>>22549865You know, thinking about it, I think one of Gen 5's biggest follies was the placement and orientation of the pokemon, rather than the designs.
I know that sounds odd, but here me out. People give the starters shit in Gen 5 a lot for being the worst batch of starters yet. Looking at them as a stand alone, they're actually pretty solid designs, however they are iffy being treated as starters. Imagine if the Emboar line was just a standard pokemon you found in a volcanic region or something? A lot more appreciable.
The choices that they used as starters are fine designs, but they're just not the sort of designs that have the same mass appeal as other gens.
The Patrat line? They've always stuck out to me as just really.. bizarre, and I think a big part of it is because of how common they are. They're meerkats, and as a design for that animal, they work well. However, it's strange seeing a meerkat- a percieved foreign and thus "rare" animal- in just about every bush and trainers pocket around the region. It feels weird to think that I could walk out in my back yard and see a couple meerkats dickin' around.
Now imagine the Patrat line in a Safari Zone. A lot more fitting. It's not common, in fact somewhat exclusive, and fits the context of the environment a lot better.
I've always been under the assumption that context has a lot of influence on a pokemon's likeableness. Back in Gen 2 when Girafarig and Yanma were rare and new, they stuck out to me as being really cool. Now they're just "another" pokemon, and have lost a lot of that coolness. I believe some of that is at play here.
