>>42750657first, raticate is supposed to look fatter because he's eating too much. it wasn't displayed the best in the kanto version, but they revisited that design inspiration with alolan raticate.
then,
> pokemon has always had pokemon that don't look like pokemon.yes, even kanto pokemon have some questionable choices. however, the point is that the overly cartoony, steven trannyverse artstyle has become a heavier and heavier burden to the newer pokemon designs. like of course thee stage one pokemon are going to be kind cartoony and cute, but they still look semi-plausible ad they evolve into monster-like creatures with less cal-arts noodlearm/gianthead designs. for example, compare charmander and scorbunny:
charmander has a large head and stubby features, but none are over-exaggerated to the point of ruin. he looks like a cute baby lizard thing. switch to scorbunny and you can see that the head easily has 2.8x more mass than the entire rest of his model combined. the noodly arms and odd feet, as well as lack of visible joints (charmander has visible knee joints) make this look cartoony as fuck. this isn't a BAD design, this just isn't a POKEMON design. it's a cal-arts cartoon design.
now, let's take into question zeraora and the pokemon he's based on; the mewtwo clones.
the mewtwo clones are the following:
> mewtwo> deoxys> darkrai> genesect> technically diancie, but we don't count her> magearna doesn't count either> zeraora> melmetal i guess?> calyrex maybe but he isn't even out.let's go through one by one:
mewtwo is designed to be the intimidating, stronger version of mew. the slightly less muscular looking arms are understandable since most psychic types had that trend of looking a lot less beefy. however, this "less beefy" look isn't exaggerated to oblivion. there are distinguishable joints, and the limbs aren't too thin. the thighs look normal for a cat-like/kangaroo-like monster. nothing looks overexaggerated.
deoxys is a unique pokemon inspired
