Let's Talk About Pokemon - Varoom and Revavroom

Scarlet/Violet model gifs ripped by Twitter user adamsb0303!

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965: Varoom

Ooh, another Poison type! And what a fun little guy! Varoom is a little cartoon single-cylinder engine of such cartoony proportions, it looks like it'd fit right into a rubberhose cartoon. It's even animated that way a bit, with that nozzle of a schnoz (Schnozzle) stretching and inflating despite being made of metal.

We like how even proportion-wise it's even shaped a little bit like an animal, but not so much so that it becomes one. It mostly comes with how the body is formed around the metallic hide and how it has an exhaust pipe for a tail. Varoom's a lot of fun! Even if it shares a problem with its evolution that we'll get into in a minute.

You wouldn't catch a car

966: Revavroom

This Pokemon was actually "revealed" before the game's release, but never formally so. It'd appear in trailers and promotional images as a big boss Pokemon, but we never found out its name or actual appearance until the game came out.

This Pokemon is one employed by the game's obligatory "villainous" team, Team Star, being installed as the engines of their bigass "Starmobile" cars, where they pose as tremendous boss fights, but nonetheless are still "Pokemon" so they get to participate in Pokemon battles normally. It's better than that one time one of the Gamecube games introduced a Groudon mech only for it to be a vehicle to throw more Pokeballs. We just hope future games do more "Pokemon, but artificially supped up by humans", cause it's a neat premise for boss fights without either just inventing some non-catchable Pokemon creature or just. A bigger than usual Pokemon.

Anyway, back then, we only saw Revavroom as a big living engine block, with a single eye and covered in stylized exhaust pipes with purple-colored "splatter". But easily Revavroom's most eye-catching feature is how its mouth is actually situated ABOVE its head! It's the radial set of teeth with the big tongue sticking out of it!

There's even a fun bit of speculative ecology around it, with how it's set to make the sound of a revving engine to scare and intimidate other Pokemon. Which is such a fun idea, if you're gonna turn an engine into an animal! It's such a neat and fun design! But there's unfortunately one little deal-breaker that's sadly kept this thing from getting up there into our legion of absolute favorites.

Revavroom is apparently a sentient engine because it's a "poison that entered and inspirited an engine left in a scrap-processing plant." So we have yet another Pokemon that is a pollutant brought to life, to join the ranks of Grimer, Koffing, and Garbodor. In fact, there's theories that the "poison" that inhabits Revavroom is in and of itself a Grimer that got stuck in a car engine and just became the car engine. Theories because we never get to know what resides in this line's innards otherwise, it's kept fairly vague. But either way, so far so good!

It's also said to attach itself to rocks and makes something of a vehicle-shaped body out of them. This is supposedly because it extracts minerals and fuels from these rocks in order to keep its engine running. And there's fun to be had in the idea of a pollutant creature that is all three: The fossil fuel, the fossil fuel processer, and the fossil fuel guzzler.

Sadly though, in execution, we're not a fan of its stony body. Props for trying their best to get this thing to feasibly work as a "wild animal", but we kinda would almost prefer if Revavroom was just attached to an actual vehicle instead of this rock-car that feels a bit like the design equivalent of circle-pegging a square hole.

And probably the most frustrating thing about the design, they sacrifice having a funny floating sentient engine monster or said engine monster living inside a discarded junker of a car in favor of this fake rock-car thing, and they don't even USE that car body! They float around instead of riding on the ground!! What?!? WE DON'T EVEN LIKE THAT FAKE CAR BODY BUT

We like you a lot, Revavroom, we really do. But we want to LOVE you so badly. Still though... it probably says a lot about how good this Gen is when the sentient, cycloptic engine with a funny mouth is easily our biggest heartbreak from this lineup.

Personal Score: 9/10

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