@ digg
It seems to me like you think that I am complaining that newer Pokemon designs aren't enough like old designs, thus it's bad. That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that there are a lot of designs, old and new, which are terrible. I'm one of the last people that you'll see with the rose-tinted nostalgia glasses. (Side note: I deal with that kind of **** all the time in places like /r/wow and here, and I hate having to fight against the "older is better" circlejerk.) I'm just getting sick of terrible Pokemon designs old or new, you know?
Klefki, I don't like. At all. Cool that you do, but for me it's up there with the hypothetical chair Pokemon. I don't like that it's based around a key ring, fairy type or no, I don't like that it looks like it has a keyhole for a face, and I don't like the fact that it has keys hanging right on it. It looks like something someone made up specifically to sell.
To help illustrate my point, let's look at some of the other old sh*tty pokemon:
Gen I:
Diglet -> Dugtrio was pretty awful.
Voltorb -> Electrode was equally as awful, and served as pretty much living Pokeball bombs.
Farfetch'd was a bad pun and generic looking.
Jynx was blackface.
Gen II:
Pineco was... literally a pinecone.
Mantine was a generic manta ray.
Every @#%^ing deer Pokemon in Gen II and on.
Ledyba was just a Ladybug.
Gen III:
Spinda was a dizzy bear? I don't even know.
Wailmer -> Wailord: "Crap, guys, we've gone three generations without a whale! What do we do!?"
Nosepass. No really, what the hell.
Gen IV:
Spiritomb. It's a bunch of glowy balls with a scary face.
Tangrowth (Tangula was pretty bad too)
Drifloon and Drifblim. They were just weather balloons. I feel like they wanted a ghost/flying but couldn't figure out how to achieve that.
Chingling -> Chimecheo are pretty bad ideas, I'd argue. A windchime Pokemon doesn't appeal to me at all.
Chatot has a cool idea behind it (record your own call), but the music note parrot is pretty friggin' ugly.
Gen V:
Blitzle -> Zebstrika. Electric... zebra? I mean, it's not another electric mouse, but I'm not sure where the zebra came from.
Yamask. A human becoming a Pokemon? Not to mention the design just looks bland to me.
The Vanillite series. Possibly the worst offenders to me. It's ice cream. That's it. That just seems stupid to me, and there's plenty of other special attack ice type concepts they could have used. I would even have taken a snowman over an ice cream cone.
Ferrothorn would be so much cooler if it didn't have the weird leaf-bush-tentacle things.
The Klink series. A gear design for a steel pokemon is great, but I think it came off weird. If it had been maybe some kind of automaton instead of a bunch of gears just thrown together, I think that would have been better.
Chandelure. The idea of candels as Fire/Ghost is great. I love the first two of this series. But the final form fails to impress me for some reason. I think it would have been cooler if it was still a candle instead of a chandelier.
Everything I say here is of course subjective. These are just the Pokemon I don't like. Maybe you like them. Maybe you like all of the ones I posted, and hate my favoties. And that's ok! Great for you. But what I don't like is mostly designs that seem basic or lazy, and a key ring Pokemon seems like that to me. What I like to see in Pokemon are designs that seem original, creative, or cool. I like designs that really pop out, that when you see them make you think "That Pokemon looks really good, I want one!" A key ring pokemon might actually have a lot of thought behind it with the fairy typing and fairies stealing keys and stuff, but it still seems to me like not very far from a lava lamp pokemon, or a car pokemon, or a door. Or ice cream.
But for some examples of my favorites, I really like Dusknoir, Aurorus, Malamar, Pangoro, Milotic, Gardevoir, Victreebel, Volcarona, Litwick, Eelektross, and Glaceon, to name a few.
Edited, Oct 4th 2013 6:13pm by IDrownFish