The 10 worst Pokémon of all time

There are over 1,000 Pokémon now, created over 25 years by all sorts of different people. No matter how much you love Pokémon, you have to accept that with so many creatures, at least a handful belong in the garbage. Sure, every Pokémon is someone’s favorite, but these awful designs make them hard to love for the vast majority of trainers.

A ‘mon can be terrible for several reasons. Maybe they look ugly, can’t hold their own in battle, another ‘mon does what they do better, or maybe they’re a literal pile of garbage, it could be anything. Either way, we’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel and picked out the worst Pokémon that you’d only ever catch to fill your Pokédex before shoving them in the PC forever.

However, sometimes a great Pokémon design can be ruined when it becomes a shiny, and Game Freak are getting worse at making shiny Pokémon, so it's no surprise.

Apologies in advance, Generation 5 fans.

Cryogonal

Snowflakes are extremely pretty when observed up close, so a soft and graceful snowflake Pokémon could’ve been an easy win. Instead, the decision was made to make it ugly and menacing, with the Pokédex explaining how it uses icy chains to drag people away. Even that might have worked if it just looked a little cooler. Instead, its body doesn’t have any of a real snowflake’s beauty, and the glowing eyes look weird.

Binacle

While it’s a bit creepy, Barbaracle is a perfectly fine Pokémon. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for its pre-evolution. A rock with arms has already been done with Geodude, which isn’t a great design, but it gets a Generation 1 pass. When it came to designing Binacle, someone must’ve looked at Geodude and asked themselves, “How can we make this worse in every way?”. The answer is by putting eyes on its hands. Horrible.

Vanilluxe

Vanilluxe has become somewhat of a poster child for lazy Pokémon designs, and it’s easy to see why. Truth be told the “inanimate object with a face” genre of creatures has a lot of great ones in it, just look at Palosand or Chandelure, but Vanilluxe fails to realize what makes those so good. Rather than creatively incorporating sentience into the object it's based on, it slaps two faces on ice cream and calls it a day, there’s nothing interesting happening here.

Bruxish

Bruxish is about 75% of a good design that gets utterly ruined by the last 25%, namely its face. Its multicolored body is a unique look for a fish Pokémon with lots of appeal, but it ended up with the ugliest face possible. Uncomfortably big lips, slightly too big teeth, and eyes that stare directly into your soul.

Lickilicky

It’s got a body-sized tongue that it uses to lick everything around it. Do we really need to explain this one?

Garbodor

While it’d be easy to label Garbodor a “literal trash Pokémon” and move on, it’s not like these kinds of designs can’t be beloved. Muk is just a pile of toxic ooze, but its design has a strong sense of personality and charisma that makes you buy in. What does Garbodor have? Its eyes look like they’ve been glued on, so when it tries to look menacing it feels dumb, not to mention the coloring on it is straight-up ugly.

Slurpuff

With just a few minor tweaks Slurpuff could be very cute, but in its current form, it doesn’t even come close. The way its tongue sticks out of its mouth constantly is weird – even if it isn’t as long as Lickilicky’s – and the candyfloss hair doesn’t work in the way it was supposed to. It doesn’t feel like a natural part of its body, more like it’s wearing a wig. Everything seems slightly wrong about it.

Simisage, Simisear, and Simipour

A triple threat, these are three of the most pointless Pokémon to ever exist. These three monkeys feel like the starters from a knockoff game. They get given to you in Black and White as a way to cheat the first gym then become utterly useless for the rest of the game. They’re ugly, they’re weak, and they’re completely outdone by every Starter Pokémon ever.

Spewpa

Middle-stage Bug Pokémon are deliberately designed to be useless; it’s part of the joke, but somehow Spewpa fails at even that. It doesn’t have the cute Metapod gimmick of only knowing Harden, which means it doesn’t have anything worthwhile. It doesn’t look like a middle ground between Scatterbug and Vivillon, in fact, it doesn’t look like anything. It’s the definition of a space-filler Pokémon and it will not be tolerated.

Throh and Sawk

These aren’t Pokémon, they’re men in karate outfits, one of which has sunburn and the other has frostbite. Humanoid Pokémon can be good, but these are by far the worst ever conceived. Why do they have clothes? It raises so many questions we never want to think about. Are they born wearing them? Can they take it off? Are they part of its flesh? Just thinking about it is cringe-inducing and upsetting. Everyone, go and find a picture of Eevee to cleanse your mind and soul.