Why Have Starter Pokémon Gotten Cuter?

One vibrant spot that noticed exceptionally on-line folks by way of a slightly grim weekend was the reveal of the most recent online game installments for the Pokémon franchise. An announcement for Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet with an accompanying trailer revealed a number of the latest inspirations, Arceus-inspired open-world gameplay, and, most significantly, the three new starters.

The latest Pokémon to hitch the first-choice ranks are Fuecoco, the fire-gator; Sprigatito, a weed cat; and Quaxly, a water duck, and clearly the least impressed of the bunch. It’s not likely Quaxly’s fault—water-type starters have been notoriously simple since Nintendo checked out a turtle again in Generation 1 and mentioned “How about a turtle that’s a water type?” (Mudkip, our darling Gen III boy, was the very best of the bunch.)

But these new monsters for Scarlet and Violet, all of them appear… slightly cute. Soft shapes, not a whole lot of further bits sticking up, and naturally, large eyes. Sure, the primary tier of each Pokémon’s evolution are all the time fairly chibi-fied, however these three particularly appear made for mass manufacturing. What I imply is that this: it’s simpler to make animations, key artwork, toys, and different merchandise when a design is easy. The less complicated shapes a design makes use of, the better it’s to make and market. It appears that Pokémon, which has all the time existed on some stage to promote toys, is making the swap to blatantly promoting future merchandise with each single starter. That’s the character of the beast, er, monsters—you need to promote one thing.

But for the Gen IX starters Fuecoco, Sprigatito, and Quaxly, this elevated ease of manufacturing comes on the expense of innovation. The clear Spanish and Mediterranean inspirations obvious within the trailer imply that there might have been any variety of motifs, themes, and even shade schemes to experiment with, even contained in the constraints of each technology’s starter. It looks like a wasted alternative, and a irritating instance of bland designs created for ease of use over visible experimentation. Granted, they could shock us within the evolutions of those three Pokémon, however I’ve given up on trusting the franchise to not make any initially cute, four-footed creature bipedal. (We all bear in mind Delphox. And Incineroar. And Blaziken.)

This may additionally be a sign of an oversaturation of the Pokémon franchise normally. To date there are almost 900 Pokémon accessible throughout all eight generations of video video games. This is a big quantity of design work, and after 900 completely different morphisms of animals and objects with elemental themes, possibly it’s time to contemplate that Pokémon’s designs haven’t actually improved since Gen IV’s Piplup, Turtwig, and Chimchar.

Or possibly I’m only a 30-something millennial growing older out of Pokémon, greedy at nostalgia and wishing that I might really feel excited by one thing that Pokémon introduced within the final 5 years and discovering myself woefully wishing for that one superb summer time in 2016 the place everybody was taking part in Pokémon Go. Truthfully, I simply wish to play one thing enjoyable and charming, and I’m struggling to search out a lot to take pleasure in about these slightly primary, unusually-colored animal designs.

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