So I did a little review of random fusions I made on the fan-game Pokemon: Infinite Fusion generator a while back, and it was pretty popular with readers so I've basically been copy-pasting some interesting designs and doing short little write-ups on commute. I actually had this second article ready, but I was waiting to release it after finishing the Indigo Disk. Thanks to real-life stuff, however, I decided to release this a bit earlier since this is an article that's basically done.
And anyway, I think this is a nice way for me to be able to do some relatively minimum-effort content in terms of monster-reviewing since I don't really have to understand a whole new game's lore or whatnot. Just some reviews. And I guess I can make this a series. I just don't know how regular (or, more likely, irregular) these reviews will be, since I might be able to talk about 10 designs in a day, or maybe 2 over several weeks.
I did a more in-depth explanation of the fusion process in the first review. Basically, the Infinite Fusion calculator has two different combinations, with one Pokemon as the body, and the other Pokemon as the head + colours, and vice-versa. But the most interesting ones are the crowdsourced custom sprites for the fusions, the bulk of which is what we'll be talking about here!
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Starting off with a couple of fun gear fusions, Klinklang + Staryu goes for the obvious route... but sometimes the obvious route is good! They just replaced the Klinklang gears with Staryus, and it does help that Staryu already has a gear-esque golden core that can 'interlock'. The fact that Staryu already has some ring vibes to it helps with the theme of the primary ring around it.
I really do like this Ivysaur + Klink fusion, too. Replacing Ivysaur's regular leaves with gears is obvious but nice enough, but then putting Klink's wacky mismatched eyes on Ivysaur really does elevate this fusion, I think. One of the commenters on the previous post noted that I could do entire reviews based on a single Pokemon fusion, and the Klink family honestly seems to be a great one to do... eventually.
Right now, I'm just having too much fun with random fusions. Not all of them have to be epic. Like Slowpoke + Bulbasaur here. Putting Slowpoke's head on a chibi body is cute enough, but I love the nice touch of swapping out Bulbasaur's bulb with a Shellder, referencing the quasi-symbiotic relationship between Slowpoke and Shellder.
I just really like this visual image of the Sandile + Doduo fusion over here, with two entire crocodile heads sprouting out of Doduo's body. The screaming one on the right is cute!
I generally only pick one of each combination of fusions, but Hoothoot + Bellsprout gave me a rather hilarious duo! The one on the left, with the Bellsprout body and Hoothoot's head, has the typical gloriousness of honestly just anything on Bellsprout's slender, vine-like body. But the reverse version, with Hoothoot's leg acting as the 'trunk' and Hoothoot's body being like a weird 'fruit' coloured like Bellsprout is so weird. I actually think having a mixture of Bellsprout's eyes and Hoothoot's beak really does make this fusion look especially adorable. Is it a plant that hops around like an owl, or an owl whose body is leafy and fruity?
I still do have time for more badass fusions, of course -- Alakazam + Glaceon here looks particularly cool. You could see this as a final boss or an elite enemy in an ice-themed area in a JRPG, couldn't you? I like that they picked the Mega Alakazam design for the base, too, since the idea is that instead of manipulating spoons, Glaceakazam here is manipulating snow and creating little snow-dogs or something. Not quite tiny snow Eevees or Glaceons, but the effect is there and fits well with Alakazam's vibe.
I really just like Forretress + Heracross. Another one that takes inspiration from the Mega form, this fusion basically takes Forretress's silver-purple chunks as armour around its head and giant chunky arms. I love that the end result looks like some kind of barnacle or crustacean kaiju, and replacing the central beetle horn with one of Forretress's giant cannon is a nice touch.
Oh! A cute! Koffing's idea as a floating gas-dispersing mine is changed a bit with this fusion with Vileplume. Vileplume's already simplistic face is just simultaneously adorable and sinister attached to anything, but I love that they swapped out Koffing's regular crater-vents for mushrooms coloured like Vileplume's flower. Yes, Vileplume's a rafflesia flower instead of a fungus, but the concept is pretty cool regardless and presumably he's ejecting spores to create more gas-fungus-flower hideous abominations.
Dunsparce + Magneton here is kinda cute, too, with three squishy Dunsparces having Magneton magnets poking out of the sides of their heads. Unlike Magneton, who's just held together with magnetism, the Dunsparces here actually visibly have their tails coiled together, like a particularly twisted balloon!
They don't add a lot of Pokemon beyond Generation III, but I love the selection that they picked! Pyukumuku, the disturbing gut-vomiting sea cucumber, being one of the choices they made is excellent. And while I had a couple of different Pyukumuku fusions that I almost included here, this fusion with Pinsir is particularly great. Eliminating Pinsir's arms, turning his giant stag beetle murder-claws into two rubbery extensions, and most of all turning Pinsir's fang-filled nightmare mouth into... well, a different kind of nightmare mouth, one that's yawning open for Pyukumuku's gut-hand to spiral out like a ghost appendage? Pretty great.
Sometimes you really don't have to think too much and let the design combination speak for itself. Wailord + Exeggutor here makes use of the Alolan Exeggutor design, only instead of balancing a cluster of heads on top of an already ridiculous coconut tree neck, Exegglord here balances an entire fucking Wailord on the tip of the tree. Could you just see this goofy-ass thing waddling across the battlefield ready to throw down with the Forretress/Heracross fusion above? I love that it's got a little whale tail at the back of the Exeggutor lower body.
I tried to mix some Pokemon with their evolutions, but not a lot of them really impressed me. These two did, though. Staryu + Starmie gives us the rather hilariously obvious answer of having Staryu's colours pasted on the 'front' star of Starmie's anatomy. I've always found it wacky that Starmie is basically two stars pasted together. That's cute.
Shroomish + Breloom is also just adorable, mixing Shroomish's face, stubby feet and 'hair' with the upper toadstool cap of Breloom's "hat". Very cute! I like Shroomish, but I could've seen an alternate timeline where they decided to make Shroomish and Breloom's design closer to each other.
The various iterations of combining Magnemites with Magnetons, or Doduos with Dodrios all end up with the hilarious but obvious gag of just changing the number of heads that are there. I think Beldum + Metang here are a bit more creative, looking like a wacky vehicle from Star Wars or something. I like that the spriter interprets this combination as a halfway-evolution between Metang and Metagross, having a half 'X' on Beltang's face.
Oooooooh that's adorable. Exeggcute + Exeggutor ends up with each Exeggcute head separately evolving into its own legged body. Each of them has Exeggutor's colours, with stubby feet and hair and everything. I really like this one!
Speaking of Shroomish, this combination with Venonat is just adorable. Honestly, if not for its similarity with two existing Pokemon, I could see this as a ghoulish little fairy-gremlin living in the deep jungle, with its 'hair' seemingly covering most of his face, and only the adorable little hands and fangs poking out under a mass of hair. I say 'seemingly covering', because those red orbs? Those are Venonat's compound eyes. Creepy and cute, just like when you realize that real-life scallops have like a couple dozen eyes lining their 'lips'.
I don't have much to say about this Misdreavus + Unown fusion. I just really like the monochrome and the rather unimpressed singular eye on Misdreavus's head. Her pearl necklace have also transformed into a bunch of eyeballs, too.
Chandelure is one of my all-time favourite Pokemon, and honestly the entire line is ripe for me doing a 'entire article made up of fusions of this Pokemon' review. But right now, just have this very pleasant and honestly very sleek-looking Chandelure + Breloom fusion. I like how the dinosaurian anatomy works pretty well with Chandelure's colours, but particularly how the 'toadstool' seems to have burnt and the hellish flames are sprouting from inside.
Litwick seems to be one that's adorable mixed with a lot of smaller Pokemon. Litwick + Oddish here is just cute, having Oddish's general body layout, but with Litwick's melting candle body and three tiny fire fuses replacing Oddish's leaves.
I couldn't decide which of these Litwick + Solosis fusions to include, so I did both! Both of them basically has Solosis's design of being a central nucleus covered with a blob of cytoplasm. The one on the left is pretty simple, They just turned Litwick round, pasted Solosis's diamond-mouthed face on it, and stuck it into the cytoplasm blob. The little cytoplasm-green-flame is the somewhat-literal cherry on the top, though.
And the one on the right? I love the visual image of the melting candle wick, and putting it on a nucleus is great... but replacing the cytoplasm with ghostly flame in an almost Gastly-like manner is a pretty great creative choice from the spriter.
Mr. Mime is another one that I can do a whole article out of, and he's not an obvious one like Grimer or Gastly or Solosis or Porygon! But obviously fan artists are going to capitalize on Mr. Mime's fandom reputation of being 'creepy'. I don't actually find Mr. Mime that creepy, but I absolutely love this Mr. Mime + Dusknoir fusion that goes full-in on the psycho-clown vibes. Look at that giant Pennywise mouth! They really lean into some creepy-clown aesthetics with this thing, and swapping Dusknoir's weird-looking plastic collar with Mr. Mime's horns, arranging it like the 'hair' of the monstrous clown-head? Pretty great!
Mr. Mime + Tangela. It's just disturbing, and the fact that there's a smiling Mr. Mime head in the midst of the mass of tentacle-hands, each of which end up in a mime hand... yeah, pretty creepy but hilarious.
The one on the left is Zekrom + Articuno. And I'm just picking it randomly because... to be honest, I really didn't have much to say about much of the legendary fusions. A lot of them just become a lot more elaborate and over-the-top, like a Final Fantasy boss or a final-form Digimon, and those are honestly not my cup of tea. Hell, I don't even find a lot of them cool... but this one is all right. I think Zekrom's colours are just cool in general. I don't doubt I'll eventually find a bunch that I like as I experiment with the many many fusion options, but I didn't find any that I particularly like at the moment.
I do really like Suicune + Klink (or it might be Klang) here, which is probably not something that people will instantly jump to as being 'cool', but this mechanized, robotic version of Suicune is pretty neat! I like that it's a bit chunkier and more awkward-looking than what you think a 'robotic Suicune' would look like, and I particularly love the artwork on Suicune's giant forehead-crystal being interpreted as a weirdly-shaped gear. But the best part is that Suicune's two whip-like tendrils are now giant chunky gears that trail behind from the forehead crystal.
Dialga + Diglett here is just hilarious, particularly since Dialga's head shape is already phallic. Associating it with Diglett's face, and removing a lot of the plastic toy details on Dialga, makes the whole thing look even more ridiculous. Love that Dialga's feet (which already look pretty artificial) are planted to the ground is also fun!
Ooooh. Ooooh, look at this fucking thing. Cradily's another one that's ripe for an article of its own, but look at this thing. It gets more disturbing the more you look at it! They basically swapped Zapdos's black feathers with Cradily's dicks tentacles, and even Zapdos's talons have been replaced with dicks tentacles. The colours just add to how prominent the dicks tentacles are, even moreso than the original Cradily design. I actually do find putting Cradily's head combined with some Zapdos spikes on a long, elongated neck to be legitimately, unironically badass looking, making this actually feel like someone who can kick your ass instead of 'ha lol look at the dickbird'. I think eliminating the fake eyespots and making the real Cradily eyes look more prominent ends up making that head instantly look more threatening than goofy.
Here are a bunch that I slapped 'random' on, and I'll always try to break up these articles with a bunch of randoms before going to themes like 'legendaries' or 'fusions of an evolutionary line' or 'fusions with itself'. Omanyte + Bayleef just already looks pleasant with Omanayte's blue, but the combination of spiral-shaped shellfish replacing Bayleef's necklace, and the glorious artwork of Omanyte's squid head on a dinosaur's body is just adorable.
Vileplume + Ditto is just... a regular rafflesia, but with the eyes sprouting out of the center of the flower instead of a impish little body below it. I love the adorable Ditto smile on it, but having the eyes be glowing red like Vileplume's adds that additional layer of sinisterness that I love Vileplume for.
We'll end this relatively shorter review with ten 'fused with itself' fusions, which always feels like a way for people to either interpret like a 'prime' or 'pure' version of a Pokemon species... or see a weird, alternate evolution.
Like Wobbuffet here! Double-Wobbuffet... swaps the anatomy of the 'main body' and the 'tail', with Wobbuffet's traditional blue body with the >_< face reduced into a tail, and the main body now being coloured with the black colours and the eyes of the tail. It looks a bit more disturbing, more alien, and it's been a long-running implication that the tail might be the 'core' of the organism, and I assume this is a version where the tail's grown and developed enough strength to fight on its own.
Double Ferrothorn here just looks supremely cool. All the extra spikes just makes it look like something from a 90's comic, and I love that the fusion has caused it to sprout like a massive set of chompers not dissimilar to Mega Glalie or something. I like the sprite artwork on making the spiky vine-arms much more threatening... but I think this design still has a lot of charm built into it like the mistletoe leaves and the 'emo eyeliner' leaves.
Double Trapinch just turns into an utterly horrifying design. Is that an Ekans it's eating? This thing reminds me of something, but I'm not quite sure what. But it's such a weirdly unnatural design to see Trapinch's eyes be on either side of his mouths. It just fucks with our mind, who tries to look for 'normal' heads, even though I'm sure there's probably a bunch of worms or something out there whose eyes are arranged like this. In any case, the spritework here really wins in selling this design.
A lot of the fused-with-itself legendaries fall into the same artistic choice of just being more elaborate versions of themselves, and a lot of them (particularly the Sinnoh/Unova ones) just give me a headache. And honestly, it's not like I like this double-fused Deoxys, but I appreciate the concept of having it have traits of every Deoxys form. The arms of both attack and defense form, the long, elongated shoulderpads and cranium of the speed form, and even the head is a mixture of normal, attack and speed.
Now, I'm not saying being generally 'cool' doesn't have its place, but I just didn't find it with the fused-with-itself Legendaries. Now, non-legendaries, on the other hand... just look at double-Armaldo (with a correct number of limbs for an insect, even though he's a radiodont instead of an insect) and double-Nidoking here! I particularly like the insane kaiju-looking Nidoking.
Double-Chimchar turns the monkey's body black for some reason, but also sets his head on fire. I think there might be an in-joke here because there's a lot of references to other properties on this game, but I really do like the visual image of Chimchar's head being permanently on fire. It probably doesn't hurt it, but it's a fucking monkey, so you can imagine just how much more destructive this screeching, mischievous shit is going to be.
Double-Bulbasaur! It looks happy, though it also looks like it needs some eyedrops. I like that the Bulbasaur's bulb seems to have matured prematurely, having turned red like Ivysaur/Venusaur's, and even has little versions of the leaves around it.
I don't really have anything smart to say about Larvesta + Larvesta. It just looks really cool, being a caterpillar that's on fire. This design uses a bit more blacks compared to the original Larvesta, or at least makes them more prominent next to the fiery-red abdomen... and it's a very common colour palette, but it's still a very cool one, isn't it?
You know they're going to do something creepy with Shuppet-Shuppet, and I love that they took the concept explored with Mega Bannette, but just doing it with Shuppet's body. The stitches and the pink 'inner body' leaking out is pretty well-done, and I love that one of it is designed to look like Mega Shuppet's tongue here. The best part of this design, of course, is having one of the Shuppet fusion's eyes stitched shut. Creepy!
No comments:
Post a Comment