>>37171607I wish they'd stop going for the short-term "surprise!" factor with starters and give us solid starters that will actually hold up in the future. If you think about everything that made Charizard (and Venusaur and Blastoise to a lesser extent) such an icon, it's the exact opposite of what current starters do. Stop giving us anthropomorphized human-like creatures that have weird proportions, are arbitrarily mixed with human occupations/fighting roles/etc., and fit way too rigidly into the categories of "tough, cool, girly". Just give us back the neat, simple fantasy animals that grow up into believable adult versions of themselves without going over the top, having a wide appeal and encapsulating cooless, toughness, AND elegance. Notice how people loved Litten when it was first revealed because it was a cute fire kitten with a 'tude, and that's all it had to be. Nobody asked for a bipedal sausage-fingered bara tiger wrestler with a tank-top and a fire belt, and consequently, many people dislike it, and are even mad that it got forced into Smash for lack of a better gen 7 rep. So many people wanted Incineroar to be that one cougar mockup, which was simple yet cool, imaginative yet realistic, in the vein of earlier starters, but were utterly let down.
The reasons why people are so fond of the original 151 are the same reasons why people love animals in general. Real life animal designs are natural and not a clusterfuck of themes, they have biological tools that make them unique, useful, combat-adept, and interesting without being "literally a ninja/mage/opera singer/etc.", they can be vicious hunters, tender parents, clever scavengers, agile movers, and cuddly lovebugs all in one package. Starters felt more inspired by these traits in the earlier generations. But when you take what are essentially the faces of a Pokemon generation, and focus on making them "characters" rather than "animals", all that appeal gets lost somewhere along the way.
