921: Pawmi

Another Gen, another Pika-clone. And Pawmi isn't even one of the more exciting ones. It has SOMETHING interesting going on and being set up; it not only has electrically charged cheek-pouches, but also paw pads that are electrically charged too. Pawmi is actually posed a bit more like a Pichu where it's not great at casting electricity yet, so it has to charge up by rubbing its paws on its cheeks first.

Use the Force, Pawmo!

922: Pawmo

Wait a second?! A Pikaclone?!?! Evolving?!?!?! Is that even legal??????????

Unfortunately, it's extremely undercooked. Like, what do we have to go off of here? It's just Pawmi but it's standing up. It's so not-different they had to temporarily turn it a different shade of orange so that this was a bit more obviously Pawmo. It gains the Fighting type but that's easily the most exciting this Pokemon gets. I don't know, it's just such a nothingburger Pokemon.

Pawmi. Pawmi never changes.

923: Pawmot

And we guess the logic here is that Pawmi > Pawmo > Pawmot is meant to be Pichu > Pikachu > Raichu, but still. We think this line could've gotten away with just being two stages rather than three. Cut Pawmi out and this line wouldn't be missing out on much.

Pawmot is at least a little different, but it's still. Almost entirely the same thing. Just bigger and a little fuzzier. Like, this is Poliwhirl into Poliwrath levels of uneventful evolutions. But we guess that's kinda the rub with a design like this. There's plenty of times we've wished a Pokemon held onto the charm of its pre-evo rather than change so drastically. If you already liked Pawmi and Pawmo, a bigger one of those in Pawmot is probably exactly what you would've wanted. If you're like us and are already aggressively ambivalent to them, then of course Pawmot isn't gonna do us any good.

Speaking of rubbing, Pawmot at least does something a little more interesting with the whole being-a-Pikaclone thing. Rather than charging up electricity in their cheeks, they fire bolts out of their paw pads. With it supposedly rubbing its hands together to work up a bolt of lightning. This already goes fine with the whole fighting thing, but they apparently even work as defibrillators, with Pawmot being one of two Pokemon that learn the new move "Revival Blessing", a move that outright revives a teammate from being fainted.

Other than that, eh. We've always wanted these Pikaclones to get their own Raichu, but we hoped they'd be a bit more exciting than this. Thankfully this is the only one of two designs that just feels outright bad to us.