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Simple color palettes and body detail. Most Pokemon don't have more than 4 body colors, and often if a color is used somewhere it's probably also used in another spot so the design looks more coherent. Their body detail is also minimalist. For example, Tangrowth doesn't have all its individual vines grown, only the vines coming out of the bottom of its body and near its face are drawn in detail and the rest go into a minimalist blob shape. If you have a furry Pokemon like Venonat, the outline and shading of the Pokemon portrays the furry shape, but they don't draw detailed strands of fur inside of the outline. They also often have consistent eye designs.
Also nearly all Pokemon have some secondary theme that ties fittingly into their design, extremely few to zero Pokemon are simply just a regular animal drawn in an anime style, or an animal with a completely arbitrary element slapped on. For example, Incineroar was made a wrestler because the tiger mask is a well known pro wrestling character. Blastoise has a tank theme because turtles themselves are slow, shelled, armored things just like tanks, and the cannons might be inspired from shelled aquatic animals having tubes that come out of their shells that siphon water. They didn't just arbitrarily slap cannons on Blastoise for no reason.
If you can get these things correct you can probably make a decently convincing fakemon. The problem is that most fakemon artists are garbage and fail to understand most of these things.
