23. Ekans

You guys there’s something super witty about Ekans that I noticed just now, you’re going to be so amazed you didn’t see it before okay ready it involves the name Ekans and what happens if you spell it b—

Oh. Everyone figured that out about twelve years ago? Of course, I was just… making sure.

The sad thing is, that’s pretty much the most interesting observation there is to be made about Ekans. It’s a snake. Not even a very cool snake, just a purple earthwormy one.

Nedroid has an “Inventing Pokemon” game with the rules “Basically all you have to do is combine two things, or take one things and put a face on it. It's easy!”

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Well, Ekans doesn’t even make that much effort. It’s one thing, that already has a face.

Maybe I’m just incapable of appreciating it, being a Pokémon Blue child (Ekans was Red-exclusive), but it’s not much worth training either. It’s got that underpowered Poison typing that, again, is super effective against five whole pokemon of the first 150, and learns no particularly useful attacks.

But far be it from me, that I should write off a pokemon just for being weak and based somewhat uncreatively off a real animal. So here’s some positives: I like its protruding, lifeless eyes, and the gold band and underbelly on its later sprites. They give it a certain classiness.

The Winner:
Ruby and Sapphire

Okay, so you’re going to draw a snake in action. You have some options. You can draw it in a perfectly concentric coil, like its sitting in a basket. Observe: some of the worst Ekans sprites.

OR, you can draw it in a cool, sidewinding, figure eight shape of cosmic relevance. Gee, tough call.

Usually the FireRed and LeafGreen sprites take Ruby and Sapphire’s rushed ones (as most of these pokemon aren’t catchable in those games), and improve on them. But I don’t really see the improvement in making Ekans look smaller and less brainy? So this one it is.