I love cool collaborations as it’s often the key to delivering some of the funkiest looking tech and peripherals around. Or sometimes the worst ones. Razer is one brand known to deliver a little of each with stylish and cute collabs like the Kuromi collection and bright gloriously ugly ones like the gear themed after a Minecraft Creeper. The brand has recently announced its newest collaboration with a new Pokemon lineup and I gotta say, these are more creeper than cutie.
The lineup features a keyboard, mouse, headset, and mouse mat all plastered with faces of the starter Pokemon from the Kanto region. All of the peripherals sport the same sticker style onslaught of Charmander, Bulbasaur, Squirtle, and Pikachu faces all stacked on top of each other. It’s an explosion of yellow, orange, blue, and green, on what would otherwise be boring black peripherals. While I’m a big fan of anything but boring, I’m not sure this was the answer.
The keyboard is the fullsized Blackwidow V4 complete with number pad and themed alt and space bar keys. It even has the dedicated scroll bar like the V4 Pro. The faceplate of the board looks like it’s been covered with a single sheet of this starter face contact, and that’s about it. It’s almost distressing looking at it and seeing all those trapped babies looking back at me, asking if they can come on my parentless journey around the world with me. The vibes just seem off on this aesthetic.
Thankfully the mouse has some improvements. This time we are treated to a Wired Cobra, with that same face packed design on the left and right mouse buttons. The main body is a solid Pikachu yellow, as are the scroll wheel and side buttons accenting themselves nicely against the black. I still don’t love it, and I think I’d feel bad mashing down on their sweet little faces all day, but there’s promise here.
The Kraken V4 that’s been reskinned in Pokemon livery is a bit more like the mouse. It carries over that black and yellow Pikachu aesthetic over the main body of the headphones, only showing off those creepy faces on a portion of the headband. I’d have to say this is easily the best looking piece out of the whole kit, and the faces don’t look as distressed as they do all crammed on a flat object. It also looks a lot like the headset used in the less globally available Pokemon collaboration the brand has done.
But that brings us to the Gigantus V2 mousemat that is, you guessed it, covered in those faces. It’s fine, but as far as aesthetic choices go this still reads more as a mess of Pokemon to me than a happy collection. It’s very likely that all the starters I released in Pokemon Go to be ground up into candy have actually gotten trapped in this mouse mat and are now judging me for eternity.
I understand I’m an adult, and this is a collaboration more aimed at kids but it doesn’t need to look quite so much like it. At first glance this all looks like gear that came in a show bag at a carnival where I got swindled out of all my hard earned money for a gold painted magikarp. We know Razer can deliver cool Pokemon gear, like the sweet Gengar stuff that came out in China, we just are yet to see any of it come to the west.