>>40045507>shonen frog>one of best designs there isI'll make a case for greninja not being an amazing design. Given, toads and frogs are tied to ninjas in japanese arts and media, and as such, frogs are a great vessel for a ninja-inspired design. The execution is however horrid. It tries too hard to do the cool guy schtick. Ken Sugimori stated at one point that he doesn't want to make pokemon look too cool, they should have a quirky trait as well to balance things out. I don't think that the tongue scarf is a od quirky feature, because 90% of the time you think of it less of like a tongue and more like a scarf, so it just looks "cool". The other 10% of the time when it's unwrapped, like pic related, you see that its main function is to hide its awkward looking upper body. It's not even awkward in a cute way, it's just awkward to look at and makes me thankful it hides its mouth and neck.
Let's not forget that being the shilled special snowflake it is, not only does it get one of those popular black shinies (you know like charizard and rayquaza where normies will automatically wet their panties over "omg le red scarf so kewl"), no, it also gets its own super special awesome form change, like no other starter, or any other pokemon for that matter, has. All this design does is push that kakashi shonen trope for easy shilling, while not having much substance to back up the popularity. It's still a great design, but I wouldn't call it "one of the best" in my wildest dreams
