Nidoran♂, Nidorino, Nidoking

Wait no, please. Have two pictures of the poison bunny.

He’s so pretty! The male counterpart to yesterday’s toxic rabbit dinosaur has incredible hearing and can maneuver its ears in any direction. It also learned Double Kick, which was the ONLY way for me to get through Brock if I ever did a run where I wasn’t using starter mons. Yellow version got Mankey, but for Red and Blue, it was Nidoran or grinding FOREVER.

I feel like Nidorino has always gotten uglier with every iteration. And it suffers HARD in the 3D models, which is unfortunate. It looks so lively here! And dangerous! Plus, this is the FIRST pokemon anyone got to see in the games and the anime. The opening fight features NIDORINO of all pokemon against Gengar and is replaced with Jigglypuff in Blue Version for some reason. Both of those would continue on as fan favorites and even be featured in fighting games later on. I honestly think they should put Jigglypuff and Nidorino in Pokken Tournament. It would be really out of left-field but a fun reference to the game’s origins. And I think Pokken could make our boy look fierce again.

I think of all the Nidoran redesigns, Nidoking has stayed the most scary looking, but this first early iteration is TERRIFYING. Of all the pokemon we’ve seen so far, this is the one that looks the most like it would kill you on purpose. He can use his powerful tail to crush your bones, and in the manga he is shown to have acid in his claws. Speaking of the manga, it chose to use Nidoking as the T-Rex of the Safari Zone, during a particularly terrifying sequence involving many extremely deadly pokemon. They’re much more massive in the manga than in the Pokedex, and they’re honestly a little pathetic at like 4’7”, but that’s still basically gorilla sized, which is still pretty scary. I’ll still always believe in my heart that it’s Tyrannosaurus sized.