Pokemon: Venusaur

I have been pretty lazy lately, and now that Pokemon X and Y are out, I do not see me recovering to full strength any time soon.  I am loving the game so far, though, so much more than Black and White.  Currently, I am at two badges and am in the city where I can win my third.  I had no idea the gap between the first and second gyms would take so long, nor did I realize that there would be so many Pokemon to find on each individual route.  If my progress in the game sounds slow to you, those are my excuses.

I was drawing before the games were released, though.  I was just going really slowly.  While we are on the subject of Pokemon, here, have a picture of one.

This is Venusaur, the final stage of the Pokemon series' first Grass-type starter: Bulbasaur.  Bulbasaur was the first Pokemon I ever used, my starter when I first booted up Pokemon Red.  While other starter Pokemon may add types as they evolve (for example, many Fire starters adding Fighting, or all of the starters in X and Y in their third stage), Bulbasaur is to this day the only starter Pokemon that began with a second type: Poison.  Now, fifteen years after Red and Blue reached international shores (and seventeen in Japan), you can actually choose Bulbasaur or his colleagues Charmander and Squirtle to take with you during your adventure in Pokemon X and Y.

I have a hard time declaring Bulbasaur my favorite of the original three starters (it is a tough choice between them), but he makes a pretty strong case just on his art design alone.  When it comes to Pokemon evolution chains, I hold Bulbasaur, Ivysaur, and Venusaur as the standard for how much I like the designs of the line as a whole.  You have a dinosaur with a seed on its back (one that looks oddly like a green clove of garlic), he matures into a dinosaur whose seed has turned into a flower bud with leaves coming off, and he ends up like the creature pictured above, a dinosaur with a huge flower that has blossomed.  This evolution makes complete sense to me: Venusaur still looks enough like the Bulbasaur that he was before, but you can tell that he has both changed and become significantly stronger, evidenced by the seed growing into a large, tropical flower.

I also like how colorful Venusaur is.  Cyan (or darker variants of it, like teal) has always been an interesting color to me, because I was never sure whether to lump it in as a blue or a green.  Nowadays, I try to recognize cyan as its own color apart from green or blue (we do not count yellow as either red or green, right?), but that blurred region between was always fascinating.  Venusaur's red flower provides a great contrast to this teal Pokemon, popping out with warmth from the rest of the Pokemon.  Venusaur is warm on top and cool underneath, and that evens out to a very pleasing look.

I ended up choosing Bulbasaur at the part of Pokemon Y where you chose one of the Kanto starters.  Since I chose Froakie (a Water-type) for my first Pokemon, and because I was planning to use the promotional Torchic (a Fire Pokemon), I thought rounding out the triad would be a fun idea.  At this point, that Bulbasaur is a Venusaur, and while he is not my favorite Pokemon on the team, he has at least helped me catch quite a few Pokemon.  You never forget your first, I guess.