Zubat

Oh man, OH MAN. We're kicking into high gear here! Zubat is pretty much the exact transitional point between the more mundane animal-based pokemon and the weirder, wackier, freakier stuff that truly defines the series. From here on out, most of these reviews are gonna be a lot more passionate and detailed, especially the very next couple coming up. I'm already getting emotional. Thank goodness I have Zubat to ease me into things.

There's a lot to love about this annoying little shit. Zubat is so common and so frustrating in the game's cave environments that many people outright resent it as a pokemon, but how can you possibly dislike this design? It's a beautiful, blue and purple, hairless bat with nothing but a horrible, gaping mouth for a face. Its total lack of eyes is so cool looking, and even feels like a plausible evolutionary path for a cave-dwelling animal equipped with sonar.

Zubat, unlike an actual bat, seems to remain in its subterranean habitat through its waking hours, so we're basically seeing a fully "troglobytic" mammal, though they're lucky that enough other pokemon (and humans) apparently wander through caves to support their canon diet of blood. It's also really neat how its legs have evolved into nothing but a pair of long, thin spines, or perhaps singular, long digits for hanging off a cave ceiling.

The last, but still significant characteristic of Zubat is that its evolutionary line remain the only flying/poison dual types in the franchise, though perhaps another case in which poison typing was simply handed out to everything "spooky" in the first generation. Poison sure isn't ever mentioned in their pokedex.

I knew this had to start happening sooner or later, but this is the first pokemon I'm going to have to rate a little differently at every evolutionary stage.