>>58069002there's a lot of them that are just "the same but bugger", but also a lot of those are just "life stage" style evolutions and I don't know how to feel about them. On the one hand it makes sense and there shouldn't be radical changes from one stage to the next unless it is based on a creature that undergoes significant figurative or literal metamorphosis over its life cycle. On the other hand it does feel kind of lazy and makes the evolutions rather insignificant or less impactful.Like just look at clefairy to clefable, jigglypuff to wigglytuff, manky to primape, growlithe to arcanine, grimer to muk, krabby to Kingler, or seadra to kingdra, there's nothing really imaginative there, they just get bigger, but yeah none of those radically change as they age so I don't know if it's good or bad
but then you have shit like graveller to golem where it goes from a cool living rock to a .... weird rock lizard out of nowhere? there aren't any animalistic features in geodude or graveller but for some reason golem has a separate head and distinct arms and legs with a different colouration to the rest of its body. It's almost like it's a third stage to sandslash instead of geodude. Or you have ones like whole poliwag line where it doesn't change when it should change. they're all just "the tadpole pokemon" when a tadpole or just a frog based pokemon in general should have significant changes between its evolutions. the difference between poliwhirl and poliwrath are almost non-existent outside of getting weirdly buffer and more angry, a complete waste of a slot.
there's very few that are offensive to look at as far as their visual design goes in gen1 compared to later gens, but there are also a lot of ones you have to ask why did they even bother adding a next stage for outside of needing to adhere to the gimmick of having your monsters change and (literally) evolve over time.
