People really do be out here calling this a "legendary dog"

243: Raikou

Now it's onto Gen 2's Legendaries, and the trio is a bit of a mixed bag. Raikou itself is a cool saber-tooth tiger design, with its stripes looking a little more wild and lightning bolt-ey. There is actually a bit of a cool look between having the top-most part of the design be made up of cloudy shapes while sharper, lighting-like shapes jut out from that, so it looks a bit like if a thunder cloud were an animal. That's a genuinely pretty neat way to do a lightning tiger!

From then-on it's not terribly exciting, it's a generally cool tiger monster that also has enough gravitas to it to feel worth of the "Legendary" status. For that it's pretty good at doing what it does, it just doesn't poke any of our particular buttons that get either of us too excited about the design.

Personal Score: 7/10

Hey, Entei, your hair is on fire.

244: Entei

Entei on the other hand, isn't very interesting at all. It's cool to some extent, sure, but it feels notably more grounded than even Raikou did. There is an attempt at a visual motif with its spikes and smoky back looking like a mountain range a bit, but it still doesn't really look like something that aught to be classed as a "volcano" Pokemon. It's a plenty competent design, it just doesn't have any extra "oomph" to really get attached to.

Personal Score: 5.5/10

Blue canid from a 2000s Nintendo video game associated with gemstones and has a weirdo dude fawn after them (not that one)

245: Suicune

And then there's the golden child Suicune, the lucky dog-thing that got a game all to itself. And it's not hard to see why; it's easily the best of the three between a nice color palette, mysterious intrigue, and iconic head crest. It's also generally the most imaginative of the three, not being a tiger or some lion-adjacent creature, but rather a quadrupedal mammal and that's all that's really obvious about it.

Its design is also notably cleaner than the other two. Raikou and Entei espeically were a little visually noisy, when Suicune's only real problem are that the diamond patterns on its body is a little too obvious? But other than that, it looks sleek and cool with very little detracting from it. Between the two of us, Luna appreciates it more (the cool hair and ribbon-like tails helps!!) but we can ultimately agree it's a pretty nice design.

We feel like there may eventually be a point where we'll come across a Pokemon where our opinions vary enough to make a point of it in the review itself (which may be happening sooner rather than later!), but as for how we usually feel things out, we end up scoring it based on either how both of us feel or just giving it the bigger score out of the two of us. Like for Vixi this would be more of a 7.5/10, but Luna likes it just a smidge more.

Man we're taking this of all Pokemon as a weird opportunity to talk about plurality and how it effects our opinions on things, but realizing our plurality feels like it explains a lot about how we both feel about Suicune. Pre-plurality was always kinda weird with how much I (Vixi) appreciated this thing's design and what it was doing A LOT more than it felt like I liked the thing. There even being plenty of phases where "I" liked the thing more and then not so much again. Post-plurality is like "Oh, that's why, there's a whole-ass other person in my head that likes this thing better than I do."