s possible, than their zoologists. What we can figure out for ourselves, however, is that Pokémon were quite as important in the past as they are in the present, and a few in particular – such as this bizarre-looking creature, Sigilyph. Sigilyph’s curious appearance has a vaguely Native American feel to me but I don’t know a lot about American archaeology – I think a friend of mine said she looks sort of Hopi? The text of her Pokédex entries doesn’t draw on Native American themes so an alternative possibility is that they just started drawing and kept going until they got something that looked entirely spooky and alien – and either way, it worked. 
Heh. I can never resist an anticlimax. Truth be told, I think Cubchoo’s cute, and if we like polar bears for being the savagery of the Arctic personified, we love polar bear cubs for being cute as buttons. I don’t know whether I’d call him well-designed or not… “cute baby bear” is really easy and Pokémon’s done it before – see Teddiursa – so I guess the uniqueness of Cubchoo’s design is in the weird snot thing. I assume Cubchoo’s nose is constantly runny because it’s one of the classic symptoms of a cold, and he’s an Ice-type, which is… at once almost clever and a little contradictory because no Ice Pokémon would ever actually get sick from being in the cold. 
Today I’ll be talking about the desert crocodile Pokémon, Sandile, Krokorok and Krookodile. They are… well… crocodiles that live in the desert. That’s a good start, but it does seem to me like the designers have been reusing a formula again – and I’m not talking about the older crocodile Pokémon, Totodile, Croconaw and Feraligatr. What Game Freak have done is take a North African river animal, shift it a few hundred kilometres west, turn it into a Ground-type with a wave of their magic wand and said “eh; good enough.” Sound familiar?
Meet Litwick, Lampent and Chandelure, the candle Pokémon. These guys are Ghost/Fire-types: another new combination, which is practically a guarantee that what we’re going to get will at least be interesting even if it’s not strong. The fact that they’re Ghost Pokémon is also, oddly, a good omen in itself because Ghost Pokémon are inherently fascinating; I for one am still trying to figure out what exactly they are. In the Pokémon world, Ghost-types are generally feared and seen as malevolent spirits, but in many cases this is actually unjustified – Gastly, Haunter and Gengar, famously, are not actually evil but have a very disturbing sense of humour that can easily cause playfulness to be misinterpreted as aggression; Sableye’s predicament is similar. Some, notably Mismagius, Dusknoir and Drifblim, have mysterious powers that could be used for good or evil, and where they fall on that axis is extremely ambiguous. 
For reasons I’ll get to later, this one’s a bit of an odd duck (I mean this figuratively, of course, in contrast to Psyduck, who actually is an odd duck). Allow me to introduce the Zen Charm Pokémon, Darumaka, and his evolved form Darmanitan… two Pokémon that I personally find tremendously annoying, because if you fail to deal with them promptly they can and will leave huge smoking holes in your team. Most Fire Pokémon are very active but these guys are turned up to eleven, their internal fires producing enormous quantities of energy that they will burn up by any means necessary – and I do mean any; they even use their droppings as a way of offloading excess heat; I know this because the Pokédex tells us that people used to carry Darumaka droppings in their pockets to keep themselves warm (Pokémon: it’s kind of like that). Heaven help you if you get into a fight with a Darumaka while it’s fired up, so to speak – but, that said, they’re not by nature aggressive Pokémon, just overwhelmingly energetic. 
