924: Tandemaus

If you're a fan of rodents, this Gen still has you covered! Perhaps THESE are meant to be the Gen's true common rodent Pokemon, but ingame they seem a little too remote and uncommon to fill in for that, at least compared to Lechonk.

Either way, Tandemaus has clearly gone to the Bewear school of design. In that, in a bubble, this design isn't all that remarkable. It's just little Sanrio mascot characters with the suggestion of clothing, and the entire gimmick is that there's two of them. But the flavor of the Pokemon is what excels it to be something cool.

You married Tandemaus? And got BUSSAY!

925: Maushold

When this Pokemon is ready to evolve, they do so seemingly at random and don't really evolve so much as they. Y'know. Get busy. Stuff the turkey. Passionately hug. Test the mattress. Preheat the oven. Settle it in Smash. Do two-person push-ups. Do the no-pants dance. If you're still reading after that, its evolution is actually just the pair from before but now they have kids! There's even "Family of Three" or "Family of Four" versions specifically. Of course, the Pokedex plays coy and just says the small ones "just appeared one day", but c'mon.

It's a funny little design that gets a lot of its charm simply from the fact that they're a little family of cartoon mice that boink offscreen to "evolve", springing their kids on you. Apparently even ignoring Everstones. You cannot stop Tandemaus from reproducing.

They also get the signature move Population Bomb, which is one of those random multi-hit moves, but cranked up to 11. Or.. just 10. It can hit anywhere between 1 to 10 times, combining this with its Technician ability to make it deceptively dangerous. Albeit its danger factor is largely up to chance, especially since it's otherwise mediocre in the stats department.

They're at least animated adorably. The kids participate in fighting, but the parents are always putting themselves in front of them to take the actual hits. Aww! Even in the picnic cleaning minigame, they don't like it when you try to scrub their kids.

Either way, it's a funny concept for a Pokemon executed well enough. Like we said, it feels up there with Bewear, where the flavor elevates it from being a kind of middling design. It's a design almost made specifically to elicit the reaction the fanbase had towards it.