Gimmighoul and Gholdengo

Welp, we're up to Pokemon #999 here, which means its evolved form is Pokemon #1000. For this unique and special occasion, they decided to make a Pokemon themed around money, a ghost type associated with gold coins. It's kind of cute, I guess; it's a grey, slightly flattened humanoid shape, like a gingerbread man, with goggle-like, black rimmed yellow eyes, metallic black antennae and a matching tail, sometimes seen using the three feeler-like appendages to carry a gold coin on its back like a shell. Yeah, it's TINY! I like the concept well enough, and what the design aims for is cute, but it feels a little undercooked. That cookie-like body shape doesn't look that good to me, and if they wanted it to be flat, I think it might have looked better with perfectly flat edges, like the whole creature is a humanoid "coin," right? The little antenna things feel kind of off, too, I don't really like how they bend just once and then stick out so horizontally.

Gimmighoul is part of a little sidequest where you have to collect 999 coins from its "roaming" form, which always runs away. If you actually want one as a Pokemon, you have to battle and capture its "chest form," which isn't actually a form, but just a Gimmighoul inside of a treasure chest. It's Pokemon's answer to an actual treasure chest type Mimic, even if that's technically what Voltorb already was.

If you do collect 999 coins, then you can evolve Chest Form Gimmighoul into Pokemon #1000:

...And that Pokemon is Gholdengo. A goofy looking humanoid figure made up of flexible, golden tubes for its arms, legs, torso, head, and dreadlock-like hairdo, all of which is supposedly formed from stacks of coins. We just have to take their word for it, since there's no visual indication that its smooth, homogeneous looking form is made up of smaller pieces. A few scaly-looking lines here and there might have helped. Maybe its ghostly power actually fuses the coins into one solid piece? We're just told the coins are "stacked" together, though. Man, I'm really getting hung up on this detail, aren't I? It's just stylized, that's all, no big deal! It's just...it really REALLY looks more like a guy who's also some kind of cheese stick. If I saw this drawing with no other context, that's exactly what I would have assumed I was looking at. A string cheese mascot. Maybe that's also because there's already a tradition of string cheese mascots with the same kind of head shape and hair:

Heck, this one's even got a surf board! Wait...we didn't mention that yet. Yeah, Gholdengo's got a surf board:

This is a very silly, goofy Pokemon concept, which is perfectly okay, and in fact something I strongly advocate. Do I necessarily like the execution of this particular concept? Not especially. I think it could have looked better. I disagree, however, with those who detest this as a choice for the 1000th Pokemon. A friendly, fun-loving, radical surfin' ghost made of gold treasure is perfectly thematic to that! I guess people hoped it would be something deeper and more serious, I don't know, like another god-dragon kind of Pokemon, but how many times are we gonna go through those motions? It doesn't mean anything anymore. The only thousandth Pokemon that might have been meta enough in any fresh new way might have been like, I don't know, a humanoid based on Ken Sugimori, or a Rotom-esque electronic Pokemon based on a gameboy loaded with Pokemon Green. Or, hey, how about a digivice? Yeah! A Rotom-possessed Digimon Digivice! That should have Pokemon 1000!