Delphox? Soft spot for magic foxes
A Fire/Psychic-type and Kalos's fully-evolved Fire starter, Delphox is a pokemon with an OUTSTANDING concept. It’s a fox with a robe and a magic wand that controls fire!!!! A mage fox!!!!! I vibe with that SO hard, y’all don’t even know. And yet…...I don’t really like Delphox. The concept is so, so, SO good, yet the execution is so, so lacking. It’s better in this official art, but when you see it standing up straight, it’s like…..yeesh.
So, there’s really quite a few ways in which Delphox went awry. The silhouette of the robe is a bit weird; it hides the actual shape of it a bit too well, resulting in an anatomy that’s difficult to really comprehend, particularly with the legs. When it’s standing straight like in the 3D model, this is made more problematic, because it makes it feel overly human and vaguely uncanny as a result. The next issue is the absurdly tiny head, just kinda slapped onto the surprisingly bulky body. I’m also not a fan of the flame markings on the robe, which feel very unnatural and inorganic, though this is a milder shortcoming. And last is the ear fur. Goodness. I get the designer was likely trying to give it something distinctive and fun, but it just looks absurd, with its ear fur even outsizing its tiny head by a fair amount, and it looks completely unnatural. Hhhh.
All that said though, Delphox still isn’t terrible. It’s one of those rare cases of a fully-evolved pokemon being overshadowed by a pre-evolution, in this case both of them, but it’s still got its solid wizardly vibes working for it. The stick wand in particular is a great concept, which is probably my favourite aspect of the line. It’s just disappointing overall, particularly since Braixen handles the mage theme so much better, even having its own stick wand already that gets incorporated into the design more clearly when it’s put away. Delphox probably should’ve had a long, gnarled stick staff instead to better distinguish it, now that I think of it.
If nothing else, Delphox has a lovely purple-and-silver shiny, an intensely mystical colour scheme that matches the vibes of the line much better than the yellows and reds. The reds in the shiny clash a little, but I can respect them as reminders of its fire speciality.
All said, Delphox is unfortunately a disappointment, both with respect to its concept and to its evolutionary line. I wish I could be nicer to it, since I do still love its motif and vibes a whole lot; its design is just such a mess that I can’t bring myself to actually like it. At least when something I can’t vibe with at all has a bad design, I don’t really care much. This case makes me very sad :(