I personally believe if you showed a non-Pokéfan these two screenshots (from Bulbapedia. It’s technically the same screenshot just cropped so the first one shows Terrakion and its name and the second one shows Ting-Lu and its name) and said one of these is a Ground-type and the other is a Rock-type and you have to guess which is which there is a 99% chance they’d get them the wrong way round
Concessions Time! At this point, it’s more for closure and finishing what I started. They do look fun, and I enjoyed playing with different ideas, but for my mental health, I’m dialing back my hopes for designing Fakemon that “look like Pokémon”. ^^;
A Ground-type First-Stager that lives in sandy dens takes on Electric typing with fulgurite-inspired lower legs, drastically simplified and yellowed/electricity-fied for design convention reasons. @v@; Also changed the blues from earlier to yellow, because with the new pose, alterations and polishing, it was hard to make the contrast and hue balances work without making changes that gave Hexerba a more “Ice-type” vibe.
I do want to bring the blue back in a third-ish stage, though... more on that later. XP
WIP Time! Quite a bit of polishing to do of course, but this is a comparison for my Chubex re-redesign. The above row — completed just earlier this year — is cute and a lot cleaner than its predecessor from 2014, but again, I’m trying to make designs that feel less like generic fantasy creatures and more like Pokémon.
Hopefully this is a big step in the right direction; it certainly feels more unique, as I’ve made some major shifts in what inspires the design. More on that in the final post (coming... someday... ^^’) Right now, all we need to know is that the visual basis of this Pokémon is deliberately mish-mashed and super-vague.
Update Time! I added a second image up there, with a concept for Chubex’s evolved form, Hexerba. Originally, this line was Ground→Ground-Psychic, but is now Ground-Electric, along with a lot of other instances of rewiring — no pun intended. Colors have plenty of time to be tweaked, this is just a first pass, but I’m putting it here before I forget (The pose needs work, absolutely, I was going for mid-jump like its leaping ahead here, but it does not have that energy at all).
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I’m overthinking this, and Google results aren’t helping; maybe you guys can answer this for me. When someone looks at a Fakemon design and says “it looks like a Temtem”, should the designer take that as a compliment, an insult, or just a neutral observation one should stop taking so personally?
Torterra’s the fully-evolved form of Turtwig, the Grass-type starter of Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum. Now a Grass/Ground-type, it’s conceptually the ultimate form a turtle can take: a World Turtle. World Turtles as a mythological concept occur across numerous cultures worldwide, with the general idea being that a massive turtle or tortoise holds the planet up on the back of its shell. Torterra is certainly a subdued version of the concept, more or less just having a little rock garden on its back, but it gets across the idea well nonetheless.
Torterra’s status as World Turtle is further communicated by its dex entries, with small pokemon said to gather and nest on its back, and pokemon that are born there often living on it their whole lives. Effectively a miniature ecosystem, groups of Torterra are said to look like moving forests, a fact that the Detective Pikachu movie ran with in one scene with a giant forest of them suddenly beginning to move. The World Turtle aspect is even explicitly referenced in one dex, with the HGSS entry referring to ancient peoples who believed a giant Torterra lived beneath the ground.
As a design, Torterra is fantastic. Beyond the turtle basis, it also has clear ankylosaur vibes going on, with its armoured shell and spike-adorned neck. The arrangement of the tree and rocks is perfect, creating a serene-looking single-tree forest that contrasts the formidable creature it rests upon. Its face and expression are also notably great, appearing serious yet amicable, with large semicircle eyes and a wonderfully jagged mouth. The colour scheme, too, is pleasant – mirroring the colours of a real-life forest.
Torterra’s shiny is very underwhelming, though this wasn’t always the case. In DPPt, its shiny incorporated a muted teal to the body beneath the shell, and looked much more distinctive, but the shiny was changed to a consistent green across both body and shell in HGSS for no discernible reason. There’s other instances of shinies that have more complex colour schemes than their base form, so I’m not sure why they went after Torterra.
I love Torterra, and I think it might be the “objectively” best design for a final starter stage. It has an incredibly strong concept that it follows through with and executes perfectly, and it builds upon its pre-evolutions in a coherent and logical way with massive payoff. It’s still not my favourite starter, or even my favourite Grass starter, but it’s certainly up there and I have immense respect for it.
O, to be a little woodland critter in a Torterra tree/10.
Hey, Sky! I’ve recently been permitted to open up my very own Ground type gym. Do you have any tips you could give to me or my team before we get started? Thanks in advance! -Gaia
Congratulations!!! That's so exciting!
A current or former gym leader will have more advice, but I know a few things from interning at the Cerluean Gym.
One of the trickiest things as a gym leader is adjusting the difficulty to match the challenger. Because not everyone challenges the gyms in the same order, you can't offer everybody the same battle. It's really easy to accidentally go all out and make your gym too hard. The leagues offer really good guidance on this though. Most leaders use fewer pokemon against beginners - some have different teams too.
I'd also recommend finding your own interns to help you out. Interns will battle challengers before they get to the leader, but they do more too. Gym leaders are so busy between battling, community outreach, and gym maintenance. The interns are there to take some of the pressure off and support you. Along those lines, don't forget to take breaks for yourself and your team. It's really easy to push yourself too hard as a gym leader.
Also remember that you get to design your gym however you want! Double battles, sandstorms - anything goes as long as the league approves it. I always loved the puzzles back when I challenged gyms regularly. So make it a good one for me, haha!
That's about all I've got. Good luck with the new gym! Being a gym leader is a big responsibility, but a fun one 😊
pls tell me ur thoughts on my baby boy gligar, the blepping less popular counterpart to sneasel
Gligar!!!!
Gligar’s a pretty cool lil fellow, with the blepping giving it some wonderfully silly vibes. Its concept doesn’t get anywhere near enough credit for how creative it is, being a hybrid of a scorpion and a bat, two animals that have virtually NOTHING in common. Plus a little bit of facehugger, if it propensity for latching onto people’s faces to sting them and its GS beta sprites are anything to go by. And the result is impeccable! You wouldn’t expect such disparate things to have such a great result when mixed. Still, though, think about scorpions and bats and take a good look at that image up there. Think about what typing it could possibly have.
If you guessed Poison/Flying, you’d be wrong! If you guessed Ground/Flying, then you already knew the answer and the exercise was pointless. If you guessed Poison/Bug, well, maybe don’t gamble. I have no idea WHY it’s Ground-type rather than Poison-type, but it is, and we all have to live with that fact. It does counteract Flying’s Electric weakness with an immunity, though, so I’m sure Gligar’s happy with it. And it makes it more distinct from the other bats at the time of its release, the Zubat line.
Still, a lack of Poison-typing doesn’t stop Gligar from learning numerous Poison-type attacks, and a Ground-typing doesn’t actually equate to it learning very many Ground-type attacks. Gligar’s not entirely sure what it’s doing, but that’s alright! With a face like that you don’t really need to. It didn’t even know what it was doing with its colour scheme for awhile, appearing a cool-toned purple in the main series and original Sugimori art and a magenta-ish purple in the anime before finally getting standardised into the latter in HGSS. Plus the smaller claws were white prior to HGSS, as well.
On the note of colours, Gligar’s got a periwinkle blue shiny, which reduces the contrast with the wings but is pretty aesthetically pleasing nonetheless. I definitely prefer the base colour, but it’s not bad.
Gligar’s a weird, iconic, and highly creative pokemon that doesn’t get nearly enough love. Its evolution’s pretty rad, too, but they’ve got such wildly different vibes from each other that it’s easy to appreciate them as entirely separate pokemon. Its typing is very peculiar and I’m not sure how to feel about it, but it is what it is. But yeah, love it! :p
