Hey, Geodude is literally a rock, but he's got arms and a face that look like a sentient rock, I think he's actually really good.
Voltorb and Electrode on the other hand are literally imposter pokeballs with faces.
And of course... diglet, and dugtrio. If a diglett has a massive body under the ground, does it just grow two more heads, or is it the underground equivalent of 3 people inna trenchcoat?
Anyway later gen pokemon are like... I am literally a shield or a key or a sword with a face! Im an easter island head, I'm a lantern!
In fairness I stopped playing after Gen 2, my heart belongs to Johto and my soul is probably actually trapped back in Lavender Town.
Gotta love haunter. Phases through walls, licks people, phases back to the TV room.
To keep being fair gen 2-4 is probably the highest point in the series (design wise, as a game Pokemon only became playable in 4). After that the art style changed enough to make even good Pokemon look bad and the actually badly designed Pokemon started creeping up in number.
After a brief glance at serebii, I mostly agree with this, only exception is that I really like a lot of the Gen 1s, uh hah, genuinely, though there are some... pretty bad ones in there too.
Like uh... just what the fuck is Jynx. Oh lord. But also in I think Gen 3 or 4, might be wrong, there is basically a Loudspeaker pokemon thats like an angry buff like battle toads frog with fucking loudspeakers growing out of it.
I realize Blastoise is basically a big angry turtle with fucking water cannons growing out of it, but loudspeakeromon just ... seems far more ridiculous.
I like deerling though, that ones pretty cute.
A lot of the legendaries and semi legendaries seem to get absolutely ludicrous in design as time goes forward.
Storyline wise, are we at the point where like the latest legendary pokemon are the literal gods of time and chaos and matter itself or something?
BACK IN MY DAY those kinds of pokemon were either genetic clones or semi local protective spirits embodied as a pokemon...
KIDS THESE DAYS be like oh yeah I just walk around with THE GODS OF SPACE AND TIME in my pocket!
Most gens have something redeeming about them, but there is less and less every time. In the latest i can only think of a single good Pokemon and a good megaman character that somehow found its way into the game.
You are probably thinking loudred, which was gen 3, but that seemed like a fine-ish background mon imo. Not great, not something I'd use on my team certainly, but not fundamentally bad. Ya know?
Space, time and antimatter gods were actually in gen 4, and their design was decent even if their lore was jumping the shark so hard. We've had gods of dreams and truth, gods of life and death and environmentalism, extra dimensional aliens (and aliens we feed our aliens to), and a time traveling dinosaur and robot pair. Legendaries are turning into Digimon and usually not good ones at that.
