User blog comment:BannedLagiacrus/Monster Appreciation Week: Coral Pukei-Pukei/@comment-5020152-20200204141526

Coral Pukei-Pukei keeps everything I liked about the design and concept of the original and did something new with it. Like everyone else, I think the new coat of paint is absolutely stunning. I might not agree with Pukei's classification, but it at least looks significantly more birdlike with the variety of tropical colors it's awash in.

Pukei-Pukei's original gimmick is that it used the plants it devoured during the fight to fuel/enhance its poison in different ways. Coral Pukei-Pukei does exactly the same thing with the plants in the Coral Highlands. At first I thought that using plants as watering holes was an odd decision, but it does make sense - the Coral Highlands doesn't have any major bodies of water, so of course the native flora would adapt to store water within their own bodies to cope with the dry environment. And the way Coral Pukei-Pukei weaponizes its fluid intake also feels like a natural upgrade from what the original Pukei did. Whereas Pukei-Pukei didn't use its tail very much, Coral makes its tail a much more significant part of its moveset, and to make up for the lack of different behaviors vanilla Pukei's mouth projectiles had, Coral can choose between normal water bursts, a powerful stream, or two weaker streams at once.

Overall, I agree with the general consensus that Coral Pukei-Pukei is the best of the new subspecies introduced in Iceborne. It's beautiful, the gameplay is fun and different, the changes to its properties and behavior make sense given its new habitat, and as many have noted before, it's a new Water monster in a game that's sorely lacking in them. You could say it's... refreshing.