I need a weapon.

223: Remoraid

Here's a very odd couple of Pokemon. At first glance Remoraid might just look like a fish and little else, mostly unassuming. But then you look closer at its fins and general shape and you might start to see it. An unusually long lower tail fin compared to its upper tail fin, a horn on its nose, and markings on its side that oddly look like a revolver. Yup, Remoraid is a gun.

And here's the beta design in case there were any doubts, where it somehow looked even more unambiguously like a firearm. Yeah, how they got away with this one, who could know. But as much as we're definitely not of the "video games encourage violence" crowd, it probably was a good call to tone down Remoraid's gun-ness. It's still there for the overall theme of the line, but it's a lot easier to pass as just a regular fish.

This is as far as you go!

224: Octillery

And as if Remoraid's existence couldn't get weirder, it just goes and evolves into an octopus of all creatures. It is definitely an evolution based on theme rather than anatomical similarities, seeing how Remoraid goes from a firearm to a cannon. (or in the case of the beta, a tank.) Octillery is a cute octopus with the classic siphon-as-a-mouth design trope, the twist being it fires water and "Octozooka" out of its mouth like a cannon.

It's another Pokemon sadly feeling a little lacking next to its beta counterpart though. Beta Octillery had a carapace on its body, including a helmet-like object on its head. Much like how octopuses irl can grab things like the halves of coconuts or dead bivalves to give themselves a home-made protective shell. All this to give Beta Octillery the look of a tank, simultaneously being the tank itself and a cartoonish lil dude poking their head out of a tank. It's so sad to see this design be on the cutting room floor because it's SO much more neat and interesting than the Octillery we got.

The Beta leak revealed how a lot of Gen 2's less interesting Pokemon used to look cooler; like how Mantine got a way more striking design that was angelic and cute-looking on one side but has a skull face on the other. It's such an odd case where it felt like these Pokemon were designed backwards for some reason, starting with really cool ideas but getting watered down to be a lot more "vanilla" in the finished product. Octillery here being one of the saddest examples.