Something something lily pad pun. Badum-dish

270: Lotad

Running into a new pair of Pokemon lines that take inspiration from Japanese yokai, we have Lotad here representing a Kappa! And not the Twitch emote kind. THESE Kappa are amphibious humanoids with turtle shells and a duck-like beak, as well as having a "dish" or crater on their heads that holds water.

Taking this, Game Freak made an oddball little turtle-esque creature with six pairs of adorable little nubs for legs and a lily pad on their head for holding water in. Just like kappa! How brilliant! The expression that's made grumpy by the dish covering the eye is an especially nice touch. Shame it's not true to the model, as much as we realize that's mostly just an angle thing.

She/Her, They/Them, Cool/Hat

271: Lombre

The kappa inspirations become extremely obvious here, now that it's standing on two legs and has the dish properly on its head. Though we do feel like here it's that you can really see how Gen 3 started a problem of unnecessarily segmenting designs in a rather rigid manner. The way its chest pattern just ends at extremely abrupt 90-degree angles really doesn't look great, and really could've done with looking more naturalistic. Other than that, it's a bit of a shape it's left behind so much of Lotad's beautiful weirdness, but it still has a weird flavor that's just inherent to kappas.

🧡 Also, surely I wasn't the only one who saw this as a kid, but... for the longest time I read its mouth as having a huge lower lip or underbite. But no, that's a beak, actually, and the red part is just the top half of the beak.

No! The rhythm made me do it!

272: Ludicolo

Ludicolo, on the other hand... feels like it goes a bit overboard. We can certainly give it points for uniqueness, there's most definitely nothing else in the world that's a dancing kappa with a sombrero and a poncho but. Who stepped back and decided all of these elements most definitely mesh together well? This really felt like they had several ideas for a lily pad-wearing creature and crammed them together into... whatever this thing is. The design really not helped by looking a little too close to a Mexican caricature to be totally comfortable. It's hard to hate or be mad at Ludicolo of course, but it's a design that presents an obscene amount of questions.