Welp, time to figure out how to say different things about each of these four incredibly repetitive and bland designs that have done the same concept to death. Yaaaaaaay.

Of all the designs in Generation 1, many of whom are unfairly dismissed as too simple, Diglett is easily the least complex visual design of the generation and really not in a good way. I really don’t care for just how reductive a take this is on a mole design. Moles are visually delightful little creatures, but this is barely anything more than a brown nub emerging from the ground that takes barely a passing glimpse at whack-a-mole for design inspiration and calls it good. It’s ever so slightly charming in a way but this is diminished by how tired a design it is from being overexposed and underbaked. It’s honestly shocking that this is one of the Generation 1 Pokemon to have received the most love in recent years.

Dugtrio is just three Diglett. I could stop there but in the interests of exploring why this doesn’t do it for me when other Pokemon that consist of multiple entities do, I’ll elaborate. There are some duplication evolutions and other Pokemon with multiple entities making up the same Pokemon in the future which I would consider full on masterpieces, but this is not what’s on display here. This is just three of the same Pokemon amassed together and lacking in purpose, wit, or charm. There’s nothing here to make it compelling in any way, it’s the evil mirror of the perfection of Magneton in that sense. It’s three terrible little moles whose value begins at hard countering Lt. Surge in Kanto and ends at being a horrible little demon who denies switching in competitive play. I almost want to be charmed by it, I really do, but I find it so thoroughly uninteresting and it can’t quite loop round to being funny to me. If this line was just a one and done, I’d slightly appreciate it as a quirky, if uninspired, exercise in minimalism, but there is more to come.

Continuing the trend of boring designs that iterate on Diglett, Alolan Diglett is a Diglett with three little hairs on its head. This makes it a Ground/Steel type Pokemon for reasons it doesn’t seem particularly interested in communicating visually. While Diglett and Dugtrio are just garden variety bad designs, this is just frustrating to me. It’s a weirdly terrible stain on the otherwise fantastic reputation of regional forms and the only one that feels truly like a joke design without any attempt to be interesting. There is the fascinating concept of Pele’s hair in here, a kind of volcanic glass found in wiry filaments, but this neither works with it being a Steel type or gets effectively realised. I think the worst part of Alolan Diglett and Dugtrio for me is the fact that a Ground/Steel mole that iterates on Diglett and Dugtrio was already done masterfully with Excadrill in Generation 5: a simply phenomenal design who actually knows what it means to be a mole, has a far better approach to incorporating digging into its design, and completely supplanted the need to ever see these things again, so Diglett riding those coattails for no worthwhile gain really rubs me the wrong way.

Alolan Dugtrio deigns to bless us with more changes than just amassing more of itself, and for our troubles we get an ensemble cast of appalling styled hairdos on each of the trio. They all manage to look ridiculous and ill-fitting, and a waste of what could have been a wild and frenetic shock of Pele’s hair if adapted more faithfully. Alolan Dugtrio is also the first of two designs (and we won’t be looking at Wugtrio for some time) that exposes the dreadful Catch 22 of Dugtrio designs and the complete inability for them to do anything interesting. Aesthetically, the evolution from Diglett to Dugtrio is a complete creative dead end: there just isn’t anywhere interesting to go that doesn’t feel repetitive or contrived after doing a duplication with no underlying idea. Diglett also doesn’t have the features necessary to do anything else with it for a branch evolution. Thus, we get a regional form instead. Simple, right?  Well, we still don’t get any pioneering new features, but the real kicker is in the mechanics. I talked about Dugtrio’s trapping capacity earlier but its reliance on Arena Trap means there isn’t really a case for making the Kantonian form any better than the Attack buff it got in Generation 7 already, but trapping is a really insufferable mechanic that Game Freak are clearly averse to throwing around, so Alolan Dugtrio gets Tangling Hair as a compromise “pseudo-trap” that lowers speed when contact is made with it. However this Dugtrio is still really fast and can’t take physical hits at all, so it’s basically worthless. Mechanics complaints may seem like splitting hairs (haha) but I mention this because I think this captures the fact that Dugtrio is just stuck in a rut creatively both in design and mechanics, and the regional form is just a showcase of failing to recognise that there’s nothing worth doing here and failing to be funny in the process.

Kantonian Final Verdict: 3/10 – it’s boring and overexposed, let it rest
Alolan Final Verdict: 1/10 – not funny, didn’t laugh