The Larvitar Family

We now come to Gold and Silver's "pseudo" legendary, the breedable, evolving pokemon line that gets a seat up top with the legendaries like Dratini, Dragonair and Dragonite years prior. This time, it's a decidedly less cutesy creature, actually downright messed-up looking. It's hard to tell what this thing is even supposed to be at all until we get to its final evolution, but whatever this ground/rock pokemon is, it's pissed about it.

Larvitar will bottle up that rage for a while as Pupitar, the meanest, toughest chrysalis this side of Kakuna. It's great to have a cocoon pokemon that's almost powerful in its own right, if only its stats were close enough to its final form that you could get away with Eviolite. A devastatingly deadly cocoon monster is all I've wanted since my first Metapod.

After its extended pupation, Larvitar emerges as Tyranitar, trading its ground typing for dark typing. This is one of those pokemon almost everyone immediately found drop-dead awesome, what with not only being a dark/rock type pseudolegendary but obviously representing a knockoff of Godzilla. Together with Feraligatr, that's two zilla homages in the same generation! Otherwise, though, I never found Tyranitar all that impressive, except for maybe the cool black holes in its rocky hide.

So, I want to say Mega Tyranitar looks a little silly, with way too many craggly spike things coming off it, but they're honestly very pleasing craggly spike things, the cool holes are given more emphasis, its torso forms a menacing bug-demon face, and the whole thing just looks exactly like the kind of mutated final form we see in countless classic Kaiju. Godzilla may never have transformed into anything like this, but I could totally see it.

I'll give this one a four, because I can understand why so many other people would give this one a five.

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