In the world of Pokémon, as in life, beauty is only skin deep.
So let’s consider the ugliest skins in Pokémon, sort them in ascending order of repulsiveness, and make fun of them for being a bunch of pizza-faced losers who probably took their sisters to prom and practiced kissing on a dirty old leather wallet that they found on the floor of the subway.
10. Grimmsnarl
Maybe Grimmsnarl doesn’t look like a living nightmare to you. That’s okay, that’s just ignorance. It’ll pass.
See, what makes the final evolution of Impidimp so nauseating is a detail that doesn’t necessarily translate to its animated form. Sure, it looks like it has one of those MCU personal trainers that can double the size of a given Nanjiani with just eight weeks and a nondisclosure agreement, but what you might not know is that all of those muscles are actually its hair. Grimmsnarl’s hair is prehensile, and it uses it to create a 100% hair body suit in the shape of sick gains.
Imagine if Chris Hemsworth started talking to you at a bar, and you suddenly realized that all of his muscles were just a perfectly arranged, multi-layer collection of body hair the color of pale skin. That’s the horror of Grimmsnarl. Okay, pleasant dreams.
9. Binacle
“Here’s my idea for a Pokémon. It’s a barnacle, but it’s made out of hands, but its hands are its heads. Also, it gets more hands and heads the bigger it gets. As a gentle reminder before you give feedback, my father does own the company and he said that I can fire any of you for my birthday.”
8. Garbodor
On a personal note, this one’s hard to admit, since I would die for Trubbish if he asked me to. But as an adult man in my 30s who still picks up a Pokémon game a couple of times a year instead of updating my LinkedIn profile, it’s hard not to take their design prompt of “a giant, broken sack of trash” personally.
7. Toedscool
Want to know what’s even uglier than being ugly? Deciding not to try.
Introduced in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, this Tentacool that your grandma got from the clearance bin at Rite Aid is what happens when character designers come to work hungover and recently hit by a bus. It takes an already unattractive Pokémon and bravely asks the question “What if Paint Bucket Tool, Paint Bucket Tool, Copy, Paste, Rename File?”
6. Arctozolt
We’ve all heard the expression “hat on a hat.” Arctozolt is “hat on a hat,” but both hats are terrible and also there’s some snot coming out of one of them. Adding insult to injurious aesthetics, between its too-small head, its too-big hair, and its thick, cylindrical body, it is a universal truth that if you go far enough back through your ex’s photos, you’ll find out that they dated someone who looked at least passingly like Arctozolt.
5. Magmar
“Let’s make the lovechild of Howard the Duck and Eric Stoltz from Mask and then set it on fire” is a solid pitch on paper, but in practice, it’s just a quarter century of handheld gaming disappointment.
4. Bruxish
Last night, still in a haze after receiving mystical powers from a dying alien, I dreamed that there was a Pokémon that was just Magikarp doing that thing Bugs Bunny used to do where he’d put on makeup and try to seduce Elmer Fudd. When I woke up, I was horrified to realize that my dream had brought Bruxish into being. I go now, into seclusion. I have become too powerful.
3. Orthworm
Orthworm isn’t Orthworm’s fault. It’s a result of man’s hubris – of our willingness to treat the Pokédex the way we treat capitalism, blinding ourselves to the fact that infinite growth isn’t attainable. That at some point, the house of cards must crumble. That at some point, we’ll make a metal worm.
Orthworm is a product of its generation. It’s a Gen IX creature made by artists who long ago stopped letting life inspire them and instead started throwing darts at a wall covered in index cards with nouns written on them. Unfortunately, while “do a mashup of the robot and the worm” is a very fly prompt for a scene in Breakin’ 3, it also brought us this Pokémon, which looks like a teething toy that was recalled for being too emotionally debilitating. It gets a few points thanks to the fact that in German translations, its name was “Schlurm,” which is charming.
2. Cryogonal
You know how the whole point of Pokémon is to sell toys? The soulless, personality-free Cryogonal did just that. It sold the hell out of some Beyblades.
1: Conkeldurr
Imagine a Muppet that gets really aggressive about trying to get your phone number at the gym. That’s Conkeldurr, and he sucks.
