Koraidon & Miraidon

Now at last we're at the "box legendaries," the first of two mascots central to the game's advertising. Koraidon, the mascot of Scarlet, is honestly a very cool looking fighting/dragon reptile with brilliant red skin, an appealingly lizardy face and colorful plumage, including a huge crest of blue, pink and white feathers that includes two long, whiplike tendrils. From its chin to its waist, it also has a massive "throat sac" resembling a black tire, and we've seen something like that before; it's just like the false "wheel" of Cyclizar! The two tendrils on Koraidon's head also evoke a bike's handles, too, and unlike any other legendary in the franchise, you're actually given Koraidon at the very start of Pokemon Scarlet. You can't use it in your team until the end of the game, but it allows you to ride it around, and it ties in with the storyline.

The twist is that Koraidon is, in fact, an ancient paradox form of Cyclizar; a larger ancestor from before it apparently streamlined down into a more compact little lizard. It does admittedly make more of the Paradox Pokemon feel kind of wasted, if this is how extreme the evolutionary difference can truly be. Except for the fact that its wheels still do nothing and I'm not that fond of the white in its palette, it's still one of the coolest looking legendaries and I'm glad that such a "big deal" mythic beast is just kind of a giant iguana, or maybe an anole.

Miraidon is the Violet Version counterpart to Koraidon, hypothetically the form Cyclizar will take on in some far distant, mechanized future. Radically different in style, this one is a mostly blue and silver reptilian "hoverbike," with holographic glowing stripes that "scroll" along the underside of its bulging, transparent neck whenever it's in motion. At higher speeds, its hind legs even retract into a couple of spheroid pods kind of like a set of wheels, or perhaps a set of anti-gravity engines. Its snakelike head has a black, backswept crest reminiscent of the tall, thin windshield on some motorcycles, and sticking off the head, beginning right behind its little lizardy, eyes are these big jagged "energy bolt" sort of things that help communicate the idea of extreme speed, even when you don't see it in motion. This is where Koraidon had its "bike handles," but Miraidon's handles are a couple of snazzy looking curved spikes tapering off its shoulders.

It's a densely detailed design, but almost every detail is fairly nice looking. Its many seams and segments are predominantly curved and smooth, with minimal use of hard angles outside the "energy bolt" shapes, and the whole thing has a subtle Giger-Alien quality I always enjoy seeing wherever it leaks into a Pokemon or Digimon.

But just like Koraidon, the visual connection to Cyclizar is tenuous enough that Miraidon could pass for either a quite drastic evolution or a wholly unrelated species, so if Koraidon makes the prehistoric Paradoxes look a little worse in comparison, Miraidon makes most of the metal-plated futuremons look like an almost pitiful effort. I get that they wanted the box legends to be special, but the Paradoxes could have been pushed at least a little futher towards this level, couldn't they? Somewhere in between, at least?