My Pokémoan
The Devolution of Design
The Good Old Days
It's a well-known fact that, whoever you are, things were better when you were a kid. Some people think this is because the past was better (rarely true); others realise it's because being a kid is infinitely better than going to work (always true). It's the first case I talk about now because, as I age into Boomer territory, I become more sure that some things were definitely better back in the day, child status or no. So ready your Surf HM and pop some Repel, because we're hopping a Lapras to Kanto, the original home of Pokémon, on a journey to a time and place where names, types, and designs truly meant something.
Welcome to the Lab
You awaken to your mother hollering that you need to go see the weird man next door to collect a slave monster in order to fulfill your goal of becoming the best slave monster catcher and forced combat maker in the world. Why? Who cares? We're not here to discuss your clearly depraved motivations, we're here to look at your little critters. You enter the laboratory next door, one of only three buildings in your podunk village. Why is a research centre located in a village? Presumably because of the borderline illegal experiments taking place, though this is never covered in the story. Why is it just you, your nemesis, and your families living here? Again, not explained. Again, we don't care. We're here for the design.
The Holy Trinity
You enter the creepy man’s secret animal experimentation lab and he gives you three choices of pet. All of which scream their design language at you. You can choose:
Bulbasaur. The dinosaur with a bulb on its back that’s green like a plant.
Charmander. The salamander who chars things and is orange-red like fire.
Squirtle. The turtle who squirts things and hails from a time in history when you could say the word ‘squirt’ in polite company without making people uncomfortable. He’s also blue, like water, not other fluids.
The Rot Sets In
Now, granted, starters of every generation of Pokémon do better than the average when it comes to design. That just makes sense. You want the first contact users have with your new product to be good enough to hook them and when they’re going to be spending hours and hours with this creature and its evolutions, you better get those hooks in deep and quickly. But even the starters degenerate past Gen I and the rot sets in immediately with Gen II and its mixed bag of weirdo starters including:
Chikorita. A green blob with a leaf on its head and some kind of studded necklace. I cannot fathom what its name might mean, but hey, we know it’s leaf related I suppose. Zero stars. I wouldn’t even hit it with a bus.
Cyndaquil. It’s got quills and burns stuff to cinders. Not too bad. The addition of charcoal to the colour scheme could even be considered a plus.
Totodile. It’s a crocodile that, I dunno, likes Toto. It’s blue, so a water Pokémon. I guess it ‘blesses the rains down in Africa’?
Gen III and IV do “okay”. I get Chimchar, Treecko, Turtwig, and Torchic. I can see what they’re trying with Mudkip and Piplup. From Gen V on it’s all downhill.
Snivy? Oshawott? Chespin? Popplio? Grookey? Sobble? What a mess.
Outside of the starters the contrast is even more drastic. Gen I delivers us a bevy of excellently designed monsters almost across the board. Sandshrew, the shrew that throws sand. Pidgy, the pigeon. Beedrill, the bee with drills for arms. Mr Mime, the man who mimes. Machop, the macho man who karate chops things. Granted there are some clear Gen I outliers such as Chancey and Jigglypuff who, beyond being cute, make zero sense, and Exeggutor which, hell, I don’t even know. A palm tree with legs and multiple eggs as its heads/faces… what? So, obviously not all Gen I is gold, but they do communicate clearly from a design viewpoint. However, the worst offenders outside of Gen I are beyond outrageous.
Unown Unknowns
My personal highlights for what-the-fuckery in Pokémon generations start with this collection of useless freaks from Gen II, the Unown. A true family of abominations, the Unowns come in 28 varieties to represent the English alphabet and two pieces of punctuation. What is happening here? I know for a fact they already have language in the Pokémon universe because they have books. We know Pokémon understand that language because at least in part because they listen to their trainers. What is this for? How do you ever get enough to spell anything useful? Why not just write the words with actual language. Apart from just being a useless idea, they look completely moronic. In most cases they’re simply the Latin character with a single staring eye. The only one I can tolerate is H because it looks like a Tie Fighter. Stupid, unnecessary, lazy, and with a name that I assume is supposed to be pronounced ‘unknown’, but is written un-own which just sounds like a hip new term for abandoning something.
A Splat in the Dark
Gen IV delivers with Spiritomb which I guess is a portmanteau of spirit and tomb and which has few features of the first and none of the second. Mostly it looks like something one of my dogs would leave behind after eating rotten garbage from the street. A ghastly (Gastly?) splat of purple with a mottling of green projected out of what appears to be an automated air freshener, Spiritomb looks like nothing in particular and is the harbinger of worse to come in the Poké-verse of the future.
Gen V is on fire with Vanillite which is literally just an ice-cream. This is the point at which designers threw in the towel and simply started looking around the house for random crap to turn into Pokémon. Why an ice-cream? Its mortal enemy is room temperature. What the hell are you going to do with it, ever? Why is it only vanilla? Did it not qualify for alternatives like Unown? Can we not at least have a pistachio version? Hey, at least we can be comfortably sure it’s an ice Pokémon.
Junk Drawer Pokémon
The hits keep coming with Gen V and VI’s desire to use random crap from around the house starting with Trubbish, which is simply a garbage bag with something for arms. Rubbish by name, rubbish by nature, rubbish by design. I could have puked a better Pokémon. Nuff said. Then comes Klefki which is a key ring. Again, keys are not an item unknown in the Pokémon universe so it’s unclear what role this fills beyond making you think you’ve found your car keys only to bite your finger and laugh as you grab them.
The pride of Gen VII is Palossand, the (sigh) sand palace. First up, they’re sand castles, not palaces. Second, this could only be cool if it was full of miniature Krabbys and Palossand could deploy these tiny crabs like an angry munchkin army. I honestly feel like Palossand suffers from the same issue as the Dinobots from Transformers in that, yes, it can technically hide in plain sight but I’ve seen about as many dinosaurs on beaches in my life as I have perfectly identical sandcastles. The only thing camouflaged here is some poor designers’ will to live.
Penguin on the Rocks
Eiscue joins us for Gen VIII, a return to actual animals, but with the additional flavour of random shit from around the house. This gives us the bastard hybrid of an ice cube and a penguin, so something that famously floats on water attached to something that eats fish which, also famously, live exclusively underwater. Congratulations, you’ve come up with a horror combination that will starve itself to death and, like Vanillite, be defeated by room temperature.
The Golden Disaster
The pinnacle of imagination failures comes to us in Gen IX, with so many abhorrent designs, weak ideas, and nonsensical styles that it’s hard to pick a loser of losers. Smoliv, Varoom, Orthworm, Tatsugiri, and frankly, the less said about Wiglett the better. It’s trainwreck on trainwreck. All of the worst mistakes of previous generations rehashed for a maddening crowd.
Ultimately though, I opted for Gholdengo, the Oscar of your nightmares, as my champion. Sure is gold alright, but as Pokedex entry #1000 surely everyone deserved something better than this. Most humanoid Pokémon are looked down upon by the fanbase (with some creepy exceptions like Lopunny), but this one isn’t even trying to be anything other than a living statue minus the hat to collect change while channeling the energy of a Ninja Turtle and cosplaying as a carrot. Simultaneously hideous, uninteresting, and very cringe, Gholdengo manages to be the worst of all worlds at the same time. It deserves a trophy. Of itself. Delivered with a sharp blow to its head.
Whose Fault Is This, Exactly?
So how did this all happen? Well, it’s no great mystery and I put it down to three main factors.
One: freedom of ideas. In much the same way that first albums, first movies, and first games are often the best, all the newest, freshest ideas can be pumped into this version. Nothing had yet been used in the Pokémon universe, so you Game Freak could generate infinite possibilities for the world’s creatures and then reduce them down to the best. There are, simply, no bad ideas the first time around since you can pick and choose from unlimited options.
Two: time. With a first version you have all the time in the world to make it good. Time for the ideas to brew before they even start to hit the drawing board in earnest. You’re also not dancing to a shareholder or investor schedule (at least pre-pitch) and can do things at your own pace. Now though it’s more important to get anything out within the 2-3 year release cadence, rather than release anything particularly good.
Three: greed. Not just corporate greed either, but consumer greed too. Pokémon fans want more Pokémon and, junk or not, they’re still going to pay up. In that environment it’s hard to blame Game Freak and Nintendo for maximising profits and reducing quality. This is, after all, taking place in the timeline where Logan Paul sold a Pokémon trading card for 14.5 million USD.
At Least We'll Always Have Beedrill
So, will we ever see a return to the greatness of Gen I? Unlikely. The world that created the original 151 no longer, and cannot ever again, exist. Could we see something close? Maybe, but that would require smarter consumers, and the time and patience to develop new ideas instead of just throwing Trubbish at the wall to see what sticks. Still, Gen I isn’t gone. Game Freak can and does use them as we’ve just seen with Pokopia for the Switch 2. Thus does hope burn eternally that, even if we can’t get good new Pokémon, good Pokémon products are still coming to us featuring the best generation. My generation.
Just don’t ever talk about Jynx.
 | A guest post by
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Eiscue is probably my least favorite Pokemon ever ever ever.
Chikorita is based on the „chicory”plant, and they added „-ita” in the end to make it sounds „cute”, like they do in Spanish, for example with cat: gato, gatito, I love Chikorita!