howmst do you rate the TORTERRA?
Torterra!!!!!
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.
