With Pokémon Scarlet and Violet now about as comprehensively spoiled as a game can be prior to release, especially after yesterday’s 22-and-a-half hour livestreaming of the game, people are starting to dive into some of the nitty gritty spoilers you may not think to ask about prior to release. Most of these, we’re avoiding hearing ourselves, let alone telling you, but one is too good to miss.
Via GamesRadar, Dunsparce, the Gen 2 Pokémon from 1999, is finally getting its first evolution. And it’s a beautiful piece of trolling, from the looks of it.
Mostly because the joke is—and bear with me, Dunsparce stans—entirely harmless. At 23 years old, Dunsparce has been one of Pokémon’s most unloved monsters. The poor Normal-type “Land Snake Pokémon” is bland to look at, a sort of squirmy bug-thing you that if you saw it in a pond you’d wonder if it needs cleaning. It has vestigial wings that allow it to barely float, as if mocking the beast with the always-denied possibility of flight. It has eyes, but it can’t open them. The poor bastard thing just lives its miserable life in Diglett tunnels, never evolving from nor into anything. Until now!
People of Earth, let me introduce you to: Dudunsparce!
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That’s genuinely what it’s called; they just added a ‘Du’ to the start of the name. That naming alone already makes the monster sound like a jeer, like, duh. But it gets way better/worse than that. If you’re wondering what’s actually different here, then you’ve caught on to what people are fixated on right now. Dudunsparce is just a slightly longer Dunsparce.
Seriously, at first glance you won’t notice any difference. Look again and you can see it’s now made of four segments, rather than two, and sports an extra pair of near-pointless wings on its backs. Oh, and has a third spike on its non-mouth, and a blue cap on its drill tail.
It’s as if they were thinking, “People have been begging for Dunsparce to finally get its Caterpie-like transformation for decades. Let’s…let’s completely ruin that for them.”
Granted, it’s possible they never intended for this to be a troll at all. Slightly incremental evolutions aren’t unheard of, but there’s a reason people were expecting something more here. Weedle metamorphoses into Beedrill. Larvitar gets to evolve into Tyranitar. Magikarp gets to become the almighty Gyrados. But Dunsparce? It gets Dudunsparce. It’s the same but just a little bit more of it. And let’s be honest, the best it could ever hope for is Dududunsparce.