• A new LGBTQ+ forum is now being trialed and there have been changes made to the Support and Advice forum. To read more about these updates, click here.
  • Hey Trainers! Be sure to check out Corsola Beach, our newest section on the forums, in partnership with our friends at Corsola Cove! At the Beach, you can discuss the competitive side of the games, post your favorite Pokemon memes, and connect with other Pokemon creators!
  • Due to the recent changes with Twitter's API, it is no longer possible for Bulbagarden forum users to login via their Twitter account. If you signed up to Bulbagarden via Twitter and do not have another way to login, please contact us here with your Twitter username so that we can get you sorted.

Favorite Ultra Beast?

Favorite Ultra Beast?

  • Nihilego

    Votes: 3 8.8%
  • Pheromosa

    Votes: 2 5.9%
  • Buzzwole

    Votes: 1 2.9%
  • Xurkitree

    Votes: 4 11.8%
  • Celesteela

    Votes: 4 11.8%
  • Kartana

    Votes: 2 5.9%
  • Guzzlord

    Votes: 2 5.9%
  • Poipole

    Votes: 2 5.9%
  • Naganedel

    Votes: 6 17.6%
  • Stakataka

    Votes: 1 2.9%
  • Blacephalon

    Votes: 7 20.6%

  • Total voters
    34

toastghost

i'm the right one on your touch tone telephone!
Joined
Jul 2, 2019
Messages
26,871
Reaction score
9,223
Pronouns
  1. He/Him
  2. They/Them
Ultra Beasts. You either love them, or hate them, or you don't really care. Which one is your favorite? Want to share your list?
my list is
1. blacephalon. firework clown that explodes its own head? awesome
2. celesteela. super pretty, and i like the reference to the folktale.
3. guzzlord. a black hole dragon. super cool
4. poipole. fucking adorable.
5. nihilego. i love jellyfish, and this one is really pretty.
6. stakataka. a giant moving building. why do i like it? idk.
7. kartana. an origami sword thing. cool ig.
8. xurkitree. i'm kinda indifferent to it. it looks cool though.
9. naganedel. feels like a bit much. poipole is much better.
10. pheromosa. it just looks ugly to me. i don't get how it's supposed to be beautiful.
11. buzzwole. i hate mosquitoes, and making it buff just makes it uncanny.
 
m1k55E7.gif


absolutely no arguments. it's so, so cute! Poipole is in my top 5 favorite Pokémon and I love it so very much. ;_;
 
804MS.png

My favorite would have to be Naganedel. As for my rankings:
  1. Naganedel
  2. Kartana
  3. Nihilego/Xurkitree/Stakataka
  4. Remaining UBs (these I'm so neutral about that I can't really rank them)
 
1-Blacephalon: it’s so goofy and full of personality that I can’t help but love it. It has some mean spirited gimmick that I find quite amusing too.

2-Naganadel: I always liked it, but found it a little clunky until I saw Ash’s one animated. Great design, impressive stats and moveset.

3-Stakataka: It’s a weird pick for top 3, but I find a tower of sentient bricks shaped up into a colony like a portuguese caravel incredibly interesting. I headcanon that it can change its shape as well, making it even more fun to me.

4-Xurkitree: this thing is a mess that really sells the alien concept. A Christmas tree made out of cords and wires is incredible.

5-Poipole: it’s cute, it’s a creative concept, it’s a fun twist on a starter pokemon of sorts. I like it!

6-Guzzlord: oh the sweet sweet dark lore. It’s the most intimidating, I reckon.

7-Nihilego: again, it really sells that alien invader feel. That said, it’s kinda meh, even if the anime made it look and move more interestingly. Bonus for story relevance, I suppose.

8-Kartana: I love the concept, but this thing just looks... weird. I can’t figure out how it would even move.

9-Pheromosa: it, again, feels alien, but I don’t really like its design and pheromones trait. Besides, Tsareena is the superior diva.

10-Buzzwole: I’m brazilian. We don’t have a healthy bond with these dengue fever needles around here. Besides, it looks horrible.
 
After the top 2, this becomes very difficult for me aside from like my bottom 2. I seriously love all of the UBs and wish there were more of them.

1. Stakataka - The masterpiece. We were not worthy.

2. Xurkitree - Sentient cords that have been cable-managed into a lanky humanoid beast with Slender Man proportions and a head that looks like it's covered in shaggy, static-raised hair. And yet, in its "Christmas tree" form, it could also be said to be like a jellyfish, with the cords being tentacles that hang down from a central head. It is such a flexible, electric design and is sheer genius. I get such an eerie, otherworldly feeling from it, and yet, it's also ridiculously adorable with the way it wiggles and skips around.

3. Nihilego - A hell of a first impression. I'm pretty sure I'll always remember that trailer. This is such a graceful, elegant, and strange design, with a wonderfully nonintuitive (and yet totally sensible) type combination. But more importantly, it helps form the core of SM's main storyline which I find quite strong. It definitely stands out as the only UB with a really noteworthy story role. That's a bit disappointing for the other UBs, but at least Nihilego is well-served. Although, I still wonder... Nihilego is a parasite, yeah? But what, in its own world, seemingly inhabited only by other Nihilego, does it parasitize? This is more a criticism of the general lack of insight we're given into how all this Ultra Space stuff connects, but between that and the way that Nihilego is said to imitate the movements of a young girl, it does feel like there is a little more about this creature that could have been fleshed out.

4. Blacephalon - Speaking of a lack of fleshing out. Stakataka is such a strong design that I don't even care that we didn't get to see its Ultra Space world (though I certainly wouldn't say no if given the chance), but for Blacephalon, I feel like I want a little more background. Again, the general portrayal in USUM of the Ultra Beasts' worlds as these bespoke barren landscapes inhabited only by that species doesn't do as good a job as I'd like of showing us how these beings normally live, but Blacephalon doesn't even get that much. Blacephalon's hunting method is great morbid humor, but how does it go about day by day? What's it like to live in a world alongside these freakish clowns that blow up their own heads to surprise you and then drain your lifeforce? On another note, I love how the Pokédex describes it as slithering. At any rate, I do like Blacephalon a lot for its completely gonzo concept and design which is unlike anything else Pokémon has produced. It doesn't even look humanoid, it just looks strange. Though I don't like the name "Blacephalon." It feels clunky to say. Its French name, Pierroteknik, is a 10/10, however.

5. Kartana - A very fun design. Teeny-tiny origami samurai with a fortune-teller for a beak. And again, with the nonintuitive-but-sensible typing to justify a Pokémon being made of a material that they really shouldn't logically be. For Nihilego it was glass, and now it's paper. But these aren't simply objectmons, this is the logic of their own worlds, where lifeforms like this are possible.

6. Celesteela - The polar opposite of Kartana. Still rooted in Japanese tradition, but this time producing a result that is quite huge and busy. Celesteela's proportions are so strange, but I think what I like about it most is how its rocket arms aren't attached to its body at all but are still said to be used during liftoff. Physically, this doesn't really make much sense, but that's the point. It is supposed to be puzzling to try to figure out how these beings can work. Also, Celesteela's world in USUM is one of my favorites, as I feel like we get a very good idea of their life cycle. They grow as shoots of bamboo in the ground, soaking up energy, until they are finally mature enough to erupt and then take off into the atmosphere (where the clouds actually look like traditional Japanese-style clouds - although I think that style actually originated in China, not sure), possibly releasing spores that fall back into the ground to become new Celesteela. But where is it the adults are traveling to? It's fun to think about.

7. Buzzwole - Lovably goofy despite being a freakish mosquito chad that you would realistically run the hell away from as fast as you could. I really love the effects that they use on its 3D model to make it look so defined and translucent. It definitely feels like a monster. And I love imagining that the reason it's so buff is because it drinks the sap from those bodybuilder trees in the Ultra Jungle.

8. Guzzlord - It feels as close to Lovecraftian as Pokémon can likely get because there's just so much going on here. Tiny little wings that don't make sense. A mace-like tail. Spikes all over the place. Two faces. At least four mouth-like objects, two of which are actually peripheral tongues, but they look like arms, and yet it already has two small T-rex arms up above. So many jagged teeth, and then two extra horns coming out from its upper lip. There are echoes of so many things here. Toads, dinosaurs, angler fish. This design shouldn't work but by god it does. And man... how about that deep lore. Pokémon goes Fallout. Although I still wonder what exactly we're meant to take away from the Ultra Ruin. What still puzzles me is the dude's radiation suit. It looks like a Guzzlord. With many of the other UB worlds, the scenery seems to share a morphic resonance with that UB. The columns in Nihilego's world look like crystalline jellyfish polyps. The buds on the trees in Kartana's world look like Kartana. The bamboo shoots in the Ultra Crater are literally nursing Celesteela. And yet, the thing that resembles Guzzlord in the Ultra Ruin is a manmade hazmat suit. The Ultra Ruin seems to be in the state that it's in because of experiments with some kind of new, nuclear-esque power source. (Incidentally, this brings to mind Godzilla, another potential point of reference for Guzzlord.) I used to think that maybe the radiation brought the suits to life somehow, making Guzzlord a strange abstraction of objectmon. But lately the conclusion I find myself often drawn to is more gruesome. What if... especially with how Guzzlord's concept art makes mention of its rubber-like skin, which could also be related to those hazmat suits... what if Guzzlord morphed out of irradiated humans who died inside those suits, becoming ravenous zombie monsters? This would make it less of an objectmon and closer to something like Yamask. The lone survivor tells us that Guzzlord's numbers appear to be dwindling in recent years, which makes me think there might be a limit to how many of them exist, and perhaps they lack some means of reproduction. Which makes some sense, if the species is the result of only a handful of human casualties being warped by the strange radiation they were exposed to.

9. Naganadel - Certainly it is very cool, but conceptually it kinda feels like just smashing random ideas (dragons and wasps and syringes) together. It doesn't really feel like a clever play on anything in the way that the other UBs do. Of course, no one ever said that all UBs had to fall along those same lines, so this doesn't have to be a bad thing, as the hybridization of a reptilian creature and an insect does feel very unusual. But it also feels like there is just less for the mind to chew on. Though I do like the way that it develops out of Poipole. Most regular Pokémon evolve in a way that makes some anatomical sense; heads remain heads, eyes don't suddenly vanish, legs stay where legs are supposed to go, and so on. This evolution turns that, quite literally, on its head. That cute little face you grew attached to when it was a Poipole? Now it's swelled, flipped over, and morphed into a bulbous, venom-filled abdomen with a huge stinger, while Poipole's tail has gone and sprouted a spiky Xenomorph head with a single glowing visor instead of eyes. Poipole's feet seem to have turned into broad dragon wings. This is pretty bizarre, and probably the best thing about the line.

10. Poipole - Poipole, I'm not so hot on. It is very adorable, for sure. Definitely full of lots of charm, and its expressions in Refresh are endearing. But it also feels like the "safest" UB to me, design-wise. I think it very well could pass for a Mew-esque Mythical Pokémon if it wanted to. Not only that, but I am also kind of disappointed with the lore around it. This is the first UB we saw that was not presented as a wild animal that had been dropped into an unfamiliar setting, but has actually been tamed by people. I assume this might be why it is the only one that evolves, but even that doesn't really scan, because it evolves by leveling up while knowing a relearned move, and yet it hails from a world in which Pokémon battling isn't even a concept. If this is supposed to be Poipole's own ironic twist like many of the UBs have, then okay, I guess... but I just think you could do something more interesting. Besides that, how do the people of Ultra Megalopolis benefit from living alongside Poipole? Its adhesive fluids are said to be luminescent, so perhaps that is of some use in a world with no light, but again, aside from that very loose insinuation, there's nothing. It's "popular enough to be chosen as a first partner," but popular relative to what? Are there any other lifeforms in Ultra Megalopolis? Cosmog, maybe, but even that is extremely unclear. If Poipole is the only Pokémon species in that world, then it kinda wins by default, no? But why would the Megalopolitans even want or need a Starter? This is but one of many problems with us only getting to talk to four of their people and only getting to explore about single city block of their world. No insight, no worldbuilding, and all the exposition is about how Alola got its light magic from Ultra Megalopolis rather than anything about the nature of Ultra Megalopolis itself. Like, one thing I wonder is, are Poipole's illuminated mouth and eyes adaptations to the dark conditions in Ultra Megalopolis? Did it used to look different before the light was stolen? Or did it only come into existence as a species after that? In this regard, I almost want to say that the anime handled things better, because there we see that Poipole live in nests with a queen Naganadel in a world that went dark because Necrozma suffered too grievous an injury to continue providing it with light. That injury being the result of Necrozma intercepting a meteor strike is just a boring rehash of The Jewel of Life, and probably wouldn't work as well for the games anyway, but nevertheless, the result is that the anime's version of Poipole's world feels like a somewhat more satisfying answer because there's not as many hanging questions or unexplored possibilities.

11. Pheromosa - Probably my least-favorite. "Cockroach waifu" is a hilarious idea and I get that it's meant to be Buzzwole's polar opposite. Don't get me wrong, I like Pheromosa, I just feel like it's perhaps the least-radical of all the UBs aside from Poipole, which I rank higher because it's cuter and because, well, let's be honest. I still have something of a grudge against Pheromosa because of the wild goose chase of speculation that she sent me and the rest of the fandom on by being posed exactly like Lusamine in her official art. I still want to know what the deal with that was. I don't care if the answer turns out to be something totally mundane, I just really want to know if there was ever a deeper connection in the works. As far as the dialogue of SM actually say, it is impossible for Lusamine to have seen a Pheromosa prior to her opening Ultra Wormholes all over Alola, so she couldn't have styled herself to resemble one like she did with Lillie and Nihilego (where Nihilego is explicitly said to have been seen in the distant past, and thus there could be records of its appearance in Mohn's research that are subconsciously impressing upon Lusamine when she chooses Lillie's attire). And it doesn't help now that Pokémon Masters have gone and paired Lusamine up with a Pheromosa. But I wonder if maybe it's just supposed to give Phero an uncanny feel by having it resemble a human character. Because, maybe it's just my imagination (not that anyone has a leg to stand on when it comes to stretching comparisons between UBs and human characters; looking at you, GuzzHala), but I also think Phero reminds me of Diantha, a bit? The shorts, the all-white color scheme, the curvature of the wings relative to Diantha's wings and coattails, and Pheromosa's brow is kind of jagged in a way that reminds me of Diantha's bangs. With that in mind, I draw less of a specific connection between Phero and Lusamine, and more between Phero and certain familiar beautiful female characters, which makes sense in a general way as those are not the aesthetics you would expect to be put onto a cockroach monster (even if there is some clever truth-in-television with how real cockroaches are neat freaks like Phero), and the familiarity can lead to that uncanny effect. In any case, that all gets at one of the virtues of Phero which is how humanoid it is. In my critique of Incineroar yesterday, I mentioned how I don't like how Incineroar looks like it walked off the set of Looney Toons while trying to pass for a regular Pokémon, but with UBs, that trick works, because they're supposed to be from incredibly different worlds. Pheromosa is like if you took the concept of Hollow Knight and adapted it into a Magical Girl anime or something. I also like the weirdness of Phero's body shape, with the thin, segmented cones draping over each other to form its torso. It looks physically impossible - like, imagine what an anatomical diagram of Pheromosa would look like. How its organs would have to be distributed. Wild. And notice how its antennae don't actually connect to its brow - there's a fraction of empty space between them, so the antenna either become vanishingly thin at that point, or are connected to its body by some unseen force.
 
Last edited:
Blacephalon. Not only is its name fun to say and look at (even if I still fail at spelling it right), but the pokemon itself is fun to look at. It's the most alien looking of all the ultra beasts to me. I'm freaked out by clowns irl but the fact this one does not actually have a scary clown face means I have no fear of it. It also explodes and is like fireworks and I love those.

I have lovingly nicknamed its shiny "Neon Disco Clown".

Its shiny also reminds me of the way themepark rides light up at night. It gives me a comforting nostalgic feeling for that reason.
 
I love the Ultra Beasts designs, they're so weird and alien like o_O. This is my ranking but I actually like then all:

1. Blacephalon: I love the design and the colors, that creepy clown vibe is awesome.
2. Pheromosa: Beautiful and strange at the same time, amazing. It was very difficult to choose between Pheromosa and Blacephalon.
3. Guzzlord: In my opinion, the scariest design in Pokémon, I love it.
4. Celesteela: An imposing but at the same time adorable design. An amazing twist to the legend of the Princess Kaguya.
5. Kartana: What's cooler than combining origami with blades?
6. Nihilego: A beautiful design, but at the same time creepy and ominous.
7. Naganadel: Cool design, but I like the others more.
8. Poypole: Cute Pokémon but despite its alien appearance I still consider it just that, a typical cute Pokémon.
9. Xurkitree: The idea of a Pokémon made of wires is cool, but I think the design could have been better.
10. Buzzwole: I know the idea of the design is that the muscles are exaggerated, but it's too much for my taste.
11. Stakataka: It has an interesting concept, but in my opinion it has the most boring design of the bunch.
 
Last edited:
1. Naganadel. Dope ass design, blasts holes through stuff. Amazing.
2. Celesteela. Something about a spaceship/rocket launcher bamboo shoot just hits me in the soul. I love it.
3. Buzzwole. Here comes the Crimson Chin!
4. Pheromosa. The shiny is absolutely splendid. I do wish it was a bit more explored cause a lot of SM stuff hints at their being something more to Pheromosa than meets the eye (Especially in regards to Lusamine) so I would have liked to have seen that explored.
5. Xurkitree. He vibing.
6. Kartana. Now instead of Kartana fighting on its own, imagine someone throwing a Kartana at the opponent like a shuriken.
7. Nihilego. The fact it can merge with an actual host is cool I guess?
8. Blacephalon. Purely for the "Mind is Blown" memes.
9. Stakataka. I don't care for this thing.
10. Guzzlord. Don't want to acknowledge or talk about this thing.
 
1) Guzzlord
2) Blacephalon
3) Stakataka
4) Poipole
5) Nihilego
6) Naganadel
7) Celesteela
8) Xurkitree
9) Kartana
10) Buzzwole
11) Pheromosa

The lattermost three are the only ones I feel relatively indifferent towards. As a fan of eldritch alien beings and someone with a small-but-visible interest in multi-dimensional lore, the Ultra Beasts appeal to me a lot. I'd say I would enjoy seeing more UBs than Legendaries and Mythicals; despite the really low odds of the Beasts being revisited.
 
I have a soft spot for Xurkitree, Blacephalon and Buzzwole for best embodying the fundamental weirdness of Ultra Beasts - their humanoid nature places them very snugly in the uncanny valley, where I'm seeing shapes that I almost recognise but I can't find the eyes and other features that humans typically need to establish full familiarity.

That said, I don't really dislike any of them, and some of the design choices that would usually have me turn up my nose at a 'normal' Pokémon are excused here (such as in the case of Pheromosa).
 
Poipole because of how adorable it is, I also like it's evo Naganadel though not as much as it's pre-evo.

Pheromosa, Buzzwole, Celesteela, and Kartana are also UB's I'm pretty fond of. Especially the latter two with the former being based on Princess Kaguya and the other being origami paper.
 
TBH, I do not like the Ultra Beasts. I suppose Nihilego is an okay design, but the rest of them are, well, I think you know where I'm going. I'll not say it to be polite. lol
 
Please note: The thread is from 2 years ago.
Please take the age of this thread into consideration in writing your reply. Depending on what exactly you wanted to say, you may want to consider if it would be better to post a new thread instead.
Back
Top Bottom