Mega Scrafty

Let's get this out of the way first: before anyone ever saw this design, a leak spoiled the existence of "a scrafty with a white hood," and the absolute worst kinds of people you can imagine thought that was the funniest thing they'd heard for reasons I don't need to ruin your day with. I'm not equipped to analyze that with any nuance, or presume whether anyone in the development process ever had the same thought, but the final reveal of the design only made the trolling worse, and could at the very least be lessened by a future palette swap.

But even in a timeline where a white hood carries no negative connotations and there's nothing off about putting it on a Pokemon they officially refer to as a "hoodlum," it's still possibly the lowest-effort Mega there is. The shed skin just changes color, and gets a little baggier? That's it??

Restoring the usual yellow-orange of Mega Scrafty's exuvia gives you something that you could all too easily mistake for a slightly different drawing of a regular Scrafty, which means this design already fails to achieve even as unique a silhouette as some of the other "subtlest" megas. With the shed skin being this Pokemon's core visual gimmick, they could and should have done much more than just bleach it. Ever notice there's no place for Scrafty's head crest in its hood? I figured that was because the skin was left over from Scraggy. For a mega, they could have perhaps given it a shed skin that looks more like Scrafty, and changed Scrafty itself a bit more. Alternatively, they could have draped the little lizard in a whole thick collection of old skins, like someone wearing many layers of overcoats. It could have been flaring out in an array of long, whiplike tatters, or there even could have been a couple of animate lizard skins hanging around like little decoys, maybe even with an ability that gives it an automatic substitute doll? There's so much better you can do with the concept! And now they never will!

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