These three words describe the world of Sparkle - world in which you make a tiny aquatic creature evolve into becoming a grown, magnificent being. Enjoy beautiful surreal visuals and relax with minimalistic ambient soundtrack.Ĭan you grow the biggest Sparkle in the world? Attack other species whenever you run out of other food sources. Explore the abyss in search of nutritional elements. Start as a little organism and transform into a magnificent aquatic being. Climb your way through the evolutional ladder. I would not do this, of course, but on a spiritual level, Gamefreak sort of did.Buy Sparkle 2 Evo as a Steam key at Ĭontrol the evolution with the touch of your finger. I peel out in my sports car with a "FCKDLPHNZ" license plate and disappear into the sunset with giant bags of Nintendo money. Somewhere in the crowd a baby begins to cry. "Ha ha, here's your dolphin, losers" is what I would have said in this scenario, upon unveiling Charlie Toothpaste America to a fanfare of airhorns and confetti. It's the kind of mean thing I'd have done if I were in charge of this game and actually had the contempt for dolphins that you thought I did. But it's so counter to what I imagine most would have wanted from the concept, it feels almost like a prank. After ragging on it this hard, I kind of started liking it myself. I respect anyone who loves this Pokemon for the cornball premise and awkward design. Instead, what they get is the bastard offspring of Captain America and Charlie Tuna. Thousands, perhaps even millions of players waited over twenty years to catch Flipper in a pokeball, hoping for something at least as elegant as Milotic, as cool as fellow delphinid Kyogre or even as inoffensive and passable as previous sea mammals like Wailmer or Dewgong. The stripey tail that tapers far too much, ultimately looking like a squirt of minty toothpaste spurting from a tube? The presence of a bulging muscular human chest and stumpy arms on a porpoise? The "gloves" that look like blue condoms with udder-like fingers? Or maybe just the unpleasant red, white and blue motif overall?Ī "dolphin," by which we specifically mean the bottle-nosed variety, has topped the fandom's all-time most wanted creature rep since the very first generation, and if you plug "dolphin pokemon" or "dolphin fakemon" into any given search engine, I think you'll find that even the crudest, least inspired fan creations are still easier on the eyes than this uncanny mess. The idea here is basically a "superhero" dolphin, with the zero form as its "secret identity." I'm not really a superhero fan to begin with, but it's a concept that could work, if it were designed pleasantly, but it is not, and it's hard to pin down which decision was really the worst here. This is an animal that's topped the fandom's most wanted list since the very first generation, so you'd really have expected a more exciting visual twist.but oh? What's that? It evolves you say? It's really just a little grey-blue baby dolphin, save for the ring around its tail I guess. It's not just that it's far too cute for what is actually one of the sea's most lethal and violent pack hunters, but there isn't anything interesting about its design as a Pokemon, either. It's a bit of a let-down, then, that the very first (non-orca) dolphin in Pokemon takes a route so predictable. What I actually don't like that they're unrealistically romanticized as angelic, genius sea-babies while sharks continue to be cast as mindless brutes, and that this even translates to unnecessary biases in science education and environmental conservation. I've joked a lot over the years about bottle-nosed dolphins being terrible, wretched creatures, and that's lead a lot of people to believe that I don't like bottle-nosed dolphins, when in fact they are magnificently bizarre and astonishing products of a fascinatingly circuitous evolutionary history.
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