10/2/2021 11 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.
11 Comments
Commenter
10/3/2021 11:34:38 am
But... the gen 1 birds other than the legendary birds were all Normal/Flying. Pure Flying wasn't a thing in any final game until Tornadus in gen 5 (and one of the Arceus forms in gen 4, I guess).
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Asmorano
10/3/2021 11:52:49 am
Well shit. I was almost sure that wasn't the case; I even looked up Pidgey but must have missed it. Good catch; I'll delete that section because it's clearly nothing. Thanks!
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KingPepe
10/3/2021 12:03:14 pm
The idea of Ho-Oh being the neutral but stronger member of an elemental trio reminds me of the Flare spell (and to a lesser extent, Bahamut) from the Final Fantasy series. Ho-Oh and Flare are both fire-themed but mechanically, they're the all-powerful neutral entity to their elemental-based counterparts. If you want to compare Ho-Oh with Bahamut, Sacred Fire is to Ho-Oh what Mega Flare is to Bahamut. They're fire-themed moves that can deal a lot of damage to your enemies. (The major difference is Mega Flare has no element while Sacred Fire... is actually a Fire type.) This also makes me wonder if at this point of development, Ho-Oh was intended to be the leader of the legendary birds while the legendary beasts were their own separate trio. I guess when Lugia was implemented, Lugia took this responsibility while Ho-Oh was tied in more with the beasts.
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Asmorano
10/3/2021 01:19:24 pm
Flare and Bahamut were exactly the example I was looking for but could think of. Exactly right: there's sometimes a move towards creating a head monster that is neutral, to lord over the weaker elemental monsters.
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KingPepe
10/3/2021 04:51:09 pm
If I remember right, the whole second movie revolves around the legendary birds being connected to Lugia. The capture of the three legendary birds was required to lure Lugia out and it's implied Lugia is the one that stops the birds when they fight among each other. Meanwhile, Ho-Oh is the one responsible for reviving the beast trio and in Crystal, they're required to obtain the Rainbow Wing. Maybe calling them "leaders" is a stretch from me but they at least have some relation with the trios. This is also a bit faulty on Lugia's case though; the movie only explores this while the games never touch upon it. With that said, I'd imagine the movie's own lore would play a role in Lugia's implementation into G/S. It'd be kind of confusing if you saw Lugia having power over the three legendary birds in the movie but then you play the game and Ho-Oh is the one intertwined with them instead.
Sketchie
8/3/2022 12:27:19 pm
Wow! I stumbled onto your site recently, and I'm impressed by your analyses so far. It never occurred to me that the "Korean" index was organized chronologically by artist, but it makes sense.
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Asmorano
8/12/2022 10:32:56 am
That makes a lot of sense to me! I compared Proto-Pudi to Snubbull in that article, but Smeargle has some similarities too. When I eventually edit that article, I'll make sure to add in this thought.
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Sandalphon
1/31/2024 06:59:23 pm
i was looking for anyone talking about a connection between beta celebi and unown, i think a swarm of unown would resemble biblically accurate angels, beta celebi plays a flute to control unown like the pied piper, if they swirled around it it would look super similar to some depictions of angels that were rings of eyes with a lil guy in the middle
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Asmorano
5/1/2024 02:25:56 pm
I think this is a really cute idea! There's a theory out there that biblically accurate angels were actually just letters: given that angels are supposed to be the "voice of God" and the bible is written in hebrew letters, it would follow that angels are actually the letters that convey God's word. I doubt the designers were thinking about this when they designed Celebi or Unown, but I love the concept! Thanks for the thought!
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zale
4/30/2024 01:21:26 pm
This was such a good read, thank you so much.
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Asmorano
5/1/2024 02:28:19 pm
I'm glad you liked it!
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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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