#mega staraptor

some renders of the pokemon I modeled for my recent pokemon animation!!

Well, I'll say this much: Mega Staraptor looks cool, at least. I like the extra bulk it has, and the massive talons and black eyes give it a good intimidating presence, which is something I never thought I'd say about Staraptor.

However, my main issue with it is that it feels like they didn't have any real direction for it, resulting in them just adding Stuff(TM) to the design. And don't get me wrong: not every design has to have a specific concept behind it, and just changing things is sometimes enough. But I feel like Mega Staraptor doesn't actually improve or even expand upon regular Staraptor's design apart from the aforementioned intimidation thing, which drags it down.

In fact, I think it actually makes Staraptor's design worse, as it's much more cluttered and less coherent than Staraptor's. Take the colors: the grays are nice, but the yellow accents feel random as there was no yellow in its palette to begin with. Why not make those red? It's not like they were trying to keep the focus on its ahoge, because they did add red—to its neck and no where else. Also, I feel like this was a missed opportunity to make the beak and legs dark gray, which would've drawn even more attention to the red. Something like this, maybe:

There are also a lot of arbitrary decisions made; like, they kept the white circle even though it's just barely visible under the ahoge, there's now feathers flipping up over the back of the ahoge, it effectively has two tails (one normal and one forming a "coat tail" over top of it) which results in both competing with each other because they're almost the same size, the unnecessary black stripe on the beak that adds nothing, and so on. So basically, it's not the worst by a long shot; but it is cluttered and lacks either a clear theme or clear visual direction.