5/24/2021 9 Comments ID 315 through ID 320 (Sneasel)ID 315: ???This guy is really cute! I like his fat body and his chicklet design. The eyes and the cheek spots resemble Pikachu and 305-308 to me, which makes me think Nishida designed him. He's probably based on a quail, but other than that, there’s not a lot to know about this mon. However, I think we can speculate enough to know what their goals were when designing it and why it didn’t quite make it into the 1997 build of the game. First of all, it’s pretty clear that there’s an evolutionary link between 315 and 316 as they both have a musical theme. While 316 is most easily identifiable as a G-Clef (as seen below), 315’s plumage is clearly based on a quarter note: It’s not exact, per se; 315’s quarter note looks like it swirls back in on itself like a feather, so it could be a coincidence. If you're more conservative with your speculation than I am, you might point out that they try the "Musical Bird" theme three different times in the index, and 315, 316, and 392 might all be riffs on the same idea but not be strictly related. Musical notes are, arguably, a pretty obvious theme for a bird Pokemon: Game Freak used the same idea (probably independently and not related to this guy) for Chatot in Gen IV: However, considering how close 315 and 316 are on the list, and how they both incorporate musical symbols into their designs, I lean towards the idea that they were designed as evolutionary relatives, even if the idea wasn't carried through very far in development. Personally, I like 315’s design way better than Chatot’s, which strikes me as not subtle enough about its connection to music. Given that Gen IV seems to have dipped back into earlier designs in a number of cases (Tangrowth, for one), it is possible Chatot is the heavily modified end result of 315, though I am reticent to ascribe too much connections between two generations so far apart. Chatot has a signature move of “Chatter,” which speaks to its theming as a loud songbird. There’s no moves in the Spaceworld ’97 moveset that indicate any sort of sound or music theme that could have been originally created for 315, unfortunately. That suggests is that 315 was scrapped too early to have a complete move set. The first new move in the Gold/Silver move list is Sketch, which is the signature move of Smeargle (Painter in the SW97 demo). Given that new moves seem to be have just been added to the end of the list as they came up with more signature moves for Pokemon (notice how Lugia’s signature Aeroblast doesn’t exist in 97 and was just added to the end of the list in the final), this probably means that new moves weren’t seriously added to the game until about the point that Smeargle appears on the Korean Index. Which just means that 315 was probably deleted earlier. It seems pretty clear why 315 was rejected. It shares a lot of design space with Natu, which is also a cute chick Pokemon, and there were limited slots for bird pokemon in the final but a ton of designs for bird Pokemon in the index. Given their closeness in the list and some telltale similarities in how they're shaded (look at their near identical feet, for instance), the dominant theory is that they were designed by the same designer, probably Morimoto but maybe Nishida. If that were the case, then it makes sense the designer made them both to fit the same slot in the game, and Natu was simply a more interesting choice. Personally, I think 315 was probably designed by Nishida and Natu by Morimoto, but even so its worth pointing out how close they are to each other. My best guess, given how explicitly Chatot is designed as “Music note bird,” is that the designers decided 315’s theming wasn’t obvious enough from its design and chose to reject it in favor of Natu. Which certainly makes sense to me: as much as I like 315, Natu exudes interesting mystery, while this guy is just a cute chick. ID 316: ???The little quarter-note Chick grew up into a G Clef Bird! Its beak is longer, it's sleeker, less fat, its nubs grew into wings, and it’s got a brand new smug look on its face. But the musical theme remains intact and in fact more pronounced in its evolved state. Like Chatot, 316 isn't just sort of shaped like a musical note; its body is literally a G-Clef, the sign used for most musical instruments: Saying all that, something about 316 feels off. It’s a little too cartoony, even for a Pokemon, and certainly for the second stage evolution, which tend to be fiercer and less goofy. Compare 316 to Pidgeotto and Fearow before it: Both of these guys have a sense of enormity to them: a feeling that they’re large and to some degree dangerous. 316 is not large: even its backsprite shows its whole body and makes it feel small. In addition, its shape doesn’t look at all like a realistic body. Pidgeotto and Fearow have feathers, feet, a stomach, and a discernible tail. 316 doesn’t have any of that: it's a tube bent into the shape of a G-Clef. It’s also not clear how it moves around: is it always flying, does it bounce on its tail? Sugimori really didn’t like Pokemon that looked too artificial or not like a natural creature in some way, and 316 definitely doesn’t feel like a real creature that could exist in the environment. On top of all of that, 316's eye doesn’t look like any other Pokemon’s eye, instead looking like it was out of an anime or a manga. Overall, 316 feels like a sketch of a fun idea that would’ve needed to be reworked had it gone further. It's clearly at a first draft stage: the larger idea is there but they hadn't yet fleshed out what it acts like, how it functions, and what sort of a move set it could have. You can see with Chatot how they felt that a musical note for a head wasn't enough and they designed the rest of it around a parrot shape, even giving it a unique, non-musical, tail. 316 doesn't even have much of a specific bird it's drawing from. Maybe a duck given its beak? But while the beaks on the Fearow and Pidgey lines are often based off of real types of beaks, 316's looks like Donald Duck or something similar. It fits in with other brainstormed ideas from other parts of Period One, like 305 and 306; like them, it would probably have been redrafted a number of times before it went forward, but was instead abandoned while they put effort into the Pokemon around it with more promise. 316 could also be the bigger reason 315 didn’t make it to SW ’97. If Natu and Xatu had a complete two-form family, while 315 had an evolution that clearly needed work, it made sense for the designers to go with Natu and Xatu instead. It could even be that Natu and Xatu dropped their middle evolution to better fit into a spot that was originally taken by 315 and 316 in a pre-Spaceworld '97 build. Who knows for sure. What we can say is that, in the fierce competition of bird Pokemon in the initial versions of Gold/Silver, 315 and 316 clearly were not seen as interesting compared to Natu, Xatu, Hoothoot, and Noctowl. 317: Proto-Shibirefugu?317 is pretty unique for the Korean Index. Unlike most other rejected sprites, 317 is clearly connected to a later finalized Pokemon, but it isn't clear exactly how. In this case it looks at a lot like Qwilfish and its rejected evolution, Shibirefugu. However, both Qwilfish and Shibirefugu appear later on the list in their own entries! So what's going on with this spiky guy? As far as I can see, there are five possibilities that could explain the existence of 317: 1) 317 was a rejected Red/Green design, which went on to inspire Qwilfish and/or Shibirefugu. 2) 317 was an early design of Qwilfish. 3) 317 was an early design for Shibirefugu. 4) 317 wasn’t a design for either, but was split into both Qwilfish and Shibirefugu. 5) 317 was an in-between evolution between Qwilfish and Shibirefugu. I’m going to consider each of these possibilities in order. 1) 317 was a rejected Red/Green design, which went on to inspire Qwilfish and/or Shibirefugu. This feels likely to me. 317, like many of these early designs, is very clearly an “Animal+” design, in which a regular animal is slightly modified or given one extra characteristic. In this case, it’s barely even "Plus": 317 is just a puffer fish with a cartoon face. But it fits in perfectly with the designs from development in early 1993, in which Game Freak was creating simple representatives of the Pokemon types inspired by real life animals. 317 fits perfectly next to Deer, Seel, Mankey, Tauros, and Farfetch’d. Of course, this could be coincidence. A lot of the other Period 1 Pokemon early in the Korean Index are Animal+ designs, and it is possible that during Period 1 the Gold/Silver team was also brainstorming fauna to populate the new game, exactly like the Red/Green designers were doing when they designed Mankey and friends. We can't really know for sure. Furthermore, if this theory is true and 317 really is a leftover from Red/Green, then how closely should we identify 317 with the Qwilfish line? That’s a hard question. Consider the other explanations and the evidence for and against: 2) 317 was an early design of Qwilfish. This is also possible. They both have a mean look to their eyes and Qwilfish’s backsprite, while not an exact match, is from the exact same angle as 317. It even has nearly the same line dividing its white belly from its top: If this is the case, then Qwilfish might have been clearly redesigned by a different artist when they refined this early design. Qwilfish’s eyes are a completely different style from 317, and the puffer spikes are drawn in a completely different style on each. On the other hand, given the similarity of their bellies, this could have just been a second go by the same artist. Qwilfish does make a lot of sense as a redesign of this guy. The way its body has been made a globe and its spikes now take the place of the earlier fins both look like they were attempts to take the best parts of the puffer-fish design and exaggerate them into a more identifiable and iconic design for the Pokemon. Honestly, I'm pretty convinced about the Qwilfish redesign theory when I look at the backsprites. However, the theory has problems. If 317 is an earlier design for Qwilfish, then why does Qwilfish also appear on this list later, at 339? If the Korean Index is chronological, it would imply that these were put on the list around the same time. There’s not a good explanation for this. It’s possible that Qwilfish was originally a riff on the first design, and since the first design was from someone else, they didn’t want to overwrite it. It could be that the design team was going back and forth between both designs and kept both around. It could be that a different artist created Qwilfish but out of respect for the original designer added it later in the list rather than overriding his colleagues' work. Or it could be an indication that Qwilfish was created independently of 317 and their similarity was a coincidence. 3) 317 was an early design for Shibirefugu. I think there’s some good evidence for this as well. Shibirefugu is obviously larger than Qwilfish and matches the general shape of 317 much more than Qwilfish. Its lips are the same as 317, and they both share the same tail, even if their backsprites are completely different. At the same time, like above, you can tell that Shibirefugu has been refined quite a bit from 317: it’s fins, like Qwilfish’s, are now spikes to go better with its overall theme, and it has a lightning bolt on its head to hint that there’s something more to it than “angry puffer fish.” Shibirefugu also appears later on the Korean Index, but there’s a more plausible story for why it exists alongside this previous design. Unlike Qwilfish, which is only twenty sprites after 317 on the index, Shibirefugu is the third from last Pokemon on the Korean Index, at ID 446. The last 25 Pokemon in the index are all found in Spaceworld 97 and the last few are just evolutions of Red/Green Pokemon or previous Pokemon found in the Index, which implies that they were all made very shortly before the Spaceworld 97 build. Since Shibirefugu is so close to the end, it’s possible it was designed right before Spaceworld '97 to replace 317, but since it was created so much later they just glued its design to the end of the list rather than overwrite the earlier one. That would suggest that Qwilfish was originally designed as a pre-evolution to 317, and then 317 was discarded to better match the design of Qwilfish. That would also explain why Qwilfish is found so close to 317 on the Index: because while 317 was still being considered, someone came up with a pre-evolution to go along with it. 4) 317 wasn’t a design for either but was split into both Qwilfish and Shibirefugu. This is kind of hard to say definitively, since even if 317 was made into one or the other it would have still influence the rest of the evolutionary line. 317 certainly has design elements of both Qwilfish and Shibirefugu: the general shape and tail of Shibirefugu and the pose and angry eyes of Qwilfish. It’s possible that when 317 way abandoned, they first took the best parts that worked and made it into Qwilfish, and then later when they decided Qwilfish should have an evolution, they went back to this original design and took more from it. It could be that 317 worked as a placeholder of “puffer fish Pokemon” and the Qwilfish line eventually was created to fill that gap. Of course, this is not much different of an explanation from any of the above: after all, how different is a direct redesign from an inspiration? Some of the designers could have thought of 317 as a jumping off point as they designed the Qwilfishes, while others thought they were directly reworking this earlier brainstormed idea. We can’t really know, but I don’t think it makes much difference. 5) 317 was an in-between evolution between Qwilfish and Shibirefugu. I think (5) is probably the only explanation for 317 that we can discount entirely, even though it was my initial theory before I started looking at the evidence. At first, it seems plausible that 317 could fit in between the two, because its an in-between size and because its lips look like a natural evolution from Quilfish’s puckered lips to Shibirefugu larger ones. But the timing doesn’t seem to work. Shibirefugu was designed at the very tail-end before the Spaceworld ’97 demo. That means there probably wasn’t space in the design timeline for all three to have coexisted together. Even beyond this, the Pokedex for Spaceworld ’97 doesn’t seem to have a gap for 317. The last few Pokemon added to Spaceworld '97 are all thrown in at the end of the Pokedex, like Togepi and Riifi. If there were a third Pokemon in the Qwilfish line, you’d expect either 317 or Shibirefugu to be out of order and haphazardly added to the end of the list, but neither is. In Spaceworld ’97, Quilfish evolves into Shibirefugu at level 18, which is pretty early and doesn’t seem to leave any room for an unused evolution between the two. Sure, that could have been the original level at which Quilfish became 317, but it seems both too high to be the level a first stage became a second stage, and too low for it to be the original level a second stage could become a third stage. The level at which it evolves could have been adjusted, but again, there wasn’t a lot of time between Shibirefugu’s design and the demo, so it would have to have been done quickly. Even beyond that, Qwilfish and Shibirefugu are much closer in design that 317 is to either of them. Their spikes are similarly designed like bumps on a round body, rather than the slicked-back hair-spikes of 317. If it was a rejected middle stage, then Qwilfish and Shibirefugu probably had earlier designs that matched 317’s aesthetics more, but if that were the case, why were they updated and it wasn’t? Conversely, maybe you think that 317 was invented after Spaceworld ’97 as a briefly considered middle stage. Again, this seems implausible, simply because if it was created after the fact, then it’s design would have been more commensurate with Qwilfish’s, not an alternate way of designing a puffer-fish with completely different quills. There’s a lot of speculation to do here, but for my money, here’s what I think happened. I think 317 was an early design, probably from Red/Green but maybe from the initial brainstorm for Pokemon 2. Once it was designed, Qwilfish was created as a pre-evolution for it using its backsprite as a model. They probably knew they needed to redesign 317 to better match Quilfish, but it was a good enough placeholder design that they didn’t get around to replacing it until the very end of development before the Spaceworld demo, when they finally created Shibirefugu’s design and slapped it over 317. Saying that, any of the above explanations, with the exception of (5), could be true or false to some extent. It’s impossible to know. I’ll track what happened to Shibirefugu when we get to its entry (spoilers: it gets overwritten by Stantler!), and look at the move set and its changes once we get to Qwilfish. For now, I just wanted to explore the plausible connections 317 might have with either of them, and track where its design ended up. 318: Quagsire (Nuoh)Another Pokemon that survived from the very beginning of Gold/Silver all the way to the final product! Quagsire, like Natu and Xatu before it, didn’t change drastically over the development of Gold and Silver. Its earliest sprite is still very recognizable, but has a larger jaw, an underbite, a larger arm, and a bigger tail. The jaw in particular gives it a thuggish look, while the final version focuses on its cuteness much more. The modern version also added shading to its head to give it a shinier, squishier look, in line with a salamander, while the earlier design, though still based on a salamander, was more muted in its inspiration. Even though Quagsire remained mostly intact, the early Quagsire of Spaceworld ’97 was a very different beast. First of all, the early Quagsire had a different name in Spaceworld ’97: while its final name was Nuoh (Maybe Swamp Salamander or swamp king) its early name was Mizuuo, which is either a play on Water Salamander or named after the Longnose Lancetfish, which is also called Mizuuo in Japanese. As mean looking as the Lancetfish is, I can kind of see it; both original Quagsire and the Lancetfish has the elongated lower jaw to connect them. It looks like its name was changed on 7/18/99, about a month before the Spaceworld ’99 build we have. A name meaning “swamp king,” if that’s what Nuoh means—or Quagsire for that matter—makes more sense for him anyway. Second, Mizuuo was just Water type, not Water/Ground as in the final. It isn’t clear why they made this change, but even the SW '97 Quagsire had a Ground move, so they may have revised it to provide type diversity. It could also have been because Salamanders are associated with the ground while the Japanese name for Lancetfish just means "water fish." The lancetfish is very much just a fish and has no connection to the ground type: But the biggest difference between beta Quagsire and the final product was that Quagsire was originally a single stage Pokemon! Wooper doesn’t appear at all in Spaceworld ’97, or in the Korean Index, and it is very unfinished in Spaceworld ’99. The idea of Quagsire being a second stage Pokemon seems like it was a very late idea, well after it had been conceived. It makes sense: looking at them with this knowledge, it’s clear Wooper doesn’t share many similarities with Quagsire and could have even been designed by a different designer. While they share the same palette and face, Wooper has differently styled feet and has sprouts coming from its head (which are from the Axolotl that Wooper, but not Quagsire, is based on). Wooper looks to me like it was created specifically to connect to Quagsire, but that they weren't designed in conversation with each other. Which, by the timeline we have, seems to be exactly the case. It’s unclear what exactly happened with its coloring, especially in July 1999. It started out as a light blue in Spaceworld ’97, which was in line with the very limited coloring that the game had before they remade it to fit the Gameboy Color. By July ’99, it had its modern look, but it was purple instead of blue, before being changed to the darker blue that was used in the final. It’s not certain whether this was an error, or if they were testing out this color before going back to blue; my gut says it was just an error since the shiny Quagsire of the final uses this coloring scheme and they could have easily gotten them mixed up. Quagsire’s 1997 movelist and it’s final movelist aren’t that much different, but the early set suggests a different type of creature than the goofy salamander we got. Let’s take a look: The first thing to notice here is that even though Mizuuo was pure Water type, it had a Ground move, "Mud Slap." Mud Slap was a move shared by a lot of Pokemon in Spaceworld ’97 (including Aipom, Skarmory, and Pidgey) but was turned into a TM only move by the final. Notably, none of the other Pokemon who learned Mud Slap in SW ’97 were Ground type (and two of them were flying, Ground’s mortal enemy!). So Quagsire could have had the move because it was given out to a lot of Pokemon, or it could be a hint they were already considering Quagsire as related to the Ground type. It got replaced with Earthquake in the final, which is a much better move—giving Quagsire some powerful late game moves—and fits its final Water/Ground typing nicely. It also has Rain Dance, which in Spaceworld '97 was something only the Squirtle line, the Poliwag line, and Quagsire learned, which might mean that Rain Dance was a move initially associated with Quagsire. It makes me wonder if Rain Dance originally had a different name and concept, or if part of Quagsire’s thing was that it danced! The Spaceworld '97 Quagsire was a much sleepier dude: it knows Rest and Snore in Spaceworld '97, which were absent in the final. Snore’s also nearly unique to Quagsire, in that only it and Snorlax knew the move in Spaceworld 97. This could make it a semi-signature for Quagsire, which would make sense given that its described as “leisurely” in its final Pokedex entry. Maybe it danced all day and snored all night! Anyway, Rest and Snore got replaced with Haze and Mist, conceptually moving Quagsire from a sleepy Pokemon to one that could create clouds of water vapor. Overall, I don’t think there’s a major change in concept that we can see from these two movesets, but clearly the focus of Quagsire shifted as they focused more on its identity as a water salamander and less on its lethargic nature. I like Quagsire. I think it's clear that even though it fits in with the “Animal+” basic designs from early in the Korean Index—like Gurotesu, 305, and 309—even its early sprites show a character and personality that most of these other early designs lack. Looking back on it in the context of the other discarded sprites, Quagsire’s a bizarre design, and I can’t help thinking that if it didn’t make it to the final, it’d look just as bizarre to us as some of the more out there rejected designs. But since we’ve all had twenty plus years to love Quagsire, we’re used to it. It’s a reminder that as unfinished as any of these other Pokemon are, we might have grown to familiarity with any of them. ID 319: Inoshika? ID 319 is a boar with antlers. It’s another Animal+ design, like Quagsire started and 317. Fortunately, we’re almost done with these sorts of designs as we get to the end of Period 1b, as most of the Animal+ designs are in the early parts of the index. Once again, this suggests these early Pokemon in the Index are sketchy and less developed than later designs, that this early brainstorming period was drawing from real world fauna possibly to populate the new games, and that at least some of these possibly have an origin as far back as Red/Green. 319, for instance, would fit right alongside Seel, and 309 both of which are real world animals with spikes on their heads, and both of which were designed around 1993 for Red/Green. Not to mention 304 and 317, both of which are Korean Index Pokemon which could have been early Red/Green designs as well. However, despite 319 sharing a lot of the generic design philosophy with some of the surrounding Pokemon designs, it seems to have a more interesting origin story. Most obviously, it looks just like this monster from Dragonball Z: This was the Inoshikacho, a beast that terrorized villages and was originally raised by the character Master Shen. As you can see, Inoshikacho shares the antlers and the general boar shape with 319, though 319 lacks the butterfly wings. So where did Dragonball Z get this creature from, you ask? You might think it’s a mythological animal in Japan, but in fact it was a reference to the card game “Koi Koi.” Koi Koi is a point scoring game where you match the cards into different sets that score different points. One of the hands in Koi Koi is the “InoShikaCho” hand, or, translated, the “Boar, Deer, Butterfly” hand: Dragonball Z’s monster, Inoshikacho, was a very literal interpretation of this Koi Koi hand. Inoshikacho was a boar with deer antlers and butterfly wings, matching the hand in an amusing, silly way. Now 319 doesn’t have the butterfly wings, but otherwise it looks suspiciously close to the Inoshikacho of Dragonball Z, right down to the angry looking face and the oversized, round body. It isn’t for certain that 319 was based on Inoshikacho from the show (though it first aired ten years before the Korean Index, giving them plenty of time to draw inspiration), and it may have been that 319 was just based on a mix of two forest animals, like how Arcanine mixed a tiger with a dog. However, I think the evidence is strong enough to support the theory that at the very least 319 got its inspiration from Koi Koi. If only we knew what 319’s Palette was supposed to be; if it was purple we’d know for certain where the inspiration came from. So what happened to InoShika (BoarDeer)? Obviously we can’t know for certain, but some of the same explanations which apply to earlier Animal+ designs apply here. Inoshika, at least superficially, doesn't look very original as a design and like 304 or 309 it could just have been deemed not unique enough. As well, if it was originally created as a Dragonball reference, the designers may have treated it as too-on-the-mark, or thought it wasn’t far enough away from the inspiration for comfort. It could also always have been a joke and never seriously considered. There’s a sliver of a chance it could have been made into Piloswine or Swinub (really Piloswine, since it was created first), but it’s not especially likely. There’s no indication of the Ice typing that typifies the Swinub line here, and there’s not even a tiny piece of Swinub or Piloswine that refers back to the earlier Inoshikacho inspiration. Moreover, InoShika was scrapped before Spaceworld 97, so if it went on to become Piloswine it would have been readded after it was abandoned, which is very unlikely. Instead, the Piloswine line might have been loosely inspired by the fact that a boar Pokemon had been rejected: seeing an opening for a pig type Pokemon, one of the designers might have created Piloswine to fill the gap left by the rejected InoShika. We can’t know for sure, but by instinct is that there’s no real connection between this guy and the pigs that took its place. He’s still cute though, even if he’s not quite up to the caliber of the other designs. ID 320: Nyuura (Sneasel)Sneasel’s a unique Pokemon, in that it went through more sprite changes and redesigns than any other Pokemon on the Korean Index (with the possible exception of Wobbuffet). It’s also an early Animal+ type design, but one that got reworked over and over until it no longer looked like a simple animal anymore. It also seems to have barely made it into Spaceworld 97, then redesigned barely a few months before the final release of Gold/Silver, and then redesigned again for Crystal. It’s a lucky Pokemon, one that could have easily been rejected many times along the way. The consensus is that Sneasel was based on the Kamaitachi, a yokai, or mythological spirit, in Japan that looked like a weasel with sickles for hands: Kamaitachi are supposed to be fast moving weasels who fly through the air in dust devils and slice people who get too close with their claws, giving their victims papercut-like wounds. I’ve seen it said that even though they cut people, they heal the wounds too so they don’t bleed and only hurt later, so that the Kamaitachi won’t be blamed for the wounds, giving them a trickster-like persona. This resemblance is a lot more obvious in Sneasel’s early designs, where it explicitly does look like a weasel, though its arms look pretty harmless to me, and certainly not sickle like. It also seems like a Kamaitachi Pokemon would be Flying type more than any other type, though an underhanded dust-devil-demon certainly also fits the Dark type, even if the sweet weasel sprite of early Sneasel doesn’t. It’s name, Nyuura or Nyula in Japanese, seems to be a portmanteau of “sneaking in” and “weasel,” establishing that even in its earliest versions, Sneasel was a crafty and underhanded sort of Pokemon. That’s probably one of the reasons it got revised so much, since the sweet smiling looking face of its Spaceworld ’97 design hardly gives off sneaky vibes at all. This first design feels similar to many of the other Animal+ designs of this early part of the list. It’s clearly a weasel, or maybe a cat of some sort, with large claws. Even though it seems to have been created early, its Pokedex number in Spaceworld ’97 is 246, sandwiched right between legendaries (which are normally at the very end of the Pokedex) and then Togepi, Snubbull, Aipom, and Riifi, all Pokemon which were reshuffled into more appropriate spots in the Pokedex by the final and Pokemon that we have also have some reasons to suspect were added to Spaceworld ’97 at the last second. Because it's so late on the list, Sneasel was either originally designed as a legendary--unlikely given its understated design--or it was a last minute addition which they hadn't yet found an appropriate space for in the Pokedex. Given that by July of 1999 it has a new Pokedex number, it's likely Sneasel was simply added in late after the 1997 Pokedex was mostly finalized, and moved later. That Sneasel was an early design but added late to the actual game is one possibility. On the other hand, Sneasel's also a prime suspect of a Pokemon that may have overrode something else which used to be in this Index slot. Given that it was entered into the 1997 Pokedex so late, at the point that they seemed to just be adding additional Pokemon without a pattern, Sneasel could have been designed right before Spaceworld ’97 and thrown in as one of the last designs. The fact that the sprite might be missing a right arm also hints that it may have been added later, since even the sprite might not be finished; it’s unclear to me if its right arm is simply at its side, or if it was always supposed to be visible like the later revisions and just wasn’t drawn in yet. If this is the case, Sneasel is unchronologically inserted into the Korean Index, and was probably designed closer to the end of 1997, around Shibirefugu, Tyrogue, and Ledian. However, as much as this is a possibility, its concept fits in much better with these early Era 1 Pokemon, especially since it seems to have started as an underdesigned idea based upon a real life animal. Ledian's original design also matches this earlier aesthetic, but most of the other Pokemon created towards the end of this list were more developed, complicated designs, and most were evolutions of other Pokemon. The fact that its concept (of sneakiness) doesn’t match its design much further makes me think it was created during the initial brainstorming session for the games and then input in at the last second when they needed a few more designs and they scanned back through the early parts of the index. What I find funniest about Sneasel is how the designers clearly knew that it didn’t look scheming or mean enough to fit its concept, and every single redesign seems to have had the goal of making it look more menacing. Notice how after the first design, they first change its smile very subtly into a smirk and a second hand is added to give it more of a combat pose. Then, the next revision outright changes that smirk into an evil grin, made its claws slightly pointier, and adjusts the ears a bit to make it look less sweet. We then have a completely bizarre design (the Sonic the Hedgehog Sneasel as some have dubbed it) in which the designer drew over all its fur to make it into something spikier and darker, continuing the trend of making it look more like a demon. At that point, it seems like the original designer gave up and someone else redrew it completely, loosely based on the same Kamaitachi origin but completely reimagined. It isn't certain whether the Sonic design was ever the design they were working with or whether it was just an alternative sketch they experimented with and then discarded. It’s also not really clear exactly when it was made, but it seems to be an evolution of the Spaceworld ’99 design and not the other way around (and we know the Scratchpads, from which this is taken, are post-Korean Index so it’s after those designs). The final design is also interesting because of just how late it was created. By Spaceworld ’99, most Pokemon—though not all—had their final designs, even if their poses hadn’t quite been figured out. The exception tended to be new Pokemon not seen before that build, not older Pokemon like Sneasel. And yet Sneasel is still based upon its drastically different earlier concept even at this late stage of development. That seems to suggest that Sneasel was a Pokemon they just could not figure out until the very last second. Spaceworld ’99 was a build from August 1999, and the final was released three months later in November, so Sneasel would have been one of the very last Pokemon to be redesigned! And given that its new design is so drastically different, there wasn’t much of a turnaround to finalize it. In fact, it’s Pokedex entry as of August 17th still mentions its crescent shaped claws, which are features of this earlier design, showing that even as they were writing the entries they were still thinking in terms of the cute-weasel design for Sneasel. In fact, Sneasel’s final design wasn’t even fully finished when they released Gold and Silver! First of all, unlike most Pokemon, there was no alternate Silver sprite for Sneasel. Both games used the exact same sprite. The scratchpads seem to have an unpolished design for a Silver sprite, but it was clearly not finished and discarded for lack of time. Secondly, they kept working on Sneasel’s design after release and then changed it quite a bit for Crystal, which seems very bizarre to me. Look at all the differences. First, Crystal has a completely different palette: while Crystal is black and pink, the Gold final sprite seems to have inherited the brown palette from all the way back from its Spaceworld 97 design. Its blue ears are refined into pink feathers; its white spot on its head is clarified as a pink jewel, and its eyes are clearly reworked and redefined to give it more character. All of these (except maybe the palette) are small tweaks, but they are tweaks you’d expect to see on a rough draft before the final, not after it. Additionally, look at their back sprites, and notice how the pose had been shifted a little to better match the front, the eye is drawn much better, and the back feathers-- which lack shading in Gold--are given some shading and refinement in Crystal: I don’t normally look at Crystal's designs, but in this case I think it’s instructive to show just how down-to-the-wire they must have been with Sneasel. It's very likely that they had someone redraw it at the last second and they had very little time to provide them with feedback and revisions. Instead they incorporated all of that revision work into the development of Crystal. It’s kind of amazing, in retrospect, how iconic and beloved Sneasel has become given how last minute it was.
Before we finish, I want to talk about Sneasel’s move set for just a second. Sneasel was original just a Dark type Pokemon, and while it was given the Ice type by Spaceworld 99 (maybe earlier if you think its cool blue palette was because of the Ice-type) its move list was never updated to give it any access to Ice-type moves. In fact, the Spaceworld 97 and final movelists are remarkably similar. Between the two, it lost Tail Whip (given that its new design didn’t have a tail), Sand Attack, and Pursuit, and it gained Agility, Quick Attack, Screech, and Beat Up. But most of those move changes aren’t that significant, and they still fit the same themes: Pursuit was replaced by Quick Attack, but they both imply Sneasel’s fast and a hunter; it lost Tail Whip and it was replaced with Screech, but both are similar moves and Screech fits the final design more. The only significant move change was Beat Up, which was Sneasel’s signature in Gold and wasn’t yet created in Spaceworld ’97. Given that it was added to the very end of the list—in fact, the last move in the Gen II move list-- and surrounded by other moves for Pokemon that were only created after Spaceworld ’97, it seems like the decision to give Sneasel a signature move was almost as late as its design change. This is just further confirmation that even while Sneasel was one of the earliest Pokemon to be created, it was probably the last, or one of the last, to be finalized. Sneasel’s design is really interesting to me, and it shows just how much fiddling the design team did to designs that they weren’t entirely happy with. It’s a testament to the quality of these games just as much as it shows how up-in-the-air and chaotic the development of Gold and Silver were. If there’s one really important takeaway from Sneasel’s journey, it's that Sneasel's revisions show just how far some of these “Animal+” designs could have diverged from what we saw in the Korean Index, had they been kept around longer and worked on more. Sneasel's example lends credence to the theory that ID 300 is an early Celebi, since it shows how far some designs were revised, and it suggests that it's possible some of these other Animal+ designs may have become other Gold/Silver Pokemon that we can't predict simply because their final designs are unrecognizable here in the Korean Index. As well, Sneasel shows just how much the design philosophies of the Game Freak team had changed from the beginning of Gold and Silver’s development to its end. In 1996, they were designing simplistic Pokemon designs based upon normal animals with a twist. These designs were in many way indiscernable from the early eras of Red and Green. But by the end they had moved far away from animal designs, and were in the process of revising out designs that were too obviously based on real-world animals in favor of more abstract designs (like Sneasel) or designs that at least had a hook (like Hoothoot, Lebyda, or Natu). Sneasel bridged the gap between the early design period and the late, and the ways it was revised provide us an archeological guide to how those periods in Pokemon's history were different.
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5/5/2021 3 Comments ID 310 (Natu) through 314ID 310: Natu (Neiti)Our first Pokemon that made it all the way to the final build! Well, maybe Celebi did too, but that's assuming 301 really was an early Celebi, and even then it wasn’t in SW97 and was substantially changed by the final. Natu, on the other hand, is more or less the same sprite-wise throughout development, though the similarity masks some interesting changes as it went through development. We’ll be talking more about these changes as we discuss this three (?!) stage line, but there’s still a lot to note about Natu itself. The different sprites from Spaceworld '97 to the final are all very similar, but Natu started with a brown palette, which put it in line with its more obviously Native American themed evolution, Xatu, which seems to have been originally based on a totem pole. Natu's palette eventually changed in June 1999, before eventually settling on the green from the final by Spaceworld '99. Still, it looks like it took a bit longer for Natu to get redrawn and gain a new palette than other Pokemon from Spaceworld '97: it’s still rocking the white look in and old sprite in June 1999, after others had already been reworked. The silver sprite was held over even longer, as you can see that it was still the old style even in Spaceworld '99. The Native American theme would suggest that whoever created Kokopelli also created the Natu line: likely Morimoto, possibly Sugimori. It also lightly suggests they were made at the same time, meaning that if Kokopelli was early, so was the Natu line. This isn’t the only reason to think that the Natu line was probably very early. First of course, it appears so early in the Korean Index, next to things like Donphan (the first Gold/Silver Pokemon revealed to the public) and the R/G Elephant. But even if you don’t buy the idea that the Korean Index is chronological, there are other reasons to think it was early as well. First, as we’ll talk about in more depth below, Natu has a second form unseen in Spaceworld '97. There is a lot of evidence that this second form was created prior to 1997, which also suggests that the Natu line was early too. We'll touch on those reasons in a bit. The best reason to evidence that the Natu line was from an early stage of development can be found in its drastically different early movepool: The first thing to notice here is that two of Natu's moves don't exist as-is in the final version. Stalker is an early name for Mean Look but probably does the same thing, and Synchronize (not to be confused with Generation V’s move with the same name) was a move that made the opponent take the same amount of damage as the user on that turn; it was replaced by Icy Wind in the final game. We know that the internal move list in Gold and Silver is chronological, because the Spaceworld '97 list is incomplete only at the end, and the only differences between it and the final are moves added to the end of the list which were created for Pokemon after Spaceworld '97. Which means that the move list was probably tabulated sometime before Spaceworld ’97 to match the Pokemon they already had. Natu has four moves added in Gold and Silver—Stalker, Synchronize, Pursuit, and Spite—and all of those except Pursuit appear very early in the Gold/Silver movelist. Given that Synchronize and Stalker were reworked, it strikes me as plausible that Natu’s moveset was figured out before they had fully completed the Spaceworld 97 move list, and was filled in with mostly early moves (Pursuit could have been added in slightly later, maybe to replace an earlier move). All of this suggests to me that Natu itself was done earlier than other Spaceworld ’97 Pokemon and it’s moveset was thus finished earlier than others. This isn't the only reason the moveset is important: the moveset hints at a very different flavor for the Natu line that will help us explain the next Pokemon in the index, 311. Natu’s an awkward Pokemon in the final game: it’s a Psychic/Flying Pokemon with only two Psychic moves: Foresight and Psychic. Foresight is awful and only learned after it has already evolved and Psychic is learned at level fifty IF you Natu it unevolved until then; otherwise, you have to wait until level 65, past when you’ve beaten the Elite Four. Other than that, it has one bad Flying move (Peck) and Nightshade, a Ghost-type fixed damage attack that is bizarrely given to a bird Pokemon that has nothing to do with Ghost Pokemon. The final moveset is very evocative of a mysterious bird that can tell the future, and I think it’s a real triumph in giving it character. But part of that character is that it’s pretty frustrating to use in battle. Not so the early version of Natu! In Spaceworld ’97, it starts with Confusion, which is a decent enough Psychic move to take advantage of its typing, and has a number of Flying type moves to use, like Drill Peck. Moves like Stalker, Quick Attack, and Pursuit all give it the flavor of a fast Pokemon which chases after prey; moves like Spite and Synchronize (which makes the opponent take the same amount of damage Natu would this turn) give it a flavor of an attrition based Pokemon which punishes its opponent for trying to defeat it. All of these elements—playing into its identity as a bird, its quickness, and its cruelty to its opponent—completely change the type of Pokemon it is, while its traits in the final—of being a bird who sees the future and hops around slowly—are completely absent. By Spaceworld ’99, it’s Pokedex entries are close to the final and mention its ability to tell the future, so clearly its flavor had been reworked by then. One last thing makes me think the Natu line was one of the earliest lines designed for Gold/Silver. In the final game, Natu is only found in one obscure spot, which suggests to me that it was created at an earlier time in development before they had worked out exactly what sorts of Pokemon were going to be needed to populate the environment. A similar pattern happened in Red/Green: most of the earliest Pokemon created didn’t fit in any region of the game, and so the Safari Zone was created as a catch-all environment for designs they liked but couldn't obviously fit into the regions created for Red/Green. As a result, the Safari Zone was disproportionately stuffed with Pokemon which were early designs from the initial stages of development, like Exeggcute, Chansey, and Kangaskhan. To be fair, Spaceworld ’97 did have a completely different map layout and story, and so you could account for Natu’s obscurity by assuming it fit more into Spaceworld '97’s world than the final, but even that map still had more or less the same regions and environments as final Gold/Silver, just spread out over a Pokemon world version of the Japanese islands. On the other hand, Natu's obscurity could be a result of how drastically its flavor changed over development. As Natu’s development made it into a weirder and more obscure creature (as we'll see in its moveset), it may have gone from a tiny bird that could've fit almost anywhere to a Psychic bird that didn't make sense on the initial routes. One last note: Natu is the first in a series of odd bird Pokemon found in the Korean Index. I’ll be pointing it out as we go along, but the Korean Index is simply stacked with new ideas for birds. If you’re wondering why any of them didn’t make it into the final, my guess is that they were all in competition for the same slots that Natu and Hoothoot got, and that they got cut because Hoothoot and Natu were the superior designs. ID 311: ??? A second form of the Natu/Xatu line! It’s tempting to call it some like Batu or Klaatu, but we really have no idea. I’m not even sure it was ever a second form, and not just an alternate version of Natu. This guy is really interesting to me. He fits into the middle ground between Natu and Xatu in that he’s more developed than Natu (Natu’s final Pokedex mentions wings so undeveloped it has to hop around, and here we see them grown) but he has smaller feet and wings than Xatu, which looks far more formidable than 311. This Pokemon is clearly based on a roadrunner, unlike the more sparrow-like designs of the other two. Again, since Kokopelli was designed around Southwestern American folklore and roadrunners are from the same place, this just continues to cement the idea that these Pokemon were made by the same designer. “Klaatu” also has an eye design on its back, which matches the eye design found on the back of early Xatu, again demonstrating how these form a natural three stage evolution that changes more gradually than Natu into Xatu. Saying all that, 311 feels quite unfinished. Notice the discrepancies between its front sprite and its back sprite. Most obviously, the back sprite doesn’t have a wing where there should be one; either it’s invisible because it’s folded into its back, or this is some kind of deformed one winged bird. Secondly, the tailfeathers are completely different between back and front: in one they cup together into an oval at the top, while in the other they’re spread outwards at the top. The back sprite is a different, and probably earlier, design for sure, but it also seems like it was never completed. Instead, the lack of a wing makes it seem as though its more an anatomy sketch where wings would be added later, but never were. All this suggests that though Natu and Xatu were probably implemented early, 311 may have been discarded even before that. Having said the above, there’s some really interesting conclusions to draw when comparing this roadrunner to Natu’s moveset. At least according to Natu’s final Pokedex, Natu is not a fast Pokemon; its wings don’t even work. And yet its moveset has Quick Attack and Pursuit in it (not to mention Stalker, which of course implies a Pokemon that keeps following its opponent even after it tries to escape). All of these moves seem much more suited to a roadrunner Pokemon than a flightless chick. Could 311 originally have taken Natu’s place, but was then switched out when they came up with Natu? Or maybe they were a three stage evolution when the move set was being designed, and those moves were given to the line because they suited 311? Alternatively, if you don’t believe that the Korean Index is chronological, 311 could have been an attempt to expand the Natu/Xatu line after SW97. If this was the case, it wasn’t considered long, given its lack of wing and that there are no signs of it in the June 1999 build. I very much doubt this possibility. First, the Korean Index introduces almost no Pokemon designs which were later than SW97, and the two it does were probably special cases. Given how similar the lineup of the Korean Index and SW97 are, it doesn’t seem likely to me that they created short lived evolutions like 311 and then scrapped them almost immediately after. Even more significantly, this theory wouldn’t explain why Natu’s movelist seems designed for 311. Quick Attack, Pursuit, and Stalker seem designed for an earlier version of the design which included 311. It is far more plausible that 311 informed that movelist and explains why those moves so ill match Natu. If the Natu line was ever considered as a three-stage line, my suspicion is that 311 was cut when they decided to make Natu evolve by the Heartstone (it doesn’t work in SW97, but its still in the code). Most Pokemon which evolved via stone were two stage evolutions, and they may have hoped to bring Natu/Xatu in line with them. Then, after SW97 when they changed their mind and made Natu evolve just by level, other Pokemon had probably already taken that slot and there was no room to squeeze 311 back in. This is only speculation, of course, since the other Pokemon that used the Heart Stone—Politoed—was a three stage line, but it still seems plausible. It could also have been removed for continuity reasons. It was probably very difficult to make a moveset for a tiny bird, a fast running bird, and a Psychic totem-pole bird. Even the final skips over this by completely avoiding bird moves that Xatu could do but Natu could not: focusing on their Psychic nature probably gave the team more space to design a moveset that fit both stages. Adding another completely different bird might have been too much, and removing it would allow them to avoid the “Natu with Quick Attack and Pursuit” problem of SW97. ID 312: Neitio (Xatu) Xatu’s where we can most obviously the Native American influences in this line. There are two obvious (and one obscure) inspirations for Xatu. The first are Pacific Northwest Totem Poles, like you see here: Not only does Xatu’s beak match this picture, as well as it’s blocky style of coloring, but the little frog friend it has in SW97 seems to be a clear match for a totem pole figure below the bird on the top. In fact, the SW99 and final Silver sprites even match the typical totem pole pose, with wings outspread around it. The second inspiration for Xatu (and Natu) also comes from Pacific Northwest Indian culture. That is, both heavily resemble the trickster god Raven: Raven is one of the most prominent gods in the pantheons of some of the Native American tribes now found in Washington and Oregon states. While most of the gods in these Native American pantheons tend to keep their distance from humans, Raven is typically represented as a trickster god who can be a champion to humankind. There are legends in which Raven gave humans the gift of fire, as well as legends about how Raven put the moon in the sky. Even though he’s not the head of the pantheon, he’s often described as the creator of the Earth and of humans. He’s also a god with a lot of personality and charisma: like other trickster gods such as Loki, or Coyote in other religious system, there are far more stories devoted to him then there are other gods. While Raven is depicted in many different ways, the similarities are unmistakable. For instance, in the first picture of Raven, not only can we see the eye that can be found on Xatu’s back in the exact same place, but we can also see that Raven has a second face, right where Xatu’s companion is on his chest. Furthermore, the second and third Ravens have wings identical to Natu and 311’s wings. While the similarities to Raven and Totem Poles was toned down in the final designs of Natu and Xatu, the similarities still remain. What about the last inspiration? Well, as it turns out, Xatu had made a previous appearance in Game Freak's earlier game, Pulseman! This enemy from Pulseman is more obviously based on a Mallard Duck; likely the same ducks that inspired Duck Hunt. But it has an unmistakable resemblance to Xatu's final palette. It's likely that they either found the Native American theme a bit too obvious, or they simply thought the brown palette was boring, and when they were searching for a new color scheme for the Xatu family, they decided to make it a reference to Pulseman. Regardless, it's a pretty interesting find for me to discover the secret Pulseman origins of Xatu! (Thanks to RacieB for the find!) Xatu’s movepool in Spaceworld ’97 was extremely limited, but that’s because at the time it evolved via the Heartstone, and traditionally stone evolutions like Wigglytuff, Poliwrath, Victreebell, etc didn’t learn any extra moves, presumably to incentivize the trainer to keep them in their unevolved form until they had the moveset they liked. The Heartstone was one of two new evolutionary stones in Spaceworld '97, alongside the Poisonstone, and only Politoed and Natu used it to evolve. It was probably removed when they came up with the idea of evolutions that used traded items, which was a more original way to cause the new Pokemon to evolve. As a result, by Spaceworld 99, they had gotten rid of the Heartstone and changed the evolution method to just simple leveling. Natu evolved into Xatu at level 20 in Spaceworld '99. By the final, they had upped the leveling requirement to level 25, possibly to account better for how high leveled Natus were in the wild. There's only one more point of interest for Xatu. By Spaceworld ’99, we have early Pokedex information for most Pokemon that had survived to that stage in development. Most of these entries are pretty much the same as the final, as you can see with Xatu’s: Beta: It's believed that it stands still all day long, with hardly a twitch or a peep, because it is looking into the future. Final: It's believed that it stands still all day long, with hardly a twitch or a peep, because it is looking into the past and future. Even though these are very similar, I do want to note two things. First, the final added “looking into the past” to the entry. While it’s not a big change, this seems to be more consistent with the earlier Xatu sprite that had an eye on its back, which would have visually symbolized “looking into the past.” I don’t think this is proof the old design was still in use, but it is interesting. Secondly, from this entry it is clear that Xatu is not the sort of Pokemon to use Quick Attack or Pursuit; it clearly spends most of its time staying put. The remnants of 311 were clearly gone by this point, and Xatu’s flavor was nailed down as “future seeking bird” rather than the “fast hunter bird” flavor its old moveset would imply. ID 313: ??? I simultaneously think this is a great design and completely understand why it didn’t make it even as far as Spaceworld ’97. It’s a bizarre, slightly deformed design, not unlike Morimoto’s signatures in Pokemon design. It could also be a Sugimori design given his design work for Hoothoot, which similarly is a bizarre, exaggerated version of an existing bird. It reminds me most of Doduo, though Doduo’s signature two heads aren’t a part of this design at all. However, the long legs, the fact they are both based on flightless birds, and the sort of shellshocked look on its face all remind me of Doduo. It’s clearly based on a Kiwi bird, though instead of looking forward, the bird is looking up straight into the sky, giving it a sort of look to it that makes it look stupid or confused. FrenchOrange at The Cutting Room Floor has suggested it might be an undead bird and that it’s at a weird angle because it’s a zombie undergoing necrosis; it’s possible, but that might be a stretch. My best guess is that it’s either just a play on a Kiwi's innate goofiness, much like Hoothoot is an exaggerated and sillier looking owl, or that 313 is based on old stories in which Turkeys, being extremely stupid birds, would look up at the sky when it rained and drown themselves. Really, any speculation is possible with this guy, as we have so little to go on. Another mystery about this Pokemon is how old its design is: was this originally a scrapped design for Red and Green, like 304, 309 and possibly 305-308? Given its place in the index, so near the beginning, it’s certainly plausible. It does fit the design sensibilities of the second era of Red and Green’s design: it’s an Animal+ sort of design, it’s a deformed and monstrous design similar to Crocky and Cactus in concept and given its close resemblance to real life birds it fits very snugly with Farfetch’d and Doduo, made in the same era as regular birds with one slight twist. If it was created in this era, it probably didn’t make it far, and probably competed for the same flightless bird concept that Doduo nailed much better. If it was brought back for Gold/Silver, it likewise probably faced the same problems of being not distinct enough from the other birds and was dropped again. But we can’t really know for sure, and its just as possible that it was made for the earliest build of Gold/Silver before it was dropped or just never implemented in the first place. Like I mentioned in the Natu entry, there are a ton of bird Pokemon in the Korean index, and its likely they were all competing for the same two or three spots which eventually went to the Natu line and the Hoothoot line. Pokemon like this one probably didn’t get very far in development because they had so much competition; we know from interviews that Sugimori was a huge fan of Hoothoot, and Natu was, as we saw, an early Pokemon that was well liked enough to stick it out through the entire process. In the end, Undead/Stupid Kiwi bird just probably didn’t fill a needed niche in the games and didn’t get beyond a rough idea. ID 314: ??? Like 313, there’s not much to go on with 314 either. It’s clearly based on a scorpion, which wasn't used in Red/Green but is a great concept for a Pokemon. It also shares that “Animal+” plus design typical of these early Gold/Silver designs and the early phases of Red/Green’s design, which plausibly dates it as far back as the early development of Red/Green where they were brainstorming fauna to fit the world. However, it doesn’t look much like a Pokemon; notably, it lacks a distinct face, which gives it a generic monster sort of look. Of all the designs in Red/Green, as disparate as they were, the designers were careful that almost every single one of them had a recognizable face that could show emotions and express character. The three exceptions--Staryu, Starmie, and Zubat--prove the rule. Staryu and Starmie have a crystal eye, similar to 314, but have a five limbed body that give them humaniod features to emote with. Even Zubat which also lacked eyes, had such huge teeth that it could still show off a face. Not so with 314. What does this mean? It’s unclear. Was 314 from such an early stage of design that it predated the design sensibilities that led to Pokemon’s distinct style? Unlikely, given that the earliest Pokemon we know of, such as Rhydon, Gyaoon, and Kangaskhan, all have even more cartoony faces, not less. Another possibility is that 314 was created by someone completely new to the team, and thus looks so drastically different. Again, it’s possible, but we don’t have any other corroborating evidence. The only other explanation I can think of is that it was inspired by something far outside Pokemon with different design sensibilities, and they planned to bring it into line with other Pokemon before it was scrapped and ignored. For instance, The Cutting Room Floor suggests that 314 may have been based upon a scorpion enemy from Dragonquest: But this doesn’t seem right either, since even this Dragonquest enemy has a face and more personality than 314! If the Scorpion looked more like a Pokemon than 314 does, why would have it been designed to look less like a Pokemon than the original? It could have been based on a different source, and it certainly looks like a generic trash mob from an early RPG; maybe this guy filled in as exactly that when they were programming Pokemon very early on. My bet is on Option 2: this was a design by someone outside the Pokemon design team and it was never redrawn to conform to the design sensibilities of the team. Which means this was probably part of the larger brainstorming very early in Gold/Silver’s design cycle, or from even earlier, at some point early in Red/Green. I’ve also seen suggestions that this is an early version of either Skorupi or Gligar, both of which are plausible: 314 certainly has the pose of Skorupi, and Skorupi fixed 314’s face problem but changed little else, so I can see this being a possibility. However, given the long time between development of Gen II and Gen IV, I’m hesitant to speculate that Pokemon from this list were reused so much later. Given how sketchy 314 is, it’s just as likely that Skorupi was created just to fill a “scorpion Pokemon” slot in Generation IV and they just coincidentally look similar. Likewise, this design might have evolved into Gligar, but just about everything had to change: its pose and its face are completely different, and Gligar even gains wings which 314 lacks. As we’ll see, some Pokemon on this list undergo drastic transformations, so it is possible 314 changed this much. However, as we’ll see when we get to it, Gligar’s early designs hint it was probably originally based on facehuggers from the Alien franchise and its Scorpion similarities were supplementary to that initial design idea. Furthermore, Gligar nor 314 appear anywhere in Spaceworld ’97, so if this did lead to Gligar, it was clearly brought back from the dead after 1997, which is unlikely. If 314 was the starting point for Gligar, it would probably have been a very loose inspiration rather than a direct line, I think.
Because it doesn’t appear in Spaceworld ’97, it is very likely 314 was a very rough design from the earliest brainstorming for Gold/Silver. If it appeared in an earlier build I doubt much work was put into it. At best, they probably planned to come back to it, but by the time they did, Gligar was a better Scorpion design. Whatever happened, 314 never got a chance to fill a niche, and seems to have been forgotten as they filled out the initial 1997 roster. Another long string of mostly unused designs (plus four Pokemon that, revised, made it to the final!). The first of these are clearly “cute” designs by Atsuko Nishida but have an unfinished look; the rest of them look to me like a mix of Morimoto and Nishida’s designs, possibly in collaboration. Again, most of these are “Animal+” designs and seem to be brainstormed ideas for fauna that could populate the world; not unlike how Pokemon like Rattata and Pidgey were used in Red/Green as generic animals to populate the environment. At least one of these is almost assuredly a scrapped Generation I Pokemon, and I have my suspicions about at least one more. This period also starts the designer’s early obsession with bird Pokemon designs, which this list seems to have a ton of before they cut them. Whether these were just a quick dump of old designs, redrawn and made available to tinker with, or a brainstorming session of world-populating fauna, almost none of them feel all that fleshed out and very few of them probably had a lot of design work put into them. ID 305: ??? This is…very basic. It’s clearly a design by Atsuko Nishida: it screams cute, it’s got the cheek dimples that appear in many of her designs, and it’s based on a simplistic shape that accentuates its adorable features. Cutting Room Floor points out that it slightly resembles Kirby and, well, fair enough. But it doesn’t look very developed at all, and certainly isn’t ready for a Pokemon game as is. It doesn’t have a hook, any features that denote a type, or any concepts to build a moveset around. It shares a bit with the earliest designs of Jigglypuff, but even Jigglypuff has those huge eyes that pull the design together, making it distinctive: There’s one thing that gives us a clue to this pokemon’s larger design goals, and make me think the design similarities to Jigglypuff are not indications that this is a early version of it or that they’re related. Namely, this little guy seems to be the first in a four (!?) stage evolution, followed by 306, 307, and 308: We’ll discuss the weird mystery of how there seems to be a four stage evolution when we talk about 306 and 308, but for now it’s worth noting that these other stages give us clues about what was going on with 305. All three of the following are clearly grass types, which means that 305 could possibly be designed after a seed that grows into the tree at the end of the evolution. That would fit with his round design, though frankly it’s still a weak design even if we know this. Sunkern, in the final, is a much better depiction of what a seed Pokemon could look like: I doubt this is an early version of Sunkern; Sunkern seems to have been created in the July 1999 build but doesn’t yet have a sprite by then. It has a sketchy sprite that looks completely different in Spaceworld ’99, which suggests it has a separate origin, much later than this. As to my best guess about this pokemon? This is 100% speculation, but I wonder if this whole evolutionary line was a very early design for the Oddish family. Nishida also designed that line and Oddish shares a similar simplistic circular seed design that blossoms into a larger plant. But that’s just speculation. This little dude could be all sorts of things. The only thing I can say for certain is that it would have been revised before moving forward as a design. ID 306: Yuki Usagi?The second in the 305-308 evolutionary line, and probably the most interesting. Rather than a generic smiling blob like it’s predecessor, this stage of the line has a distinct idea behind it. It’s grown leaf ears and it’s body has elongated, giving it the appearance of a rabbit. It could be a Yuki-Usagi, or a type of bunny snowman that are commonly made in Japan: These bunnies are not only super cute, but they have a long history in Japan. Notice the Yuki-Usagi in the background of this painting from 1772: 306 sure does look like a Yuki-Usagi, right? It also resembles a daifuku, or a sweet type of mochi made in Japan, which is sometimes also made in the shape of a rabbit: That, importantly, raises an interesting possibility. Like 305 before it, this design has all the hallmarks of Atsuko Nishida’s design. And because of an interview that was helpful translated into English by Dr. Lava (all credit to him for the below picture) we know of one other Pokemon Nishida designed based off a daifuku: Could this be the original design of Pikachu? Well, possibly. To my mind there are a couple of reasons to doubt it. First, according to this interview, Nishida believes that there’s no data left over from her original design. This sprite is not drawn in the Red/Green style—notice how the back sprite isn’t artificially blown up like Red/Green back sprites were—so if it were Pikachu’s original design, it would have to have been specifically redrawn when they were brainstorming for Gold/Silver. Secondly, 306 definitely seems to have a grass aesthetic (not to mention that if it were a Yuki Usagi, it would also be Ice type) while of course Pikachu is far away from that design; if this were Pikachu’s original design than it went through quite a journey as it got redesigned. Third, of course, 306 is part of it’s own evolutionary line that looks very different from Pikachu’s; but then again, this could be an artifact from when Pikachu was much different. If this is the original design of Pikachu, then it potentially gives us an explanation for 305-308 is a seemingly four stage line, when that’s more or less against the evolutionary rules in Pokemon games. What could easily have happened was that 305, 306, and 307 were designed as a line, but that Yuki Usagi was picked out to be redesigned into its own independent Pokemon. After it was pulled from the line, 308 could have been added as a third stage to replace it; this makes sense, given how different the coloring and design of 308 are. Of course, it could also have been the case that all four were designed at the same time, knowing they would discard whichever was deemed the weakest design and use the rest to make a three-stage design. It also seems to be that the Pikachu connection to 306 would make the possibility of my Oddish theory for the rest a little more farfetched. Pikachu was designed in Period 3 of Generation I’s design (1993-1994), right when Atsuko Nishida was hired, while the Oddish line is one of the very last pokemon families she designed, right at the end of Red/Green’s development. Furthermore, it looks like the Oddish line was developed because they needed more grass types (it’s made at the very end along with the Bellsprout line, there were very few common grass types without these two additions), which suggests that she made the line based on the balance needs of the game right at the end. While Nishida could have dipped back into her earlier stuff and redesigned 305, 307, and 308 to fit this need, it doesn’t suggest that Pikachu and Oddish were made independently. Which also implies that either my Oddish theory or the Pikachu theory are correct, not both (though it is possible they coexist). One last thought, in favor of the Yuki Usagi-Pikachu connection. Each time I look at them, I can’t help but notice how similar the eyes of 305, 306, and Pikachu are: Obviously this similarity can be explained away by Nishida’s style, but on the other hand, I can’t shake how, if you erase everything else extraneous, these all look very much like three different takes on the same Pokemon. ID 307: ???307 is clearly the third stage evolution of 305 and 306. It’s more developed, and it’s leaf ears have turned into leaf hair. Other than that, there’s not much to say about it. It feels under-designed; though it does have shading, the majority of it is just a bland white, like 305, and its face is almost completely unchanged from it. It does look like a natural extension of that Pokemon, but while 305 didn’t have any discernible type, 307 is obviously grass. Another weird characteristics of this line is that if 306 was designed at the same time as the rest of the line it would imply that 307 would be Ice/Grass, just like 306 seems to be. But 307 shows no features of an Ice/Grass Pokemon and 308, following it, looks a bit like a tropical tree, which fits an ice typing even less. These discrepancies just make me feel even more that this line was either half baked, a brainstorming session that didn’t ever go much further, or early designs that got brought back to tinker with but in the end weren’t used. Beyond that, 307 fits my early Oddish theory probably the most out of this line; its leaf hair looks quite a bit like Oddish’s and despite its coloring 307 could be mistaken for Oddish’s big brother. We’ll probably never know the truth behind what was going on with this line, but my speculation is that these were early ideas and they either became something else that looks completely different, or were dropped for more nuanced designs as development moved forward. ID 308: ???The last of this four stage line of cute white grass-haired critters. 308 is quite the departure from the rest of the evolutionary tree: its shading is different, its eyes and mouth are a completely different style, and while 307 at least resembled a plant, this one is a full-on palm tree of some type. It’s legs have also turned into roots, furthering the connection to a plant, and there’s shading on it’s body that makes it resemble bark. It’s most similar to Sunflora in the final, but Sunflora (as Sanii or Sunny) appears later in the Korean index, and so they were probably unrelated. There’s a lot of strange things going on with the Pokemon, so let’s take them one by one. First, let’s address the four-stage elephant in the room. To this day, there is not a single Pokemon evolutionary line that has four stages (discounting mega-evolutions, of course). It strikes me as very unlikely they were considering one here, especially if, as I suspect, this is an earlier scrapped design from Red/Green. The speculation on Cutting Room Floor is that this is a split evolution from 306, and that’s possible, but for a number of reasons I don’t see that as likely. First, just on an aesthetic level, 308 doesn’t look anything like 306: it’s hair doesn’t even look close to the ears on 306 and there’s not even a hint of bark skin to 306. Furthermore, the concepts are completely different, given that one’s a Yuki Usagi—associated with snow and ice--and the other is a palm tree—associated with fire and sun. On the other hand, while it’s still quite a difference, 308 does seem to grow out of the design of 307, which in turns seems like a natural outgrowth of the design of 306. 307’s hair gets turned downwards into fronds, its feet get stretched out to the roots. As a result, while I see the progression from 306 to 307 to 308, a progression straight from 306 to 308 seems, at best, like it wasn’t thought out. That’s not to say that a split evolution isn’t impossible here; in the final, Belossom and Politoed both look significantly different than the line that proceeds them. Saying that, there’s a specific reason Politoed looks different that we’ll get to when we hit that entry, and Belossom’s original coloring--despite it’s unfortunately racist implications--do make it look significantly closer to the Oddish line that proceeds it. 308 could very well have been designed like them, to be a significant departure from the original line. The bigger reason to doubt the split evolution hypothesis is that the internal index, not to mention the final game, contains no Pokemon lines completely created for Gold/Silver which also had split evolutions. For instance, Slowking was a split evolution, but Slowpoke and Slowbro were Red/Green Pokemon; Tyrogue splits into three Pokemon, but Hitmonchan and Hitmonlee were Red/Green Pokemon. There aren’t even candidates for other split evolutions like this in the internal index, with the very unlikely exception of 317. It doesn’t seem likely to me that the 305, 306, 307, 308 line breaks this rule, especially when they appear in the internal index so early, far before the first split evolution (Slowking) even makes an appearance on the list. So what’s happening here? I can think of three likely possibilities. The first is that when this line was brainstormed, they came up with four ideas but weren’t sure which ones would constitute the evolutionary line they chose in the end: they may have been thinking of ditching one of the four and creating an evolutionary line out of the other three. I mentioned the second option above, but it could also be that one of these Pokemon was pulled out to become its own separate line (likely 306, especially if it became Pikachu) and another one was designed to take its place as a third evolution. Because this might have happened later, a different designer could have worked on it, explaining why 308 looks so different from the other three. The third option is that 308 was a redesign of 307, possibly created by a different designer other than Nishida (likely Morimoto). One reason to think this is because it looks so much more fleshed out that 307; not only does it have much more personality, but its concept is much deeper than “white thing with leaf hair” and it no longer shares basically a copy/paste of the face of the previous evolutions. Its shading is also more developed, and the design has been sharpened so that multiple parts of it all scream “tree.” Of course, "redesign of 307" theory still runs into the problem that 308 seems completely disconnected from the design of 306. However, that’s more easily explained if 308 was a later redesign: 305 and 306 were probably just not redesigned yet to create continuity with the new design for 308, and the whole line was scrapped before anyone did their redesigns. All of this is speculation, but the overall evidence leads me away from the split evolution hypothesis and towards the redesign idea. Another piece of evidence in favor of the redesign theory is the back sprites of 307 and 308: Obviously, as you can see with the third picture, in which I overlaid 308’s back sprite on top of 307’s, they don’t have identical back sprites. But man are they close. Looking at these two, side by side, it makes me wonder if 308’s back sprite wasn’t derived in part from 307’s, lending credence to the redesign theory. What’s also interesting to me is that 308’s sprite only shows us a bit of the head, while 307’s shows the entire body. In general, Red/Green’s back sprites tended to only show a small amount of the whole creature, and the pixels were blown up to give a sense of perspective. The early designs for the SW97 version of Gold and Silver tended to do the opposite: having a lot more pixels to work with, they tended to try and show the entire creature in the back sprites. However, by the final, they tended to go backwards again, and the complete game once again usually only shows part of the Pokemon in the back sprites. There are a lot of exceptions to this pattern, but take a look at some of representative examples: There's too much noise in the patterns of back sprites to make any clear conclusions, but part of me thinks that this lightly suggests 308 was designed (or redesigned) later than the others, potentially after Spaceworld '97. If that's the case, it does put some doubt on the idea that the Korean Index is chronological, but it is absolutely possible that even if 308 was added after SW97, it could have replaced a Pokemon originally found in this slot and designed earlier, or that the version we see here is a redesigned version of a Palm Tree 308 that had always existed in this slot but in an earlier design. Or that is always existed here but the back sprite is a coincidence. My guess is either the first or second option: that there was probably a white tree creature more in line with 308 here, or this is a redesign of 308 done after Spaceworld 1997 that replaced something else in this slot which got discarded. But if you are inclined to be skeptical this list is chronological, then 308 is your Exhibit A. ID 309: Hanako?This one’s quite interesting! I feel pretty safe in saying that this elephant Pokemon was a newer iteration of a rejected design from Red/Green. That design, found in the original Red/Green leak, only had a backsprite, but it matched up with images we previously had of a cut elephant Pokemon (which may or may not be referenced in Raichu’s final Japanese Pokedex entry, which mentions being able to shock an Indian Elephant into fainting). Unlike other beta Pokemon, we don’t have a name for this because it was partially obscured, but the final letter is either “ko” or “ro.” Some people have speculated its name was “Hanako,” the name of a famous elephant that lived in Inokashira Park in Tokyo for sixty years, and although that name is pure speculation, it’s as good as any other as long as we don’t forget it’s made up. The version of “Hanako” found in the Korean Index is quite different from the original in a lot of ways, to the point that I suspect it was redrawn by a completely different artist (if I had to guess, I’d say Morimoto made the original one, and Sugimori redrew it). The original has a standing pose and looks vaguely sinister, while the second looks much more like a conventional elephant. This generally matches the way designs had changed since the early development of Red/Green and the early development of Gold/Silver: notice how the original one looks a bit like the early exaggerated Kaiju designs like Nidoqueen and Rhydon, while the latter matches the “Animal+” sensibilities of many of the early designs in the Korean Index. Still, all of the distinctive parts of the original design can be found in this redesign. The most distinctive part of the original was that it seemed to have four tusks: a regular pair and a smaller pair above them (they’re hard to see but visible in both front and back sprite). Lo and behold, the redrawn sprite also has smaller tusks jutting out of the regular ones, though it’s also grown a bunch more on the top of its head. The back sprites also look very similar, though the new one has replaced the trunk with a head spike, which also reflects the way the trunk has been redrawn downwards in the newer design.
What’s interesting about this Pokemon is that it provides insight into the process by which old designs were reused. While it is possible the original "Hanako" existed on an earlier version of the Korean Index before getting revised and replaced, the existence of this elephant suggests that old Red/Green designs weren’t simply transferred over but redrawn if they were. This also suggests a level of intentionality: someone at Game Freak must have liked this elephant boi enough to redraw him and put him up for consideration. If the elephant was redrawn, it also means that potentially any of these early sprites were also redrawn rejected Red/Green sprites, though who knows which might actually be (304 and 306 look like reasonable candidates, but really anything could be). Finally, the existence of this elephant here, so early in the Korean Index, supports my thesis that the Index is an (imperfect) chronological record of the development of Gold/Silver. There are other explanations and it could be coincidence, but it’s something. Regardless, even if this Elephant had enough fans to get redrawn and considered for Gold/Silver, it didn’t appear in Spaceworld 1997 or after. There’s no real candidate for a Pokemon that might have been designed out of it: this could be an early Donphan, but Donphan shows up a few more index numbers down the line, we know Donphan had its final design even in 1996, and Donphan’s design seems to have been remarkably stable throughout development. My speculation is that this elephant is from the very earliest brainstorming stage of development when they pulled in any designs they had left over. It was possibly redrawn at least once (to move it away from the original standing design) but nothing more was done with it. Maybe there’s a version of Gold and Silver pre-Spaceworld that features this and a moveset, but my guess is that even if that does exist its moveset was probably very sketchy and undeveloped. |
AuthorMy name's Aaron George, and I'm both a historian and a fan of Pokemon, especially of development. Reach me at @Asmoranomardic ArchivesCategories |