That picture is dumb, I've never even heard half of those arguments, and they are stretched to hell and back.
GenesisSaga posted...
Yeah... no. Truth is a lot of the designs from the later gens are gonna be hit-or-miss. Some people love or hate Mawile, Nosepass, and Delcatty because of the way they look while others love them for it. Who really hates on Doduo or Diglett though? Yeah RBY contains the smallest number of truly awfully-designed pokémon, but that's because they weren't really taking risks back then. There are so many generic cute pokémon in Gen I it's almost ridiculous. I mean look at your pseudo-Legendaries across the gens. Just look at the difference between Dragonite and Tyranitar or Salamence. Cute and harmless looking Dragonite who's pretty simple and not at all intimidating and Tyranitar and Salamence who look like they could actually f*** stuff up.
Tbqh, I prefer sifting through the occasional Garbadors and Luvdiscs to find truly unique treasures like Mienshao and Luxray instead to the alternative: an entire gen of safe, boring Butterfrees and Psyducks.
I hate Doduo.
Besides, I don't see the correlation between Dragonite not being intimidating and your whole point. Salamence is just a quadrupedal dragon instead of a bipedal one, its design isn't even more complex.
But, simple is not necessarily boring, and having complex designs sometimes comes off more as trying too hard. I see most of RBY's designs as being simple, there are only a few that I'd truly call boring and Butterfree isn't even one of them, it was pretty cool back then and it still is. You're talking as if Beautifly was some incredible design improvement over it, but it isn't, it's basically the same with random colorful wings, and it came years later rehashing the same scheme.
And the same thing applies to Delcatty for example, mind you. It is, by no means, a much more interesting design even compared to Persian, who is admittedly boring.
The preconception of there being "lots of generic pokémon in gen I" and "lots of diversity from gen III onwards" is exaggerated. They are reusing schemes, entire concepts are being proposed again, hell gen IV is half composed of pokémon based on previous ones, and it doesn't seem to me that Tangrowth and Magrotfltar made Tangela or lolmagmar more interesting, I'd even argue that Tangrowth looks more generic than Tangela.
Nostalgia plays a part for gen I, but try switching the order of generations and tell me that the same pokémon that are popular from gen I wouldn't be as popular if they came later. Tell me Charizard, Blastoise, Mewtwo, Articuno, Gengar etc. wouldn't be as popular if they were gen V. It's the simple but effective design that gets more people to like them, not the order IMO.
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SuperNiceDog won the Guru contest super nicely!