Bagged Worm, a product from Pine Co.

204: Pineco

Here's a Pokemon that confused us as a child. Pineco is quite visibly pine cone-like, so it would stand to reason this thing is a Grass type. But nope! It's Bug! Mono-Bug, even! Well, its category spells it out as a "Bagworm" Pokemon, but 9-year-old us had no clue what those were!

Of course, these days, bagworms are actually up there as one of our favorite insects. These moth larvae build a hidey-hut out of various plant matter and their own silk. It's just such a neat and fascinating behavior! So Pineco is a bit of a misleading name, as they're very clearly meant to be cartoon bagworms. And that's lovingly stylized through their eyes peering out from underneath some "leaf bits" they've glued to themselves.

It's a design that's hard to talk about due to how simultaneously simple and detailed it is, with big segments of it drawn out individually, while the Pokemon itself doesn't have a ton going on with it. You pretty much just see its eyes. It IS on the other hand, somewhat presented as if the whole "clump" of plant matter here is just the bagworm itself. I do also like the spike on its head, obviously paralleling the "stem" of a bagworm's home, which is where they both dangle, but also looking a bit like a tree fruit's stem.

That said though, Pineco is absolutely wonderful despite how much I'm struggling to find words to say about it. It's so not often that a Pokemon is like, 95% inactive but isn't directly a cocoon. A Pokemon so dangerously close to just looking like an object that it doesn't even look like anything but when you take nothing but its silhouette into account. Sure, a solid presence is all a design like this can really have, but it has a strong presence in spades, especially with its somewhat unusual shape.

That's no moon, that's a space station.

205: Forretress

Forretress we feel a little less strongly about, but it's still an interesting take, especially for a creature that decidedly doesn't go in a "moth" route in any way. Normally, female bagworms stay in a caterpillar state their whole lives while males do the flying, but Forretress is very clearly something else. At this point, it almost looks like more of a walnut monster with a thick outer shell that can clack together and hide the vulnerable innards. Fitting enough for a Bug/Steel bagworm-esque creature!

It even goes off of the "fortress" idea with having appendages that look a bit like cannons sticking out the side of it. Neat! We think the most endearing feature about it thought are the unassumingly little eyes, seemingly peering out from the dark void within its shell.

It perhaps doesn't hit a ton on the appeal specific to bagworms, but it does build off of bagworms in a neat way. It's yet another example of these early Pokemon just kind of making up their own creature and running with it. This pinecone-shaped bug? Sure, it turns into a big ol' shelled creature that is also somehow an insect. Neat!