Why Scarlet and Violet’s Pokémon are the ugliest yet

Scroll back through the pages of The Boar’s Games section, and you’ll find my Pokémon journey – from riding high to gradually becoming more and more disillusioned with the franchise’s staleness. Sword and Shield were the final straw, and even the broadly positive reception of Legends: Arceus wasn’t enough to tempt me back. Now, the Pokémon Company has put out a genuinely open-world game – a hideously broken one, by all counts, but it’s a step in the right direction. One of the most exciting things about any new game, though, is the new Pokémon. But to my mind, it’s here that these games are at their worst – this generation of Pokémon are the ugliest yet.

The ninth generation of Pokémon got off to a strong start – as with each first trailer for a new Pokémon game, just a handful of the new creatures were shared with us. These ones were, by and large, good and well-designed. Although I hadn’t decided whether I’d buy the games or not, I knew it would be a tough choice of starter if I did. I normally opt for whichever one I think is the best looking, but there wasn’t a bad one among the three. And the starter trio of Sprigatito, Fuecoco and Quaxly were joined by some adorable new creatures – the cracking pig Pokémon Lechonk, or Fidough, a dog made by a baker.

In terms of putting your best foot forward, Scarlet and Violet had managed. Subsequent trailers introduced more creatures, which were fundamentally solid but not particularly exciting. There was a giant crab called Klawf, and a tiny ghost thing called Gimmighoul that seemed to live in a treasure chest. The new legendaries were also shared very early on, and I didn’t share the love other fans had for them – they were painfully over-designed, clearly with a view that you would use them as ride Pokémon to traverse the region. As a result, they had ugly wheels jammed in their necks, and Miraidon even had jet propulsion in its legs. It dampened the enthusiasm a little.

On the whole, this is a bad Pokédex

And then the games were released. I hung off to see how they were received and was a little disappointed by all the negative reception. I left it a little while before deciding that I just couldn’t justify spending so much money on a broken game, and then I looked into the Pokédex. From what I heard, even people who were unimpressed with the games were thrilled with the new Pokémon, so I was intrigued to see them. Could this salvage my negative thoughts about Scarlet and Violet?

In a word, no. There are a couple of good ones – we finally have a dolphin Pokémon in Finizen, for example, and I like the derpy Bellibolt – but on the whole, this is a bad Pokédex. There are uninspired entries – a ghost Pokémon that is a bramble with a face, and a creature that is just a flamingo. Pokémon that aren’t Pokémon – there’s a giant car in the trailer that people half-joked would be a new Pokémon, only to be proven right. Lazy evolutions – the cute Pawmi evolves into itself twice, and there’s a pair of mice that evolve into three or four mice – and bad evolutions for all the Pokémon revealed in that first trailer. And there’s so many that are just ugly, from a baby fairy clutching a hammer to a hideous Grass/Fire-type with two monstrous heads. Pick any random Pokémon from this Dex, and expect to be disappointed.

Scarlet and Violet take us past the 1,000-Pokémon threshold, and I’ve felt something I’ve never experienced before in terms of the creatures – real creative exhaustion

Worst of all are the changes to existing creatures. There’s a new Primeape evolution, which is great, but the other regional evolutions and forms are lazy (Tauros essentially turns black, and don’t get me started on Dudunsparce – it looks like the same creature). Paradox Pokémon, prehistoric or future versions of existing creatures, are dreadful. They all have hideous names, and they don’t quite work – how a robot version of Delibird called Iron Bundle made it off the drawing board escapes me.

Scarlet and Violet take us past the 1,000-Pokémon threshold, and I’ve felt something I’ve never experienced before in terms of the creatures – real creative exhaustion. This felt like a Pokédex cobbled together by people really running low on ideas. If I played the games, I genuinely cannot imagine using any of them on my team, and that’s a bad place to be. I’m thrilled that some people have looked at these games and found their new favourites, but I don’t share that excitement. When everything is so over-designed, lazy, or just turning established creatures into robots to pad out the numbers, I think it’s time to take a step back and rethink your design philosophy.