Today’s Pokémon are Game Freak’s most recent addition to the “cute fuzzy Normal-type” pool: Minccino and Cinccino, the chinchilla Pokémon. Now, I’ve expressed irritation in the past that there were already quite enough of these, and summarily executed Audino on those grounds since, let’s face it, she’s Chansey 2.0. Minccino’s odds are, to put it mildly, not looking good.
Upon closer inspection, however, a lot of the things that bug me about Audino don’t really apply to Minccino. Audino was another pink, vaguely-humanoid, fairy-looking thing along the lines of Wigglytuff, Chansey and Clefable. Minccino and Cinccino aren’t conspicuously similar to the earlier Pokémon in the way that Audino is; really the only major commonality is that they’re cute. They’re more naturalistic, more like the animals they’re based on, which is something of a trend in the more recent generations of Pokémon. I’m not sure whether I like it or not. Here, however, it does succeed in creating quite a different flavour, so this time I’m happy. Continue reading “Minccino and Cinccino”
…okay, fine. Today’s Pokémon is Alomomola, who, to practically everyone’s disappointment and against all logic, is not the evolved form of Luvdisc. 
Today’s Pokémon comes straight from Roswell, New Mexico, where they don’t know what to do with him either. Meet Elgyem, the… well, the LGM (Little Green Man) Pokémon.
I need to be up-front with you about this one. I really like Tirtouga and Carracosta. These turtle Pokémon are two of the fossil species of Black and White (the other two are Archen and Archeops, whom I talked about ages ago and allowed to live – perhaps a little generously) and the latest in a long line of prehistoric Pokémon resurrected by the miracle of SCIENCE. I think the artistic designs for Tirtouga and Carracosta are superb; Tirtouga is cute but also clearly strong enough to take care of himself, and Carracosta practically dares you to try attacking him. Both channel the “ancient” quality fossil Pokémon are supposed to possess exceptionally well. As well as having typical sea turtle qualities, like being able to safely dive to tremendous depths, they seem to be part-way through evolution into terrestrial turtles and can hunt prey on land as well. 
I’ve probably mentioned before that I quite like slightly darker takes on Pokémon, primarily because I think the setting and many of the creatures have a lot of potential for that kind of plot (witness, for instance, some of the spinoff games like Colosseum on the GameCube). A startling number of Pokémon already have some surprisingly dark designs and flavour text; even in the original games Cubone wore the skulls of their dead parents as helmets, which is pretty strong for a kids’ game when you think about it. The Pokédex also reports a couple of disturbing urban legends – like a Hypno abducting a child, and a boy with telekinetic abilities waking up one morning mysteriously transformed into a Kadabra. Gyarados, meanwhile, is famed for levelling cities and Mewtwo is, if anything, more destructive still. Ghost Pokémon, of course, take the cake; for instance, Ruby and Sapphire’s Shedinja, a mysterious Pokémon that seems to possess the shell shed by Nincada when it evolves into Ninjask, supposedly steals the soul of anyone who looks into the crack in its back. I could go on about this for days, you understand, but what I mean to do here is give you a little context for when I start talking about today’s Pokémon, the Ghost-types Yamask and Cofagrigus, because Yamask’s design… in some ways is not nearly as troubling as some of what we’ve seen in the past, but in other ways is so much worse. 
Today’s Pokémon is Vanillite, the… the vanilla ice cream Pokémon. No, for the last time, I am not making this up. It’s not actually made of vanilla ice cream, of course, which would be too far even for Game Freak. You’d have kids slurping up their Pokémon left, right and centre chasing after sugar highs and before you knew it the poor things would be extinct in the wild and bred as a new form of livestock on special farms. In fact, other than being Ice-types, I’m not sure that any aspects of Vanillite, Vanillish and Vanilluxe’s behaviour or powers have anything to do with the ice cream thing. Their schtick is that they create snowstorms. 
The time has come at last, my friends, to fill that nagging gap I’ve left behind me: time to talk about the third Unova starter, Oshawott. Now, I saw Oshawott for the first time back when Nintendo revealed the Unova starters last year (at the time, he had the fan nickname Wotter), and my first thought was that he’d pretty clearly been dropped on his head as a child. Tepig and Snivy are so much more expressive in the official art; Tepig is happy-go-lucky and cute, while Snivy is a smug bastard, but Oshawott just looks vacant. Personally I think someone dropped the ball on Oshawott’s official art and in-game sprite (which looks the same); in the show you can see Oshawott with actual facial expressions, making him look cute, proud, even devious – here, by contrast, he looks like a lobotomy outpatient. This is a shame because it made a lot of people, including me, dismiss Oshawott without serious consideration – and, moreover, before meeting his awesome evolved forms, Dewott and Samurott. The concept behind this line is that they’re samurai Pokémon. 
Excuse me for a moment. I need to do the cutesy baby-talk thing.
Pokémaniacal 