The Get List: Toreba: Pokemon Pikachu Coco Plush

Way back when I first fell in love with Pokemon, I remember looking forward to the first movie. Now I’m 7.7366543 trillion years older, that original movie is old enough to have been remade in CGI that makes me feel extra old, and I’m looking forward to the — oh my good lord — twenty-third full Pokemon movie, Coco (Secrets of the Jungle in English). Life is surreal.

When I went to the local Korean-owned grocery store the other day (normally they have a pretty nice selection of Japanese candy and snacks — way less with COVID, but I’m very, very happy with whatever they have to offer!), I was able to get a couple of these Lotte Pokemon chocolate wafers with a Coco theme:

Imagine what these would be like if they were sold in America, reduce the amount of chocolate by 30% and its sweetness by 40%, and you have these crunchy little snacks. They’re pretty tasty, but of course I was more interested in what stickers I might get:

Heracross (left) is rather cool, but the Pokemon on the right is one of my new favorites from Sword and Shield. Their Japanese name is hard to write (it’s ウッウ u’u; normally the ッ “little tsu” would be romanized by doubling a consonant, but here that’s…a little difficult. It’s pronounced like two separate sounds, kind of like “ooh ooh”). In English, the name is Cramorant (mixing cramming things in their mouth with cormorant — and I didn’t know until I was writing this up that the u sounds in the Japanese name aren’t just onomatopaeia for choking but also the reading for 鵜, cormorant). Anyway, I’ve come to really love this weird little friend, and I was stoked to get a sticker of them.

Between enjoying my cookies and hype for the movie and love for the first Pikachu plush I recently won, I was extremely happy when I saw a Toreba machine that looked like a decently easy win and managed to pick up this Coco Pikachu plush from Banpresto!

Standing a very adventurous ten-and-a-half inches tall, Pikachu here is really cute, and much, much softer than I’d originally anticipated. Neither overstuffed to slight hardness like the Korotto Manmaru plushies nor slightly stiff like some of the Mogu Mogu time plushies, Pikachu has a texture and weight that make me want to rub him against my cheek.

The very best thing about him, though, to be his Hoeruko/Wailmer bag. Isn’t it awesome? It is probably not good for my spending habits that I noticed that they’re offering the bag itself now as a prize…

His hat, particularly the way his ears stick out of it, is really cute too.

The paper tag he came with isn’t really anything to write home about or include here, but the little tag on his butt is awfully cute, I thought.

Strangely enough, I also won the shiny Celebi from this very same collection about a week after I got this one, so I’m looking forward to receiving that, especially given how nice Pikachu turned out. When Celebi arrives, I’ll be sure to put up pictures, hopefully sooner rather than later!