If last review wasn’t enough adorable little rodents for you, we now have Sandshrew. Sandshrew is a simply delightful little guy with a nice brick laid pattern for its back armour that effectively communicates its Ground typing and looks good when it rolls around in a ball. I love its sandy colour scheme, beady black eyes, and little snout-like face, plus pangolins are just fascinating animals in general and while it’s not exactly a highly experimental design it’s great all the same. As the first Ground type being covered here, it’s important to stress just how much I love this type in general. Ground types just get a lot of really nice designs that make fantastic use of earthy tones and some fantastic monster aesthetics across the board, and I think Sandshrew taking simple ideas and embellishing them with a modest Ground type flavour is a good encapsulation of that. It’s not really one of my favourites but I’m still very fond of it.

Sandslash is a lovely way to iterate on Sandshrew despite losing the back pattern and going for the arguably less interesting, but still delightful, array of great earthy spines. Sandslash can still roll like Sandshrew but looks a lot more menacing while doing so, and these spikes do a good job of looking more like a pangolin’s scales but with that spiky flair befitting Pokemon stylisation. Of course, there is the other defining feature of the addition of bigger claws that are really just here for the wow factor but I can’t fault it at all. Sandslash is just a well realised design across the board.

Alolan Sandshrew is one of a few regional forms that ask the same question of “what if this Pokemon was shunted into cold environments and became an Ice type as a result?” and despite the repetition of this same concept I think all three instances of this in the series are fantastic, Sandshrew of course being no exception. It takes the brick pattern from Sandshrew and in a stroke of pure creative genius bulks out the design and allows this to resemble an igloo, with Sandshrew’s added heft to resist the cold looking like a hoodie and with a bigger back. On top of making this look even cuddlier, Alolan Sandshrew also answers what Sandshrew does when it becomes too lopsided to roll and the result is the simply wondrous animation of sliding like a curling stone instead. I’m not sure which of the four members of this family is my favourite individually but I might have to give it to Alolan Sandshrew just because the details like these are so lovable.

Alolan Sandslash has a hard act to follow in trying to iterate on Sandslash the same way Alolan Sandshrew does for its pre-evolution, but it’s still a really solid design. This form doesn’t have the instant delight of igloo and curling stone vibes, but regardless finds new ways to adapt Sandslash. It’s only in looking at Sandslash for this review and reading the Pokedex entries that I realised it does actually have solid metal spines just contained within ice rather than the spines themselves being pure pillars of ice, which are larger and have a real exaggerated flair to them. Additionally, Sandslash’s claws are put to more purposeful use here, as both its hands and feet now have wicked jutting edges that appear to function like ice axes for effective grip in the snow. Sharing the same bulked out aesthetic as its preevolution but finding new intelligent ways of adapting the design’s basic principles to the cold, this regional form is another great one.

Kantonian Final Verdict: 8/10 – simple but sincere, it’s a lovable little design I’ve grown to appreciate more.
Alolan Final Verdict: 9/10 – a surprisingly fantastic way and well thought out iteration on the Kantonian form that’s uniquely fantastical but immersive and believable.