Veluza
IT'S THE FISH! You know what I mean! Every generation has that one main fish, and even the most mundane of them are always a delight. Our last one was the charming Barraskewda, which is of course a barracuda, but Veluza is a hake, the popular eaten marine fish in Spain. Veluza is more pointed and lethal looking than the real thing, and in fact an uncommonly "lifelike" fish Pokemon, cool and sleek with a realistically blank fishy stare a metallic silver surface that may be commonplace for fish, but surprisingly a first for fish-based Pokemon; even Wishiwashi is depicted as more of a white and blue. Veluza's only "cartoonier" characteristics are the simple, translucent purple triangles it has for fins, which unfortunately look a little tacked on, but their coloration is a nice contrast to the silver.
What's strange about Veluza is the fact that it's a psychic type fish, and what's even stranger is the gimmick of what it actually does with its psychic powers...
Veluza's signature move, Fillet Away, cuts its HP in half to significantly boost its speed and both offensive stats, which represents this fish using telekinesis to literally butcher itself. and shed "excess" flesh from its body, which is fortunately said to regenerate quickly. This comes with a unique animation in which its outer body actually splits apart, complete with the pale stripes of delicious sashimi fat. What's left behind is only a jagged, abstract fish shape formed by the purple fins and a row of diamond-shaped chunks representing the spinal column.
A fish that peels itself down to its skeleton is right up my alley, as you no doubt expected, but the gruesome fun unfortunately comes with a little disappointment. The plain, flat paper cut-out look of its underlying anatomy feels a bit cheap, but not as cheap as the fact that you only see this design momentarily before the in-game model is reset back to normal.
This is both more boring and makes no logical sense as long as the stat changes are still there, and it didn't have to be a whole programmed "form change," no, but it would have been really cool if the model remained this way until you actually restored its HP, or at the very least, remained this way until it switched out of battle, which would have been pretty easy to do. Confining its whole conceptual twist to a few seconds of animation is even enough to cost it a 6/5 rating, especially since it might not even retain that animation in future games; Dragapult appears in Scarlet and Violet, for example, but is no longer animated firing its little missile babies for its signature attack method.
A good fish, but one whose execution feels exemplary of modern Pokemon's rushed development times.
What's strange about Veluza is the fact that it's a psychic type fish, and what's even stranger is the gimmick of what it actually does with its psychic powers...
Veluza's signature move, Fillet Away, cuts its HP in half to significantly boost its speed and both offensive stats, which represents this fish using telekinesis to literally butcher itself. and shed "excess" flesh from its body, which is fortunately said to regenerate quickly. This comes with a unique animation in which its outer body actually splits apart, complete with the pale stripes of delicious sashimi fat. What's left behind is only a jagged, abstract fish shape formed by the purple fins and a row of diamond-shaped chunks representing the spinal column.
A fish that peels itself down to its skeleton is right up my alley, as you no doubt expected, but the gruesome fun unfortunately comes with a little disappointment. The plain, flat paper cut-out look of its underlying anatomy feels a bit cheap, but not as cheap as the fact that you only see this design momentarily before the in-game model is reset back to normal.
This is both more boring and makes no logical sense as long as the stat changes are still there, and it didn't have to be a whole programmed "form change," no, but it would have been really cool if the model remained this way until you actually restored its HP, or at the very least, remained this way until it switched out of battle, which would have been pretty easy to do. Confining its whole conceptual twist to a few seconds of animation is even enough to cost it a 6/5 rating, especially since it might not even retain that animation in future games; Dragapult appears in Scarlet and Violet, for example, but is no longer animated firing its little missile babies for its signature attack method.
A good fish, but one whose execution feels exemplary of modern Pokemon's rushed development times.
All Scarlet/Violet sprite animations ripped by adamsb0303!
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