We hear about it every generation. Fans, generally the long time fans of the series, start complaining that the new region’s Pokedex is terrible and that “their” generation, generally being generation one or two, had the best designs and now the designs suck. Is there any credence to their point? Or are they just looking back fondly on what made them a fan in the first place? They can keep arguing about that for a while, for now, we want to look at the absolute worst Pokemon designs by each generation. Here we go!
Pokemon Red and Blue and Yellow
Everyone loves the original 151, don’t they? Yes, they were the ones that started it all, but they are not beyond criticism. This generation had some brilliant designs that are still fan favorites including nearly all of the legendaries, Dragonite, Eevee, and their starter Pokemon, but with 151 designs in total, some of them were just bad,
Jynx is a Pokemon? She appears to quite literally be a human, and on top of that she is in black face. Nintendo did “correct” this when making the US versions, but its original design had black face with the black skin and huge lips. Accident? We will give them the benefit of the doubt, but in the end, look at this monster (of the pocket variety), it is ugly and poorly designed. Any kid that sees one of these in the Pokemon universe should think twice before even “wanting” to catch it. It is really just a person, not a Pokemon. The same goes for Mr. Mime, but at least he isn’t blatantly designed with potentially racist suggestions.
Voltorb is a Pokeball. We get it that Pokemon was fairly new and that they needed some in game marketing of their own Pokemon products, but did we need a Pokemon that looked like a Pokeball? You literally capture a Pokeball inside of a Pokeball. Then they insult us further and have this poorly designed Pokeball Pokemon evolve into another Pokeball Pokemon. You can even try to pick them up in the game, mistaking them for Pokeballs/items.
Ditto is quite literally purple sludge. Grimer, we are barely giving you a pass on this one. Grimer at least had some details drawn on him, whereas Ditto was just solid purple with what they call eyes and a mouth (2 dots and a line). It has its benefits in future generations for breeding, but nobody actually uses this Pokemon in their team, and rightfully so. Why would you want to transform into something so you can attack it with its own moves that it in most situations will be not very effective against it? Makes no sense. Regardless, if you run out of ideas in your quest to design 151 Pokemon, just make a purple blob and forget to actually give any details to its face, be sure to call it Ditto though.
Pokemon Gold and Silver and Crystal
Igglybuff is a baby Pokemon. First of all Baby Pokemon suck. They serve zero useful purpose in the game besides filling up Pokedex pages. A few of them had some fan appeal as being the offspring of already popular Pokemon (we are looking at you Pichu), but overall, they are worthless. Weak stats? Check. Redeeming value in the plot or actual game play? Not at all. Igglybuff though was identical to Jigglypuff, but with cottage cheese on the top of its head. It really looks like a creepy, sickly genetically malformed Jigglypuff. This generation started the baby Pokemon concept, and it was out of pure laziness that they did so. Why create new designs when you can just rehash an already existing design but make it smaller? Honestly Baby Pokemon are not different species, they are young versions of the same species…
Delibird is Santa Claus. No, that is not clever or well designed. There have been some nicely designed penguin based Pokemon, this is not one of them. Is that a mask or freakishly large eyebrows that are extending over his eyes? Why do they come to a point as well? Someone must have been Christmas shopping and saw a “cute” ornament or something where a penguin was put into a Santa suit and thought to themselves, “This could be a Pokemon!” It can… but it isn’t a good one. The poorly designed guy is even carrying a bag, and its signature move involves gifts, which generally heals the opponent. We literally cannot tell if Delibird is wearing a red suit or if he just evolved to be red. Considering he would have a lot of natural predators in the snowy environment, red would make him stick out for everyone to see and he would be extinct in no time. Santa penguin is not a good design…
Sunkern is what you will find in a bag of sunflower seed snacks, but with eyes. Yes, it evolves to become a sunflower, but why do we need, and most of us did not want, a seed Pokemon. They already overkill the bug Pokemon with showing us every single stage in their life cycle, but do we need to do the same for plants as well? This Pokemon is also useless in the games, too. You could go to the grocery store, glue some googly eyes on a sunflower seed and it would probably be more useful and enjoyable than playing with Sunkern in the games.
Pokemon Emerald and Ruby and Sapphire
While legendary Pokemon are usually masterfully designed, this generation dropped the ball on that front. Regice is taking the fall here, but Registeel and Regirock were also completely awful. We will lump sum them together with Regice being the poster child of the poorly designed legendary trio. They are blocks without any type of facial features. Yeah, the Pokemon world is magical and anything can happen, but these things are supposed to be living species… This trio of legendary Pokemon are in no legitimate living things. They are blocks with dots on them and poor excuses of legs. The first ever normal legendary Pokemon shafted the normal type group and they should have revolted right then and there. How do you go from the beauty of the legendary birds, from the nobility of the lgendary dogs/cats (insert another debate), to creeps with dots on them that do absolutely nothing?
Plusle and Minun are so poorly designed that they are quite literally the same species broken up into two out of laziness of creating another unique Pokemon design. On top of that, they look like an attempt to recreate Pikachu in another generation, which had already been done with the lazy design of Pichu. If you already had baby Pikachu, why did they need to make another one… and then changes its color and make another one? Having completed the entire Pokedex, getting these 2 was some of the low points in the quest to do so, because they added no value to any of the games and created an annoying thing where you had to memorize which was which based on their color, even though they are the same thing.
Speaking of Minun and Plusle being worthless, here are two more Pokemon that look exactly the same. Not only that, we already had them before. These new Kakuna, I mean Metapod, I mean terribly designed Pokemon offered nothing new to the Pokedex and showed an inability or lack of desire to actually sit down and design proper new Pokemon. We could have maybe gave them a pass if they have us maybe just 1 of these 2 clones, but giving us both of them was terrible. This bug Pokemon thing is getting old, too. We get it, some bugs go through metamorphosis. It hasn’t been fresh since generation 1 though. How many flying/bug type Pokemon do we need, too? Stop it already.
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