In the art, it has perfectly ovoid eyes indented deep into the head with dark black rock surrounding it. Like lunatone, in RSE, it has huge round circular eyes with a small indention and shadow. Rather irksome that I can not imagine pokemon in a different setting than anime without having to change so much now. Gyarodos however looked way cooler in my head when he was a sprite then when I saw him in 3D. That was untill I saw him in Pokemon Colloseum in 3D and I thought he looks actually pretty cool. I actually still believe that the designs are perfectly set in stone and sort of prefer it when they are open to interpretation. And what pokemon looked better as a sprite then in 3D All in your opinion ofcourse :) IMO, I always though Primeape to be pretty ugly back in the time. Which isn't a big deal as a caterpie most likely can place its tail however it wants when it evolves. Edit: Actually, after looking at it, you can see that it is the same except the way the tail is facing. I am fairly sure that the eye thing by the way is just the angle of the shot and the direction the eyes are looking, because metapod's eyes or on its sides, I am fairly sure it can look either way. Like the skull on the forehead of a koffing, or arbok's back stripes, or which way the eyes face on a metapod. So, it is sort of relevant, in my opinion. Which is why my opinion on this is steered by the anime, as it is mostly the anime that causes people to think of the designs very select. And truly for me, I would think, the designs were not exactly set in stone at the time, it happened that the newer media began using designs which also by the way could have been not the ones originally planned, and the games picked them up. Like in this thread people are complaining that they don't look like they should. Just happens that that steers a lot of my opinions on things here.

Pokemon smile sprites