If Wishiwashi wasn't cool enough for you, how about DEAD Wishiwashi?!

902: Basculegion

Basculin was easily one of the weirdest Pokemon in Gen 5, seemingly existing just to be the region's Magikarp analog without having a Gyarados analog to go with it. But that ends now! Basculin in the Hisui region evolve into Basculegion, a huge fish shrouded with souls, apparently the lingering will of its kind that died on the per-mating-season trip upstream, which is pretty metal.

True to real life, there's a number of sea-fish, most famously salmon, that return to the freshwater rivers they were born in to mate and lay eggs. As one would imagine, swimming against a river's stream can be dangerous, especially when there's a number of predators that see this as an opportunity to dine on the poor things. Your Basculegion is carrying the souls of Basculin that have been caught and eaten by Braviary and Ursaring!

Indeed, having the souls congregate around the thing's tailfin to give it far superior swimming power is a cool concept just on its own, but there's also the fact that Basculegion's body shape also vaguely resembles a boat, making this a haunted ship Pokemon, possibly!

What deflates the mood a bit is that the two forms are divided by gender this time. Which normally wouldn't be annoying, but then they make the male a mean demeanor with a wicked stylized mustache and beard, meanwhile the significantly lamer female just looks kinda lethargic and markings on its mouth that looks way too much like lipstick for us to be down with. It makes sense to make this a line with sexual dimorphism given it's a line about a fish's mating season but ehhh. We all know how we feel about using sexual dimorphism in fictional creatures to make a "manly" one and a "girly" one. It's not as egregious as with other Pokemon but still.

But one W at least the male can take home is that beautiful mouth it has. The stylized jaggies are cool but those teeth, while definitely could be even more chaotic, just capture the utter chaos of sharpness a fish's mouth can have. Even that slight amount of crooked teeth is just fishy goodness.

And... weirdly enough, they bothered to give Basculin a new "white stripe" form, which is now in a weird spot. The Pokedex entry states Laventon is counting this as a "regional form", but it's simply written down as "White Stripe Bascluin" rather than "Hisuian Basculin". At a glance we kinda just assumed we caught a blue-stripe form. Ultimately we decided to just stick it at the end of Basculegion's review because, well. It's Basculin with a white stripe alright. I guess interesting to now have a red, white, and blue one for the whole USA trifecta, if you're into that.

We're mostly just happy Basculin got an evolution the poor thing deserved from the start.