Ranking All 151 Original Pokémon From Worst To Best
8. Snorlax
Once upon a time - a time of the earliest Pokémon generations - Snorlax was the single most powerful non-legendary in the entire game. Huge HP, monstrous defence, the ability to heal itself entirely, if it was the last Pokémon in your team you were near guaranteed a win in competitive play. Give it Belly Drum and it could become as potent at attack as it was at defence.
While that power has wained in subsequent generations, it still retains a place in everyone's hearts for the whole Pokéflute escapade in both games and anime. Also, show me a man who says he doens't want a life-size Snorlax bean bag in his living room and I will show you a liar.
7. Lapras
If you had the chance to make any Pokémon real and then have it be your most loyal and faithful companion, you'd probably choose Lapras. I'll go into the other two you'd be tempted by in a bit, but by and large sailing around costal seaside town on the back of you own personal Lapras would be the most fun imaginable.
While Lapras is a huge fan favourite purely because of just how !*$% majestic and noble it looks, it's also the absolute nadir of water Pokémon in Gen 1. In a straight fight, it could wipe the floor with virtually every single one of them, and it's secondary Ice typing gives it a 4x resistance to many attacks. Plus, it can pack Thunderbolt, Ice Beam, Psychic, and Solar Beam, meaning it's got great attacking potential to match its huge HP.
6. Mew
The real tragedy of Pokémon Gen 1, was that the majority of players spent months of their lives combing olde internet forums and testing out all the various rumours and reports of how you could find a Mew in the game, only to then get gifted a cloned one from the weird kid at school and teach it Strength, Cut, Surf and Fly - making it little more than a HM slave.
However, that doesn't detract from the fact that the in-game mystery of Mew was one of the last great video game mysteries. In an age before walkthrough videos and how-to-guides, finding a Mew in your game somewhere genuinely felt like a riddle for the world to solve. Stop the SS Anne leaving, surf around outside the map, find the random van, move it with strength, and you'd finally find a Mew - except you wouldn't, and it was back to the drawing board and listening for whispers.
Big up yourself Mew, you were the last time gaming had a unicorn moment.