10/2/2021 8 Comments ID 343- ID 348: Unknown to UnownID 343: ???ID 344 is a strange looking Pokemon. It's an imposing design seemingly created as an intersection between a plesiosaur and a Viking Boat. Its head forms the figurehead on the mast of the ship and its legs are the oars. It would look pretty cool, all told, if its head wasn’t looking straight up, giving it an awkward pose. It's a bit of a snob, looking down condescending at its opponent. It also, due to its design, feels a bit wooden (if you’ll excuse the pun), like it can’t move that much. (All colored sprites of unused Pokemon in this article were made by @OrangeFrench, and the palettes are speculative) The design origins for this demonstrate an interest or fascination in Western mythology, much like earlier designs found in Periods 1a and 1b, like the Proto-Celebi based on Kokopelli and the Totem Pole-Inspired designs for the Natu line. While obviously the Viking influence is different from Native American influences, the fact that they draw from Western sources strikes me as a potential clue to the origins of 344. Combine that with the fact that 344 is only Pokemon in Period 1d that never even appeared in Spaceworld ’97, and only one of two that didn’t make it into the final in some state. Given that Sugimori’s designs usually survived nearly intact until the final game, 344 feels like an obvious outlier. People much better at identifying sprites than me swear that ID 344 is a Sugimori design, and as a result I'm tempted to agree. However, I wonder if the original idea came from Morimoto or Fujiwara, and then Sugimori may have sprited it? Morimoto was likely the designer of the Native American inspired designs, and his designs often veer towards the bizarre or the grotesque. Furthermore, Morimoto is likely the designer of the Pokemon directly after Period 1d; there's a small chance that one of his designs could have been misplaced a few slots earlier, surrounded by Sugimori's other sprites. I will say, that for a Sugimori design, this guy sure is an outlier. Almost all of Sugimori's other designs made it into at least Spaceworld '97, including all the others in Period 1d. Not only did 344 not make it that far, but it looks a good deal rougher than Sugimori's other surrounding designs, having no shading on its oars and a pretty basic body, all of the same coloring. It's probably underdesigned simply because it was unused, since Sugimori didn't spend more time refining it. Still, I wonder why, in the midst of all of Sugimori's other used designs, there's this one, so obviously out of place? I often see people speculate about ID 344, in particular about whether it was related to other Pokemon in the Korean Index. Here are the most common connections people make: The most common response to 344, especially when it was first leaked, was that it looked like an early Lugia, or may have been Ho-oh legendary counterpart before Lugia had been created. I can vaguely see this theory: 344 and Lugia has a similar neck and head, and 344’s paddle feet sort-of resemble Lugia’s hands. At the time of the leak, there was a lot of speculation as to which of these Pokemon in the Index was a legendary counterpart to Ho-oh, given that Lugia hadn’t appeared in Spaceworld ’97. In all likelihood, Ho-oh probably didn’t have a counterpart until Lugia, but if you were looking for one, ID 344 or the fluffy dog of ID 349 were the best bets. We know, for a fact, that 344 is not proto-Lugia. Lugia, in fact, has an interesting origin, originally created by Takeshi Shudo, the head writer for the Pokemon anime, to be the star of the second film, Lugia’s Explosive Birth. He came up with Lugia as a Pokemon who could represent mother earth, and specifically designed it for the anime, not expecting Lugia to show up in the games. To Shudo’s surprise, his “Pokemon X” was developed into not only a Pokemon in Gold/Silver, but also a legendary that featured quite prominently in Silver version. Sugimori probably drew the sprites for the final Lugia, but the original inspiration was from Shudo. (You can hear more about this in this wonderful video). Importantly, the second Pokemon movie wasn't released until July 1999, at it is very unlikely it was in development in May 1998, at the time of the Korean Index. Which makes it impossible that there was some proto-Lugia lurking in the design files from this time. There may have been something that looked similar to Lugia, but anything in the Korean Index in 1998 was only coincidentally related. Other people have suggested that ID 344 was supposed to be an evolution for Lapras, but putting the contemporary sprites of Lapras up next to ID 344, I don’t really see it. Lapras has an elegance to her design that 344 just isn’t really going for: it feels like a step back rather than a natural outgrowth of Lapras’ aesthetic. In addition, the spritework doesn’t really make them look connected: 344 is drawn from a farther-back perspective than Lapras, which, when put alongside Lapras, gives it the effect of being smaller--hardly what you want from an evolution. It could still be the case that this was meant as an evolution of Lapras, but just a very rough draft that would’ve gone through some more iterations; if so, it’s a very long shot. Conversely, Lapras could be the reason 344 never went any further than a concept. Both it and Lapras have a similar base inspiration, and since Lapras plays out that idea much better, Sugimori may have decided that 344 didn't have a niche to fill. On the other hand, consider the last two cases outlined above. Cutting Room Floor speculates that ID 344 might be related to either ID 351 (A cute Snake with an Indian Headress) or ID 415 (A seal/Anklosaurus with armor on its back). The sprite style for either of these matches our Plesiosaurus friend, so either is plausibly an evolutionary relative at first glance. I don’t personally think the Anklyosaurus is likely, since it seems to have a musical theme: its armor is a xylophone and its tail a hammer to hit the notes. ID 344 has no musical theme, and so I don’t really see why these would conceptually go together, besides having vaguely similar dinosaur themes and body types. On the other hand, the cute Snake seems like a real possibility. If you’ll notice, the black lines on the Snake’s belly match the lines on 344’s back, and the heads are similar, though 344 only has two tufts of …something (fur?) on its head, while the snake has a whole headdress. Not to mention that the Snake seems to be vaguely themed around Native American themes: if 344’s creator was also the creator of Natu, then it would make sense he also designed this Snake dude. On the other hand, if the baby snake has a Native American theme but 344 has a Viking theme, that might be another reason to suppose these aren’t connected. I like the overall design of 344, but it seems clear that work still needs to be done on it. In particular, it faces the problem of many “object+” Pokemon: while it resembles an object, it isn’t clear how 344 actually moves around, eats, or acts in the Pokemon environment. Are the paddles its feet, and can it maneuver them on land? Can it stretch its neck? As it is, 344 feels, at this stage, like a first try at a gimmick that wouldn’t really work. I imagine Sugimori sketched this design, realized that it wouldn’t work as-is, and then just never came back to it. I’d have loved to see what this guy could’ve become, but I also understand why we never will. ID 345: Hoothoot Hoothoot is one of the signature Pokemon of Gold and Silver, and probably one of the most recognizable Pokemon from Generation II. It’s no surprise that Hoothoot was an early design, and that, though it went through some minor changes in design and conception throughout the development of Gold and Silver, it still remained recognizably Hoothoot all the way through. Hoothoot is one of the Pokemon we know, for sure, was designed by Sugimori, and due to this, it's one of the reasons to suppose that the entirety of Period 1d was made by Sugimori. Sugimori explained in an interview around the time of Gold/Silver's development that Hoothoot was one of his favorite Pokemon, because he based it on a childhood pet. Here’s what he had to say: Nintendo Power: What is your favorite Pokémon? Sugimori: “Hoothoot. It has only one leg. When I was a kid, I had a pet bird. One day, I was surprised to see my bird standing on only one leg. I’ve learned since that that was normal for that kind of bird, but it had already made a big impression on me and I couldn’t forget it. That inspired me to create Hoothoot.” It’s a cool little quote because it gives us a sense of the design sensibilities Sugimori started out with: he was intrigued by the idea of a bird with seemingly only one leg. Hoothoot started from these humble origins, and in almost all of its appearances looks as though it is a one-legged hopping bird. However, it’s often the case that a player can catch a glimpse of its second leg if they’re sneaky: The earliest design of Hoothoot can be found on the artist scratchpads, and looks quite different from the friend we know and love: Since it’s from the scratchpad, this design is undated. On the one hand, it could be a weird alternative sprite where they tried to make it look closer to Noctowl (notice that its eyebrows look a bit like Noctowl's). On the other hand, there are two reasons to think it was made earlier than Spaceworld '97. First, if you examine the feet on this sprite with later Hoothoot sprites, its clear that the foot is much sketchier, and different spritework. In addition, every other sprite uses the foot design from Spaceworld'97, suggesting that the SW ’97’s foot sprite came later and the rest of the sprites were built off of it. The second reason to suppose its earlier is because this slightly flustered, giant-eyebrowed Hoothoot doesn't have a clock theme, unlike the rest of Hoothoot's designs. As you can see below, starting with the Sw’97 design, Hoothoot’s ears look like the hands of the clock, and its tail, originally, looked like a smaller hour hand. It moved a little away from this time theme by the time of the final sprites—the dots on its eyes used to look like numbers on a clock but were replaced with lines, and it got a more normal tail—but the clock part of Hoothoot still very noticeable in the final sprite. Given that this scratchpad design doesn’t have any of these traits, it was probably made before Sugimori had come up with the time theme for Hoothoot, back when it was only based on his one-legged bird pet. Because Hoothoot's spritework was mainly finished by Spaceworld ’97, it was a perfect candidate to debut in the anime before Gold and Silver were released. Like Elekid, Hoothoot first (briefly) appeared in Pikachu’s Rescue Adventure, a short before the second movie (Lugia's Explosive Birth). There, Hoothoot resembled the final design (no dots on its eyes), so presumably--like Elekid, Bellossom, and Marill--there was design work done that wasn’t immediately transferred to the Korean Index, more evidence that by 1998 the Korean Index was becoming less and less current to their newer ideas. So why did Hoothoot gain the clock theme shortly before Spaceworld ’97? My guess is because Game Freak wanted to show off the day/night feature of Gold/Silver at SW’97, and specifically designed the early areas of the demo so that someone playing might receive different Pokemon at different times of the day. Hoothoot is perfect for this: Owls are of course found only at night, and Hoothoot, with its clock-face design, could hint to players that his mysterious appearance on the demo was related to the time of day. By adding this theming to Hoothoot, they could use the limited time a player got with the demo to suggest a cool feature that might get players talking about the new games. It’s unclear when the designers came up with the day/night cycle that would define Generation II, though it’s obviously a major part of the demo showed off at Spaceworld 1997. Given that we know the original Hoothoot wasn’t always time-themed, it’s possible that the day/night cycle wasn’t created until later in development and then Hoothoot was retconned to be its main mascot. In the demo (and final) Ledyba is Hoothoot’s day counterpart, so the day/night idea could have come about soon after the creation of Ledyba. Given that Ledyba is ID 399 in the Index, which means it was designed later but still quite a bit before SW’97, it's possible this idea might have first appeared about half-way through the development pre-Spaceworld ’97. In the demo, Hoothoot also uses a special animation when encountered in battle: unlike other Pokemon, Hoothoot fades in like it's appearing out of nowhere. The fade in animation is still in the final game’s code, but its unused for any Pokemon, and so its unclear exactly why it was there. My guess is that they wanted to further highlight how Hoothoot’s appearance in the SW’97 demo was special (to demonstrate it needed specific conditions to appear) so they used a special animation for it. Maybe the animation was always meant for Hoothoot, but given its strange appearance, my bet is someone designed it for use with ghost Pokemon, and then they later decided it was unnecessary. Hoothoot’s SW’97 moveset is also more focused around this “time of day” theme. In the demo, Hoothoot was given access to the move “Moonlight,” a move connected to nighttime, as well as Hypnosis (which it still has in the final)—suggesting it’s a Pokemon awake while others are asleep—and Foresight—suggesting that it can plan for the future. In addition to other minor changes to its moveset, Hoothoot (and Noctowl) even had a signature move in Spaceworld ’97: Megaphone! Megaphone is a pretty boring move, in that it has an 85% chance to lower the opponent’s special attack. Hoothoot isn’t missing anything by lacking this move in the final, and it was replaced by Megahorn, an infinitely more usable bug-type move. Megaphone’s a bit of a weird move for Hoothoot to have. Sure, owls are loud, I guess, but why would its signature move be Megaphone of all things? It leads me to suspect that this move was either created for a different—scrapped—Pokemon, or that Hoothoot took the slot of a different bird that used to be in the games. Either way, my mind keeps thinking about ID 392: In addition, when lined up, I notice that 392’s feet are drawn as though they are just one foot, similar to Hoothoot’s. It’s probably a coincidence…probably. Anyway, that’s all I have to say about our Owl friend. Gold and Silver wouldn’t be the same without Hoothoot, and I’m glad Hoothoot made it in, even if the development history seems to indicate Hoothoot was probably always going to be a part of it. Next time you catch a Hoothoot, just imagine how exciting it would have been to realize for the first time that some Pokemon are only awake at night: that to really catch everything, you’d have to check every location in the mornings and the evenings. ID 346: SmeargleSmeargle’s a French Artist/Dog, wearing the stereotypical beret of an artist along with a tail which doubles as a paintbrush. In a weird sort of way, he’s the counterpart to Mr. Mime, another Pokemon based on a stereotype of a French performer. While--for some reason--Mr. Mime never learns the signature move of a Mime (Mimic), Smeargle’s identity is almost entirely based around it’s signature move, Sketch. There’s not much to say about Smeargle’s sprites, though they clearly from Spaceworld ’97 to the final, mostly in a way to make its pose a little more natural, and more in the style of the final games. It’s name in Spaceworld ’97 was a Japanese transliteration of “Painter,” which was probably a bit too on the nose; soon after it got its final name, “Doboru,” or a transliteration of “Dabble”. Like its sprites, this wasn’t a major change, just a refining of the original idea. The really interesting aspects of Smeargle’s design have to do with Sketch, but in order to explain why Sketch is so important, its worthwhile to explain how the movelists of Red/Green and Gold/Silver were developed. Helix Chamber has done extensive work on the movelists of Red/Green and it's worth taking a look at their articles on the subject. But to put it succinctly, the movelist of Red/Green was divided up into two sections. In the first section were physical moves and simple elemental moves, like fire or electric moves, usually arranged from weakest to strongest. At about the halfway mark in the movelist, Red/Green switches to signature moves for particular Pokemon, and follows an ordering that roughly matches the internal ID list. In sum, Game Freak seems to have designed the list as, first, a set of generic moves that any Pokemon could use, and then as a list of special moves designed to give flavor to each individual. Importantly, the signature moves seem to have just been added to the list at the end as they came up with new Pokemon, and roughly corresponds to the order they were designed. The new moves added to Gold/Silver seems like they're in a random order, and they may have been added chronologically as well, though if they were it was a bit more complicated than in Red/Green. The Spaceworld ’97 movelist is substantially similar to the final movelist, with the exception of the last ten moves. Up until then, almost every move is in the same slot and order as it would be in the final: there are some exceptions, such as “Curse” being called “Nail,” or Metal Claw being absent and a move called “Rock Head” in its place. But besides a few token moves that were deleted and replaced, everything else is in the same random order as it is in Spaceworld ’97. However, towards the end of the Spaceoworld '97 list, it takes a turn. Slots 242-245 in the move list, which in the final are Crunch, Mirror Coat, and Psych Up, are blank in the demo, and the last seven slots, which in the final are mostly powerful and/or signature attacks, are seven new designs for HMs: Uproot (replacing Cut), Wind Ride (replacing Fly), Water Sport (replacing Surf), Strong Arm (replacing Strength), Bright Moss (replacing Flash), Whirlpool (same as the final), and Bounce (not programmed in yet, but presumably the alternative to Waterfall). Of these, only Whirlpool survived to the final, while Wind Ride lost its HM status and was replaced by Aeroblast, Lugia's signature, which has the same typing, strength, and effects. It's very likely they decided that replacing the HMs of the first game with completely new ones would cause a ton of problems (maybe with traded Pokemon with the old HMs) and the idea was dropped. Presumably, moves were added to the game as they had a need for them, while the early HM moves were added to the end of the list, to designate them as HMs. Since those three slots are blank, it suggests that the moves were added in chronologically and the team just hadn't come up with move ideas to fill those last slots; Mirror Coat, for instance, was probably added when they designed Wobbuffet. The alternate HMs might have been on their way out by Spaceworld '97, and just simply left at the end of the list because nothing had erased them yet, but they were subsequently erased by moves learned by new Pokemon added after Spaceworld '97. Beat Up, for instance, is the signature move for Sneasel, and replaced Bounce, the very last move on the list. Since we know that Sneasel was still being designed right up to the release of the game, it doesn't surprise me that its signature was devised so late in the game too. I’m sure they got shuffled around or erased as the Pokedex got shuffled in this era, but there’s a good case to believe that earlier added moves correspond to earlier ideas, at least in general. Which brings us back to Smeargle. Sketch happens to be the very first unique Gold/Silver move in the move list, and it’s also the first TM move. While it was probably a TM just for testing purposes (after all, a Sketch TM would make any Pokemon that could learn it potentially learn any move!), the fact that both are assigned such a low number indicates to me that the first move Game Freak may have come up with for Gen II was Sketch. That makes sense, since Smeargle is more or less defined by its gimmicky move more than anything else; at the same time Sugimori came up with the concept of Smeargle, he would have wanted a move to define it, and that may have gotten them started on brainstorming moves. If I’m correct, than Smeargle helps us date at what point in development the Pokemon team moved from just brainstorming new Pokemon designs and began to start devising movesets for the designs they had settled on! Smeargle would then be a demarcator of one stage of development to the next. It’d also mean that they started working on the movelist around the end of 1996. Pokemon after Smeargle on the list may have been designed simultaneously with new moves that would fit them, while Pokemon before Smeargle might have gotten their signature moves added to their movesets retroactively. Notice how Cotton Spore acts like a signature move of both the Mareep line and the Jumpluff line: rather than being a move specifically designed for one or the other, it was probably a move made later specifically to fit both lines. There are some big problems with this theory though. Even if Sketch is the first move in the movelist, the next four moves are Triple Kick, Thief, Spider Web, and Mindreader. Triple Kick seems specifically designed for Hitmontop, which is at the very end of the Korean Index; Thief is used by no one, but is TM 41. Spider Web is the TM right after Thief, and used by the Spinarak line, which are forty positions later in the Korean Index (ID 385 and ID 386). And then Mind Reader is a move used by Suicune and Hitmontop, again. So obviously if Sketch was chronological, then we’d need to explain why all these other moves don’t seem to follow the same obvious pattern. Maybe, conversely, they started the movelist much later, around Hitmontop, but programmed Sketch first because Smeargle needed a move more badly than any other Pokemon? It certainly couldn't use anything else, since its design was dependent on its gimmick. Or maybe someone at Game Freak was working on new moves independently of the Pokemon design, and then the Pokemon designers used the moves as inspiration as they were creating new designs? Maybe Triple Kick used to belong to a different discarded design, or it overwrote a different move when they came up with Hitmontop (this might make sense of why Thief and Spider Web were TMs 41 and 42—maybe they overwrote moves that were earlier)? Unfortunately, this all feels messy, and while at first I thought the movelist was clearly chronological, my further analysis has made it hard to say anything conclusive. All we know is that Sketch seems to have been programmed into the game early, and given that it clearly has a link to Smeargle, the two might have been linked, chronologically. One last odd thing to mention about Smeargle. In the Spaceworld ’97 demo, Sketch didn’t work correctly. Instead of replacing Sketch with a new move, it often instead replaces the opponent’s move with Sketch! This weirdly makes Smeargle a particularly deadly enemy: if you don’t kill it in one hit, it’ll completely erase the move you used! Whether this was just an overlooked error that Game Freak hadn’t gotten around to fixing, or a sign that Sketch was programmed late and they hadn’t yet got it working correctly, is hard to say. Despite all my musings and research on Smeargle, I find this whole line of inquiry as mystifying as it was when I started. Smeargle remains a mystery, despite it's seemingly simple origins. ID 347 Ho-oh (Note: the 1996 sprite above is a fan-made mockup created by Farore, made to recreate the first very blurry Ho-oh sprite we have.) Ho-oh, of course, is the most iconic Pokemon from Generation II, and one of the two to appear on the covers of the final games. It’s clear that Ho-oh was a mascot of the games from the beginning, and Sugimori seems to have liked the design, as it appeared in very early promotional material well before the debut of the games. Internally, however, it seems it took awhile to get Ho-oh just how they wanted it. Ho-oh’s maybe the most important Pokemon in my entire analysis, because it’s the Pokemon on which the dating of Period 1 rests. Ho-oh was the first Pokemon from Gold/Silver revealed, in Cococoro magazine in 1996. There, Satoshi Tajiri gave an interview about the new games and explained they’d have over 200 new Pokemon to catch. From that magazine, we know that Ho-oh’s design was completed by 1996, which means that if the Korean Index is chronological, we can conclusively say that all the Pokemon before Ho-oh also date back to 1996 or earlier (except for maybe a few which might have later been rewritten by newer designs). Thus, Period 1 in this analysis is all the Pokemon we know were produced before that 1996 build, and Period 2 will cover all the Pokemon made in the next stage of development. It’s probably also coincidence, but it’s worth pointing out that in the Corocoro interview, Tajiri mentioned there would be over 200 new Pokemon in the new games; most of the time in interviews, Game Freak employees mentioned “at least 250.” Again, it’s probably coincidence, but if Ho-oh was the most recent Pokemon they’d created at that point, there are 48 new designs in the Index- plus the original 151, that makes 199. Allow me to make one more observation about numbering, concerning Ho-oh. In the Spaceworld ’97 Pokedex, Ho-oh is #247, right in front of Kingdra (#242), Raikou (#243), Entei (#244), Suicune (#245), and Sneasel (#246). While Sneasel is an outlier (and I’ve previously discussed how Sneasel is probably out of order due to its late inclusion in the demo), this whole Pokedex numbering heavily resembles Red/Green’s Pokedex, which ended with the three legendary birds, the three Dragons, including third-stage Dragon Pokemon (Dragonite), and then Mewtwo. It seems that, if you assume Ho-oh was the ultra-legendary in that Mewtwo slot, Ho-oh was clearly meant to finish up the list, except for a secret Mew-like Pokemon at #251. However, Ho-oh is only #247, and there are four Pokemon after it: Togepi (#248), Snubbull (#249), Aipom (#250) and Riifii (#251). All of these Pokemon after Ho-oh come much later in the Korean Index, all of them have drastically different Pokedex numbers in the final games, and all of them aren’t legendary Pokemon and therefore are out of place. There is additional evidence with each of them that they were added very late to the demo, and that they, alongside Sneasel, were added so late that they didn’t have time to reorganize the Pokedex to fit them somewhere logical. Now, it could just be that Game Freak hadn’t fit all 101 new slots by the time of their inclusion, but Ho-oh’s place as #247, when it should clearly be #250 (like it is in the final game and a clear mirror to Mewtwo as #150), makes me suspicious that there was a late-in-the-day Pokedex shuffle just before Spaceworld ’97. That leaves five slots in Spaceworld ’97 that were potentially overwritten before the shuffle moved Ho-oh down to slot #247. While they really could be anything, I would guess the slots might have been filled by one of the following: Natu’s 2nd evolution, Some sort of legendary Pokemon in Sneasel's slot, Elekid (if my suspicion about it being a second evolution is correct), the flying fish Sato, the extra evolutions for Manbo1 or Gurotesu, or one of the many extra birds found in the Korean Index (Togepi's moveset is suspicious). But this is all way pie in the sky speculation: those five missing slots, if they ever had anything in them at all, could have had anything found in the Korean list. Anyway, let’s get back to Ho-oh. Ho-oh’s name is derived from the Japanese word for a phoenix, Houou. As a result, its origins, and initial design, are very similar to Moltres, which in initial materials (such as the 1996 Pokedex translated at DYKG) had phoenix-like features, such as the fact that drinking the blood of a Moltres would grant someone immortality. (Also note that in Neo The World Ends With You, the final boss is also designed after a Chinese Phoenix, and ends up looking like a dead ringer for Ho-oh, albeit with a different palette: Despite Ho-oh’s links to phoenixes, Ho-oh only got its fire-typing very late, by August 1999, just months before the release of Gold and Silver. Up until that point, Ho-oh was first just a Flying-Type Pokemon. For awhile after that, it Normal-Flying typing, a bizarre choice for a legendary bird. It’s possible they hadn’t yet decided on its typing for a long time, or it could be that having a Normal legendary bird was thought to be the most logical extension of the Ice/Electricity/Fire triad of the first three birds; after all, Eevee is Normal type in contrast to the elemental triad of its evolutions, and it isn’t unheard of for other RPGs to have neutral, super versions of elemental adversaries. Its movelist in Spaceworld ’97 reflects the lack of Fire typing: while Ho-oh, at that point, has its signature move, Sacred Fire, it has no other fire attacks. Instead, Ho-oh features some of the stereotypical moves that bird Pokemon tended to learn: it had Wing Attack, Gust, and Sky Attack, along with stranger moves like Scary Face, Light Screen, and Reflect (Clearly there was a defensive theme going on here?). Sacred Fire aside, it seems the intent, at this stage of development, was to make a legendary Pokemon with the designed around neutral elemental abilities. While the final Ho-oh doesn’t have many more Fire moves (just Fire Blast and Sunny Day to facilitate fire use), it also lost these flying and normal moves in favor of Future Sight (Psychic) and Ancient Power (Rock), both moves that feel more in line with a legendary bird. Ho-oh first appearance in the anime, on April 1st, 1997, may also reflect that they hadn't yet decided to give it a fire theme or typing. There, while Ho-oh appears to Ash as a sign of good fortune, it doesn’t look like a fire-type Pokemon at all, but was colored entirely Golden. Notably, its shiny colors make use of this Golden Palette in the final game. As a fun aside, you can tell that this appearance in the anime was already planned by the time the Corocoro interview was printed, because the first thing they mention about Ho-oh is that it "only appears before a genius who will go down in history,” clearly referring to its appearance in front of Ash. Clearly, at this point Ho-oh theme was based much more around fortune and luck than around fire. There were probably two reasons Ho-oh changed. First, a neutral legendary Pokemon is lame. It’s clear from the Spaceworld ’97 moveset that they were having trouble giving Ho-oh a particular identity as a Flying legendary Pokemon: Recover, Light Screen, Reflect, and Sky Attack are all good moves but they are all learned by a slew of other Pokemon, and only Sky Attack really feels like something a legendary bird would use. The move to fire made a lot of sense thematically—since Ho-oh is clearly a Phoenix—and also allowed them to give Ho-oh a little more of an identity, now more completely around Sacred Fire and Sunny Day. The second reason was Lugia. In Spaceworld ’97, Ho-oh was not a paired legendary Pokemon, more akin to Mewtwo than anything else. While the three legendary dogs existed, Ho-oh was a fourth legendary Pokemon, unique and unpaired. This is probably another reason they resisted making Ho-oh fire type, incidentally: if he was Fire-type, he’d be stepping on Entei’s toes. While a number of people have speculated that other Pokemon on the Korean Index were designed as counterparts to Ho-oh, I see no reason that we even have to suppose a counterpart. Mewtwo was a lone legendary surrounded by three birds, why not a lone bird surrounded by three elemental dogs? But once Lugia was created (originally for the anime), Game Freak wanted to incorporate another legendary Pokemon, and made Lugia the counterpart to Ho-oh. Ho-oh was no longer the fourth neutral member of the elemental birds, but now the mirror to Lugia. Lugia was psychic type, and while that doesn’t contrast all that well with Fire, it probably compelled the team to give Ho-oh an elemental type to mirror better with Lugia. Dark wouldn’t make sense even though that typing would contrast Psychic, but now that Ho-oh was in it’s own rivalry, it would no longer compete with Entei as a legendary, and the team probably felt Fire was the more flavorful choice for Ho-oh. Still, it took them a long time to get there, and Lugia existed for months before they had settled on Ho-oh’s design. As a final piece of analysis, there’s something strange going on with Ho-oh’s sprites. If you’ll notice, the sprite for Ho-oh in the Korean Index is different than the Spaceworld ’97 Sprite. While Spaceworld ’97 is looking upwards and looks a bit like an emblem, the Korean Index has the final sprite with earlier shading. The Korean Index's Ho-oh is much more aggressive and looks like it is screeching and ready to strike. This is odd, because the vast majority of the Korean Index’s sprites are the same as Spaceworld ‘97's, suggesting that it wasn’t updated very much after Spaceworld ’97. The exceptions to this were Stantler, Elekid—both of which I’ve proposed explanations for—Bomushikaa, Ho-oh, and a few of the original 151. This is weird, but not unexplainable, since Ho-oh might have been one of the very few sprites updated after Spaceworld ’97. What’s harder to explain is that we have evidence that Ho-oh’s original design was much closer to the final one. As we see in B-Roll footage we have of a build previous to Spaceworld ’97, Ho-oh used to have a pose very close to the final and very different to Spaceworld ’97: Also note how Spaceworld ‘97’s opening featured a reworked version of its Ho-oh sprite; it kept the same sprite was darkened to make it appear to be more in shadow, like how the final game makes Ho-oh (or Lugia) an outline on the title screen: At first, I thought this was an oddity that seemed to prove the Korean Index had a Ho-oh sprite from before Spaceworld '97. Which would make no sense, since SW'97 pulled from these sprites: shouldn't it only have later sprites? As I looked more closely, however, I realized the 1996 Ho-oh sprite is different from the final sprite, even if it looks really close. The most obvious differences between them, other than shading, is that the final Ho-oh has tinier feet and a different shaped beak. It was Farore on The Cutting Room Floor’s discord server who finally explained to me what was going on (Thank you Farore!). In fact, the SW ’97 sprite was an edit of the 1996 sprite! If you look closely, they share almost all of the sprites for Ho-oh’s wings, but the Spaceworld ’97 version had its head edited to be looking up. The giveaway is the large feet: both the original sprite and Spaceworld ’97 sprite have the same big feet, while the final reworks them to be smaller. But the final sprite also takes from the original sprite, as you can clearly see in Ho-oh’s face: the beak is slightly reworked into a different shape, but the mouth and eyes are the same in both. This is cool for any aspiring sprite artist: we can clearly see how Sugimori pulled bits from each of his designs as he tweaked the overall composition. It also seems to prove that these sprites are really in the correct order: that the tailfeathers in SW ’97 are obscured but were fully visible in the earlier sprite seems to confirm that SW’97’s sprite was made after it; that the tailfeathers and wings were completely reworked for the final sprite but it kept the mouth of the first also suggests that this timeline is correct. Of course, what was going on, and why does Spaceworld ‘97’s Ho-oh look so different from the two sprites before and after it? SW ’97 could have simply been an experiment: Sugimori could have tried to the head-pointing up pose for a while before deciding that it didn’t work and reverting to an earlier pose. My speculation is that the team wanted to experiment with an obscured black outline for Ho-oh on the title screen instead of the Pokemon in full-view, like they did with the final, but the 1996 sprite didn’t make for a very recognizable outline. By having Ho-oh’s head pointing straight up, you could make it partially or completely black on the title screen and it’d still be readily obvious that it was a bird. If they decided to move in a different direction for the title screen, or if Sugimori didn’t like this new sprite for the in-game design, he may have reverted it back. Anyway, that’s about all there is to say about Ho-oh. I’ll say that, for such an iconic Pokemon, it’s weird to think about a time in which the design team knew they were going to use him but had no idea how. Ho-oh’s certainly much more interesting in the final game than as a Normal/Flying legendary, and there’s a reason he’s still so fondly remembered. ID 448: UnownSince Ho-oh’s dated to 1996, there’s a question of whether Unown deserves to be in Period 1d, or in the next section of development. However, there are a lot of clues that suggest Unown seems to have been conceived from the very beginning of Pokemon 2’s development. A weird Pokemon from beginning to end, Unown didn’t change much throughout development, but does highlight some of the interesting ideas being thrown around in the early stages of Pokemon Gold/Silver's development. Unown is a Sugimori design, like the rest of Period 1d. An interview in Nintendo’s Official Japanese Gold/Silver Guidebook, published along with the release of the games in Japan, suggested that Unown’s early concept began as a strange alien Pokemon. However, as "artists" (it’s unclear if this is a mistranslation or if the interview is suggesting that people besides Sugimori worked on Unown) began to sketch Unown, they realized their early sketches were beginning to resemble the letters of the alphabet. Soon, the Game Freak team began to sketch them into 26 different forms, and the idea of Unown as a variable Pokemon type was born. We know that Unown’s concept was solidified early in development for a number of reasons. One of the best reasons to suppose this is that the SW ’97 overworld map, which is in many ways very incomplete, actually has a prototype version of the Ruins of Alph (called the city of Font here), where the mystery of Unown is unraveled in the final games. We don’t have any interiors for the Ruins in SW ’97, so it’s likely they hadn’t quite figured out what to do with them yet, but they were clearly meant to have a role in the games from some of the earliest stages of development (another reason to include Unown with the rest of Period 1). In retrospect, you can kind of see this in the final games. The Ruins of Alph in the final is more or less cut off from the rest of the story, and feels like out of place side content. This is probably because the designers were keen to keep around the idea even as they reworked the entirety of the map and the story for Gold/Silver: what used to flow into the story pretty seamlessly now was an outlier. The original Ruins of Alph also had a Team Rocket building right next to it—were the Unown originally key to Team Rocket’s quest for world domination? (Thanks to @OrangeFrench for this info on early Ruins of Alph. He's basically an expert on the early maps in SW '97) The sprites for Unown stayed almost exactly the same after Spaceworld ’97 all the way into the final, except for palette changes. But we do have an earlier, longer “A” sprite for Unown in the Korean Index. The Korean Index also has a separate set of all the final Unown sprites, in with separate file names that indicate they are Unown sprites and not part of the numbered sequence. This is because the designers seem to have coded an alternative way for Unown to draw its sprites from a separate file list, allowing it to have the 26 forms that it does. The extra tall “A” Unown which exists in the Korean Index is from before this additional code was created, and is thus an earlier, slightly different, design for Unown. It’s likely there were never earlier designs for the other letters: this tall “A” was probably a placeholder until they could figure out a way to give Unown all of its other forms. I’m still suspicious that the original Celebi sprite, the one that looks like Kokopelli, was somehow related to Unown (or vice versa), but I can’t think of any way they would be. They are both completely monochrome, based on wall scrawls, and they both have little white eyes. But on the other hand, Kokopelebi was probably made by a completely different designer, and it was probably a design made much earlier than even Unown. The spritework on both, I have to admit looks pretty different. So while they ostensibly look similar, I’m struggling to come up with any reason they’d be linked. Unown are interesting, further, because they bring us to the subject of gimmick Pokemon. Almost all the Pokemon in Red/Green as fully usable in battle: the ones which are not, like Metapod and Magikarp, evolve into something usable. Arguably Farfetch’d might also be a sort of joke Pokemon; some have suggested that he’s supposed to be a bad Pokemon you get for an unfair trade. But even Farfetch’d has a full moveset and has potential. In the quest to broaden the types of Pokemon that you can collect, Gold/Silver introduced a completely new set of Pokemon: "Collectable" Pokemon, mostly useless in battle, which have a main purpose of being collected and stuck in the box. It’s clear the idea of Pokemon not useful for fighting was one of the first ideas Satoshi Tajiri ever had about Pokemon: in his first design documents, he explained that some Pokemon would be used for menial labor or as transportation (Clefairy and Lapras, respectively). It’s clear that the original concept of Pokemon was that these would be more than fighting monsters, but that they would also play an important role in how the world worked; the HM system was a very limited way of showing that some of your pokemon were useful for things besides fighting. So it made sense that as Gold/Silver had already invented new third-stage evolutions (Crobat), alternate evolutions (Slowking), and even pre-evolutions (Elebebii), having Pokemon with no use in-battle was a natural experiment as well. Smeargle might have been the first exploration of a gimmick Pokemon, since it was designed entirely around one odd move, but Smeargle resembles Ditto more than anything else: a Pokemon that fights in a unique way in battle using a specialized move. But Unown’s different. Unown only uses one move, has abysmal stats, and doesn’t evolve into anything. There’s no way to make Unown helpful in battle: the entire point of Unown is to catch it and forget it. In fact, in Spaceworld '97, Unown is even more useless than in the final. In the final, Unown has "Hidden Power," a vaguely interesting move that has a different type and power for every individual Pokemon that knows it. This means that every Unown will be slightly different; while Hidden Power is never what you might call "good," at least this gives Unown something that is slightly interesting to try out. But in Spaceworld '97, all it knows is Psywave, a Gen I move that does variable damage. At worst, it does one damage; at best; Psywave still doesn't do much. While no one uses Unown for fighting anyway, I appreciate that they changed this, to give Unown at least something to do. As a first draft of the “Collectable” type of Pokemon (or call them gimmick, that works too), Unown makes a ton of sense. If you’re going to have a useless Pokemon, why not make it come in different forms so that collecting it becomes its own minigame? Unown perfectly fits this new idea and makes collecting fun for its own sake. In this regard, having Unown be useful would have been a detriment: imagine each Unown had slightly different moves and you had to shovel through 25 garbage forms to find the right one? By the final game, the idea of the “collectable” Pokemon was dramatically expanded. Delibird had a regular moveset in SW’97, but was reworked into a useless Pokemon with a useless move by the final; Shuckle was created and then was reworked to lose most of its battle functionality soon afterwards. However, the baby Pokemon were the main way that collectables were expanded. As originally conceived, Elebebii/Elekid could have been a fully usable Pokemon: it has stats and a full moveset, so it fit a niche by being an early game version of Electabuzz that would eventually evolve, to give a different spin on Electabuzz. The other babies in Spaceworld ’97, similarly, still had full movesets, so while they would have evolved quickly, they still had a battle use. But by the final, babies only appear as a result of breeding in the daycare, and are more or less useless except to breed the correct egg moves. This is a significant change from Red/Green, and arguably the moment when Pokemon became its own genre and diverged from the traditional JRPG. Red/Green, despite having the “catch ‘em all” aspect to it, was almost entirely focused on getting you to the final boss at the end of the Elite Four. The games play like any other RPG, except with a much larger roster of playable characters, and each area is meant to be another challenge on the way to getting to the Elite Four. But Gold/Silver begin to diverge from that format. There are special areas (like the Ruins of Alph) that exist only to help you find rarer Pokemon; there are Pokemon you can catch that are more or less useless except to complete the Pokedex. The games also don’t hyper focus on finishing the Elite Four; instead, that’s just one step of the journey, before you head to Kanto so you can continue your collection of Pokemon. Many new features have been created, like breeding and happiness, to take care of your Pokemon, rather than just prepare them for the final battle, and there are a number of post-game areas just designed for chasing down legendaries. Sure, Red/Green has some of this too, but the focus in Gold/Silver is different, and that focus will only continue to stress collecting as the goal rather than completing the story. By the time we get to Sword/Shield, the story itself is almost perfunctory and just an excuse to get your closer to collecting all the newcomers. All in all, collectable Pokemon like Unown were a positive innovation for the Pokemon games. They diversify the gameplay of the games and give different types of players different goals when playing through the games. Despite that, the existence of useless Pokemon like Unown has always irked me. It was always frustrating to me as a kid that there was no real point to using such an intriguing Pokemon like Unown. Only now, much later, do I realize that was exactly the point: Unown is not a Pokemon to be used. It’s a Pokemon to be appreciated.
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ID 339: QwilfishWe’ve talked a little about Qwilfish before, back when we discussed ID 317, the puffer fish that looks suspiciously like Qwilfish and its evolution. I’ve even included it here in the Qwilfish chart, because I think there’s a non-zero possibility that it was an early design for Qwilfish. Beyond the question of the relationship between 317 and Qwilfish, there are a few other things to say about Qwilfish’s design that are worth discussing. The more I look at those backsprites, the more I’m convinced that Qwilfish was designed out of 317. The white belly is almost the same, the tailfins are almost in the same place, and the general shape of the body is about the same. However, I also think it’s pretty obvious that the two designs have different designers: look, for instance, at the way the spines are drawn on each, the very different eye designs the two have, and even the way shading is used to imply a reflection off of Qwilfish’s back. We know that Qwilfish’s design is Sugimori’s: not only is it right in the middle of other Sugimori designs in the Korean Index, but the design also stays more or less stable throughout its development, which suggests Sugimori. Before, I predicted that 317 was probably made by Morimoto, and I still stand by that. Morimoto was responsible for a lot of Animal+ designs and more cartoony designs, both of which fit 317. So there are a couple of possibilities of what happened here. Like I said in the previous article, 317 could be an old design that dates from Red/Green, added to the Korean Index by Morimoto when they were brainstorming old designs to use again. Then, Sugimori could have liked the design and made his own version of it, which became the Qwilfish design we're familiar with. Alternatively, someone (Sugimori or Tajiri, presumably) could have asked for a puffer fish design and both Morimoto and Sugimori turned their own version in; Sugimori’s Qwilfish was used for the final. A third possibility, mentioned in the article on ID 317, is that Sugimori designed Qwilfish explicitly as a pre-evolution to ID 317, and then 317 was later revised into its evolution, Shibirefugu, before being eventually abandoned. We can’t really know either way what happened. I think the idea of Qwilfish-as-preevolution is the least likely of those theories, however, given that none of the other Pokemon in Period 1d were designed to be evolutionary relatives of earlier Pokemon (See the articles on Hanagomura an Elebebii for possible exceptions). I do think it’s worthwhile to point out that Qwilfish’s design, at least to my eyes, looks much more refined than 317. In particular, I really like how Qwilfish’s spikes are integrated into its body design and replace its fins; it’s a very streamlined design that works really well. My hunch is that you couldn’t get to such a streamlined designed without first working off of an earlier clunkier design, which makes me think Qwilfish is a refined version of 317 (or an earlier unseen design). Beyond whatever connection Qwilfish had to 317, its design stayed almost exactly the same until the final game, right down to the pose. One interesting thing about its sprite is that, in both the 1999 sprite banks, Qwilfish is actually using the same sprite it was using in Spaceworld ’97, but its final sprite is slightly different: notice how the shading on its belly changes drastically in that final sprite. This is uncommon, as most sprites were redrawn after SW’97, but it shows that Qwilfish’s design was either good enough or not a high enough priority to fix until a couple months before the final release of the game. Either way, Qwilfish wasn’t messed with much after SW’97 and entered the final game mostly intact. Which is not to say that the final Qwilfish was identical with the Qwilfish of SW’97: though they look almost identical, its concept was modified quite a bit from its original design. The most significant change is that the Qwilfish of SW’97 was a two stage evolutionary family, eventually evolving into the adorable Shibirefugu! This makes Qwilfish significantly more interesting as a Pokemon: it would be useful in the late game and not just a useless catch when you use the rod looking for better Pokemon. Shibirefugu, while only water type in SW’97, has a lightning bolt on its head which suggests that it might have been electric type, meaning that Qwilfish might have given the player access to an interesting typing. Qwilfish was probably not originally designed as a Pokemon that could evolve (unless 317 was its relative), given that Shibirefugu is almost at the very end of the Korean Index, and was designed as part of a larger block of Pokemon made to be evolutionary relatives to earlier designs. Given that it was such a late idea, probably added to SW’97 only right before the build was completed (again, unless 317 was an earlier design of it), the designers may not have been especially emotionally invested in Qwilfish as a two-stage Pokemon, and it was probably easy for them to cut Shirebirefugu. Which is a shame, because I think it’s a shame that final Qwilfish is very much just a filler Pokemon. Qwilfish’s SW’97 moveset is also far more interesting than its final moveset: In Spaceworld ’97, Qwilfish learned Thunder Wave. While this is normally a move held pretty much exclusively by electric-type Pokemon, it makes perfect sense here for Qwilfish: puffer fish poison paralyzes its victims, just like Thunder Wave. Thunder wave also makes sense if Shibirefugu was ever going to be electric type; otherwise, neither it nor Qwilfish would learn any electric moves. Also interesting is that SW’97 Qwilfish learned Self-Destruct and Explosion. Qwilfish looks a bit like it was inspired by a naval mine, so exploding would make sense. Also, it’s almost a stereotype in video games that Puffer Fish enemies explode to fend off the heroes, and so it makes sense for Qwilfish to do the same; maybe it was too annoying for Qwilfish enemies to constantly explode. The final version gives Qwilfish Pin Missile, which is a pretty flavorful move, but otherwise everything it learns is pretty generic: Hydropump and Take Down are learned by just about everything, and Minimize is about making the Pokemon smaller, not larger like Puffer Fish are known for! The final move set is definitely a downgrade from the original in just about every way. I think Qwilfish had real potential to be an interesting, unique Pokemon, but most of that was lost with the revisions to its moveset and the loss of its evolution. By the final, it exists, but it’s pretty much there to be a generic fish. ID 340: HanamoguraThis is certainly a strange one. Not only is Hanamogura a strange design, it’s has a strange placement in the Spaceworld ’97 demo. As a result, there’s no real consensus on what is going on with Hanamogura. I’ll go through the different theories and present evidence for each, but I am as befuddled by Hanamogura as anyone. Hanamogura was first discovered in 2018, when Team Spaceworld revealed the leaked SW’97 demo. One of the most surprising things found in the demo were the starter Pokemon: the fire starter and water starters were completely different. Chikorita, however, was present, more or less identical to its final design, as was Meganium. Right between those two, though, was this bizarre dude, looking nothing like either of them or anything like Bayleef that would replace it. What was Hanagomura doing there? What was it supposed to be? Even it’s sprite is bizarre looking, and awfully hard to parse. To help make sense of it, I’m once again recruiting Raciebeep's artistic skills to provide an artistic rendering of Hanagomura: As Racie drew it here, what we see is a small potato-like creature with a target on its belly, surrounded by six unfurled leaves, blossoming from the middle like a flower. It also has three antenna on its head and some feet-like roots below. While I think Racie’s interpretation is the best one, it's not the only way to interpret the sprite. For instance, the target on Hanamogura’s belly could be its mouth, and the smile could be two beady eyes. (Unfortunately, I don't know the artist for this one; let me know if you know!) Its name, Hanamogura, can mean two different things in Japanese: “Flower Mole,” or “Flower Spy.” The mole interpretation makes the most sense, given that Hanamogura’s central body looks most like a mole popping out of a flower (A mole with a target on its belly, but nothing is perfect in this world). I’ve also heard the idea that as a “Flower Spy” we’re seeing something unexpected pop out of Chikorita: we thought Chikorita was a cute leaf dinosaur, but inside it was hiding a completely different body. The main problem with Hanamogura is obvious: Hanamogura looks absolutely nothing like Chikorita (named Happa here) or Meganium (named Hanaryuu here). Given how close those two look, it makes Hanamogura feel even more out of place. There are four theories worth covering, which I'll address in turn. 1) Hanamogura was designed as the middle evolution between Happa and Hanaryuu. The most common response when people see Hanamogura sandwiched between Chikorita and Meganium is to assume that the three were always meant to go together, and that Hanamogura is just a very unorthodox second form. Meganium’s antennae seem to first appear on Hanamogura’s head, which shows a progression from one to the other. I’d also add to this that Hanamogura’s name seems to work alongside Meganium’s early name of “Hanaryuu,” or “Flower Dragon,” and if you squint you can imagine that the progression from a lowly leaf thing (Happa) to a secret creature hiding inside Chikorita (Hanamogura) to a Flower Dragon makes some sort of sense. (Credit to @AndyKluthe) It's a pretty horrifying concept, if you think about it. This progression doesn't feel very likely to me: it feels like an ad hoc way to explain Hanamogura's presence more than a concept Game Freak possibly designed around. However, you might argue that we're not seeing final products here in Spaceworld '97, so of course some ideas don't seem to work: after all, they scrapped Hanamogura later anyway, possibly for this very reason. However, after examining the Korean Index, it seems to me that this is the one theory we can, more or less, completely rule out. The other two starter Pokemon families appear later in the Index, but they appear right next to their evolutionary relatives, implying that they were all designed together. Hanamogura appears much earlier than either Chikorita (ID 369) or Meganium (361) which means they were both designed after Hanamogura was. They could have been designed later once Hanagomura was designated to be a starter Pokemon, but it sure does not look like they were designed to retroactively fit the design sensibilities of Hanagomura. Furthermore, Chikorita and Meganium were designed as part of a later block (Period 2a) which was likely designed by a different designer—probably Atsuko Nishida—so it seems strange to think that two different designers made different stages of an evolutionary family that were supposed to go together. It's happened before, like in the case of the Dragonite line, but it's a bit strange. Finally, Period 1d is mostly bereft of evolutions: those that do have an evolution were either from Gen I (Elekid) or the evolution was added later (Girafarig). While Hanamogura could have been designed as a one-stage Pokemon at first, like Girafarig and Donphan et al, it seems unlikely, given that starter Pokemon are usually designed together. 2) Hanamogura is the remnant of a completely different starter line that was scrapped prior to Spaceworld ’97. My original theory to explain Hanamogura was that there was a completely different grass starter line originally, just like Spaceworld ’97 has an unused water and fire starter line. Maybe it was just the case that, by Spaceworld ’97, they had already gotten around to overhauling their grass starter—thus the two newly created designs of Chikorita and Meganium—but they had yet to come up with new designs for the fire and water lines. Under this theory, Hanamogura is a leftover from their first ideaand there were presumably two other designs—for the first and third stage—which were overwritten in the Korean Index with something else. This theory still could be true, but I’ve moved away from it recently the more I look through the evidence. The first strike against it is that there's not a lot of evidence in the Korean Index that many Pokemon designs were completely overwritten. There are a lot which probably had updated sprites that overwrote old sprites, but there’s only one plausible case where an earlier design was replaced outright and replaced with a completely new Pokemon (that case is ID 343, which we’ll cover later). If designs were being overwritten, why are their so many obviously incomplete or unusable designs still present in the Index? Why, for instance, didn’t these guys get overwritten? Furthermore, as much as I look at the Index, there’s no obvious place where those two original Hanamogura evolutions would even logically fit. Since Hanamogura is a Sugimori design, the other two Hanamoguras would presumbably also be in Period 1d, right next to Hanamogura, but we know Donphan, Slowking, and Stantler predated Spaceworld ’97 and were presumably in the Index for awhile; likewise, Girafarig, Crobat, and Qwilfish’s designs stayed so static through the development of Gold/Silver that Sugimori had probably put significant time into their designs before Spaceworld ’97, implying they weren’t just thrown in at the last minute and overwrote something (through it’s possible). If we go back earlier before Period 1d, and suppose that Sugimori or someone else had designed Hanamogura’s relatives at an earlier phase in the list, I can’t find any obvious gaps where two evolutionary relatives may have gone: the Pokemon in previous Periods are either sketchy and underdesigned (and so therefore were probably in the Index since the beginning), or we know they came from Red/Green (and thus were probably in the index from the beginning), or they are located right next to their own evolutionary relatives (and thus are unlikely candidates to be added later). My best guess, if you think this theory has legs, would be that Remoraid and Elebebii, the next two designs on the list, may have overwritten two other Hanamoguras (something weird is going on with Elebebii, when we get to it). I still don’t think this is likely, but that's more or less where they would have had to go. But maybe the two Hanamogura relatives weren’t overwritten: maybe they’re some of the unused designs still on the list? Alas, while I’d love for this to be correct, as much as I comb through the Korean Index, I can’t find anything that would be a good candidate for Hanamogura’s old evolutionary relatives. ID 404 is the best bet for a first form, since it looks like it’s flower bud is a shell, ready to break into Hanamogura. At a stretch, I could imagine Sunflora as a third form, since it has the same roots. But I’ll be the first to admit that this relationship seems tenuous: And even if you do think that looks right, you'd need to explain why the other two parts of Hanamogura's family appear after Meganium and Chikorita on the list, rather than before them. One last point in favor of the "leftover from an earlier starter family" theory. Hanamogura is a weird sprite: it doesn’t seem based on a single real world animal, nor does it have an obvious inspiration. As a result, it really feels like a second stage evolution, like a Pokemon design that grew out of another, simpler, idea. But we really don’t know. Overall, maybe this theory could be correct? We can’t say for sure what the pre-Spaceworld ’97 builds looked like, and so it is certainly possible, though unlikely. 3) Hanamogura was an unrelated Pokemon, and is used here as a placeholder before Game Freak designed Bayleef. The idea here is that, by Spaceworld ’97, Hanamogura had already been discarded, or had never been more than a brainstorm. However, the developers had not yet finished with the Chikorita (Happa) line by this point, and since starter Pokemon are always three stages, they knew they needed one more design. So, before they had come up with Bayleef, Game Freak took another Pokemon from the Korean Index and used it instead, with the clear intent of deleting it once they had time to come up with Bayleef. If this alternative is correct, Hanamogura was never meant to be part of the Chikorita line at all, and may never have been used in the games at all, but is simply included because it was the easiest sprite to use as a placeholder. There are some precedents for this: the early Cyndaquil design, with an incorrect palette, was used as a placeholder design before they had come up with a sprite for Larvitar in the June 1999 sprites, and Pupitar used the sprites for the by-that-point deleted Urufuman Pokemon. They had designed Tyranitar by that point, but virtually no work had been done on Larvitar and Pupitar, so Game Freak pulled in these other sprites. There are other cases in later builds where old sprites are used as well, albeit usually the old sprites being used were usually from the Pokemon that were overwritten by the new design. If this really was the case, though, it’s the only instance of an old sprite being used as a placeholder in Spaceworld ’97, which otherwise feels as though they had finalized most of their designs by that point. There aren’t any goofy Larvitar sketches, for instance, in Spaceworld '97. The main strike against this idea is that there are just enough links between Hanamogura and Meganium to suggest that they weren’t completely unrelated ideas. Notice, for instance, that Meganium’s Antennae are drawn nearly the same way as Hanamogura’s. Hanamogura has three while Meganium has two, and the backsprites show a different shading on each, but their similarity is unmistakable. The antennae could be coincidence, but they sure seem to indicate some connection between these two creatures. As well, the two names (Hanamogura and Hanaryuu) have enough similarities that they seemed to be named based on each other. Furthermore, why would Hanamogura have a name if it was a discarded placeholder? While Misdreavus later used Norowara’s name even after it had switched designs, it was far more common for Game Freak to use “Mitei” or “Pending” for designs that were placeholders. It doesn’t make sense they would have programmed in a name for Hanamogura (and one that fits its mole like design, so we know the name was meant for it) if it was always a placeholder. So maybe this theory could be true? I think the evidence points against it, but I don’t think it's as conclusive as the previous two theories. 4) Hanamogura was the inspiration for Meganium, which in turned inspired Chikorita and Bayleef. The more I look at the Korean Index, this theory continues to look more correct. If you notice, of the three grass starter designs, Hanamogura was designed first, then Meganium, then Chikorita. Hanamogura was designed by Sugimori in Period 1d, while Meganium and Chikorita were in Period 2a, a patch of designs that were likely all developed by Atsuko Nishida. The most likely situation was that Nishida was asked to design an evolved form for Hanamogura and that she came up with Meganium. Meganium was such a good design, she followed up with a first form for the Hanamogura/Hanaryuu duo, Happa (Chikorita). Chikorita was clearly designed as a small and simpler looking Meganium, to capitalize on the strong design of Meganium. At that point, they had two designs for Pokemon that were both solid, and which both had a strong visual similarity with each other. With those two forming a much more cohesive family, Game Freak decided to ditch Hanamogura and put Nishida in charge of developing a new second stage, which eventually became Bayleef. Spaceworld ’97 is right in the middle of that process: Nishida had designed the other two evolutionary stages, but they hadn’t yet decided to discard Hanamogura (or hadn’t yet started the process). This theory matches the order that Hanamogura, Meganium, and Chikorita show up in the index, which is a point in its favor. It also doesn’t require us to suppose that there were overwritten designs somewhere that we’re not privy to. For these two reasons, I’m pretty convinced that something like theory happened. There are interviews in which Nishida discusses how she likes making evolved forms of Pokemon very different from their earlier stages, so the player would be surprised as they raised the Pokemon; this design philosophy fits perfectly with the supposition that Nishida created Meganium as an evolved form for Hanamogura. The theory also explains why Chikorita’s early name—Happa (Leaf)—doesn’t match the other two the way Hanamogura and Hanaryuu do: Hanaryuu was made to evolve from Hanamogura, but by the time she was designing Happa, she may have moved away from the idea that they had to be related to Hanamogura at all. There’s more evidence from the naming data we have that supports this hypothesis as well. According to internal records, the Pokemon that became Bayleef was named “Hanamogura” until April 3rd, 1999, at which point it was changed to “Mitei 01,” presumably because Game Freak were scrapping Hanamogura for a new design. But Meganium lost its old name, Hanaryuu, at the exact same time, and gained the name Meganium right as Hanamogura disappeared. This suggests to me that once they scrapped Hanamogura they also decided to give Meganium a name that better suited it, since there was no longer any reason for its name to reference Hanamogura. It’s not conclusive proof by any means, but it’s consistent with the larger explanation. Whatever happened, I think this is a design change I can get onboard with. Bayleef, despite being made last, might be the strongest design of the three, and Chikorita, Bayleef, and Meganium together create a surprisingly coherent and iconic trio. Beyond that, Hanamogura’s spritework is notably weak for Sugimori, who otherwise is a master at using simple pixel work to convey complex features very clearly. Hanamogura’s sprite is anything but clear, and the fact that people are still trying to parse where its face is suggests it would have been a disaster had it stayed to the final. As good as Sugimori is at designing Pokemon, here it seems like Nishida saved the day. ID 341: Remoraid Remoraid is a pretty creative design, in that it’s a fish that’s also a gun (or just a water gun). I know a lot of people hate Pokemon designed to look like real-world objects, and Remoraid may have started that trend, but at least here the idea feels much more unique and original. Unfortunately, whether for censorship or other reasons, Remoraid lost most of its unique design and by the final was nothing more than a slightly quirky fish. Remoraid, like most of Sugmori’s Pokemon designs, remained pretty much the same all throughout development, except for one twist. Very late into development (only a few months before the final build), Remoraid underwent a design change that stripped it of all of its more gun-like traits. Its handle was transformed into a tail, and its trigger was transformed into a fin on its belly. While, in retrospect, if you look at the final design, you can kind of make out how Remoraid is supposed to look like a gun, it’s only because we have its early design that that is clear. This is a shame. When I was a kid, I always wondered what Remoraid’s theme was supposed to be; it was a surprise when I learned it was supposed to look like a gun. In this case, I wonder if Game Freak was as unhappy with the final design as I was as a kid. Like I’ve noted, Sugimori’s designs underwent the least revision, and there’s good reason to think that Sugimori was happy with Remoraid’s design if he didn't mess with the Spaceworld '97 sprite to even tweak it or change its shading. It seems most likely to me that they were forced to change it to less resemble a gun to meet censorship requirements, possibly for the American market. A gun Pokemon would certainly have upset some parents, and probably would have contributed to a higher rating. Given that a lot of the other changes from Spaceworld ’97 to the final were to tone down dark or creepy content (Norowara and Kyonpan, for instance), it wouldn’t surprise me if this change was dictated to them right before release. The change goes hand-in-hand with Remoraid’s evolution, Octillery, which was originally designed to look like a tank. Before the change, this was a Pokemon family in which a gun changed into a tank; afterwards, it was a family in which a fish changed into an Octopus for no apparent reason. UPDATE: A reader (@Boi_die) noticed that the change in Remoraid's design happened around the same time as the Columbine Shooting in the United States (April 1999). Given the close timing of both events, I'm pretty convinced that the Pokemon team may have decided to walk back Remoraid's design rather than associate the games with guns in any form. It's a bit unfortunate for Remoraid's design, but I can see, historically, why this was a good call. The change happened late enough that Remoraid’s moveset still cleverly expresses its theme. Whether in Spaceworld ’97 or the final, Remoraid learns one move in which it focuses its attack (Focus Energy in the demo, Lock-On in the final) and then just about every beam attack in the game (The major difference is that it’s best move is Zap Cannon in the demo, and Hyper Beam in the final). Like a gun, Remoraid shoots beams of death from its mouth! While they might have kept this moveset even without the design change, it does feel like the last obvious remnant of what they were trying to do with Remoraid before it got watered down. It may not have been the case that censorship was to blame for Remoraid’s changes: Tajiri and Sugimori were notably interested in making Pokemon which fit logically into the natural world; one or both may have felt that a Pokemon shaped liked a gun might have seemed too artificial to exist in Pokemon’s lakes and rivers. It could have also come down to imagining how early Remoraid would even move: with only a trigger and a handle rather than actual fins, early Remoraid gives me a stiff, awkward vibe when it comes to movement, and they may have agreed. That doesn’t entirely explain why Octillery’s design was changed as well; my bet is still on censorship, but both reasons may have contributed. One final observation. While in Spaceworld ’97, Remoraid already had an evolved form, the Korean Index suggests that that wasn’t always the case. Remoraid is ID 341, while Octillery is ID 376, suggesting that it was made later to capitalize on Remoraid’s theme. That might explain why the two are so surprisingly different in terms of animal choices, and it might suggest that Nishida was the developer of Octillery, not Sugimori. There isn’t too much more to say about this, but there may have been an early build in which Remoraid was on its own as a single stage Pokemon. ID 342 & ID 343: Elebebii & Elekid My rule is that I cover each entry in the Korean Index one at a time. Except…this is an exception. Everytime I considered how I would organize the Elebebii (Erebebii technically, but ls and rs in Japanese are interchangeable) and Elekid entries differently, it didn’t make sense to split up the content. So we’re just going to do a double entry. ID 342 is Elebebii, the baby Pokemon which evolves into Electabuzz. But, strangely, the next entry on the list is Elekid, which is an updated design that replaced the early Elebebii design. In many ways, this doesn’t make sense: nowhere else in the Korean Index do we find an updated design taking up a different slot than its previously used design (with the possible exceptions of Pudi and ID 325, or ID 317 and Qwilfish). This entry will be divided into three sections. In the first, I’ll discuss Elebebii’s initial design and its implications for what we know about baby Pokemon. In the second, I’ll discuss Elekid’s design changes and the most orthodox, logical theory to explain why he appears in this second slot. In part three, I’ll offer my own speculative theory that pulls together what we know from the first two parts, and offer you a theory of exactly why they exist side-by-side. Ready? Part I: Babies! Elebebii is notable for a lot of reasons, but what it tells us the most about is the birth of the idea of baby Pokemon. Notably, Elebebii is the first baby Pokemon to appear on the Korean Index, and it’s pretty isolated from the rest. The next baby Pokemon on the list is at ID 375 (Cleffa), which is then followed by Pichu (ID 379) and then a trio of Red/Green designs brought back because they could be repurposed as babies (ID 395, 396, 397). All of those are much later in the index and bunched up together, but Elebebii is on its own. All this points to the idea that Elebebii was the first baby Pokemon Game Freak came up with, and only later was the concept of baby Pokemon universalized into a class of Gold/Silver Pokemon. So in many ways, Elebebii isn’t the first baby Pokemon, because at the time of its creation, there wasn’t yet such an idea. As a refresher, baby Pokemon were introduced into Gold and Silver as extra evolutions for existing Pokemon from Red/Green. In the final game, it was mostly already cute Pokemon which got baby pre-evolutions: Clefairy, Pikachu, and Jigglypuff got Cleffa, Pichu, and Igglybuff, respectively, while the notably uglier Electabuzz, Magmar, and Jynx got baby versions that made them a lot cuter. The cuteness angle was really important to the reception of these Pokemon, because they were otherwise pretty worthless: you never encounter them in the regular game except through breeding Pokemon in the daycare, and unless you’re an obsessive player who wants to carefully decide which special egg moves your specially bred Pokemon would get, they served basically no gameplay purpose. Spaceworld ’97 had a lot more baby Pokemon than the final: In addition to the above, Ponyta, Growlithe, Grimer, Doduo and Paras also got pre-evolutions. We’ll talk more about these as we come to them, but in general they were probably removed because of how little gameplay use they have. In the final, they most act as ultra-cute chibi trophy Pokemon, which is a valid reason to have them in the game, but can’t really justify a good 10% of the new Pokemon introduced in Gold/Silver being unseen/useless in a casual playthrough. They seem to have kept the ones that evolved into the more popular Pokemon, and then used three more for the Electabuzz/Magmar/Jynx trio, maybe to make that triad a little more interesting and to try and salvage their popularity. From the Korean Index, Electabuzz was the first to get a pre-evolution. Notably, Period 1d has a lot of experiments with new ways of evolving Gen I Pokemon: Crobat is a third stage evolution of Zubat which evolves via friendship.(though it still evolves by leveling in SW’97), Politoed is an alternate third form that evolves via a different evolutionary stone, and Slowking is an alternative third form which evolves via trading while holding an item. Elebebii was also part of this experimentation with new types of evolutionary relatives for Gen I Pokemon: what if, instead of an alternate third form, a Pokemon had a secret first form? Electabuzz seems a perfect candidate to build off of this idea, since in Red/Green its only ever captured after level 30. That opens up a cool possibility: what if Electabuzz was actually an evolved form, but since we caught it so high leveled in the first games that we never saw what it evolved from? While they decided not to take this route with baby Pokemon in the final game—in the final, you only encounter babies when you hatch them from eggs, and they evolve via friendship, not level—at the simplest version of this concept, Elebebii works perfectly as an unevolved form we never got to see before. Likewise, in Spaceworld ’97, all the baby Pokemon evolve by level (at level 12 or 15), which goes with this concept of an unseen first form. The idea of an secret first form that evolved at level twelve or fifteen, notably, works less well for some of the later baby Pokemon introduced than it does for Electabuzz: in Gen I you encounter Pikachu, for instance, at level 4, which means that it should still be a Pichu if Pichu only evolves at level twelve. Given that a leveling evolutionary method makes more sense for Elebebii than the other baby Pokemon, and given that Elebebii is so far removed from the other baby Pokemon on the list, it seems pretty clear to me that Elebebii, at an early point in development, was always meant to be a one-off idea. Just like Crobat was a secret final evolution we never saw in Gen I, Elebebii was a secret first form we also never got to see in Gen I. It was only later in development that Nishida realized she could borrow this idea and retroactively make the Clefairy line into a three-stage evolutionary family. And only after that idea worked the designers began to imagine “baby” as a special category of Pokemon. Once Nishida made Cleffa, she went on to make Pichu (since Pikachu was so popular and one of her favorites), and after that the designers pulled up old Gen I designs and reworked them to function similarly as babies. And then Elebebii was retroactively not just a secret first form, but a new class of Pokemon you would only find via breeding. Part II: Cool Kids Elebebii’s design didn’t stay the same long. In fact, Elekid, Stantler, and Bomushikaa are the only three Pokemon in the entire index to feature a design in the Korean Index not present in Spaceworld ’97, and all three of them seem to be updated designs made after Spaceworld ’97. This would be an aberration all on its own, if not for the fact that Elekid’s earlier design was present right next to it in the Korean Index. What’s going on? Furthermore, the updated design of Elekid in the Korean Index is interesting in its own right. While at first glance its identical to the final design, if you look more closely, Elekid’s horns are straighter in the May 1998 design, and its backsprite is from a different perspective. This is an Elekid design that doesn’t show up in any of our builds at all, but only in the Korean Index! If you needed it, that’s proof that some of the designs in the Korean Index were being worked on even after Spaceworld ’97, and it also means that Elekid was probably one of the first designs to be updated after Spaceworld ’97 (which means the Elebebii design, as adorable as it is, probably didn’t last long). As @OrangeFrench has observed, the most obvious reason Elekid was being worked on so soon after Spaceworld ’97—at a time when few of the other Pokemon designs were being updated—was because of it’s upcoming appearance in Pikachu’s Rescue Adventure, an animated short released in Japan on July 17th, 1999. In this short, Pikachu teamed up with Elekid to rescue Togepi, who had wandered off while Ash and the rest of the humans were sleeping. Given that this short was probably in production months before it was released, the anime team probably asked for some Pokemon designs they could debut, and Game Freak gave them Elekid, as well as Lebyda, Bellossom, and Hoothoot. Sugimori probably didn’t think Elebebii’s design was good enough or final, so he decided to work more on it, hence the new design for Elekid. This explanation doesn’t completely match up. Most notably, Hoothoot and Bellossom both use designs in Pikachu’s Rescue Adventure that hadn’t yet been updated in the Korean Index by May 1998. Hoothoot’s design around his eyes is the same as the final, not the smaller dots found in the Korean Index, but that could be a simple change tweaked closer to the release of the short: by June 1999, Hoothoot’s design has the final lines below its eyes. Harder to explain is Bellossom, which has its final green-skinned palette in Rescue Adventure but still uses its darker-skinned sprites in both the Korean Index and the June 1999 sprites. If they didn’t need to work on updating Bellossom’s design months before Pikachu’s Rescue Adventure, why was it important they updated Elekid beforehand? I don’t think these objections prove the Rescue Adventure theory is wrong; they just seem to offer conflicting evidence. This is probably just all a sign of how chaotic the development of Gold/Silver was: while they were designing the games, they were also juggling requests for the anime and other things. They likely just didn't have time to update the in-game sprites to the most current designs. The other problem with this theory is it doesn’t explain why the Elekid design seemingly overwrote whatever was originally after Elebebii. In the case of Bomushikaa, its post-Spaceworld ’97 design simply overwrote its older one; why didn’t Sugimori just overwrite Elebebii with the new design? One possibility: maybe because he was designing it for Pikachu’s Rescue Adventure, Sugimori didn’t want to overwrite the design they were currently using in the game? Maybe he wasn’t sure which design was going to be better, so he left them both? If that’s the case though, why didn’t he just leave the original Elebebii on the scratchpad? Why did he take up an entire slot in the Korean Index? And, while it has nothing to do with Elekid in particular, what was in that slot that he overwrote? Maybe it was a pre-evolution of the Pleasiosaur Viking Ship Pokemon that comes next in the Index (Unlikely, but possible)? The above explanation is, by far, the most likely explanation for what happened with Elebebii and Elekid: Sugimori reworked the design and for whatever reason didn’t want to overwrite the previous design. However, all of the above leaves me just uneasy enough to search for an alternative. Part III: An Alternative There are of course some obvious reasons that we think of Elebebii and Elekid as iterations of the same design. Both designs have more or less the same moveset, both fit into the game in the same way (as a pre-evolution of Electabuzz) and Elekid looks more revised and complete than Elebebii, which makes sense because there’s no trace of Elebebii in the game by the time Elekid’s sprites show up. But what if, at one point, they were different Pokemon? What if, prior to Spaceworld ’97, the plan was not to have one pre-evolution from Electabuzz, but two? Just by looking at the sprites, this seems eminently possible. Elebebii is much smaller and seemingly cuter than Elekid, which serves as a nice transition from the simple battery like baby to the full adult Electabuzz. As a three stage family, they actually look pretty coherent. There's an obvious progression. First, Elekid inherits the stripes and the scrunched chubby mouth of Elebebii; then Elekid keeps its pose and its lightning bolt on the front as it turns into Electabuzz. I can certainly see this as a three-stage family, even if we otherwise have no evidence for it. Part of the reason we haven’t considered this before is because Elekid is a baby Pokemon, and all baby Pokemon were only a single pre-evolutionary stage before the original Pokemon they grew into. But, as we’ve already established, Elebebii was created before the concept of baby Pokemon was established: what if, in this early stage of development, they had initially conceived of Electabuzz having two secret stages we never saw in Red/Green? This would easily explain why there are two versions of Elekid back to back in the Korean Index: because at one point they were two separate Pokemon. It would also mean that the Elekid design in the Index, while still potentially being made after Spaceworld ’97, could also have predated it, like most of the other designs in the Korean Index, which would make more sense. If we buy into this theory, Elekid was discarded before Spaceworld ’97, once they transformed Elebebii into another one of the numerous baby Pokemon in that build (it’s cute design looks more like a baby, which might have been the reason to do so). But as they cut more and more baby Pokemon, Game Freak changed their mind and replaced the most babylike version of the design with the Elekid one. In part, this might have been to go along with the designs of Smoochum and Magby, which each look more visually similar to Elekid than to Elebebii. There’s a lot of speculation that goes along with this theory, and I admit that my evidence isn’t rock-solid here. But given that these two designs exist side by side, and no other designs in the Korean Index exist like that, it seems likely to me that something unique was going on with Elekid. If we posit that Elekid and Elebebii were initially separate, all of a sudden all the incongruities fit. It also means that we don’t have to speculate on what filled that ID number before the Elekid design overwrote it, because Elekid was always there.
Whether you’re convinced by me, or skeptical, I’m sure none of us ever thought there was this much interesting things to say about Elekid of all things. So far, the way I've been dividing Period 1 into parts has been through blocks made by the various designers. It looks as though the Korean Index is chronological, but it may have been set up specifically in batches made by each designer and then input all at once. Period 1a is composed of five designs by Morimoto; Period 1b seems to be either an unknown designer (like Fujiwara) or a collaboration between Nishida and Morimoto (probably the latter); Period 1c was defined by Pokemon designs that were almost assuredly designs by Atsuko Nishida. Period 1d (from Donphan to Unown) is the first block done by Sugimori, the lead Pokemon designer. His style is very distinctive, in the proportions of the Pokemon he draws and the shading he uses. He's highly influential and important to Pokemon's development, and all the earliest Red/Green designs were probably his work. Even later designs were probably overseen by Sugimori, and his style, along with Nishida's to a lesser extent, defines Pokemon as we know it. Sugimori is also responsible for more Pokemon designs than anyone else, including some of the most well known and popular Pokemon. As a result, there are some distinctive features of Period 1d that we don't find elsewhere. First, of all of the Pokemon in Period 1d, only one goes unused. That makes sense given Sugimori prolific output and given how central he was on the design team: he's made so many Pokemon that he knows what works and what doesn't, and he's so important to the overall style of Pokemon that most of his designs are probably more fit for the games than those of other creators. Secondly, most of the Pokemon in Period 1d have a very stable design: almost all of them have the exact same sprite all the way through development, or they changed in only minor ways. Again, Sugimori's style is the style of Pokemon in general, and while other people's designs were probably retooled to fit the games better, Sugimori's probably defined what the games should look like. Another way to put it is that Sugimori's designs didn't change to better match the others; other designs were changed to be more in line with Sugimori’s creations. ID 334: Donphan Everyone’s favorite elephant guy. Donphan’s an important Pokemon to the overall reconstruction of the timeline of Gold and Silver because we know he was created early in development, well before Spaceworld '97. Even though Donphan's design is pretty static throughout the entire development cycle, he's still an interesting guy. In particular, Donphan's neat because we can see many different smaller pieces of evidence suggesting how early his design was finalized, giving us a sense into what Pocket Monsters 2 may have looked like before Spaceworld '97. He's also good evidence for the hypothesis that the Korean Index is more or less chronological. Donphan was one of the first four Pokemon to be seen by the public. His design was first shown in the Pocket Monsters Official Handbook, released May 1997. In the Handbook, four Pokemon from a pre-Spaceworld ’97 build of Pocket Monsters 2 were shown off: Ampharos, Donphan, Slowking, and Ho-Oh. All of these Pokemon are from the first part of the Korean Index, and together they help us date this part of the Index (and what I’m calling Period One) to probably the earliest prototypes of the games, in 1996. In the Handbook, they make some speculation about Donphan, implying that the writers didn’t have any insider information about what it was actually like: “This powerful-looking new Pokémon seems like it could really pack a punch. The details are still unknown, but it looks like a Rhydon-type Pokémon, doesn't it?” Tangentially, the tone of this quote about Donphan is in direct contrast to what the Handbook had to say about Ampharos and Slowking. In the case of those two, the writers of the Handbook implied the designers told them something about those Pokemon, but the Donphan entry is pure speculation. Thus, it isn't clear what sort of access the writers had to the Pokemon team: were they just given the sprites and told to speculate, or did the Pokemon team tell them a little about each one? Anyway, Donphan certainly ended up having only cosmetic similarities to Rhydon (the Handbook probably just meant that Donphan, like Rhydon, was probably brutish and aggressive). We’ve already discussed Ampharos, which had a completely different sprite in the Handbook, and we'll talk about Slowking shortly. Donphan, unlike Ampharos, has pretty much the same sprite as it has in the final: the only differences are minor shading changes and that he seems to have a blue palette in this version: In Spaceworld ’97, that palette changed to brown (which became its shiny palette in the final), and in every build after that, Donphan had a gray palette. And...that was it for Donphan's design: it looked essentially the exact same in 1996 as it did in 1999. While all of Sugimori's designs stayed relatively the same throughout development, there's an additional explanation for why Donphan’s design is so static: Mewtwo Strikes Back. The first Pokemon movie came out in July 1998, but it was probably produced over at least the half-year before that. That means that the animators of the movie had to base their designs off of Gold/Silver builds even earlier than that, possibly even before Spaceworld ’97. This is important because in Mewtwo Strikes Back, importantly, Pokemon fans got to see their first animated Generation II designs. In a short before the movie, Snubbull, Marill, and Togepi appeared, but in the actual movie, exactly one Generation II Pokemon made a cameo appearance: Donphan. It's time on screen is brief. At the beginning of the film, Donphan briefly fights Bulbasaur in a tournament. Since it appears in the film, the designers probably thought they couldn't change Donphan's design any further, and thus Donphan stayed essentially the same even as the Pokemon around it were shuffled back and forth and redrawn multiple times. Interestingly, Donphan uses Rollout in its on-screen battle with Bulbasaur, which is a move the final Donphan learns, but not one that Donphan learned in Spaceworld ’97. Was Donphan’s moveset changed soon after Spaceworld ’97 to include Rollout (and the filmakers were working with an post-SW97 updated moveset), or was it given Rollout in future builds because it had the move in the film? Rollout already existed in Spaceworld ’97, but it was only learned by the Geodude family in that demo. My bet is that the anime team was given a list of moves that Donphan could probably use, and they decided on Rollout because it was a cool visual. After that, Game Freak may have changed its move set to match the movie. However, either explanation could be right. It would be interesting if the film was the reason Donphan got Rollout: it's not the only time the anime influenced the games, but it is a rare enough occurrence to note. Regardless, once the movie showed Donphan, its design was fixed. Notice as well that Donphan’s palette in the movie was its final grey: they probably did enough work on it before the production of the movie started to change its coloring from Spaceworld '97's ugly brown palette, and after that, Game Freak could mess with the coloring any more. Donphan did, finally, receive a minor design change, but it took until the international versions of Gold/Silver, and then it was extremely small: they deleted some of the texturing under Donphan’s trunk. Why? Because it closer matched the movie, in which Donphan had a smooth underside to its trunk. Some people theorize that Donphan was actually designed even earlier than Gold/Silver, and is, in fact, a redesigned version of the Elephant Pokemon that was cut from Red/Green. Anything’s possible, but there are a couple reasons I doubt this theory. The biggest problem is that the Elephant is already accounted for, as ID 309. Sure, its pose has been dramatically changed since the Red/Green incarnation of the Elephant, but 309 is unmistakably the same creature. As a result, in order for Donphan to be a later design of the elephant, they would have had to first redesign it into ID 309, then take another crack at it, but for some reason decide not to overwrite the earlier redesign. Which is possible, and something similar happened at another point in this list (Elebebi and Elekid), but doesn’t seem all that likely. Besides, when it comes down to it, the only similarity Donphan has with the original Elephant its that they both were elephants; it doesn’t even have the extra tusks that were part of the early elephant’s design. Saying that, I will admit that the poses of 309 and Donphan are very similar. I think this is probably coincidence more than anything, but it is there. Besides its movie appearance and its early appearance in the Handbook, there are some other indications hidden in Spaceworld '97 that Donphan was an early design. First of all, while most of the new Pokemon in SW97 have placeholder stats of 50 across the board, Donphan has 70 HP, 70 Attack, and 70 Defense. It’s not much, and it’s by far not the only Pokemon without placeholder stats, but it does suggest that Donphan was around long enough that they had already tweaked its stats a little during testing. Notice that, for instance, Phanpy, its preevolution, has the generic 50s in each stat. Phanpy appears much later in the Korean Index and probably was designed right before SW97, so it makes sense that they wouldn't have had time to design stats for Phanpy. As a side note, the late inclusion of Phanpy in the Korean Index also demonstrates that Donphan was probably designed originally as a single stage Pokemon, possibly even by the time the Handbook was describing it. Phanpy is at the very end of the Index which suggests that it was a last minute idea before Spaceworld '97 was finished, and that Donphan was only given an evolution later in development. To further this, Phanpy is right in the middle of a later Period of the Korean Index that is entirely devoted to designing evolutions for other Gold/Silver Pokemon. Donphan was likely a much earlier design, and as they were putting the final tweaks on the Spaceworld roster, Game Freak probably filled it out by expanding on the Pokemon they already had. Donphan's moveset also shows signs of how early it was designed. Donphan’s SW97 moveset is actually almost completely different from its final moveset. It seems to have been designed more as a tank than as the sweeper it became: 1997 Donphan had Protect and Endure while the final gets Rapid Spin and Earthquake. It has no Ground type moves in the prototype, which is weird since it was Ground type in that build, and suggests that it inherited a Normal-type moveset from earlier in its design. They probably changed this moveset in part to differentiate it from Rhydon, which has a very similar moveset to Donphan in SW97, but in addition had Earthquake, making it more or less superior. Oddly, in the final, while Donphan no longer learns Endure, Phanpy still does, which could be a throwback to the earlier moveset that they forgot to change. Anyway, the most interesting thing to me about Donphan’s early moveset is that it only has three new moves made for Gold and Silver: Protect, Endure, and Scary Face. They’re all really early on the internal move index (which was probably made chronologically as they needed a new move): Scary Face is move #184, Protect is #182, and Endure is #203 (remember that Generation I’s move list ends at #165, so all of these were in the first forty moves designed for Gold/Silver). Rapid Spin, an addition to its final moveset, is #229, much later in the index. Thus, the Donphan of SW97 might have had its moveset designed before they had made many new moves for Gold/Silver, and it was later edited to add moves they designed later in development. None of this is proof, but it all fits with Donphan being designed earlier than many of the other Pokemon. That’s all there really is to Donphan. It’s a cool Pokemon, and I’m sure Game Freak was reasonably happy with it from the beginning, which is why they had the confidence to show it off in the Handbook and in the movie. I don’t think there are many other Gen II Pokemon that remained this static over the course of development, and it’s interesting to see that in the midst of so much being thrown out between SW97 and SW99, Donphan was a solid rock in a sea of chaos. ID 335: SlowkingSlowking’s the third of the four earliest Gold/Silver Pokemon introduced in the Pocket Monsters Official Handbook. Thus, like Donphan, Slowking's one of the important Pokemon that helps us date the different periods of the Korean Index. Because of Slowking, Donphan, Ampharos, and Hooh, we know that the Pokemon around this part of the list we all pre-Spaceworld ’97 and likely dating back to 1996 builds of Gold/Silver back when it was just called Pocket Monsters 2. It’s interesting that, of those first four, they all appear pretty close together in the Korean Index: Donphan and Slowking are right next to each other, here at IDs 334 and 335, Ampharos was only 14 early at ID 321, and Hooh is thirteen after this, at ID 347. Why were these four, all close together, the first four shown off to the public? First, three of the four are Sugimori designs and one was made by Nishida. Since Sugimori and Nishida were the most important designers, their designs were probably some of the most popular early designs, and also the most likely to be finished or close to finished. As a result, when selecting Pokemon to preview, it might have made sense to pick some of the early--and thus most iterated--designs by these two designers. Secondly, it could just be that this is a sign that Periods 1c and 1d are where the designers were finally getting serious about designing Pokemon directly for Gold/Silver. Periods 1a and 1b are filled with either incomplete designs or throwback designs from Red/Green, but 1c and 1d seemed to have been worked on more completely (goofy Japanese ghost design nonwithstanding). So the selection of these four Pokemon could be an indication that the designers saw this as more or less the beginning of the list, and the Pokemon before this as less developed or designs that they brainstormed but weren't sure about. It certainly seems that Sugimori was happy with the Slowking design, as it barely changed even from its first appearance pre-SW97. The shell’s design does vaguely change between SW97 and the final, as you can see in the backsprites: most prominently, it loses its teeth gouging into Slowking’s head. But the front sprites are nearly identical. This seems to be a repeating pattern for any of Sugimori’s designs in the Korean Index: most of the time, he seemed to be happiest with the first design and it kept relatively stable. But there are other parts of Slowking that seem more in flux. For instance, I’m not sure they had really understood how Slowking would evolve for a long time, and tried out various ideas. In the Official Handbook, the writers described a version of Slowking’s evolution that matches ideas later found in the anime: Secret Data on Slowking: Slowpoke, a very stupid Pokémon, was out fishing for bait when a Shellder clamped onto on its tail, causing it to evolve into Slowbro. However, it is said that, in 1 instance out of 10,000, a Shellder will clamp down on a Slowpoke's head instead of its tail. As the Shellder bites down, its essence penetrates the Slowpoke's listless brain cells, bestowing upon it extreme motivation. Slowking has quickly become a hot topic among Pokémon collectors. How its evolution takes place is still unspecified, but it has been established that it evolves from Slowpoke! There are two important parts of this passage worth paying attention to. First, the passage suggests that Slowking's method of evolution has something to do with where a Shellder ends up choosing to clamp down. While of course the game's mechanics can't be expected to perfectly convey the flavor the designers have in mind, it is notable that this passage says nothing about trading Slowking to evolve it or the King's Rock, both features of its final, and Spaceworld '97, methods of evolving. Now, to be fair, the sentence "how its evolution takes place is still unspecified," matches other similar sentences in the book "Pokedex," translated by Dr. Lava, Nob Ogasawara and Did You Know Gaming here. That book, written in 1996 (a year before the Handbook), contained a lot of unused lore from the early Pokemon games, and notably used the phrase "it's method of evolution is still unknown" whenever it discussed Pokemon like Gengar that evolved via trade. This could be coincidence, or it could be a hint they already knew Slowking would evolve through trading with another player. We should be careful not to make too much of this, as this "secret data" is mostly flavor. Regardless, I still find this paragraph suspicious. All of these details may be lore, and who knows how much of those details were provided by Game Freak and how much were speculation from the authors of the Handbook, but this whole paragraph strikes me as a ton of details for a discussion of an evolutionary method that has absolutely nothing to do with the in-game mechanics. The second thing to notice is this: “it has been established that it evolves from Slowpoke!” On the one hand, that should be obvious, but there’s a very weird inconsistency in Spaceworld ’97. For some reason, in SW '97, Slowking evolves from Slowbro, not Slowpoke! It evolves the same way as in the final-- by trading holding a King’s Rock—but it doesn’t evolve as a branching evolution from Slowpoke. Which is weird. To add to this weirdness, there's another Pokemon in Spaceworld '97 that looks very much like it should have something to do with Slowking's evolution...but doesn't. I present to you Taaban (Turban): Taaban’s a weird Pokemon, and we’ll discuss its irregularities in full when we get to its entry. To be clear, Taaban has no data associated with Slowking or Slowbro in SW’97. It is found much later in the Korean Index (ID 418), which suggests it wasn’t created at the same time as Slowking and probably, at first, didn't have to do with Slowking's evolutionary method. In fact, it seems like a later idea. Because there’s no data for it relating to the Slowpoke line, it could simply be a coincidence, and be otherwise unrelated. But look at it. There’s clearly some connection here, one that wasn’t implemented in SW’97, and may not have been implemented at all before Taaban was deleted. We'll come back to Taaban; first, I want to discuss the irregularity of Slowking evolving from Slowbro in Spaceworld '97. What's so odd about this is that the Handbook, which is pre-Spaceworld '97, already states that Slowking is a split evolution. If that's the case, why wouldn't Spaceworld '97 follow it? It could simply be an error, or something they hadn’t fixed yet. But my supposition is that Game Freak wasn’t sure how Slowking would evolve at first and tried a number of different methods. Originally, I think Slowking was designed as the third stage of the Slowpoke line. That would have been very early, pre-Handbook, and its just speculation, but given that Crobat, a new stage three for the Zubat line sits right next to Slowking in the Korean Index, they may have both been invented at the same time as new third forms for Gen I evolutionary families. Even if I'm right, however, this evolutionary tree didn’t last long, and even by the printing of the Official Handbook, Game Freak had already decided on a different idea. This, of course, was the branching evolution as pioneered by Politoed. Politoed was updated from its old Red/Green design and put into Pocket Monsters 2 around the same time as Slowking. And like we discussed in the Politoed article, Politoed was the first attempt at a branching evolution in Gold/Silver, born out of a problem that they couldn't solve with Politoed first incarnation in Gen I. The original Politoed was too close, design-wise, to the other frog Pokemon in Red/Green, but it was also too distinct from them to be related to them or grafted on as an evolution (like Blastoise was grafted onto the Squirtle line). They couldn't solve this problem in Gen I, and the Politoed line was deleted. But in Gold/Silver, the solution Game Freak came up with was to make Politoed branch off of Poliwhirl. This allowed it to be an original take on the Poliwhirl line and offered it a place in that evolutionary family where it was both distinct from all the other forms (because it evolved in a non-normative way) while still acknowledging the toad origins for both. If they had come up with that solution for Politoed, they may have been eager for other designs with which they could also try the branching evolution theme. Slowking was the natural choice. It was made around the same time, it evolved from a Gen I Pokemon, and there really weren't any other good candidates yet, especially this far into the Korean Index. Crobat, the only other Pokemon from this era that fits the requirements of being a third stage from a Gen I Pokemon, doesn’t make sense as a split evolution: it already looks like a meaner version of Golbat, and its connections to Golbat are far more clear than its similarities to Zubat. In fact, it's not until Bellossom (and the Eevees) that you get another Pokemon in the Korean Index that even evolved from a Gen I Pokemon--some pre-evolutions exist between these but they served a different purpose--and Bellossom is ID 436, more than a hundred Pokemon later! By the time of Bellossom, they were probably designing new evolutions specifically for this branching idea; Slowking was so much early it was probably repurposed. Notably, Poliwhirl can't evolve into Politoed in Spaceworld ’97: the Heart Stone that’s supposed to help it evolve doesn’t do anything yet. In fact, none of the other branching evolutions (besides Eevee) work at all: Tsubimotto and Bellossom use stones that don’t work, and Slowking of course is a three stage evolution. This makes me think that by Spaceworld ’97, they may have known their plans for these evolutionary trees but hadn’t yet gotten around to implementing the mechanics. Hence the reason why Slowking still evolves from Slowbro: it's still using its old evolutionary method even though they knew they were planning to change it. This isn't the first time something like that happened: notably, Houndour and Houndoom are only Fire type in Spaceworld '97, even though unused dialogue in the demo has a trainer mention them as examples of the Dark type, which they would eventually be. None of the above theory is for certain- it could be the case that Slowking was never, at any point in development, meant to be a third stage evolution and this was always a placeholder. But if that’s the case, why program in the evolution at all? Politoed, Bellossom, etc don’t have working evolutions, so why bother programming in Slowking’s? Back to Taaban. How does Slowking's disembodied shell fit into all of this? It's very likely, to my mind, that Taaban was created as they were considered exactly how to implement Slowpoke's split evolution. Taaban’s much further in the Korean Index –ID 418—which means that it wasn’t designed around the time Slowking was but after the fact. It’s also the beginning of a series of Pokemon in the Korean Index that all evolve into or from a Gen I Pokemon. IDs 418-428 are all evolutionary relatives of Gen I Pokemon, and everything after that until the end of the Index is either an evolutionary relative of a Gen I or Gen II Pokemon, not a new unrelated Pokemon. It’s very likely, as a result, that Taaban was created with evolution in mind (to be clear, I don't think it was created to have anything to do with Shellder; I think it was created with the Slowpoke line in mind). This is kind of obvious looking at the rest of it’s design: Taaban is clearly modeled on the Shellder that Slowking and Slowbro have (it’s even got the jewel on it that Slowking’s Shellder has) and it has a very basic moveset (Harden, Body Slam, and Water Gun, all learned at level one). It doesn’t make much sense as a Pokemon on its own, either for gameplay or design-wise--why make a second, bad Shellder? And yet, it has no evolution data… It seems to me that someone on the design team was bothered (just as I was when I was a kid) by how little the Shellder clamped onto Slowking/Bro looks like an actual Shellder. We now know the reason for this: Slowbro was one of the original Capumon and was designed without Shellder in mind; the Shellder link in its lore was created after the fact. But someone in the design team created Taaban as a way to explain why the Shellders were so different, and they had plans for Taaban to play a role in Slowking’s evolution. Taaban was supposed to intiate the evolution instead of Slowpoke evolving when traded. Given that even the final Gold/Silver has a story area devoted to Slowpokes and their tales (Team Rocket’s cruel plan to cut them off in the Slowpoke Well), there’s even story space in the final game where Taaban could have gone. So what happened? Likely, they couldn’t figure out a good way for the evolution to work. Maybe if both Taaban and a Slowpoke were in the party together and Slowpoke leveled up, the Taaban would disappear and get merged with the Slowpoke? Maybe you were supposed to use an item on one of them in your party and they’d merge? Either’s a nice idea, but there’s no precedent for that type of evolution in the games yet, and they may just not been able to work out the programming kinks. We know that they tried out something similar in Generation III with Ninjask and Shedinja (though it’s the opposite direction, one Pokemon turning into two), and with Mantyke in Generation IV (though the Remoraid doesn’t disappear from your party), but the idea may have just been too ambitious here. On top of that, why wouldn’t Slowbro also evolve out of a Taaban and a Slowpoke in the party? What makes it different from Slowking? It may have been too complicated to work out. In any event, Game Freak decided to keep the trade evolution method of evolving Slowpoke, but fixed it so Slowpoke evolved when traded with the King’s Rock, not Slowbro. In addition, once the Heart Stone disappeared from the games, Game Freak decided to use the exact same item for Politoed’s evolution; another hint that these evolutionary methods were thought through in concert. Slowking’s moveset and its sprites didn’t change much, but they did decide to get rid of the teeth from Slowking’s Taaban clamping down on his head. Maybe they were just streamlining the design and wanted it to look friendlier; maybe they wanted the Taaban to look less like an animate creature of its own now that Taaban was no longer in the games. Slowking was certainly a favorite of the designers: a talking Slowking even appeared in the second Pokemon movie, released a few months before Gold/Silver came out in Japan. This is understandable: it’s a good design. Slowking takes a distinctive trait of Slowbro and flips it on its head. It’s no wonder that the basic design stayed the same, even if the developers struggled to find the right way to integrate Slowking into the existing line. ID 336: GirafarigOr the story of how the Girafarig lost its head. Girafarig was a great design for a Pokemon, but one that, for whatever reason, lost most of what was interesting about it by the time it had been revised forthe final game. Like all of Sugimori’s designs in the index, Girafarig stayed nearly identical from start to finish, with one exception: its back head. The mystery of the missing head is intriguing. It’s unclear exactly what happened to Girafarig or why they decided to tone it down, but it has an interesting design history, and as we walk through it, I’m hoping we’ll at least understand better why the designers made the changes they did. Girafarig is an palindrome, just like its Japanese name, Kirinriki (it’s only a palindrome in kana, for what its worth). In its original design, Girafarig itself was also a palindrome: it had a face on either side of its body, one normal looking, one evil. RacieBeep’s interpretation of this sprite, in particular, is great and worth showing here: I really like the simplicity and nuance of this design. I like how it was Dark/Normal type originally, because that matches how it was half a normal Giraffe animal, and half an evil Giraffe animal. Every since I was young I didn’t understand why the final was Psychic, or why its name was a palindrome if its design wasn’t quite that. We now know, of course, that those were later changes to the original design. My younger self would have been much happier with the Dr. Giraf and Mr. Farig design shown here. In Spaceworld 1997, Girafarig had this split persona design. It also, interestingly, had a pre-evolution: Twinz (Tsuinzu). Twinz has an winding design story all of its own, which we’ll cover when we get to it. Suffice to say, Girafarig and Twinz weren’t designed together, as Twinz is ID 403 in the Korean Index. But by the time Spaceworld ’97 was made, they’re pretty clearly tied together, and its possible that Twinz was originally designed specifically as a preevolution for Girafarig. It’s certainly a really solid and unexpected design choice: a conjoined ghost pokemon evolves into a conjoined evil Giraffe Pokemon. It's clear, however, that this original design had problems. First, let’s take a look at the move sets for Twinz and Girafarig in Spaceworld ’97: …oh. There’s not a lot there, is there? This is especially an oddity because almost all of the Spaceworld ’97 move sets are complete. The team hadn’t gotten around to balancing stats yet, but except for a handful, all the move sets were programmed in. Which makes Girafarig especially odd. There’s a number of reasons why this could be: they could have decided to include Girafarig and Twinz late and hadn’t done much work on them (unlikely, since almost all the Sugimori designs from Period 1 are used in Spaceworld ’97), or they could have recently changed their typing and erased the move sets while they rethought them. The most obvious explanation is that it was really hard to come up with a move set that suited both an anthropomorphic ghost and a four-legged devil Giraffe. Even with these three moves, they don’t seem to suit Twinz at all: how is Twinz supposed to double kick someone? It seems likely that, because Twinz and Girafarig were so different from each other on a physical level, the team was constantly having issues trying to find a way to make them coherent as an evolutionary family. This extended to typing as well. Dark/Normal fits Girafarig perfectly, but it fit Twinz…okay? Sure, Twinz looks a bit like a dark type (though Dark would eventually come to have a trickster identity rather than an evil one), but it also looks much like a Ghost type. I mean, its sprites (even more its updated sprites in June 1999) even look pretty close to Haunter. So the design team turned Twinz into Ghost type, which necessitated changed Girafarig to Ghost/Normal around April 1999. But that doesn’t make sense either, and it was clear these two Pokemon weren’t working with each other. In the Spring of 1999, Game Freak tried three different solutions to the Girafarig problem. First, they tried to give Girafarig a third form (or second, since it’s not clear if Twinz is still connected to it by this point). My guess is that this evolution was intended to tie the entire concept together: maybe it gave Girafarig more ghostlike properties to bring it back towards the Twinz design. We don’t have a sprite for this form, nor a name (just “Pending 05”), but we do have stats, typing (it’s a Ghost type, unlike Girafarig which was Ghost/Normal), and a move set. This evolution, whatever it was, doesn’t seem to have solved their problems, and so it only lasted a few months before it was scrapped. After the third evolution idea fell apart, Game Freak’s second plan was to completely scrap the Twinz concept, and we have at least the backsprite of a baby Girafarig (its palette is a little wrong). It never got much of a moveset (just Girafarig’s abilities at a lower level), but it was noticeably Normal/Psychic, like Girafarig had finally become by that point. It's very unfinished in the data we have: its still using the Tsunzu name, and its front sprites have been replaced by weird sketches that would eventually become Wobbuffet. Important, baby Girafarig is also the first time we see an approximation of what would become Girafarig’s circular tail/face that replaced its evil face. It isn't clear, however, which came first: did baby Girafarig inspire the tail, or was its tail made to be a less developed version of Girafarig's new tail? The third answer Game Freak came up with was to finally sever Twinz from Girafarig entirely, and let Girafarig exist as a single stage evolution (Twinz, bizarrely, went on to get turned into Wobbuffet). This solution ended up being the only reasonable one, and by this point, Girafarig had lost its second head and now had its final shape. That’s a lot of backstory, and it still doesn’t explain why Girafarig lost its head. The answer could be simple. Sugimori really didn’t like Pokemon concepts that weren’t logical as animals in the wild. An animal with two heads on either side of its body may have been too confusing to think of in an ecosystem: how would it walk, for instance? Of course, Doduo exists, and they didn’t have a problem with that design, so maybe not. In fact, maybe Doduo’s existence made Girafarig feel redundant, and so they shifted its design. Between Spaceworld '97 and the final, there's also a definite move away from scary designs to cute ones: maybe they just wanted Girafarig to be more huggable? Either could be the reason. Another likely possibility is that Girafarig was changed for balance. After Spaceworld ’97, Game Freak may have decided they didn’t need Girafarig to be Dark and that they had a dearth of new Psychic Pokemon. Once they changed Girafarig to Psychic, the evil back head no longer made sense, so they changed its sprite to match the new typing. Of course, this theory is good and all, but it doesn’t take into account the Ghost typing Girafarig had in between. Maybe they simply thought the original design was too on-the-nose, and changed it to nuance the design a bit more? I think the most likely scenario was that the gradual loss of Girafarig’s identity was more or less accidental: that it was a death by a thousand cuts. Girafarig was a problem child because it was connected with Twinz, and each step to solve that problem changed a small thing about it, until it no longer resembled its original intent. First, Girafarig’s typing didn’t match Twinz’s concept, so they changed them both to Ghost, and then to Psychic when that wasn’t working either. Second, they couldn’t find a move set that worked for both types, so they changed Twinz into baby Girafarig. In the end, they decided they didn’t want to use the baby version, but they liked one thing about its design: the new tail, which after all fit the new typing of Psychic. So when they got rid of the baby, they took the best parts of its design and merged it with the original Girafarig. In the end, Girafarig became Psychic because of Twinz, but by the time they solved the Twinz problem they didn’t have any reason to change Girafarig back. And in the course of trying to solve the Twinz problem, they found a new design they liked better and reworked Girafarig to match. None of these designs were larger conscious changes to Girafarig, but simply a process that ended up at the final design. It sure is a travesty though. Girafarig was so much better as a Pokemon in Spaceworld ’97, when its concept was stronger. The final Girafarig is fine, but it really pales in comparison to the idea of an evil dual-giraffe. Of all the Spaceworld ’97 Pokemon, Girafarig isn’t my favorite, but I do think this ranks right alongside Kyonpan and Grotesque as the best designs we were robbed of. ID 336: CrobatCrobat is another Sugimori design that remained almost exactly the same throughout development, at least sprite-wise. In fact, if you look closely, its Spaceworld ’97 sprite is actually a different drawing than the final one, but the final was redrawn to be as close to it as possible. Sugimori clearly liked the design he had in the first place, and had no reason to change it. It's name and species type did change. In Spaceworld ’97, Crobat is known as “Ekushingu,” which translates into “X-ing," matching the way its wings form an X-shape. Crobat’s species is also “X” in SW '99, instead of Bat like it is in the final. Initially, I thought the Japanese name translated to "X-Wing," but the Japanese spelling for that is a little different, unfortunately. Which means that Crobat isn't as related to Star Wars as I'd intially thought: I’m not sure why Crobat was the logical progression from Golbat. Golbat’s central characteristic is its large, ungainly mouth, which actually grows smaller when Crobat takes the driver’s seat. Meanwhile, Crobat’s four wings don’t seem to be predicted by Zubat or Golbat’s designs, though Zubat’s “legs” do look a little like they could have evolved from it. Part of me wonders if, like Politoed, Crobat has its origins in an early design somewhere, but that wouldn’t really make sense given that Red/Green had an unused Zubat pre-evolution that was scrapped, which leaves no room for a fourth Zubat. Crobat probably doesn’t date from that far back. On the other hand, most of Gold/Silver’s added evolutions weren't direct progressions from their Gen I progenitors. Instead, Game Freak tried to add a unique twist to what came before. That’s probably all that’s going on with Crobat. Crobat was probably always designed as a third evolution for Zubat; there was probably never a time when it was considered as a split evolution. In Spaceworld ’97, it had a simple evolutionary method: all it took to evolve Golbat was to get it to level 44. A lot of the Spaceworld ’97 third forms evolved simply from a level requirement, which is interesting because by the final game, none of them would use a level requirement. In one of Gold/Silver’s cleverest design choices, all the new third evolutions they introduced could only be evolved through methods introduced in Gold/Silver, such as friendship, or by holding a particular item. It’s a small little design decision, but I’ve always loved that attention to detail. It creates an illusion that these Pokemon were always in the world, even in Red/Green, and if you just had a King’s Rock when you were in Kanto you could’ve also had a Slowking. Which means that Crobat eventually shed its simple level requirement and changed to evolving based on high friendship. Friendship was a new stat introduced in Pokemon Yellow that determined how much your Pikachu liked you. Mostly, the in game reward for high friendship was that Pikachu would make cuter faces you talked to it. Using Pikachu in battle and walking around with it raised its friendship; making it faint lowered its friendship. ...I'm not sure why Pikachu's wearing Daniel Boone's hat in one of those. (Edit: FrenchOrange has informed me that this is actually a bucket. I'm not sure that makes it make any more sense than before, though.) Anyway, at some point after Spaceworld ’97, the developers decided to import this system from Pokemon Yellow into Gold/Silver, but expand it to include every Pokemon. Friendship, in the final game, can also be raised by grooming your Pokemon in the underground mall, and affects the power of Return and Frustration (both these moves appear in Spaceworld '97, but I'm not able to verify whether they worked with the friendship mechanic yet). To make the best use of friendship, Game Freak decided to it as a blanket evolutionary method for all the baby Pokemon they were introducing, a cute idea that meshed well with the concept of weak infant Pokemon you needed to take care of. In addition to these baby Pokemon, friendship was used to evolve Golbat into Crobat, and Eevee into Espeon (in the day) or Umbreon (at night) after they removed the stones that Eevee previously would have used. Except, originally, Umbreon and Crobat didn’t evolve via high friendship; they evolved with low friendship. This is very flavorful design, and I love the implications: that to get a mean, angry Pokemon, you had to treat it badly. Except, as you probably are already thinking, this didn’t work for both gameplay and thematic reasons. Most importantly, in a game where you are learning to travel the world with your Pokemon buddies, why would the game encourage you to mistreat your friends? It seems immoral at the very least, and antithetical to Pokemon’s ethos as a series. But also, even if we ignore that, it wouldn’t really work as a gameplay mechanic. Just walking around with a Pokemon in your party raises its friendship, as does using it in battle and giving it items. Thus, just by having your Golbat hang out with you, you are fighting a losing game against it falling in love with you. To fight back the tide, you’d constantly have to get it knocked out in battle, over and over, doing exactly the opposite of what the game wants you to do: win battles. It was probably quickly discovered how annoying a low-friendship evolution was, and so they switched the method to high friendship. This loses a bit of flavor, but it’s probably worth it for the trade off of actually being able to evolve a Golbat at all. Golbat’s move set is more or less the same in Spaceworld ’97 as it is in the final, owing to the fact that it just copies Golbat’s move set, like any evolution would. The main way they differentiated it from Golbat was by pumping speed into its stats. At first, the only difference between Golbat and Crobat was that Crobat had an extremely high speed stat, but Game Freak eventually went back and buffed all its other stats as well. Clearly, those extra two wings aren’t just for looks. Other than that, Crobat was Crobat. A good design that didn’t need much work put into it. ID 338: Stantler (Odoshishi) Stantler’s a huge oddity in the Korean Index, and on the face of it, the best counterexample against my hypothesis that the Korean Index is roughly chronological. Everything about Stantler needs to be explained, since at first it doesn’t seem to follow the patterns we’ve seen established through the rest of the list up to this point. Saying that, I don't think Stantler disproves anything at all, and in fact, I think Stantler's special case can tell us some really interesting things about the development of Gold/Silver and the organization of the Korean Index. Let's start with what's problematic about Stantler. First, and most importantly Stantler’s not in the Spaceworld 1997 demo, but it is in the Korean Index. In fact, other than Elekid (which is its own weird situation), Stantler’s the only Pokemon in the Korean Index that appeared in Gold/Silver after Spaceworld ’97. Now, the Korean Index is dated six months later than Spaceworld ’97, so the obvious conclusion is that Stantler was designed in that intervening period. Except, that doesn’t make sense. Stantler’s early in the Korean Index, at ID 338, and not far away from Pokemon we know predated Spaceworld ’97. Ho-oh, which we have evidence was in a pre-Spaceworld ’97 build, is after Stantler in the Index. So on the face of it, Stantler should be later in the index, probably at the very end. But it isn’t. Does that mean the Index isn't in chronological order? This isn’t the only thing weird about Stantler. In the Korean Index, Stantler has a drawn front and back sprite, both very close to the final sprites (again, a signature of Sugimori’s designs is that they didn’t change much over time). But in the June 1999 data—which is the first time Stantler appears in the game—Stantler is using the backsprite for Shibirefugu, not its own. In fact, the backsprite we see in the Korean Index isn’t used in any of the later data we have: by the time Stantler has its own backsprite in Spaceworld ’99, the backsprite has an updated design for the antlers. Again, this doesn’t seem to make sense: if they had a backsprite already drawn, why did Game Freak use Shibirefugu’s instead? One explanation for all this is that Stantler was created after Spaceworld '97, in the intervening time between November 1997 and May 1998, when the Korean Index is dated. This was my first explanation. If this was the case, Stantler simply overwrote another Pokemon that was already in ID 338, which would explain why it's seemingly out of order. Unfortunately, there are a lot of reasons to doubt this explanation. First, nearly all the other Pokemon in Period 1d were used in Spaceworld ’97 and most made it to the final: it’d be very strange that there was an unused and overwritten design sandwiched between all these others. To be fair, there is one example of this in Period 1d: ID 334, the viking boat design, which didn’t get used. But then, why didn’t Stantler overwrite #334? Furthermore, Stantler’s sprite is very clearly a Sugimori design, like all the designs surrounding it. If Stantler had overwritten an earlier design, wouldn't it be more likely it’d be out of place artist-wise as well? None of this is proof, but if this hypothesis was correct, I’d expect to find Stantler in a less ordered place in the Index, like in the midst of Period 1e (ID 349-360) where almost none of those Pokemon were used in Spaceworld ’97, and there were lots of choices for Pokemon that they could scrap. I think Stantler was always in this slot, and I think the reason it appears here in the index is because Stantler was a redesigned version of Deer, the unused deer/moose Pokemon from Red/Green. Once we make this assumption, I think most of the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. Deer, if you are unfamiliar, was one of the lost Pokemon from early in the development of Red/Green. Despite its uninspired name, Deer had a pretty distinctive design. It’s antlers looked more like moose antlers than a deer’s, and its body was covered in a sort of spiky armor that just might be bamboo (but might not be). The only picture we have of Deer was from the internal popularity poll, and it was marked “needing improvement.” It clearly did "need improvement," because it got cut before the final game. If Stantler was Deer, it would explain why Stantler was so obviously an “Animal+” design (Deer plus eye antlers), even when most of Sugimori’s other Gold/Silver designs are more nuanced than that. You could make the argument that Girafarig is an “Animal+” design, but its much more complicated for that, in my estimation: Girafarig has an evil-twin concept and a palindrome concept involved, a far cry from “a seal with a spike on its head” or “deer with funny antlers.” Because Stantler originated from Red/Green, it inherited an earlier design philosophy when the team made less abstract and nuanced Pokemon designs. Stantler, unlike Girafarig, fits right in with Gen I’s development. There are lots of reasons to think that Deer and Stantler are related. First of all, consider Stantler’s Japanese names. In its earliest incarnation, Stantler was named “Mejika.” This is an ambiguous name, and could mean two things. Mejika, on its own, means doe, or female deer. If you break down the word into “me” and “jika,” it instead means “eye deer,” which fits Stantler’s concept as a deer with eye-shaped antlers. Either way, naming a deer Pokemon either “female deer” or “eye deer” isn’t far away from the original name, “Deer.” After Mejika was abandoned as a name, Stantler got its final name, Odoshishi, which is a pun on Shishi Odishi, a Japanese term that loosely translates to “Scarecrow” but literally translates to “deer scarer.” Shishi Odishi are commonly used to make sounds to scare birds away from crops, or to resemble the eyes of predators. The most common form of Shishi Odishi are bamboo water fountains that move as they pour out their water, much like a drinking bird toy. There are less common Shishi Odishi that are made from balloons and designed to look like giant eyes, to unnerve birds. Stantler’s antlers, of course, are modeled after those. Thus, its final name is a pun: rather than a “deer scarer” we have an actual deer that scares things! The reason I go into such detail about Stantler's name is because some people think that Deer’s initial design is of a deer made out of bamboo. I can definitely see what they’re referring to. Look, for instance, at Deer’s segmented neck, and notice how much that neck could be the same bamboo rod that pours water out of a Shi Shi Odishi. If that’s right, then we have a name connection to Stantler, given that both are, in some way, based off of Shishi Odishis. Of course, your mileage may vary, and it’s very possible that Deer’s sprite is more spiky and armored than it has anything to do with bamboo. Any similarities could be coincidence. But if you’re skeptical about that, consider the movesets of the two. Deer, suprisingly, actually had a moveset in the Red/Green leaked data, and comparing it to Stantler’s brings up a lot of similarities: (Highlighted blue moves are ones that Stantler learns; red moves are moves that Stantler learns by TM) Some caveats: the early movesets we have are weird and may not be 100% correct. In these early Red/Green movesets, Pokemon tended to learn way more moves than in the final, and many of them are learned in a weird order. Notice, for instance, Leer and Quick Attack, usually early moves, learned at the very end of Deer’s moveset. As well, remember that a lot of time has passed between these two move sets, and that the team learned a lot about balance in that intervening time. Deer's movelist could be as early as 1995, and Stantler's comes from the final, in late 1999. So there are bound to be differences.
Saying all that, it is very interesting to me that one generation later, a ton of balancing work, and a whole set of new Gen II moves, Stantler’s moveset still heavily resembles Deer’s! Three out of Stantler’s moves were learned by Deer, one of Deer’s other moves (Roar) can be learned by TM. Furthermore, there are other similarities in the remaining moves. In the early data, Tackle was a lot less universal as a starter attack than in the final, and Jump Kick was plausibly given to Deer before it was decided on as a signature move of Hitmonlee. It's very plausible that as Game Freak got to Stantler, they chose something more appropriate for its early physical moves, like Tackle and Stomp. Also note that both Deer and Stantler have an early Psychic move: Deer has Confusion, which could confuse its targets, while Stantler puts an enemy to sleep with Hypnosis. And while Deer has Supersonic, Stantler has Confuse Ray, a move that does the exact same thing but more reliably. The only move of note that Stantler lacks is Thunderwave, which makes sense since Thunderwave is pretty much only learned by electric Pokemon. If Stantler was Deer, we can explain a lot of the problems with Stantler's placement in the Index. Stantler was early in the Korean Index, but this section was filled with old designs which were reworked and brought back to use in Gold/Silver: Kotora and Raitora are only five slots early than Stantler, and Politoed is only 12 slots away. We know that Sugimori designed the original Deer, so it makes sense that he’d be the one to rework it for Gold/Silver, hence why it appears in Period 1d rather than earlier in 1c. Once we acknowledge Stantler as a Deer rework, all of a sudden Stantler’s placement in the Korean Index makes sense. But, then, if Stantler fits in this part of the index, why didn't it appear in Spaceworld '97? My theory is that it wasn’t designed after Spaceworld ’97, but before, and taken out of the SW'97 demo at the last minute. As I’ve seen pointed out elsewhere, Spaceworld ’97's map was based far more closely on Japan, and the city of Nara is closely associated with deer. It’s easy to imagine that Deer was brought back from the grave and put into the game so that they could have them around the Pokemon version of Nara. However, just before Spaceworld ’97, Stantler was cut. Eventually, they decided to revive Stantler and put it back into the game, and from there it made it into the final. So, in my hypothetical, what Pokemon replaced Stantler shortly before Spaceworld ’97? My original hypothesis was Twinz, the Girafarig pre-evolution, simply because Twinz and Girafarig have such an incomplete moveset. Taaban could also be a possibility: its evolutionary connection to Slowking hadn’t been programmed into Spaceworld ’97 yet, which could be a clue that it was added in at the last second. Likewise, we know that Sneasel was added into the game last second given its weird placement in the Spaceworld ’97 Pokedex, and so it or the Eevee evolution Riifii could be the potential culprit. There are a lot of possibilities. However, I think it was either Togepi or Shibirefugu are our best bet. Togepi and Shiburefugu are at the very end of the Korean Index (IDs 445 and 446 out of 448) which means they were created right before the Spaceworld ’97 build was finished. In addition, Togepi is misplaced at the very end of the Spaceworld ’97 Pokedex, incongruously next to legendary Pokemon, suggesting that it was put into the game at the last second, as a replacement for something else. On the other hand, Shibirefugu was located right next to Qwilfish, its evolutionary relative, in Spaceworld '97, but that location just happens to also be at the beginning of the Gold/Silver Pokedex, where a lot of early game Normal Pokemon are otherwise located, a role Stantler could easily fill. Furthermore, when Stantler was added back into the game, it replaced Shibirefugu, which implies that Stantler could have been in its slot earlier, and simply got readded in when they decided Shibirefugu was unnecessary. If Stantler was replaced by Togepi, it was probably because Game Freak knew the anime was going to use Togepi soon (it first appeared on May 28th, 1998, six months after Spaceworld ’97) and they wanted Togepi in the demo to potentially show it off. It’s also noticeably incomplete: it’s a baby Pokemon inside a shell, but it doesn’t grow into anything. If Stantler was replaced by Togepi, they must have quickly rearranged the Pokedex and stuck Togepi at the end. If Stantler was replaced by Shibirefugu, it was because Stantler originally had the slot right after Qwilfish and they cut whatever was right after Qwilfish in order to fit Shibirefugu there. Either is a good bet. It doesn’t matter which Pokemon replaced Stantler, just so long as we think it is feasible Stantler was replaced. And while this doesn’t explain perfectly why Stantler was using Shibirefugu’s backsprite for a bit (maybe they were just using outdated assets and hadn’t gotten around to porting over Stantler’s real backsprite?) it would explain why it already had a backsprite in the Korean Index that wasn’t used. It was used, just in a build before the one we have. Of course, all of this requires a lot of speculation, and I could certainly be wrong about some, or all, of this theory. Saying that, given all the other evidence that the Korean Index is chronological, my hypothesis seems to explain the existence of an early Stantler better than any other theory I can entertain. And if I’m right, then we’ve learned a lot about the development of Gold/Silver. Not only do we now know about what happened to Deer, but we also learned a bit about how Pokemon were moved in and out of the actual game before and after Spaceworld ’97. And if I’m correct that Togepi or Shibirefugu were the Pokemon replacing Stantler, we also can explain a bit more about the rushed aspects of their designs. All because of Stantler, the deer Pokemon with scary antlers. |
AuthorMy name's Aaron George, and I'm both a historian and a fan of Pokemon, especially of development. Reach me at @Asmoranomardic Archives
October 2021
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