Klawf
It's KLAWF!!! This was one of the earlier Pokemon officially previewed, and fans were split between hating its "ugliness," adoring its "ugliness," and just asking what distinguishes this enough from Krabby and Kingler.
Obviously I'm in the "it looks great" camp. For one thing it has silly eyes on little stalkies, like an actual crab. The tufts of dark fur at its joints and its nostril-like face holes nicely capture the fuzzy weirdness of some crabs. The blocky mouth is a better caricature of crab mouthparts than most we've seen in this franchise, and overall it has the most accurate body shape to a plain straightforward sideways-walking crabbo even if it ought to have at least one additional pair of legs.
It is still admittedly "just" an orange crab, though, so yes, that is kind of redundant to Kingler, and could have at least benefited from being some other color. It's otherwise a fairly different Pokemon; it's pure rock type and lives out in the game's desert canyons, so this is 100% land crab! It's also an ambush predator that clings to rock walls, rotating its eyeballs around to watch for prey before it drops down. Another of those little ecological details I love so much, especially when they're believable but not completely ripped from nature. There are, as far as I'm aware, no crabs that hunt this way, but it's entirely conceivable that a crab could evolve to do so.
This is also the first Pokemon we're reviewing that doubles as one of the in-game "titan" bosses, meaning you can battle a huge giant-size version. Unfortunately, this kind of makes regular size Klawf feel a little underwhelming, and I feel that every "titan" species should have at least been a fairly big Pokemon in its natural state, at least on the level of Onyx or Gyarados. If Klawf has been a more novel coloration and always ridiculously large, I'd have probably given it a perfect 5/5.
Obviously I'm in the "it looks great" camp. For one thing it has silly eyes on little stalkies, like an actual crab. The tufts of dark fur at its joints and its nostril-like face holes nicely capture the fuzzy weirdness of some crabs. The blocky mouth is a better caricature of crab mouthparts than most we've seen in this franchise, and overall it has the most accurate body shape to a plain straightforward sideways-walking crabbo even if it ought to have at least one additional pair of legs.
It is still admittedly "just" an orange crab, though, so yes, that is kind of redundant to Kingler, and could have at least benefited from being some other color. It's otherwise a fairly different Pokemon; it's pure rock type and lives out in the game's desert canyons, so this is 100% land crab! It's also an ambush predator that clings to rock walls, rotating its eyeballs around to watch for prey before it drops down. Another of those little ecological details I love so much, especially when they're believable but not completely ripped from nature. There are, as far as I'm aware, no crabs that hunt this way, but it's entirely conceivable that a crab could evolve to do so.
This is also the first Pokemon we're reviewing that doubles as one of the in-game "titan" bosses, meaning you can battle a huge giant-size version. Unfortunately, this kind of makes regular size Klawf feel a little underwhelming, and I feel that every "titan" species should have at least been a fairly big Pokemon in its natural state, at least on the level of Onyx or Gyarados. If Klawf has been a more novel coloration and always ridiculously large, I'd have probably given it a perfect 5/5.
All Scarlet/Violet sprite animations ripped by adamsb0303!
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