time to talk design
the new pokemon are loving lazy and there's no way around it. the starters all have completely circular heads with no major features to give them a unique head shape, their bodies are also just spheres, and overall they look like cheap cartoon characters instead of pokemon. gen 7 had this problem too but it was nowhere near as bad as this
wooloo is just a sheep. comparing it to
mareep because it's another sheep pokemon; wooloo is simply a caricature of a sheep, with goofy cartoony proportions as to make it more marketable. mareep is also pretty goddamn similar to a sheep, but it has different colors and also body structures to make it stand out and also complimenting it's typing. wooloo's colors are literally just sheep colors. and no, the 'it's the early route normal-type mon!" excuse doesn't work because if it was supposed to be the early route normal type mon it would be a rodent. why do people love this loving thing so much i don't get it
drednaw and corviknight are decent i won't lie
yamper is just a corgi. of course, it stands out more from the animal it's based off of than wooloo, but it's still essentially just a dog. i can't criticise it too much considering it's supposed to be the obligatory pikaclone of the region but you can tell they were desperately trying to make it as marketable as possible, both by the design itself and the animal it's based off of (why do people love corgis so much)
the purple thing from the E3 demo, as much as i want to love it because it's not a boring animon and it has a unique typing, sucks really bad too. once again, you can see how desperately they wanted to market this thing, because of how babylike the head-to-body ratio is and how goofy and cartoony it is (its skull is like 5x the size of its body jesus christ). i tried my hardest to appreciate this design but nope, it sux
the legendaries. both are extremely intricately designed, which is good for legendaries, and the colors are nice and contrasting, so it's good there. the shield one uses the shield as a part of its anatomy, which is clever. unfortunately the sword guy takes the lazy route and they just make it hold the sword. they could've put the sword's blade on its head but nah. that being said, it's hard to dislike this one because of how goofy it looks; it's a goddamn dog with a sword so it gets a pass despite being a bit lazy
tl:dr the mons suck and you can tell the designers are intentionally being lazy and trying their hardest to make the mons as profitable and marketable as possible. the day the actual designers over at loving game freak themselves manage to get blown out of the water by pretty much
every competent fakemon designer on the planet you know the game's gonna suck ass. especially considering you won't be able to transfer almost half the dex because they're too goddamn lazy to spend extra time modelling, so whoopeee! looks like instead of using well designed and more interesting mons from almost all generations before gen 8 i'll be stuck using this garbage