Thoughts on the shiny meowth line?
(There are seven shinies here, so I'll be pairing them together for simplicity's sake.)
Meowth: Yeah, Meowth's shiny sucks. It's just regular Meowth but with more pinkish accents instead of orange-brown and a slightly desaturated body, none of which is actually noticeable. You'd think that they'd at least change the color of the coin to silver or bronze or something, but nope. Gigantamax Meowth is at least consistent, but I don't know if I can give it a lot of points for that when the original shiny is so poor.
An easy fix would've just been to make Meowth like... literally any cat color, basically. I think white with red accents would've been neat, as that's a common palette for lucky cats, but anything would've been better than this.
Persian: Persian is technically consistent with Meowth, just being a desaturated, slightly pinker version of the original, but once again that's not a good thing when the pre-evo's shiny is so underwhelming. Same ideas for improvement can be made here, though I will point out that the gemstone could be literally any color other than red.
Alolan Meowth/Persian: I don't know why this line has so many poor shinies, but here we are. At least I kind of understand the rationale here—A. Meowth is based on the British Shorthair, a blue-ish furred breed—but I feel like a shiny can stray a little ways away from the concept as long as it still makes sense, given that a shiny is just a weird one-in-a-million thing.
Even putting the fact that it's just a slightly darker blue aside, the accent colors are really poor here. A fairly dark shade of blue combined with purple accents make for a very low-contrast design, not helped by the ears being a baffling shade of light teal that's borderline eye-searing.
My suggestion for an improvement would just be to make the body purple or gray—something with more inherent contrast than just a darker blue, but not completely divorced from the concept. Also, see the above comment about making Persian's gem a different color. Couldn't have at least gone with a yellow to match Meowth?
Galarian Meowth/Purrserker: It took us this long, but we finally have some good shinies! The G. Meowth line swaps out the standard dull brown for a much higher-contrast gold/yellow, which still makes sense conceptually due to them having sort of a loose pillaging theme going on. Between the two Purrserker works a bit better due to having additional orange-gold accents instead of just being monotone, but both are good.
Overall: Almost all of Meowth and Persian's shinies are very similar to the originals and incredibly underwhelming. However, the G. Meowth line is legitimately good and the one you should take interest in if you really want to shiny hunt one of these guys.
