Buizel never quite worked for me – it’s one of those Pokémon with just one too many design elements to feel natural.
Stripped down to just the little orange mustelid with two tails? Great! You have an slimmer, more acquatic cousin to Tails from the Sonic games – down to the improbable tail-o-copter. Add those blue fins? Excellent as an adaptation to their environment; I don’t know how webbed elbows are going to especially help with maneuverability, but it’s not the furthest-fetched idea in the series.
I think it’s the instertion of a biological life vest – a pool floatie fused to the very animal itself – that goes just a bit far over the line for me. This stands out especially egregious if you’ve ever worn a floatation device in open water, since they make it very noticably difficult to swim and easy to get pulled along with any sort of current – this is how lazy rivers work, after all. Sticking one on a river predator would be actively harmful, especially when mounted so as to pull at their neck, and so the designers have kinda shot Buizel in her poor little foot here.
The poor guy is inoffensive and even a sort of colorful-cute, but she deserves to be free.
Of all the evolutions so far, this may be the most “make it bigger and slightly more complicated” approach in the entire series. I can’t think of a single design element of Floatzel that isn’t already present on Buizel for comment, aside from how her floatation device is now wrapped even more uselessly around her entire body rather than just holding her head up.
I suppose she has a fun little water-droplet patch on her pelvis, too, but I’d rather not stare too long if it’s all the same to the reader.
Floatzel isn’t especially gifted on the battlefield, either – not terribly surprising for a monster that can be had before the first gym in its original appearance. Her speed and attack stats are great, but especially without TMs or a move tutor, she can’t get too creative with them – which hurts her chances of standing out considering Water is the most populous type in the game. She’ll hold on all right in the main game, but her miserable defenses mean she’s going to go down an awful lot if she can’t keep knocking things out in single shots.
A nice thing I will say about these designs is that I really dig the concept of a river-weasel as a Pokémon. Otters are a known and loved river-mammal, but are well-explored to the point where I’d expect them to appear in the series a lot sooner than they ultimately did. Taking that back up the classification tree and going for a relative – seemingly a mountain weasel, no less – gives us something that feels plausible without being a direct cartoonification of an existing animal. That’s the kind of “30% different” speculative biology where this series is really in its wheelhouse.
It does dampen things a little bit that we already have such a wonderful weasel monster, but I think the concept wins out over the specific execution in this case.
Buizel and Floatzel have never especially spoken to me, and they fill an “early-game pure water type” niche that the games are getting better and better about having alternatives for. She may have been around in Scarlet & Violet, but otherwise her absence from the series since X & Y outside of Sinnoh-based releases says to me that the series aready has her on the back burner in Reserve, and if not for Ash’s use of one in the anime and her being among the debut fourth-generation newcomers, I could honestly see these two being Retired over time.
Any and all appreciation for Buizel and Floatzel is welcome in the comments!
Dextraneous 
