#fighting-type

Hakamo-o PMD neutral, amazed, frown, happy, mad, and teary-eyed PFPs.

Free for non-AI and non-commercial use with artist credit.

INKTOBER 2019 Day 5 - Build - Timburr

Shiny Hakamo-o PMD neutral, amazed, frown, happy, mad, and teary-eyed PFPs.

Free for non-AI and non-commercial use with artist credit.

Oh DANG, it’s Lucario!!!!!!

Lucario’s HUGE. Literally the second-most-beloved pokemon in the franchise according to the Pokemon of the Year poll, Lucario represents a perfect storm of factors all coming together to result in an ASTOUNDING degree of popularity. It’s…..rly big. For comparison, Pikachu got 19th in that same poll.

It all started with a movie, Lucario and the Mystery of Mew, released about a year before Gen IV’s Diamond and Pearl did, with Lucario being one of the first looks at the upcoming generation. Because Pokemon movies up to this point had featured legendaries, people had assumed Lucario, too, was a legendary, and the movie did little to disconfirm this. It could talk, it had a unique anthropomorphic design unlike most other pokemon seen thus far, and it had special powers that seemed unaffiliated with any particular type, dubbed “aura”. Already a recipe for hype!

Once Gen IV came out, it became apparent that Lucario was actually just a normal pokemon, a Fighting/Steel-type (for….some reason), even having a pre-evolution in Riolu. But it still felt special: neither it nor Riolu could be found in the wild, with a Riolu egg instead being obtained through an optional sidequest trekking through a cave on Iron Island. You would be accompanied by someone named Riley, whose design harkened to a movie character named Sir Aaron, and who himself used a Lucario. As a reward for your help, he would bestow you with an egg, that would then hatch into Riolu and you could then evolve into Lucario after raising its friendship level.

Lucario’s popularity was practically sealed. It had a massive amount of marketing through the movie and other media that built up to DP’s eventual release, and when DP finally did come out, Lucario had a perfect balance of difficulty to obtain it with how likely a player was to actually encounter it. It just felt SPECIAL, in a way no other pokemon ever quite has, before or since.

As a design, I respect Lucario. It’s certainly got some peculiar quirks to it: the anime mouth doesn’t sit right on the face with respect to the snout, the oddly-bent tail feels kinda haphazardly glued on, the aesthetic of wearing parachute shorts is kinda weird, and the only allusion to it being Steel-type seems to be its rather nonsensical spikes. But an anthropomorphic blue jackal with a clear Anubis-inspired silhouette is undeniably cool, and I feel positively toward it overall despite some odd decisions. And I actually like the dreads!

Naturally, it would later be a recipient of a Mega Evolution in XY, and a pretty alright one overall. However, one result of its popularity led to it missing part of what made it so popular in the first place: all players would receive one from a gym leader as a natural part of XY’s story. Appropriate for such an iconic pokemon to introduce Mega Evolution, sure, but it made it apparent how much of that “special” aspect Lucario had since lost. Being gifted one for free just didn’t hit right. As a design, Mega Lucario’s red markings feel a bit excessive, and I’m not as into it as I am the base design. It’s not bad, though, and the floofy tail’s an improvement.

Lucario’s shiny swaps the blue and yellow, albeit with the yellow now a more unnatural citrus tone. Suitably distinct from the base form, but not really an improvement. Mega Lucario keeps the general colour scheme, but shifted darker into a rather unpleasant olive shade.

Overall, I like Lucario. It’s got some weird aesthetic choices, but on the whole it’s pretty neat and VERY iconic. I don’t particularly vibe with it myself these days, but I definitely understand those who do, and I find its immense popularity both justified and unsurprising.

Oof. Uh. Conkeldurr.

So um, how to put this. I think I….kinda hate this guy? A bit? The bulging veins, the ludicrous musculature, the creepy goatee, the distressing proportions, the bulbous red nose, the ugly colour scheme, the name. It’s like somebody tried to deliberately concoct a pokemon for the express purpose of me finding it distasteful. So many qualities I dislike, all rolled into one single, godforsaken creature. This is not a face one can look upon and experience affection. It is a face of revulsion and sorrow. A face of having the badness.

Which isn’t to say it’s a bad design, mind you! I think Conkeldurr is a decently competent concept. The body layout and veins are a bit weird, sure, but it’s got an incredibly distinctive silhouette and a represents a very unique idea of an old man construction worker monster. They’re NOT CLOWNS, though. That’s a drunkard’s red nose! The whole line is derived from very specific Japanese stereotypes about construction workers. I fell into this trap already and had to revise this review! Don’t be like me.

But yeah uh. It’s a Fighting-type. And it’s pretty ugly. Like, I get that that’s the appeal for a lot of people, but it’s REALLY ugly. The gross veins don’t even really communicate veins anymore with their weird layout, though that’s probably the only outright “bad” aspect of its design insofar that everything else is INTENTIONALLY unpleasant. This is not a pokemon anyone is actually SUPPOSED to like in any sort of straightforward way, y’know? So I’m gonna be a good little cat and be repulsed by its design just like Game Freak intended.

Eugh, ew. That’s even worse. Goodness.

I don’t really like Conkeldurr. Like, at all. But again: I respect it. It’s got a solidly creative concept and it knows what it’s doing, even if what it’s doing is something I find actively reprehensible. And let me be clear: even if I don’t like Conkeldurr, I still like the fact it exists. All pokemon are valid. Every last one.