>>53203763Anything can become a mascot if it's shilled hard enough. A design doesn't have to be good to be the face of something, it just has to have enough hype behind it. Kind of like the games themselves, actually. Gen 1 was utter dogshit as a set of games, broken and buggy and unfinished and barely functional with lacking mechanics and poor choices all around with graphics that make your eyes bleed and sprites that look nothing like the official art but they sold like hotcakes because Nintendo pushed that shit HARD in the west, I enjoy the ads more than I enjoy the games like that one where the dude COMPRESSES A BUS OF POKEMON INTO A GAMEBOY.
Pikachu is and always has been a mid design, charmander has always been cooler and a better design for a starter, if it wasn't for the ashnime pikachu would be relegated to the pits of time and nobody would care about pokemon. In fact, they were going to make clefairy - that's right that ugly little ball of nothing - the mascot.
