ID #405: ???ID 405 presents us with another mystery bug Pokemon, just as sketchy and rough as the rest of the Pokemon we’ve seen in Period 2d. Possibly related to 403, our new buggy friend was probably created by the same mystery designer, and was likewise probably never a real contender for inclusion in Gold and Silver. While we don’t know much about 405, there are enough clues to make at least a few conjectures. First, the existence of 405--so close to 403--seems to confirm that the team was, at this time, looking for more early game bug Pokemon. Ledyba was only six entries back, and it was probably created in response to the Spinarak and Bagworm lines that were competing for a spot in Period 2b. While the main designer of Period 4d was probably not in the inner circle of Pokemon designers—and thus probably not privy to the current design needs—it seems likely that they also knew that Sugimori and the rest of the team wanted early game bugs that could slot in seamlessly into the world. Which is seemingly why 403 and 405 were designed. ID 403 was probably a mosquito, or possibly a wasp, but 405 feels much more obviously designed to be a housefly. Unlike 405, it’s crouched down on all four legs, and is less humanoid—in particular, it lacks the goofy expression and shrug that anthropomorphizes 403 so much. It could just be because I’m so used to the evolution design patterns of modern Pokemon, but going from a more animalistic design to an upright humanoid one feels like a natural evolutional progression. On top of that, given that almost all bug Pokemon evolve, it doesn’t seem too far-fetched that 405 was meant to evolve into 403. (Colorized, of course, by @OrangeFrench!) Or it could have been the other way around. Or they could have been unrelated ideas. It’s hard to say. It’s unclear from the sprite, but there may have been more to the concept of 405 than meets the eye. At first, it just looks like a simple housefly. But look closer. Notice how its head looks like a helmet, especially in the backsprite, and how its arms seem to have shoulder blades that jut out from the sides. While all bugs have chitinous armor on them, in this case, it seems emphasized more than in other designs, and it makes me think that there’s possibly an armor theme going on with 405. Maybe, possibly, it was meant to be a knight, or some sort of soldier? Maybe, like Remoraid, Octillery, 380, and Mantine, 405 was meant to have a weapon aesthetic, and possibly resemble an armored car or a tank? If this was an intended theme though, it’s very subtle. Further revisions of 405 would have been needed to bring that theme much more to the forefront (and then probably de-emphasized again if it had been kept to the final game; see Octillery and Remoraid). In fact, further revisions of 405 were probably needed in general. The spritework on this guy is rough: the shading is messy, it’s busy and not always easy to tell what lines are supposed to denote what, the perspective isn’t great, and the outline of the wings is incredibly simplistic. Look at the helmet on the backsprite for the biggest example: its shading is different and simpler than the rest of the sprite, suggesting that the sprite was recently revised before the concept was scrapped entirely. Some people who view this sprite think that the backsprite and the frontsprite aren’t consistent, and that the backsprite has a completely different design; again, they point to the head, which they claim looks much different in the backsprite than in the front. I’m not positive I see it, but if that is the case that the sprites are significantly different, it just further emphasizes how 405 was unfinished and likely dropped before the concept got very far. Some viewers also see significant differences between the backsprite and frontsprite of 403. In this case, look at the body of 403, and note how the body looks completely different in the backsprite, like it's bulbous. I’m not sure how much to make of this, or if it's really an inconsistency and not just a bad perspective, but if that’s correct than it’s further evidence that these two were created together and dropped together. I think this concept actually has a lot of promise, even if it wasn't well executed here. An armored bug Pokemon, maybe with a spear for a stinger, a shield in the other arm, and a chitinous helmet, would be really cool! ...I'm just talking about Falinks, aren't I? Too bad this design isn’t Falinks. Nothing was lost when the team decided to drop 405. ID 406: ???In 406, we find a design that’s a little more interesting. 406 is a little dinosaur guy who seems to have an egg on his head. He’s kind of cute, and the egg thing might have meant to go with the breeding mechanic that had first been conceived of around this time in development. There’s a couple of theories about what was going on with this guy, though I think both are unlikely. But let’s see what we can dig up. Unlike the previous couple rough sprites, 406 doesn’t look bad. His bottom-left foot feels a bit pasted on, and his body seems a little too smooshed to be as clear as it could be, but he’s got a cute face, an obvious visual hook (unlike 405) and a distinctive outline. He’s wearing what appears to be an egg for a hat, implying that he’s a baby that’ll evolve into something greater; it’s also interesting to me that his tail also looks cracked, like he’s got a an egg ready to hatch from his tail as well. Or maybe it’s like the club on the back of an Anklosaurus, and it’s been cracked from whacking too many things? I definitely get some Cubone vibes from this headgear-wearing baby dino. There’s one detail in the sprite that’s really unclear to me. Right under its egg helmet, 406 has a ring of…something? They look connected to its headwear, a little like doilies hanging down from it. But what are they supposed to be? Are they pieces of the egg? Are they related to some type of Japanese hat that I’m unaware of (and thus making this design a visual joke)? I’m really stumped on why those are even in the design, and what purpose they serve. TCRF speculates that maybe 406 was an early version of Cranidos, a micropachycephalosaurus Pokemon from Generation IV. Cranidos, named after the armor on its “cranium,” is a dinosaur Pokemon with an armored head that it can use for smashing things. In many ways, it’s the descendant of the Gen I and Gen II “Animal+” designs, in that Cranidos is basically a real animal, slightly stylized to fit in the Pokemon universe. Because 406 is also a cute dinosaur Pokemon with armor on its head, the comparison is obvious. But could they really be related? In my estimation, its unlikely. I’ve pointed out a few times in the Cryptodex where I think it’s obvious that a Generation III Pokemon was based on one of these discarded designs. The most obvious was Huntail, which was clearly a redesign of Gurotesu. I’m also pretty convinced that Snorunt may have been a rework of Wolfman. But those are just a few years apart, and most of the same designers were working on both games; I’m not expert but I’m not even sure there was much of a development break between the release of Crystal version and the development of Sapphire and Ruby. But Generation IV was released in 2006, a good nine or ten years after these designs in the Korea Index were first written down. I don’t know how much of you are artists or creators, but how often do you go back to work you did a decade ago? Much less find it good enough that you’d want to bring it back? In addition, by Generation IV, the design team was shaken up quite a bit. While the main four designers—Sugimori, Nishida, Morimoto, and Fujiwara—were still involved in the design, there were a lot of new designers as well. It’s unlikely that the main four created 406, and why would any of the new designers go back to these designs that they didn’t work on? In addition, I just don’t think 406 and Cranidos have much in common. Cranidos doesn’t have an egg theme at all, and it’s missing a distinctive club on its tail. Instead, it looks like the most obvious translation of a micropachycephalosaurus into the Pokemon world—an design origin, I might add, that seems pretty obvious, and doesn’t really evolve naturally from “baby dinosaur wearing an egg as a hat.” They look superficially similar, but the inspirations for each are completely different. However, if Cranidos is somehow a heavily redesigned 406, at the very least it answers my question about the little doilies on 406’s head. If we look at Cranidos, it has a ring of spikes on its head in similar positions to the doilies! That means that, at least potentially, 406 might have been meant to have similar spikes. It’s impossible to glean this from the spritework, but that could conceivably make sense. Another theory about 406, which a commenter made me aware of, is that it was potentially designed as a pre-evolution for Ampharos. Ampharos was one of the first Pokemon designed for Gold and Silver, and was clearly a favorite, because it remained in the games almost unchanged from its original design and it was used in early promotional material. Given that the team was nearing the end of the first draft of the new roster, it seems possible that they may have been thinking about making Ampharos part of a multistage evolutionary family, and 406 seemingly works pretty well in that slot. Notice that Ampharos and 406 share the same bulb at the end of their tails; Ampharos’s isn’t cracked like 406 but there’s still a similarity. Furthermore, the headshape (at least what we can see under the egg-hat) is the same, the feet have the same ovular look, and the body shape and tail design both look pretty similar. 406 is a completely different color, but otherwise, I definitely see a resemblance. And given that 406’s design is so completely connected to the idea of a baby hatching from an egg, it makes sense that it was designed with an evolutionary relative in mind. Of course, Ampharos’s eventual evolutionary relatives looked completely different and had a completely different theme. Mareep and Flaafy retroactively decided that Ampharos was related to sheep in some way and these days the Mareep/Flaafy/Ampharos family is such a staple of the series that it’s hard to notice how little sense the progression makes until it's pointed out to you. It’s neat how examining the Korean Index has shown me how ad-hoc that evolutionary line was, and how Ampharos was completely disconnected from the idea of sheep at first. At the very least, 406 seems more inline with its initial aesthetic. (Credit to Milena Gorosito!) I’m still not totally convinced by this theory, though I will admit that the visual similarities are enticing. But while Ampharos is definitely not a sheep, it also doesn’t really seem to be a dinosaur either, like 406 definitely is. In particular, take a look at its backsprite. Even though Ampharos’s backsprite isn’t really comparable (it doesn’t focus on the bottom half of Ampharos), 406 looks very clearly like an upright dinosaur from the dimensions of its body and the placement of the tail, and that aesthetic just feels off for the Ampharos family. Furthermore, the sprites have enough significant divergences that you might argue they're more different than alike. 406's eyes are shifty, while Ampharos' are cute and adorable, Ampharos' tail has stripes while 406's doesn't, and the tail orbs, as previously mentioned, are dramatically different. In addition, I’m generally skeptical that 406 is related to Ampharos simply because Ampharos is a Sugimori design, and it seems like that Sugimori, or at the very least Nishida, would have been the ones assigned to create its pre-evolution. Maybe 406 was created to be a pre-evolution but it was never really followed up on because Sugimori didn’t love the design? Mareep is only two entries after 406; if 406 was designed to relate to Ampharos, it was dropped incredibly quickly. This theory could be true, and I don’t have a lot of evidence against it. But it just feels off to me; call it a hunch. In any case, there’s not really any more evidence one way or another. 406 never made it very far, and by the time the roster had been reorganized for Spaceworld ’97, it was nowhere to be seen, and Ampharos had a new family. ID 407: ???And now, at least we come to the end of Period 2d and Era Two in general, with another strange mystery sprite. 407’s got a strange face and five outstretched fronds, or leaves, or blossoms, or something, shaped in a star pattern. It’s not at all clear what this design is supposed to be, but it's certainly weird looking. First of all, let’s take a moment to take in this design. Look at that face on 407. It doesn’t look like anything else in Pokemon. The eyes are dark circles with a white-square for an iris, which looks stranger the more you examine it. But the mouth's giant lips look positively odd. They look a little like the lips on fish in the Sponge Bobverse, but they look very off-model for a Pokemon. The closest referent I can get to them is Jynx’s early sprites. And man, having lips similar to Jynx is definitely not where you wanna be. But also look at those…protuberances coming from the sides of its circular head. What are they? The most common interpretation is that they’re petals, and that this is some sort of flower Pokemon. I can kind of see it, for sure. This leads some to speculate that 407 is actually a very early version of Cherrim, from Generation IV. I have to admit, the resemblance is uncanny. (Speculative Cherrim palette created by @OrangeFrench!) Not only does Cherrim have the same five petals, they’re laid out in the same pattern. Cherrim did gain a body, which is hard to see from its sprite, but its a minor difference, the sort you'd expect after a redesign. It's not hard to be drawn to the conclusion that there's some connection between these two. Just last entry, I devoted a paragraph to explaining exactly why I’m reticent to draw connections between Generation II and IV. Saying that…it’s hard for me to ignore the visual similarities between these two designs. ID 407 is much uglier, and the team wisely got rid of those bizarre lips, but the general shape and look of the Pokemon remained the same. Saying that, if 407 really is Cherrim, then it went through a lot of retheming and work before the team remade it into Cherrim. In Generation IV, Cherrim has an interesting gimmick where it only appears in this form if the weather is sunny; otherwise, it covers its face with its leaves and looks sad. Now, Generation II did introduce weather effects for the first time, so it’s conceivable that #407 was created to take advantage, or to showcase, those weather effects. However, I doubt it. Nothing in Generation II changes forms in mid-battle; in fact, the only Pokemon with different forms is Unown. And Unown is a special case, given that it looks like special code was written just to make Unown appear differently. If #407 really was early Cherrim, this idea to respond to weather probably came later. Or, charitably, 407 was never considered because of hardware limitations that made the idea hard to implement in Generation II. You know, that just gave me an idea: ...That can't be right, can it? At the very least, maybe they were related evolutionarily? Honestly, this is probably giving 407 too much credit. Given that Period 2d is full of abandoned designs, my guess is that it was never conceptualized enough to even get to the point where the team was thinking about weather effects. I think it's absolutely plausible that 407 was an early iteration of Cherrim. But there's another theory I want to talk about as well (I can’t take credit for the idea, as it was left as a comment on a previous entry). This theory starts by examining the development information we have for Generation III. In general, this data is a lot more limited: we don't have any sprites of beta Pokemon, for example. But in the development files for Ruby and Sapphire, there’s an unused Pokedex entry that doesn’t obviously go with any of the Pokemon designed for that generation. In this entry, slotted for Index #297, it describes the “Everlasting Summer” Pokemon as such: Ruby: “A Pokémon that inhabits warm regions. Its tendency to act as a group becomes noisy when 3 or more gather.” Sapphire: “It's said that if you give the petals on its head to an unrequited partner, your love will come true. If you try to take its petals, it will become viciously angry.” That Ruby entry could describe lots of things, but the Sapphire entry’s mention of petals on the Pokemon’s head is...suspicious. Alongside that, this Pokemon was described in the data as the “Everlasting Summer” Pokemon, which would be a fine descriptor of Cherrim, otherwise known as the “Blossom” Pokemon, or 407, which definitely has the looks of a summer wildflower. It’s at least conceivable that Cherrim had shown up in the development of Gen III, and was shelved until the design finally made it into Generation IV. That would mitigate my objections about how long it was between Generation II and IV: if #407 was redesigned for Generation III and then scrapped again, it’s conceivable that #407 made it all the way to Gen IV not because it was from the development of Gold and Silver but because it was reworked from Ruby and Sapphire. Saying that, Cherrim’s Pokedex entries don’t look anything like that discarded entry: Diamond: “It blooms during times of strong sunlight. It tries to make up for everything it endured as a bud.” Pearl: “It is docile as a bud, but turns cheerful when it blooms. It folds back into a bud if sunlight wanes.” These entries seems to be a strike against the “Cherrim was originally in Generation III” theory. But you know what Pokedex entries they do seem to match? Take a look at, of all things, Luvdisc’s entries: Ruby: “Luvdisc live in shallow seas in the tropics. This heart-shaped Pokémon earned its name by swimming after loving couples it spotted in the ocean's waves.” Sapphire: “Luvdisc's heart-shaped body is a symbol of love and romance. It is said that any couple meeting this Pokémon is promised a loving relationship that never ends.” The Ruby entry for our unknown Pokemon mentions that it lives in “warm regions,” and Luvdisc’s mentions that it lives in “the tropics.” Meanwhile, our mystery Pokemon’s petals could be given as a gift to make your unrequited love come true; meeting a Luvdisc promises that two lovers will have an everlasting relationship. It sure seems like the early Pokedex entry for #297 was loosely refined into Luvdisc’s. However, there are problems. Notably, #297’s Pokedex entry mentions petals, whereas Luvdisc…doesn’t have petals, and is notably not a grass-type Pokemon at all. My only guess about this is that maybe #407 was redesigned to be a fish, or was always designed to be a fish. Not only does its face look a lot like a fish’s—especially with those weird lips—but the “petals” could also have been the fins of a tropical fish. Maybe 407 was supposed to be something like a Mandarinfish: Still, this theory requires that you have to make a number of logical leaps. If you think 407 is an early Luvdisc, you need to first buy that the unused Pokedex entry was designed for #407, and then explain how #407 became a fish, and then a fish which looks even further from the original design. The Cherrim theory requires only a little less: for 407 to be Cherrim, you have to buy that this rough, sketchy idea found in the Korean Index was kept for more than a decade, possibly put into Gen III and then dropped, and yet was liked enough that it was picked up again almost ten years later and reworked completely, into a Pokemon linked to weather effects. Either theory is plausible, but they require a lot of suspension of disbelief. Or, maybe, #407 was just a sketchy looking sprite for a flower (or fish) Pokemon that never went very far? You be the judge. Era Two Wrap Up The fifty Pokemon between ID 357 (Honoguma) and ID 407 constitute a period in the early development of Pokemon Gold and Silver that I have dubbed “Era Two.” Distinctive about this era is how much more focused the designs were than what preceded them. Rather than the haphazardly brainstormed Pokemon designs of Era One, the Pokemon we find in this era—Especially in Period 2a—were designed to a plan. New Pokemon types were introduced; Starters were designed; new gameplay gimmicks, like babies and Delibird, were introduced. This entire era feels like its being made to a plan, not just the whims of the designers on a particular day. Era Two probably started in late 1996 and ended in early 1997; my guess is that summer was too late, given that the build presented at Spaceworld ’97 was completed on November 15th, 1997, and there was still a lot of work to do by the end of Era Two. Still, by the end of this era, there was a substantial amount completed. Most of the new gameplay elements introduced in Generation II were completed by this point—happiness values are the only major incomplete mechanic by this point—and more importantly, Era Two ends with a rough draft of the new roster for Generation II. The team was aiming to introduce 101 new Pokemon, and by ID #407, they had 108 to choose from. While the team had probably already decided to drop many of these designs—I suspect Period 1e was mostly dropped by this point—they still had a full roster of designs to input into the game. From this point on, everything in Era Three would have to take an already used spot: the team was now culling and revising the Pokedex, not just filling it with every idea they had. Main Themes1) Introduction of New Gameplay MechanicsEra Two seems to be when the team decided to hash out exactly what Gold and Silver were going to add to the Pokemon franchise. As a result, a lot of the Pokemon clustered in Period 2a—the part that is most obviously done by Sugimori and Nishida, who would have been the ones most in charge of developing these new gameplay elements—act as a proof of concept of these new ideas. Often, these new gameplay mechanics appeared as a one-off in Era One, either as an experiment or designed to be something else entirely and later retrofit to use these new mechanics. But if a few of these elements can be first seen in Era One, in Era Two the team codified these new gameplay elements, and created enough examples of them to make them work in the new environment. There were four new types of gameplay mechanics hashed out in Era Two: a) Two new types: Steel and Dark b) Baby Pokemon c) The new breeding mechanic d) Pokemon designed purely to be collectables In addition, Period 2 also extended two mechanics already featured in Generation I and made a decision that they’d reappear in the sequel: e) Starter Pokemon f) Legendary Pokemon. I’ll deal with each of these one by one: a) New TypesI’m sure one of the main features on the team’s wish list for Gold and Silver were new Pokemon types. Types were an instantly iconic and recognizable part of the Pokemon franchise. Given how popular this mechanic turned out to be, it made sense to add new ones in the sequel. In addition, I’m sure the team knew that Psychic Pokemon were deeply unbalanced in Generation I, and wanted to fix that somehow. To that end, the team created two new types of Pokemon: Dark, which was designed as a direct counter to Psychic Pokemon, and Steel, which was meant to be the ultimate defensive type. These two new types were still substantially incomplete, even by Spaceworld ’97. Steel was named Metal at this point, for instance, and their effectiveness charts are completely different from how they would be in the final games, often in strange ways. Dark has a weakness to Normal type, for instance, which would probably have made it unusable. In addition, some Pokemon that were supposed to be these types just weren’t yet: the in-game text in Spaceworld '97 mentioned that Houndour and Houndoom should have been Dark-type even though they’re pure Fire-type, and I have my suspicions that the Wolfman line was supposed to be Ice/Dark as well. So these concepts were still being tweaked even as late as November of 1997. Era Two was when the team first decided on these types, and developed what these types would mean in-game. Rinrin, the cute Dark-type kitten, was added as a showcase for the Dark-type in Period 2a and Skarmory was created soon after to show off the new Metal type—there’s even in-game text in Spaceworld ’97 that hints that Skarmory is the first example of a completely new type. In addition, the Houdour and Wolfman lines were introduced in this Era, possibly to show off the Dark type even more, and I have my suspicions that ID 380—the drill squid unused Pokemon—might also have been considered to show off the Steel type (though in my entry I argued that the most likely case was that it was Water/Ground). Not to mention that Twinz was a Dark/Normal type by the time of SW ’97 and it was also created in this Era. Clearly, the team was experimenting with the idea of new types, and trying out different concepts to show them off. Some of the Pokemon in Era One show up as Dark or Steel types in Spaceworld ’97, but these were probably created with a different idea in mind and then retroactively made these types when the team was looking for more examples to show them off. Manbo1, Ikari, and Gurotesu were all Water/Steel in SW ’97, but we know that this evolutionary family was created post-hoc by gluing together three Pokemon from separate families, as shown by the Korean Index. Gurotesu and Manbo1 were probably not designed as Steel, but only made into Steel-type to give consistency to the line, and Ikari, with its metal anchor for a tail, was an obvious candidate to retroactively make into a steel type. Likewise, Girafarig was Dark/Normal in Spaceworld ’97 despite being created in Era One. However, while its design certainly fits Dark/Normal quite well, its clear that the team weren’t sure of its typing, and tried out Ghost, Psychic, and Dark at various times trying to find a niche for it. It’s not at all clear it was designed with the dark-type in mind. b) Baby Pokemon!Another new addition to Gold and Silver was the idea of baby Pokemon: previously unseen first evolutions of popular Pokemon, now made more cute and even more adorable. It seems like an obvious slam dunk for a sequel, as it allows the team to capitalize on their most profitable creations—Pikachu, Jigglypuff, Clefairy—by creating a new version of them for kids to collect. It appears that the idea for baby Pokemon started out in Era One section of the Index. Initially, someone created Elebebii, an otherwise unseen early evolution of Electabuzz. Given that Electabuzz was normally caught at a reasonably high level, it was plausible to imagine it had a first-stage counterpart that only appeared at a level earlier than it was possible to see Electabuzz. This wasn’t a baby Pokemon at this stage, but instead a hidden first-evolution. But the idea clearly had wheels, because by Era Two the team was creating all sorts of new experiments with the concept. The difference between Elebebii and with the new babies in Era Two is that these later ones were designed specifically as cuter versions of already popular Pokemon; Electabuzz was not really that popular, and Elebebii probably originated from the idea that Electabuzz was a high level one-stage Pokemon. Its not clear if the team had decided whether or not that babies could fight—by Spaceworld ’97, they had the same movesets as their adult versions, whereas in the final they only had a few weak moves—or if babies were related to the breeding mechanic—Mikon could be found in the wild in Spaceworld ’97. So a lot of things about the concept still needed to be hashed out. But the team clearly capitalized on this idea. Just in Era Two, they created Cleffa and Pichu and repurposed three Generation I designs—Mikon, Puchikoon, and Gyopin—into babies. By the end of this era, they had five examples of the genre to try out in the game, and in Era Three the team would only double down on this concept, literally doubling the number of baby Pokemon by creating adorable versions of even unpopular Pokemon. c) The Breeding MechanicAlongside the creation of baby Pokemon, the team was also starting to develop the idea that the player would be able to breed new Pokemon, not just catch them. We can see that because in Era Two are the first introductions of Pokemon with specific genders, like Miltank, Rinrin, and Snubbull (which were all exclusively female). ID #378 (The Stork Design) probably also had something to do with this new breeding mechanic, though who knows what, and ID #406 plays with the concept of a baby hatching from an egg. It’s unclear by Spaceworld ’97 how far the team got through the breeding or gender mechanics that would be a staple of Generation II, but at the very least the idea was being developed in Era Two. d) CollectablesThe last new mechanic designed for this generation was the idea of “Collectable” or “Gimmick” Pokemon. These were Pokemon that weren’t designed to fight, or to be useful in any way except to collect and have in your Pokedex. Unown, the very last Pokemon designed for Era One, was designed with this concept in mind, and the baby Pokemon, while still at this point having movesets, were along the same lines as Unown: not useful for getting through the game, but fun find and to collect. Delibird was also a Pokemon which, by the end of development, had been turned into this type of collectable Pokemon, but it was made into a collectable late: up until 1999, it still had a full moveset. It’s unclear if the team already had this idea for collectable, gimmick Pokemon when Delibird was created, or if it's coincidence that Delibird, Unown and the baby Pokemon all appear close to each other in the Korean Index. Still, it's worth wondering if this idea was in its infancy even as early as 1997, and that the team was still deciding just how useless these Pokemon should be in fights. e) Starter PokemonFinally, Period 2a introduces all of the original Spaceworld ’97 starter Pokemon. Well, except for Hanamogura, but it's hard to know what to say about that particular case. Other than Hanamogura, all the starter Pokemon are clustered together, which tells me that they were part of Era Two’s new focus on filling out the roster with necessary gameplay elements. In retrospect, it feels obvious that Gold and Silver would have three new starter Pokemon and that they’d mirror the types of Bulbasaur, Charmander, and Squirtle. But it’s important to remember that this was the first sequel to the original game, and no pattern like that was yet established. So, to some degree, deciding on three new starters (as opposed to just reusing the old ones) and deciding that they would be the same types as those in the first game was an important decision for the designers to make. The new starters set the tone of Generation II, demonstrating that this would be the same game as the first but with new Pokemon filling in for old favorites. Still, as much of a leap as it was to have the three new starters, there was still a lot more work to be done on them. Seven of the nine starter Pokemon would be reworked before the final game, meaning that only Chikorita and Meganium were the only ones the team was happy enough with. By Spaceworld ’97, the starters had only placeholder stats, but even when they got stats, they were initially identical to those of the original starters. On top of that, Chikorita’s moveset was very similar to Bulbasaur’s. The team spent a lot of time trying to figure out a way for the new starters to both be the same as their counterparts in Generation I, but also distinct from them. So even by their creation, the team still had a lot of work in front of them. f) Legendary PokemonFinally, this era is where the team first developed the legendary replacements for Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres. Era One had ended with the creation of Ho-oh, which might have been conceived originally as a Normal-type fourth member of the legendary bird trio. Their might have been other Pokemon near Ho-oh which were also conceived of as legendary Pokemon, though who could say (the wind swept dog and the Viking Ship design seem like the most obvious possibilities). However, in Era Two, the team decided not to just extend the legendary bird family, but to create new counterparts: En, Sui, and Rai. These were very obviously dogs at this point in development, not yet made into the more feline or tiger-like versions that we see in the final. But they were clearly made to be counterparts to the legendary birds. They were each the same types as the legendary birds—even Sui was Ice and not water, even though the team had, by this point, largely dropped the Fire/Electric/Ice triad in favor of Fire/Electric (or Grass)/Water. And on the first go around to make their stats, the “legendary dogs” got almost the exact same stats as the Articuno, Moltres, and Zapdos. There was probably a moment in development when the team considered creating legendary Pokemon of new types, or making a different number of them. But during Era Two, the team decided, like they did with the starter Pokemon, to stick with the existing formula. They'd add two more legendary Pokemon by the end of development, but those Pokemon were stand-ins for Mewtwo and Mew, not an original take on the formula. In the end, the team decided to capitalize on what worked from Red and Green, not to shake up the gameplay too much. 2) Diversifying the Roster By pioneering these new gameplay mechanics, the team fleshed out all the necessary Pokemon needed to make the sequel work: they created representatives promote new features, and check the boxes for Pokemon that needed to fill a spot in the Pokedex, like the starter and legendary Pokemon. But the other big design goal of Era Two was to fill out the fauna of the world with an eye towards making sure the games had enough Pokemon of each type, that they had early game and late game Pokemon, and that they covered a diverse range of new concepts for Pokemon that hadn’t been touched in the previous Generation. While this is much more subtler of a goal than working through all the gameplay elements, you can still see notable examples of this, especially throughout Period 2b. For instance, in Era Two the team worked on trying to create more early game bug types, an important niche that needed to be filled by the final game. They ended up with seven to choose from: Ledyba, Spinarak, Ariados, Bagworm, Butterfly-that's-not-Butterfree, Shrugging-Mosquito, and Armor-Fly. They also designed a series of Pokemon based on concepts that seem ripe for Pokemon inspirations, but were not featured in Generation I. In just these fifty Pokemon designs, we have: a tank, an octopus, Santa Claus, a penguin, a shooting star, a hedgehog (or echidna), a stingray, a bagworm, a spider, a circus seal, a werewolf, a Koala, a Tanuki, various flies and mosquitos, and even a skeleton monster. And that just scratches the surface. True, Era One also features a lot of new inspirations for designs, but those have a very top down feel to their design. For instance, Smeargle, Girafarig, Remoraid, Hoothoot, and many others in Era One seem like the designer had the concept first and then drew it based on their idea for a new Pokemon. Hoothoot, we know, started from an idea Sugimori had of a seemingly one-legged bird from his childhood; Girafarig seems like it was originally inspired by the idea of a palindrome Pokemon, and a Giraffe was added to go along with that idea; Smeargle was clearly designed off the idea of a painter Pokemon, or possibly designed around the concept for the move “Sketch.” Meanwhile, the diverse creatures of Era Two mostly feel like the designer started with the animal or typing first, and then created a concept to go along with their brief. Obviously, this is a very subjective analysis. But look at a few examples. The Pokemon in Era Two seem much more likely to be an extension of some sort of assignment the creator was given: “Create a Water/Flying” Pokemon and you get Mantine; “Create a cuter version of Pikachu/Clefairy” and you get the babies; “Creature an Fire/Dark” Pokemon and you get Houndour. Most of the Pokemon in Era Two seem like extensions of some niche that the designers wanted to fill, rather than a top-down inspiration they had. In other words, in Era One, the concept decided the typing and animal inspiration; in Era Two, the typing and animal inspiration inspired the concept. This is overly simplistic, and I’m sure that’s not the case for every single Pokemon. But I think its enough of a trend to acknowledge. 3) So, What Did the Pokedex Look Like at This Point? As I’ve mentioned a few times, by the end of Era Two, a rough draft of the original roster must have existed. At this point, 108 Pokemon designs were in the Korean Index, and the team was expecting to either have 100 or 101 new Pokemon to add to the existing Pokemon from Red and Green. So, the question is, what did that Pokedex look like? What was included, and what was not? While we honestly have no idea, we can make some educated guesses. Pretty much everything that made it into Spaceworld ’97 up to this point was safely in the original draft of the Pokedex. We know that Ho-oh, Slowking, Politoed, Ampharos, and Unown were very likely there, though all of those existed in SW ’97 so it doesn’t help us further. I also suspect that by the end of Era Two, the original evolutions for Manbo1 and for Gurotesu were in use. I also suspect that an earlier version of Stantler was probably in the roster, and that the early Cyndaquil might have overwritten something else that was in the roster, given the odd placement of that Cyndaquil. So, taken with an extreme grain of salt, here’s my best reconstruction of what I think the Pokedex looked like at the end of Era Two. I doubt they were ordered in any logical way at this point, and they probably still used the Korea Index numbering, since there hadn’t yet been a need to order them differently. There were probably placeholder names for most of them, given that Manbo1 was still named with a placeholder by Spaceworld '97. Obviously none had stats (since none had stats by Spaceworld '97), movesets may have existed but were probably mostly placeholders or copied from Gen I Pokemon--Smeargle at the very least probably had Sketch in its moveset, as an exception--and who knows if types had been decided on for most of them by this point. Most of the below is more or less guesses, but given what we know, we can at least speculate on what had been deleted before this point: Some caveats. The Pokemon designs that I’ve deleted from that lineup were, of course, still in the Korean Index. I just think it’s likely that these were so rough or derivative that the team probably stopped work on them very early on. At the same time, the last three rows (which constitute Periods 2b, 2c, and 2d) are absolutely filled with Pokemon that didn’t make the cut, and they probably already hadn’t made the cut. I’ll bet they were in the initial Pokedex at this point simply because the team hadn’t created new designs to replace them; the competing designs from Period 2b and the throwaway designs from 2d were probably the highest priority to replace as soon as Era Three of development started. As well, I’ve modified a few of the Index slots to match an earlier stage of development. Stantler was very likely still Deer, the rejected Generation I design at this point in development. In addition, the early Cyndaquil sprite that appears in the Korean Index seems like it was made later, after Spaceworld '97, and maybe as late as the team switched over to designing for the Gameboy color. Look, for instance, at how good this sprite looks with the Gameboy Color style sprite, as compared to the SuperGameBoy palettes the team was using by Spaceworld '97: (Once again, thanks to @OrangeFrench for colorizing these sprites for me!) Whether an earlier version of Cyndaquil existed in that slot, or whether it overwrote something that was discarded from Generation II even earlier is impossible to say. Likewise, I’ve taken Elekid out of the slot its found in, because that sprite was clearly made after Spaceworld ’97 as well. In this particular case, I’m more sympathetic to the theory that an earlier version of Elekid was always in this slot but got overwritten by a new design. Either that, or Elekid overwrote something much older and was placed in that slot in the Korean Index because the team wanted it next to Elebebii. Whether or not they were ever a three-stage evolutionary family is up to debate, but I tend to lean towards the idea that they were and one of them was cut by the time of Spaceworld '97. This version of the Pokedex is, obviously, unfinished. But think about the ways in which its unfinished. It has a lot of variation when it comes to different types of Pokemon; it has a good type spread; it has starter Pokemon and legendary Pokemon; in many ways, this set of 100 Pokemon could conceivably work in the final game. The main way that this list feels unfinished is because of the lack of evolutionary relatives. Out of this list of 100 Pokemon, at least 48 of them were single-stage Pokemon at this point in development. That’s a huge proportion of unconnected Pokemon! So while this roster may have worked to some degree, there were currently too many different families of Pokemon; too many Pokemon that don’t grow as the game goes on. To make this into a workable roster, they’d need to consolidate the Pokemon families and make more of them connected through evolution. Which is pretty much exactly what Era Three is focused on. What I’m Still Uncertain About In general, there are less things in Era Two that I’ve changed my mind on or learned along the way while writing these articles. I have learned what a Drop Bear is, and I’ve heard some great theories that Snorunt and Shuppet were loosely based on Wolfman and Kageboozu, respectively. Thanks to everyone who’s left a comment during this Era of the Cryptodex; those comments make it all worth it. However, I am still uncertain about some of the periodization I’ve done in this Era. I think there’s a lot of places where there’s an argument that the Periods I’ve drawn are not as cut and dry as I’ve made them out to be. Let me go down the list. First, I’m unsure of where Period 2a ends. Octillery is a Sugimori creation, just like a lot of the rest of Period 2a, but it doesn’t introduce a new gameplay mechanic and it’s the only Pokemon in Period 2a to evolve from something from Era One. Octillery also looks to be sitting next to the strange Wind-Sock Fox Pokemon in the next slot, which is unused, rare for Period 2a. If there was some reason those two Pokemon were competing for the same slot, it’s conceivable that that is the real beginning of Period 2b, which is composed of pairs of competing designs. I just for the life of me can’t figure out what might have linked them, and Octillery otherwise would be an oddball in Period 2b as one of the only Sugimori designs there. So I’m really not sure where ID 366 and 377 fit; they could easily be the end of Period 2a or the beginning of 2b. But that’s minor quibbling. My bigger concern about Periodization is that I’m really unsure what was going on in Period 2c. As much as I tried, I wasn’t able to hone in on a strong theme of this run of seven (or six) Pokemon. Half of them were old Generation I designs, brought back as baby Pokemon; maybe the next three are Sugimori designs that he dropped into the Index after he brought back these older designs? This group is just kind of an oddball group. Likewise, because Period 2c is so loosely composed, I’m really not sure what to say about the Mohawk Hippo Pokemon in slot 400. It’s rough and strange, like Period 2d, and the obvious place to put it would be as the first Pokemon in Period 2d. But as I’ve said previously, by suspicious that it was designed to be one more baby Pokemon (this time for Drowzee) has led me to place it at the end of Period 2c, with the other three baby Pokemon. But I’m very uncertain about that placement, and my suspicion is that I’m being too clever by half. It probably belongs in Period 2d, with the rest of the rough reject Pokemon, despite my theories to the contrary. Finally, I continue to be fascinated by the counterpart runs of unused designs in Periods 1e and 2d. They’re clearly designed by the same person. They’re almost all unused: Only Manbo1 was used in Spaceworld ’97, and given that it was glued onto a cobbled together evolutionary family with Gurotesu and Ikari, it feels to me like a late-in-the-day pull. Like I’ve said before, it seems like these were made by a designer somewhat out of the loop, and that they never had much of a chance to be used in the final games. But, as one commenter offered, it could also be the case that these were all rough designs that the team added all as a bunch, on the off chance they would later want to work on and develop these ideas. That is, these might be the throwaway designs of Nishida, Morimoto, Fujiwara, and Sugimori, and the reason they look like another designer is because they were quickly drawn up and then never revised. I just wish we had a little bit more to go by to understand these two sections of the Korean Index. What really was going on here, and why were so few of these designs used or even developed? Understanding these strange, often un-Pokemon-like designs would go a long way to unlocking the entire Korean Index. Enduring MysteriesThere are still a few places in Era Two that I don’t fully understand. Unfortunately, we’ll probably never understand them, but these are the areas that feel most like places where I'm wrong, or I just don't have enough information to know what's going on. a) Cyndaquil In ID #364, in the midst of an otherwise pretty-well understood section of the Korean Index, is an early Cyndaquil design. There are basically no certain answers about this guy, and everything about it, including its placement, raises questions for me. First, the sprite we have is clearly one of the latest sprites in the Korean Index: stylistically, it looks much more like the sprites made after Spaceworld ’97 (see above). That, combined with the fact that Cyndaquil didn’t appear in Spaceworld ’97, makes it safe to assume that the Cyndaquil sprite we have in the Korean Index was added in very late, probably as close to May 1998 (when the Korean Index is dated) as possible. But was Cyndaquil always in this slot, and like Stantler and Elekid, was its sprite just one of the very few updated after Spaceworld ’97? Or did it overwrite something that used to be there? Odds are about equal in either case, but there’s no way to say for sure. Furthermore, what’s Cyndaquil even doing there? Was it designed to be a completely different Pokemon and then just repurposed to replace Honooguma as the fire starter? If so, it’s a strange coincidence that it appears so close to the rest of the starter Pokemon in the Korean Index. Maybe when it overwrote something completely different, it was added in there because they already had it in mind for a starter? But if that’s the case, then what typing was it supposed to be? It certainly doesn’t look like Fire, Water, or Grass type. My best guess is that it was originally just a Normal-type, designed to diversify the fauna of the roster, like the ninja squirrel a few slots before it, or like Miltank and Snubbull. There would be some symmetry in this: Honoguma was transformed into the Normal-type Teddiursa, so the Normal-type Cyndaquil replaced it and got changed to fire. But we can't really know if this explanation is true, and there's just so much weirdness with Cyndaquil's placement that I don't know what it all means. Everything about Cyndaquil doesn’t quite fit where it is, and as much as I can come up with plausible explanations for it, it’s still a mystery. This is another case where I really wish we had a slightly earlier build, or a version of the Korean Index dated slightly earlier, so we could compare what had changed. b) ID 380 I wish I knew for certain if this guy was a rework of the unused Squid Pokemon from Generation I. It certainly seems plausible that it is, and the way the drill is sloppily drawn onto its hands and its head suggests that at an earlier stage of development 380 looked even more like the Generation I sprites. And yet, which one of them is it supposed to be? 380’s backsprite doesn’t quite look close enough to either of the unused backsprites to be plausible. Another example of a Pokemon that I wish we knew just a little more about. c) ID 392 What is this bird’s deal? If it follows the pattern set by Period 2b, then as I posited, it might have been created to fill in a previously unused set of two types, in order to match the Water/Fire Bomushikaa that follows it in the Korean Index. But…this guy doesn’t suggest any obvious types, and it certainly doesn’t obviously look like a counterpart to Bomushikaa. I’m still pretty certain that viewing these as counterparts is the most likely way to make sense of 392, but it’s a mystery to me exactly what their relationship was. Maybe there wasn’t any symmetry between them, and two designers just came up with completely different designs to fit the same slot in the roster. Understanding more about this guy would confirm or disprove a lot of my theories about Period 2b. d) ID 397 and ID 400 These two unused designs are odd because of their placement. ID 397, in particular, feels like it probably fits better in Period 2d than where we find it in Period 2c, but there are two more used designs after it--Ledyba and Twinz, created by Sugimori, before Period 2d starts. Maybe that’s an indication that Twinz and Ledyba overwrote some other rough and unused designs? Or maybe this frog has a lot more to its concept, but that’s been lost to the mists of time. Either way, something’s missing about this guy. There’s something more to this frog than meets the eye. Meanwhile, I’ve written in length about ID 400. Was it meant to be a baby Pokemon, possibly related to Drowzee? Did it have some relationship to Slowpoke, which also shares a derpy face with 400? Was there more of a plan for this guy? Or did I overthink him, and did he really just belong with all the rough discarded designs that follow him? I don’t know, and none of the information we have can further help us divine the true purpose of this design. Once again, this is a mystery I really wish we could solve. Looking AheadWe’re a little more than halfway through the Cryptodex by now: by my math, we've covered 108 entries and we have 85 to go. The rest of the 41 designs in the Korean Index will form Era Three, which I believe will be divided into Periods 3a, 3b, and 3c. After that, though, we’re not done! We still have to discuss all the Pokemon designed for Gen II that were created after the Korean Index. While some of these straddle the line between “completely new design,” and “heavy rework of an existing design,” I still want to go through all of the last Pokemon made before the games were released. According to my numbers (which may change by the time we get there), we have 43 designs to go through after the end of the Korean Index, which will constitute Periods 4a, 4b, and 4c. Alongside those, I’ll also talk about the reworks and redesigns that went into Pokemon we’ve already covered. I won’t spend much time on these reworks, but it’ll be nice to view the new design in the context of what Game Freak was doing in 1999, to understand exactly why they remade the Pokemon as they did. Era Three, coming up next, is probably the clearest era of the entire Korean Index. Almost all of it was devoted to making evolutionary relatives for Pokemon they’d already designed; instead of brainstorming new ideas, Era Three was focused instead on fleshing out the teams already created Pokemon. Era Three was probably also worked on right up until the last days before the Spaceworld ’97 build was compiled, and the last few Pokemon on the list show signs of being hurriedly produced. It’ll be an interesting sequence of designs to go through, because at this point, the intentions of the designs become even clearer. So if you’ve been enjoying the Cryptodex, don’t worry! We’ve got a lot to still do! Thanks so much for reading, and I really appreciate all the wonderful comments! This project only grows stronger the more ideas people discuss and suggest as we move through these early, strange Pokemon. (Betobebii art by @RacieBeep!)
4 Comments
When we reached the end of Era I, I noted there how the last eight Pokemon designs, which I designated “Period 1e”, were an odd, disconnected bunch. Of those eight, seven of them didn’t even make it into Spaceworld ’97, and the one that did was soldered onto two completely unrelated Pokemon to make a new evolutionary family. Period 1e also didn’t fit much with what had come before it: 1d and 1c had obvious signs that they were made mostly by Nishida and Sugimori. Period 1e didn’t really fit well anywhere, its designs were odd and mostly based off of generic animals. All of them looked like rough drafts that didn’t have much work done on them. Period 2d is a counterpart to 1e in pretty much every way. Fitting awkwardly in between Era II and Era III, Period 2d doesn’t really match up with the rest of the designs in Era II, which tended to focus on Pokemon that were needed for balance and to introduce new concepts into the games. Instead, Period 2d is a section where all the designs went unused and all seem to be more or less randomly inspired, rather than created according to a larger plan. Like Period 1e, these designs are Animal+ ones and they show signs of being very rough. I’d say it’s most likely whoever designed Period 1e also designed these and added them into the Index after the main work by the central Pokemon team was done. If I’m right, Era II can be demarked by the fact that the rough draft of the new Generation II lineup was substantially complete by its end. Era II ends at ID 400, which means that the team would have created 101 new 'mons, exactly as much as they'd have needed to get to #252. If this is the case, then Period 2d was an afterthought or an appendage to the designs above it. All seven of these are also very isolated: they don’t look like the stuff around them, and none of their designs reference any of the other Pokemon designs around them. Likely, the person who designed these seven Pokemon was outside the main group of Pokemon designers and was making designs without much input on what the team’s goals for designs were. Like with Period 1e, this designer’s sprites were almost completely unused in Spaceworld ’97, which suggests someone who didn’t have a close connection to the rest of the team or the art direction that Sugimori was giving. Thus, these end up looking a bit random. Given how few 1e and 2d designs were used at all, I wonder how seriously any of these were ever considered by the team. It's possible that ID 400 was part of this group too, as with 397; Twinz and Ledyba could have overwritten two other unused designs in Period 2d, making it look as though 397 belonged to a different set of designs. Conversely, 400 has a strange look that fits in with these seven, and it's just as likely it fits in Period 2d and is does where I placed it, in 2c. I placed it there because I thought it was likely enough to be a Drowzee baby that it fit conceptually with the other baby Pokemon in 2c, but if you don’t buy that argument, it should probably be the first design here. One last thing to note is that there are a lot of theories that 2d Pokemon were redesigned into Pokemon from later Generations. ID 406 could have eventually become Cranidos, some claim, and 407 could have become Cherrim. In fact, 403 or 405 could have been early Yanma, for that matter. While I’ll examine those theories in more detail when we get to those numbers, I will say I’m pretty skeptical that anything in this Period went anywhere all that interesting. Assuming they were made by a minor designer, it’s unlikely that anyone would have paid them enough attention to make a return. ID 401: ??? ID 401 comes ready with a smile. He’s a gigantic skeleton monster, with a huge snout and tiny beady eyes in his skull. He’s got huge teeth, spiked shoulders, and a skeletal tail, all ready to face down even the fiercest Pokemon. While 401 never got all that far, out of everything in Period 2d, he’s the one that most intrigues me and has the most interesting hook, in my book. Probably inspired by a lot of the earlier designs from Generation I, ID 401 was probably unused not because it was a bad or “un-pokemon” ish design, but simply because it wasn’t made by the main design team and thus wasn’t designed to fit a particular need. It's likely it just didn’t really have a place in the final product. 401’s main design inspiration is obvious: he’s a spooky skeletal dinosaur. Can’t really get more in depth than that. He is distinctive because he has that long snout, and the good people at TCRF think he looks a little like the Alien from…”Alien,” but I don’t really see it. You might think that he's a dead version of another Pokemon, but unfortunately not: no other Gen I or II Pokemon seems to have a snout like that, so there doesn’t seem to be any clear connection to anything else. On the other hand, it’s possible the team could have designed a living version of 401 if they decided to move forward with this design. The art style on this guy doesn’t really match anything Nishida, Morimoto, Fujiwara or Sugimori did; it doesn’t have the proportions of a Nishida design, nor the shading and outlines of a Sugimori design, and while it matches the “grotesque”, bizarre aesthetic of a lot of Morimoto designs (like Mankey, or Crocky), it has too much filled in detail to my eyes to fit Morimoto either. We don't have a lot of examples of designs we're sure were done by Fujiwara, but his designs tend to have a flat look to them, which is not the case here. The high detail in the sprite also makes it a bit hard for the eye to interpret, especially on a small Gameboy screen. I suspect if this design was used, someone would have redrafted it to make it simpler and let it jump out more at the viewer. For instance, the detailing on the bone joints on this guy doesn’t work too well and is confusing to the eye: look in particular around the arm and rib joints and how it’s not always clear what’s background and what’s bone. It’s clearly rough and would have gotten further refined. In general, 401's sprite is just very overcomplicated and hard to read, in a way that's not usually seen in finalized designs. The ribs on the backsprite are very difficult to discern; it isn't clear what's connecting the right arm to the body in the backsprite; all of the detailing on each individual bone makes it almost impossible to tell what's white space and what's another bone. While I think Periods 1a, 1b, 1e, and 2d all probably are predominantly the same artist (especially 1e and 2d), the closest design relatives 401 has are 309 and 349. Notice a similar eye on each, and similar feet. The slightly overcomplicated detailing on 349’s fur, as well, bares a similarity with the bones on 401, and make me think the same person worked on them. So let's discuss a little about what could have been going on with this guy. When this design was first discovered, the leading theory was that this was just a fossil sprite, like those that exist for Kabutops and Aerodactyl (I wonder why Omanyte never got one? UPDATE: OrangeFrench has reminded me that squids don't have skeletons). This was discarded pretty quickly. Obviously, we don’t have a sprite which would be a living version of this fossil, but beyond that, this guy shows obvious signs of being alive. First, it has those eyes, which wouldn’t appear on a fossil; it also has an active battle pose, and what looks to be gums on the upper part of its mouth. At least, that’s how RacieBeep interpreted that part of this sprite when she made her (well done) art of 401: It’s also notable that the skeletons in Generation I were shaded completely differently than 401. That either means that 401 isn’t quite finished, or it’s evidence that 401’s designer (and thus the designer for 1e et al) may have been one of the new designers brought on to the team after Red and Green were finished. Another unlikely possibility is that 401 was designed as an alternative evolution, or a third evolution, for Cubone and Marowak. You could easily imagine a Ground/Ghost evolution of Cubone in which the bone mask comes alive and envelopes the entire creature, or one in which the Cubone dies and gets animated by the bone mask. It doesn’t fit very well with the lore of Cubone, admittedly. Overall, this isn’t likely at all to me, especially because of the isolated nature of 1d, but it is a theory. The most interesting similarity to me comes from comparing 401 to the earliest design for Generation I, which were usually inspired by Kaiju from Godzilla or Ultraman. While 401 doesn’t specifically resemble any other Pokemon, it does share a lot of similarities—in terms of its pose, the squareness of its sprite, the fearsomeness, even the “Dinosaur+Gimmick” style of its design—with those early ‘mons, like Nidoking, Kangaskhan, Gyaoon, and Omega. Omega in particular is an interesting comparison. Omega was a robot Kaiju, made of metal but otherwise not really different from the Kaiju design features (t-rex body, large nose, two smaller arms and a powerful tail) that inspired a lot of other early Pokemon. While 401 obviously doesn’t have any inspiration from Omega, the idea is the same: it’s a generic dinosaur Kaiju made of a gimmicky substance, in this case, bones. I don’t think this guy predates Generation II, but I also think he would fit right in with those old Generation I designs had we discovered him in the Blue source code. Futhermore, many of the earliest Generation I Pokemon designs were based on common RPG tropes: Grimer was a slime, Voltorb a mimic, etc. Skeletons are an extremely common RPG enemy, which further makes 401 feel like those early Pokemon designs. Maybe Cubone was the Pokemon team's attempt at a skull enemy, and they just decided they didn't need another one? Whatever inspired this guy’s design has been, of course, lost to history, and unfortunately we’ll never know if he was just an angry bone dinosaur, or if there was more here than meets the eye. UPDATE: Two readers on twitter have informed me of their own theories on the existence of 401. Their theories are honestly better than anything I had, so I think it's worthwhile to consider these ideas as well. First, @KeithGeek indicates that my observation above about 401's relationship to other Kaiju-like Pokemon might have more significance than I originally realized. @KeithGeek pointed out to me that there was a kaiju in Ultraman (the show that heavily inspired Tajiri and Sugimori when they were making Generation I) that looks an awful lot like 401. Here's Seabozu: Obviously it's not an exact match, but we really aren't looking for an exact match here; Seabozu could have just been an inspiration. Apparently, Seabozu features in a pretty well known episode, as an undead Kaiju trying to find its rest in a kaiju graveyard. It makes perfect sense to me that 401 might have been based on this episode, as a intentional throwback to the kaiju designs of Pokemon Red and Green. Who knows, maybe it was thrown into Period 2d because Tajiri and/or Sugimori liked the idea of another Ultraman homage, but the team just didn't have enough room to include it in the end. Our second theory comes from @FreeeknU, who reminded me of the original premise for one of the Pokemon movies written by Takeshi Shudo (the sources I have say it was supposed to be the third movie, after the one featuring Lugia, but I've always heard this was the initial plot for that movie before Lugia was created; not to mention Shudo mentioned that he came up with the idea while Gold and Silver were still delayed). In Shudo's original idea for this movie, he imagined that a dinosaur fossil was discovered in the Pokemon world. That fossil would then come to life, and then cause mayhem as it left destruction in its wake. It's a very out-there premise, and I'm sure it was rejected because it added real world creatures (dinosaurs) into the Pokemon universe. Still, Shudo himself was excited about the concept. We know that the design team eventually added Lugia into Gold and Silver after Shudo had come up with the idea of Lugia. Could 401 have been an attempt to add a version of his original Pokemon movie idea? Maybe in one version of his draft, the discovered fossil was more akin to 401: a skeletal kaiju Pokemon that Ash and his friends would have to defeat. I don't think this theory is entirely likely, but it is interesting, and if the dinosaur-plot was originally created for the second movie, the timeline would fit (401 was probably created very late 1996 or early 1997). I don't quite know what to make of it, but I think its a cool theory to consider. ID 402: ???402 is a cute rabbit, skipping through the grass. Or it’s a land oyster, jealously protecting its pearl. Or it’s a relative of Dragonair (and Aqua, for that matter): after all, it seems to share the same pearl around its neck that they have. Or maybe it’s all three? Who knows? 402 stands out in Period 2d for a couple of reasons. First, it’s the only “cute” design; 406 and 407 have some cute elements, but the rest of this section of the Index are clearly much either fierce or just weird looking. 402’s sprite is also substantially higher quality than the rest of the sprites in this section; its shading is much more thorough, it uses multiple types of spritework on different sections of the sprite. Notice how the feet are blurry at the outline, while the rest is clear? Or how it has an outline that uses multiple colors rather than just all black? Thirdly, 402 does have some similarities to Pokemon designs earlier on the list: like I said, its “pearl” around its neck looks quite a bit like Aqua’s, and its face looks suspiciously like the unfinished Puffball Pokemon in slot 305, though in both cases, its eyes and its pearl are different enough from those Pokemon that it’s clear 402 wasn’t made by the same designer. Of all the designs in Period 2d, 402 is the most likely to have been seriously worked on; it's possible it was even in a slightly earlier build of Gold and Silver before Spaceworld ’97. The work put into the sprite makes it clear that this wasn’t a first draft like the rest of 2d. On top of that, some of the unique features of the sprite. Most prominently, notice how the outline of 402 uses multiple shades of gray and not just black; compare that to most other sprites, like Aqua, above. This sort of outline is uncommon, and usually shows a sprite designer with a lot of experience. 402 also looks more like a Pokemon design they could have used than its surrounding neighbors: once you add color to the sprite, it fits in pretty well with Spaceworld ’97 Pokemon like Sneasel and Marill. So...what is 402? It looks most like a rabbit, but its strange ears suggest something more is going on in this design. Recently, many people have noticed the similarity between 402 and Elfilin from the newest Kirby game, Kirby and the Forgotten Land. They both have the same large ears, and a similar pose. Maybe 402 was a design sent back in time from 2022 to the developers, and they incorporated it into the Korean Index? (402 was transformed into an Elfilin sprite by OrangeFrench) But more seriously, there are a couple possibilities that could have inspired 402. Upon first impression, 402 seems like a rabbit. It has large ears, its pose makes it look like it's running or hopping, which brings to mind a a small mammal, and its face resembles a rabbit’s, right down to the black nose in the center. …Unless that nose is actually a small mouth, which it absolutely could be. On the other hand, lots of people have noticed that 402’s large ears might in fact not be fluffy appendages but instead hard clam shells; this is more apparent if you look at the back sprite, which gives makes the ears look more like they are meant to clamp together. If this is the case, then the pearl necklace our little rabbit has around its neck might itself be a pearl, like clams have, that it is trying to protect; when under attack, maybe this guy shuts its ears closed to defend itself. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s possible this guy is a close relative of Cloyster. Also possible is that 402 is at least partially inspired by a Venus fly trap. Instead of protecting itself with the clam shell, maybe 402 has a cute and unassuming face in order to trick predators to get closer, where it would then SNAP its ears together and eat its enemy! The team already had those sorts of creatures in mind when designing Gold and Silver: Gurotesu was designed after an angler fish that is known for tricking prey in this exact same way, and the final version of Wobbuffet—which has a fake body and a small black head on its tail that it protects—both function similarly to a Venus fly trap. The spots on the back of the ears give some credence to this idea: other plant based Pokemon, like Bulbasaur or the unused Tsubimotto are often depicted with spots akin to these. The main problem with this theory is that 402 doesn’t have obvious teeth on the ends of its ears. It does have spines at the top of the ears (which could just be fluffy hair if this guy was supposed to purely be a rabbit), but not much more than that. If Venus Fly Trap was an inspiration for 402, subsequent drafts probably moved it away from this initial design idea. Any of these guesses have implications for the other features of this guy. If the design intention to make a pure rabbit Pokemon with large, goofy ears, then 402 was probably a simple Normal-type Pokemon meant to populate some of the early areas of the game. Like the Koala and Tanuki Pokemon discussed earlier, 402 was likely made because the team wanted some more Pokemon that could fit into forest-like landscapes and be relatively easy to catch. Its movelist, in this case, would be anyone’s guess: probably simple moves like Body Slam, Agility and maybe Double team which would reflect its quick nature, as well as High Kick to reflect the powerful legs of a bunny. It would probably also have a brown palette. If it were based on a clam, however, than maybe this guy would have been a water-type Pokemon, and probably have had a blue palette to reflect the typing. In that case, you could imagine that it would have had a similar moveset to Shellder: probably moves like Water Gun and Clamp. It would probably also have Protect in this case: Protect seems to have been given to a lot of Water Pokemon in Spaceworld ’97, and would make perfect sense for a Pokemon which could hide itself in its clamshell when in danger. Finally, if it really was a Venus Fly Trap Bunny, 402 probably had Bite as a move, along with some of the standard Grass-type moves, like Razor Leaf or SleepPowder. It would probably have had a green palette in that case. (Colorizations by OrangeFrench) It’s anyone’s guess why 402 didn’t show up even in Spaceworld ’97. Like I’ve mentioned, this guy seems to have had more work put into its sprite than the surrounding mons, so it sure does feel like it was under consideration. But I have my hunches. If 402 was meant to be a water or a grass Pokemon, I can see it being scrapped just because its design doesn’t really convey those concepts very well: if it was meant to close its clamshell, there’s not really a way to express that concept in a static sprite like Pokemon have. Certainly, the sprite 402 has barely broadcasts the idea of clamshell; you'd need an animated sprite, like the team used in Crystal, to convey this idea. In addition, the games already have Cloyster, and it isn’t clear they would need another clam Pokemon, especially with how many water Pokemon are already in the Korean Index. On the other hand, if 402 was just a generic bunny, then it was probably not chosen for the same reason that most of the more basic, Animal+ designs in the Korean Index were dropped. They just weren’t distinctive enough to drape an entire Pokemon concept over. Just in the last couple entries, we’ve seen a ton of Animal+ designs that never made it into SW’97: IDs 380, 386, 387, 392 and 397 all never made it past the Index, and so there’s a case to be made that the team, at this point, were very uninterested in this style of design. As it is, I don’t see that ID 402 has enough of a hook to get a player to know what its “deal” is simply from viewing the sprite: if it couldn’t really explain its concept to a player, it’s a prime candidate to get cut. Saying that, my gut instincts are that 402 was close, and if we had any builds just a little bit earlier in time, we’d have seen more of what this guy was like. There’s something special and interesting about 402’s concept, enough that the team clearly tried to make it work. From our view trying to reconstruct it, however, that unique hook just isn’t quite clear. ID 403: ??? 403 is a bug. It’s a weird looking bug, with a face that doesn’t really resemble any other Pokemon up to this point. Oddly, 403 is also in a humanlike pose; it uses its front two legs to make a shrugging gesture. One of the more sketchy looking sprites in the entire Index, the only thing I’m confident about in this case is the 403 was never really in consideration for inclusion in Gold and Silver. Everything’s a bit off about this guy’s sprite. No other bug Pokemon has thin black little lines as arms; even Beedrill’s legs have more definition to them than these indistinct pipe cleaners. 403’s strange ganglia from its mouth are not something we’ve seen on any Pokemon sprites before this, and the unshaded stripes on its abdomen look very unfinished compared to how other Pokemon are drawn. Its eyes and wings are drawn quite similarly to the sprite that beedrill has in Spaceworld 97, making we wonder if the same artist made that Beedrill sprite: If these really were made by the same artist, then it's possible 403 was made by someone hired to work on new sprites for already existing Pokemon. We have some evidence that the newer designers were first tasked with doing alternate sprites for Pokemon Blue or Yellow; maybe this was a way of giving them experience drawing Pokemon's style? It could easily be the case that whoever designed the Pokemon of Period 2d was hired on as a minor sprite artist. That would explain why Periods 2d and 1e feel so out of place compared to the sections around them: this new designer may have made their own designs in their free time, independent of the main team that was creating new design. Cutting Room Floor speculates that 403 might have been based on prehistoric gigantic bugs. It’s possible, but I don’t think we need to posit a connection between 403 and ancient bugs, given that Pokemon like Beedrill clearly show that giant bugs are already a normal phenomenon in the Pokemon universe. Instead, this guy looks to me like he was equally inspired by wasps and by mosquitoes. 403 has some pretty obvious stripes on its back abdomen, as I mentioned, which look very similar to the markings on the back of a yellowjacket, the most common bee where I grew up. They look a little like the stripes on Beedrill, but as I noted, Beedrill's are properly shaded, while 403’s stripes look pretty basic and are one solid color. In addition, the eyes of 403 are very clearly wasp eyes, as can be seen by comparing them to Beedrill's. While obviously wasps don’t have a penchant to make human-like gestures with their arms, everything else about this guy looks like a wasp to me. However, there’s also an argument that 403 is instead a mosquito. The stripes could just be segmented parts of the abdomen, like mosquitos have if you view them carefully. The eyes could also just as easily be the compound eyes of a mosquito, though obviously those are less prominent than on a wasp. But wasps don't have probosci nearly as prominent as 403 does, while mosquitoes do. In addition, given that Pokemon already has a wasp-inspired Pokemon, basing 403 on a mosquito would be a way to find a new real-world animal to draw inspiration from. We already saw in Period 2b and 2c how the team was trying to create more bug Pokemon for the first draft of the roster, and so 403 could also have been an attempt by a green designer to throw their hat in the ring. Less likely—but still possible—is that 403 is a very early concept for the Pokemon that eventually became Yanma. If TCRF was right about 403 being based on a prehistoric insect, then Game Freak might have originally designed it to reflect an ancient type of fly, before moving in the direction of the dragonfly, which is much more iconic as an ancient ancestor to modern bugs. Meganeura, a giant sized ancient version of the Dragonfly, are very often seen in films and television about dinosaurs because they first evolved during the Jurassic era. If this really is the precursor of Yanma—and to be clear, I doubt it, given that Period 2d seems to have been discarded before even Spaceworld ’97—then it’s a pretty distant cousin of Yanma, given all the changes it needed to go through to get there. Most Bug-type Pokemon evolve at least once, and it appears that 403 was no different. Just two entries after 403, ID 405 looks exactly like the sort of thing that would evolve into 403. Or, at the very least, the two could be related, such as counterpart Pokemon. It’s likely the designer of Period 2d designed these two close together because they were connected. I’ll compare their sprites in much more detail once we get to 405, but suffice to say there are enough differences in the sprites to doubt a strict evolutionary relationship. Other than what I’ve already discussed, there’s not much to say about 403. It’s unlikely he ever got a moveset, or much lore behind him. 403 is about as close to a basic Animal+ design as you get, and its no surprise that the team didn’t go any further with this design. ID 404: ???In ID #404, we find yet another strange design that we don’t have a lot of information about. Unlike the three entries above it, there are at least two theories as to what’s going on with 404. Both theories have holes in them, but at least they give us more to think about than we had looking at, say, 403 the mystery bug. So let’s shoot into these theories. Most simply, 404 is a Cyclops-plant of some sort. It’s got a critical expression on its face, though of course since its face is just an eye, that’s open to interpretation. It also has three leaves around its body, and roots that function like feet. It’s unclear what its head actually consists of: it could be a generic flower head, flat with an eye in the middle, or it could be more spherical, and resemble something like a spiky globe. The first would make it just a flower, while the latter might indicate it has a flower bud for a head, ready to sprout, or something even stranger, like a exploding mine for a head. Or, looking at it in more detail, is that really an eye, or is it sticking out its tongue at us? You be the judge. The spritework on 404 is pretty good, at least better than 403; the eye is detailed, the body and feet are distinct, and there is shading throughout. Saying that, 404's backsprite feels oddly unfinished. While the front seems to triangular spikes all over the sides of the head, on the back these spikes aren’t nearly as apparent. Where the spikes were supposed to be (at least by comparing the front sprite) instead we just have a blurry outline. Maybe the intent was to give the sprite more depth, and suggest the spikes were facing towards the camera? The effect, however, is that the head looks far more smooth and circular on the back than on the front. It seems like this was something that might have been worked out in later drafts, if they had ever been serious about this design. And what are those three dots on the back of the head? It's unclear to me what exactly this guy's head is supposed to look like. The first theory about 404 is that it was intended as a pre-evolution of Sunflora. Putting their sprites next to each other, you can easily imagine that they could go together: (404 colorized to match Sunflora's SW'97 palette by OrangeFrench) In Sunflora’s final sprite, it has legs, but in this earlier version, it has roots for feet which look very similar to the roots found at the base of 404. In addition, their bodies are similar, and they've got about the same size of head as each other, as long as you don’t count Sunflora’s petals. In this imagining, 404 is the bud of a flower, and Sunflora is what happens after 404 blossoms. In this reading, 404 might be viewed as a prototype of Sunkern, Sunflora’s pre-evolution in the final. We’ll get to Sunkern eventually, but one notable thing about Sunkern’s development is that the team went back and forth on including it at all. In the post- SW’97 builds we have, the design team had already created Sunkern by April 1999, but then deleted him by July 1999, only to bring him back—with a completely unfinished sprite—in August of 1999. First, this indicates that the team changed their minds about giving Sunflora a pre-evolution later in the development of Gen II, which could suggest that maybe they were also ambivalent about giving it a first form before Spaceworld ’97 as well. This would be a good explanation of why we don’t see 404 in Spaceworld ’97. Secondly, when Sunkern was put back into the game, it had a placeholder sprite in place, implying that its final design wasn’t made until just before release. While the sprites we have from June show it without any sprite at all, this could be because the team was in the process of deleting Sunkern, and it's possible it had an earlier design before June which got scrubbed. It’s at least feasible that this was that design. There’s one key problem with this theory: Sunflora appears after 404 in the Korean Index (ID #417), which suggests that Sunflora was created after 404. That just doesn’t seem likely, given the design concepts behind the two. Sunflora’s got a very simple design gimmick: it’s a (sun)flower; 404, on the other hand, is a much weirder concept, and only really makes sense if the designer already knew that it was going to sprout into a flower. I mean, look at it: without already knowing that Sunflora exists, would you ever guess that 404 was a flower bud waiting to bloom? I don’t think there’s any chance 404 was created first and that Sunflora was created as an extension of the same idea. It is possible that 404 is out of order in the Korean Index and it overwrote something else—and I did note how, unlike the surrounding ‘mons, 404 looks as though it could have been a Sugimori design, which Sunflora is as well—but we don’t really have any evidence for this, and that’s complete speculation. I’d say it’s still possible 404 was designed as Sunflora’s first stage, but unlikely. On top of that, something about the two sprites just doesn’t match up to me. Despite both 404 and Sunflora having a dual color outline on their sprite, possibly indicating Sugimori’s handiwork, everything else indicates they were drawn in different styles. Sunflora’s eyes are happy anime eyes, while 404’s singular eye has a pupil and is drawn far more realistically. Sunflora’s roots, while they are shaped similarly to 404’s, are shaded completely differently, and look white in parts, while 404’s are darker. Finally—though we shouldn’t make too much of it—404 has three leaves on its body, while Sunflora only has two. I don’t know how much to make out of these sprite differences, but they’re just enough that I’m uncomfortable with saying that these two are related for sure. The second possibility is that 404 wasn’t related to Sunflora, but was instead meant to be a pre-evolution for Hanamogura, the strange plant-like Pokemon that took the place of Bayleef in Spaceworld ’97. If you compare the sprites, you can see similarities here as well. Unlike Sunflora, 404 and Hanamogura’s root-feet look very similar and have almost exactly the same coloring on them. 404’s strange, bulbous head also looks more suited to opening up like the petals that Hanamogura has. Of course, this isn’t perfect; the eyes are still not a match, and Hanamogura has spots on its petals that are absent from 404’s face. But maybe these parts of the design would have been revised had the team worked on it more, so who knows. In this scenario, there are two possibilities. First, 404 might have been created while Hanamogura was just a single stage Pokemon, unattached to Meganium. That would probably mean that Hanamogura was never meant to have anything to do with the Meganium family and thus was thrown into Spaceworld ’97 at the last minute as a placeholder sprite for a second stage Meganium that did not yet exist.
Conversely, if it had already been decided that Hanamogura was too different from Meganium to remain the Grass starter, then this might have been an experiment to divide Hanamogura off of the Meganium family and give it a new first stage. If the latter’s the case, the experiment was unsuccessful, because as of Spaceworld ’97, Hanamogura was still connected to Meganium and Chikorita. If I had to bet on what I thought was most likely, I’d personally say 404 was not related to either Sunflora or Hanamogura. In my opinion, it’s far more likely that 404 was just a strange idea, designed on its own, and then dropped for better designs. However, that’s not to say the above theories are implausible, and I would be unsurprised if either of them turned out to be correct. Of course, we’ll never know for sure. Until then, we can wonder whether we really do have a proto-Sunkern on our hands. |
AuthorArchivesCategories |