Because of her mysterious behavior, I have decided to name her Mystery.

116: Horsea

Seahorses are pretty rad, and Horsea is no exception. It's not a super adventurous design, but at the same time, not every design in a monster game has to be. Does Horsea really need to exist for any reason other than expanding the biodiversity of the Pokemon world or even just because the artist that drew it liked seahorses? Not really. It's just there! And it's really good at being there!

It's a perfectly competent cartoon seahorse, complete with a little nozzle for a mouth/snout, looking ready to shoot water out of. That is kinda all there is to it. While I do generally wish it'd do something a little more interesting, I can't say I can think of any meaningful way that I'd change it, so it's plenty good by me!

It's not just a phase, mom!

117: Seadra

Seadra, for my money, is a mark cooler than Horsea, at least on concept. It takes a seahorse's rough-looking exterior into account by giving it a lot of spikes and scales, which add a lot of definition to the design. While there's plenty of spiky seahorse species out there, Seadra totally feels like not just a seahorse, but also like they worked a bit of Turkeyfish into the design too. I think you could reasonably criticize it for being a little hard to read, just due to how spiky it is, but for me it just makes it fit in so well with the undersea creature vibe. The only thing I'd say is outright missing is a secondary typing like Poison to really accentuate the Turkeyfish-like aspects, or Dragon with how much seahorses are associated with dragons. But, I guess that'd have to wait until Gen 2...