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.
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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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