Pokemon Concept Corner: Leveling the Gen 5 Conflict, Part 2

Why no dolphin love?Welcome once again, dear readers, to Pokemon Concept Corner! To explain to any new readers, last time, we looked at a few of the more bizarre Pokemon from earlier generations, to put the new Pokemon on a more equal playing field in the eyes of us fans. 

Today, however, we’re taking a look at the opposite side of this coin. While there are many awesome new Pokemon, we can all agree that some of them are pretty flat-out stupid. And let’s be honest here, there are over 600 Pokemon now, so we’re gonna get some repetition and ridiculousness, but when you think about it there are actually some very good opportunities for Pokemon based of real animals that still haven’t been used, and a few of these are what we'll be talking about today.

 

Dolphins

This one is so obvious it hurts. Dolphins are awesome animals, appearing in culture all over the world, even playing important roles in Greek and Hindu mythologies. On top of that, dolphins are extremely intelligent creatures, and just as graceful and just plain cool. Dolphins have even been used by various military applications across the globe over the years, for rescuing soldiers and civilians and locating underwater mines.

 So obviously we’re seeing a lot of potential for dolphins here. So why do they remain unused? There have been many fan-made dolphin Pokemon(I myself have one in my fakedex), and there were fake silhouettes for the 5th gen starters that featured the water-type being a dolphin. In the research I’ve done, I’ve found no negative links between dolphins and Japan. If there are any, they’ve escaped me. There’s some potential for a cool Pokemon here, and it’s not being used...hopefully this will be rectified in future generations.

 

Okapi
This is an animal you may not know. Native only to a certain part of central Africa, but seen in zoos all over the world, Okapi look like a sort of combination of a deer, a giraffe, and a zebra. The giraffe is it's closest relative. From the standpoint of creating interesting-looking Pokemon, this is a gold mine waiting to happen. The only problem is, how to make a Pokemon out of this without making it look like a cheap imitation of the existing giraffe, zebra, and deer Pokemon? My guess is we’ll see a Pokemon based on this creature in the near future, just as soon as a good design is agreed upon.

 

Lions
Okay, before you scream “but..Arcanine!”, let me clarify something. Arcanine is NOT a lion. Lions are cats, and Arcanine is a dog. While a step in the right direction, Arcanine seems more like a three-way cross between a lion, tiger, and wolf. It’s close, but no cigar.
This is another one that you’d think would’ve been used by now, and is another concept that gets used in many fakedexes, usually as a prominent fire-type. And again, there’s no obvious negativity to lions in Japanese culture. On the contrary, Asia is one of several continents who’s various cultures have portrayed lions very positively, as noble, brave, iconic creatures. Perhaps the lion is being saved for a prominent legendary or starter role in generation 6. This seems like a fairly large possibility.

 

I wish there was more to say about the examples I’ve given, some kind of real reasoning to explain why they remain unused, while we have that stupid, stupid trash bag. Admittedly, we know Nintendo wanted to make generation 5 seem very different, like a fresh start, so maybe these were left out intentionally for that reason. It’s likely we’ll see Pokemon-ized renditions of any or all of these guys in the near future. We’ll just have to wait and see.

From here on out, we’ll begin covering some more varied ground, outside of the debates around the new Pokemon. In fact, we most likely won’t be covering anything else related to Black & White for a while, maybe not even until the games come out in America, where I live. But stay tuned, because next time on P.C.C, we go mythological!

COncept Corner is (c) Jay Petrequin, 2010