Annihilape
You truly never know who's going to get a new form or evolution these days, except that, slowly but surely, they're giving something new to virtually every first-gen Pokemon. Gen IX not only gives Primeape a surprise new evolution, but a new signature move, rage fist, which is stronger depending on how many hits the user has already taken. Once a Primeape has used Rage Fist at least 20 times in its life, it can now evolve into Annihilape, a fighting and ghost type Pokemon resembling a dingy grey, shaggier, even more infuriated Primeape with luminous, red eyes.
It's not bad looking, and if you loved Primeape, this is one of those evolutions that doesn't stray so far from its predecessor that it drops the whole point of it. However, I will say that they really dropped the ball on its lore. Primeape, for many years, has always had a Pokedex entry stating that it will literally die if it STOPS being angry, so when the existence of a Primeape ghost evolution was leaked, everyone was sure it would actually be calm and serene, maybe floating in meditation, a Primeape that died having finally found inner peace.
If you liked the angry ape as an angry ape, you probably wouldn't like it as a chill hippie ape, but it really was a missed opportunity to make a weird pokedex fact more relevant. Really, Annihilape should have been a fighting/dark type angry evolution, and a happy ghost could have been a split evolution. As it stands, the pokedex doesn't even acknowledge that this is now a ghost type. It doesn't do anything at all with its ghost aspects! If I were rating based on lore alone it'd probably get a much lower score, but I rate primarily on aesthetics and design, and those are pretty solid here.
It's not bad looking, and if you loved Primeape, this is one of those evolutions that doesn't stray so far from its predecessor that it drops the whole point of it. However, I will say that they really dropped the ball on its lore. Primeape, for many years, has always had a Pokedex entry stating that it will literally die if it STOPS being angry, so when the existence of a Primeape ghost evolution was leaked, everyone was sure it would actually be calm and serene, maybe floating in meditation, a Primeape that died having finally found inner peace.
If you liked the angry ape as an angry ape, you probably wouldn't like it as a chill hippie ape, but it really was a missed opportunity to make a weird pokedex fact more relevant. Really, Annihilape should have been a fighting/dark type angry evolution, and a happy ghost could have been a split evolution. As it stands, the pokedex doesn't even acknowledge that this is now a ghost type. It doesn't do anything at all with its ghost aspects! If I were rating based on lore alone it'd probably get a much lower score, but I rate primarily on aesthetics and design, and those are pretty solid here.
All Scarlet/Violet sprite animations ripped by adamsb0303!
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