ID 413: SmoochumID 413 is Smoochum. It’s another baby Pokemon, and an interesting one too: Smoochum is one of the few baby Pokemon from Era III to survive until the final game (4 out of the 10 do), it’s one of the few which evolve into an existing single-stage Pokemon, and it also marks the moment when the design team decided that Elekid would be a baby Pokemon, and part of a trio of baby Pokemon. Like Betobebii, Smoochum is another example of the team experimenting with babies for unpopular or underrepresented family lines from Generation I; unlike Betobebii, it doesn’t feel like there was even much of an attempt to make Smoochum cuter than the original Pokemon. Smoochum is the baby form of Jynx, from Generation I; as a result, it has the same origins as Jynx. It's worth talking about those origins, since they're so controversial and such a part of what Pokemon is in popular culture. The most direct influence for Jynx is the Yuki-Onna, a mythological Japanese ghost which resembles a beautiful woman with black hair and blue lips. A Yuki-Onna is composed of snow or ice, and in many stories she dissolves when exposed to warmth. Magmar and Electabuzz were both based on pretty well-known Japanese Yokai, and while Jynx wasn't originally part of that trilogy, her design shared a lot of similarities with them. Given the look of Jynx (though Jynx has blond hair, and not black) and its otherwise pretty random Ice-typing, Yuki-Onna has to be one of the first things the designers were thinking. However, the other origin for Jynx is, of course, the tarbaby. Tarbabies are old, racist toys for child that resemble black-face characters from back when that was acceptable. While tarbabies—and blackface in general—has become seen as horribly offensive in the United States since the Civil Rights movement, in other countries—Britain and Japan in particular—blackface never had quite the same offensive connotations for a large proportion of the population. As a result, Japanese media, especially in the 90s, often used blackface imagery when depicting black people. Dragonball Z is one of the most obvious examples, but there are a lot of others out there. (Sorry, I'm not using a picture to demonstrate this) Of course, Jynx also resembles an opera singer, and there are arguments that she’s supposed to resemble the Japanese fashion of Ganguro, which is a type of darker makeup used by women as a type of rebellion against traditional Japanese standards of beauty. These could also be involved in Jynx’s origins, but its unlikely they were the main inspiration. Anyway, this article does a good job of summing up the entire controversy, and it’s worth checking out to learn more about the topic. Smoochum is just a smaller Jynx, and unfortunately that makes its resemblance to a tarbaby more obvious and the other inspirations (opera singer, Ganguro) more tenuous. In the original version, it had a black face and large lips, just like Jynx. However, by June 1999, the team had changed Smoochum to have a purple face, like the modern Jynx. You’d think this was because of the controversy over Jynx, wouldn’t you? I did, but for whatever reason, the timeline doesn’t match up. First of all, the accusation that Jynx was a racist caricature was made first (as far as I can tell) in an article by Carole Boston Weatherford, published in the Greenboro News and Record. In that article, Weatherford argued, “"The character Jynx, Pokémon #124, has decidedly human features: jet-black skin, huge pink lips, gaping eyes, a straight blonde mane and a full figure, complete with cleavage and wiggly hips. Put another way, Jynx resembles an overweight drag queen incarnation of Little Black Sambo, a racist stereotype from a children's book long ago purged from libraries." But that article was published January 16th, 2000; Smoochum’s appearance was changed to purple in June 1999, if not a few months earlier. As far as I know, this accusation hadn’t been made in a mainstream forum before Weatherford’s article (please let me know if you know anything predating this), so Smoochum couldn’t have been changed in response to the accusations of racism. Furthermore, it’s also relevant that Jynx wasn’t changed in June 1999; in fact, Jynx still has the racist blackface sprite in the final game, which was released November 21st 1999, also before Weatherford’s article. So what’s going on? It’s unlikely the team recognized that Smoochum was a racist caricature on their own. If they did, why didn’t they change Jynx’s design at the same time? But on the other hand, why would the artist who made Smoochum purposefully make her skin color different from Jynx’s in 1999? All the other babies match their adult form’s palettes, but Smoochum doesn’t. Maybe the team just thought purple looked better? It would be quite a coincidence. Anyway, I don’t know the answer here; and I think its unlikely that Smoochum’s palette change had anything to do with censorship, unless there's an earlier accusation I'm missing. Beyond the palette, Smoochum also underwent a few other interesting design changes. First of all, Smoochum went through three different names. First, it was known as Rippu, which is a Japanese transliteration of the English word “Lips.” Given that Smoochum’s Pokedex entries mention that it uses its lips to feel everything it comes into contact with (a little creepy, in my opinion), this feels like a fitting name, if a bit simple and on the nose. By the rebooted production of the games in 1999, Smoochum’s name was changed to Kisukisu, which means…Kiss Kiss. Again, it’s a pretty fitting name, if a bit on the nose. But then, right before release, the name was changed one last time, to Muchuuru. Bulbapedia thinks that this name—which they transliterate into the bizarre Muchul romanization that the official website uses (a much more natural English transliteration would be Muchuu or Muchur)—is a combination of the Japanese word for a daze or trance, and “chu,” which is used as an onomatopoeia for kissing in Japan. This is a weird last minute change, but it is easily explained. We know from other production materials that the last minute changes to a lot of localization names were after the team found out the names couldn’t be copyrighted. I think it’s fair to say that’s probably what happened here too. Kisukisu is a fine name and an apt descriptor of this Pokemon, but it was probably too generic. Thus, the team came up with the more bizarre “Muuchuru,” which was distinctive enough for the copyright board. Probably more interesting than the naming changes are the ways Smoochum’s visual design was changed. Smoochum’s final design is notably less cute and lackadaisical than its 1997 design. In Spaceworld ’97, Smoochum has a smile on its face, and it is lifting its arm up as if to reach for a snowflake; in 1999, the same Smoochum now glares directly at the camera which a threatening look, and its hand is in the shape of a fist, as if it’s getting ready to punch your lights out. What was once a (albeit racist) cute design has now been turned into a bully that beats up the rest of the baby Pokemon. I'm not sure why the team made this change; Smoochum’s name and Pokedex entry don’t hint anywhere at its malevolent anger. It’s possible a new designer just didn’t like all the baby Pokemon being cutesy or innocent, and thought that by giving Smoochum an attitude, it would make it stand out a little more. My best explanation is that Game Freak had clearly wanted the Elekid/Magby/Smoochum trio to be a bit different from the other babies. All three of them, in the final game, learn most of their evolved form's moveset, and they all have better stats than the other babies. They also evolve later than other babies. I think the team wanted to characterize them as older children that were more dependent, and able to fight back in their own right. While I have no idea why that involves Smoochum seemingly making a rude gesture at its enemies, I bet the changes to its design was to make it look less like a child and more like an adolescent. As for Smoochum’s gameplay, there’s two minor changes from Spaceworld ’97 to the final to note. First, in Spaceworld ’97, Smoochum is just an Ice type, only gaining its Psychic type upon leveling up. This could have been a simple oversight, or there could have been an idea that, as a baby, Smoochum might lack the Psychic powers it eventually grows into. We’ve seen this once before, in how Staryu gains a Psychic type after evolving into Starmie, but that was the result of a stone-evolution, which can often add an extra type to the evolving Pokemon (see Poliwrath, Nidoking, Nidoqueen, and the Eevees). While Smoochum isn’t a stone evolution, we do see the same phenomenon in Baririina, the Mr. Mime baby that didn’t make it to the final game. Mr. Mime is a psychic type but his pre-evolution is only Normal type and presumably hasn’t yet learned to control its powers. There’s also one notable change to Smoochum’s moveset. In Spaceworld ’97, the baby Pokemon all had identical movesets to their evolutions, just learned at a lower level. This makes perfect sense, since it was the pattern mostly Generation I mostly followed: 1st stage Pokemon learned the same moves as their evolutions but more quickly. By the final, however, many of the new baby Pokemon lost most of their movesets, instead learning one or two moves that the adult version didn’t, giving them a small reason to exist (other than for breeding moves). For instance, the final Pichu moveset lost almost all the moves that Pikachu could learn, but gained Sweet Kiss; Cleffa was the same. Smoochum, Elekid, and Magby, in the final, were the exception to this: they still learned the full moveset of their adult versions. This was probably because, conceptually, these babies were older and stronger than Cleffa, Pichu, or the other babies. Smoochum, Magby, and Elekid were fulled fledged first forms for Magmar, Jynx, and Electabuzz, and thus they deserved having the entire moveset. Except…Smoochum doesn’t learn Lovely Kiss, Jynx’s signature move. It did in Spaceworld ’97, but in the final, this move is conspicuously absent. It also doesn’t learn Ice Punch, another move that is closely associated with Jynx; because Smoochum evolves at level 30, and Jynx learns Ice Punch and Lovely Kiss before that, a Smoochum that becomes a Jynx will always be strictly worse than Jynx herself. Again, I have no idea why the team made this choice; it’s even more nonsensical given that Smoochum’s sprite looks like it’s about to punch you in the face. Most baby Pokemon are only, very narrowly, useful for breeding moves the adult wouldn’t otherwise have. Why have a baby that is can't learn some of the adult's best moves? There are no obvious answers for the choices that were made with Smoochum. Sometimes, research into development doesn’t yield new insights, only more questions. ID 414: HinaazuOur next extry is Hinaazu. Hina means princess on its own, but it's probably short for Hinadori, which means baby bird. Azu means...something; I'm not entirely clear. But as far as I’m concerned, this baby version of Doduo would’ve been named Doduno. It fits the same naming scheme of Doduo and Dodrio, it rolls off the tongue, it’s cute…this guy’s Doduno. So that's the name I'm going to use. Doduno is our third baby Pokemon in seven entries, and it follows some of the same patterns as the other two babies. Doduo and Dodrio weren’t particularly cute or popular Pokemon, so we have another case of an underserved family getting a baby. As a commenter also pointed out, the babies in this stretch of the Korean Index tend to be added to mid or late game Pokemon from Generation I with relatively late evolutions: Grimer, for instance, evolves at level 38 and Doduo evolves at level 31. So these might have been chosen as candidates for babies simply because they were late game mons and there was room for a hypothetical earlier evolution. Doduno didn’t late very long, like most of its adolescent compatriots, and there’s a glaring reason why: its visual design doesn’t make any sense. If Doduo has three heads, and Dodrio has three, most people are quick to point out that Doduno should have one. Not three. Which it clearly has. Not only does this not follow the gimmick of the family line, but it also brings up lots of questions. What happens to the third chick? Does it die on evolution? The problem with creating a Doduo baby is that the design team was kind of drawn into a corner. If they followed the pattern that Doduo and Dodrio set, then Doduno would look like a regular, one-headed chick. It’d be very difficult to find any way to distinguish it from a real-life animal: ...Hardly an inspired design. If the goal was to make Doduo more popular, giving it quite possibly the most boring pre-evolution would hardly solve that problem. On the other hand, if the team tried to capitalize on Doduo’s gimmick, they’d end up with something weird that didn’t quite follow the pattern. Obviously, the designer chose to go the latter direction and gave Doduno three heads to make it stand out. None of this was insurmountable. For instance, if the team went with the one-headed version of Doduno, they could have made exaggerated its features and given it a goofy look, maybe a bit in line with the dicarded ID 313 (the strange Kiwi Bird). This could have been put alongside a Pokedex entry which explained that Doduno was uncoordinated and confused without two heads to take over different tasks. Or if the team had kept the three-headed version, I could imagine a Pokedex entry that explained that the chicks divided into three different creatures before they evolved into Doduo. Or something. My point is, I don’t think the current design is good per se, but I don’t think it was unworkable. Like we see with the majority of these baby Pokemon, Doduno did not make it to the final game, or even to June 1999. By June 1999, the Pokemon team seem certain that they wanted to use this slot for a second stage evolution for Marill, but the team hadn’t quite figured it out. They went through multiple designs for Azumarill, and for much of this period, he simply has a copy of Marill’s stats and a placeholder name (Mitei 04, which means “Pending 04”). In June 1999, future-Azumarill was using Doduno’s backsprite as a placeholder for its yet to be drawn backsprite, and until the very end of development, Azumarill actually used Doduno’s leftover palette, which they hadn’t bother to change (it even uses Doduno's palette as its shiny palette in the final!). So in a weird way, traces of Doduno surived almost to the very end of development, even though the team knew they weren’t using him for a pretty long stretch. My hunch is that he wasn’t removed from the roster because of his design problems; Betobebii, Puchikoon, Pudi and Koonya all have better designs and yet all of them were removed at roughly the same stage in development. I think Doduno was removed as part of the larger purge of baby Pokemon. As we’ve discussed before, the purge was probably because babies simply weren’t useful for the gameplay of Gold and Silver and their Pokedex slots could be better used to build diversity to the lineup. Saying that, I think there’s an alternate world where the babies could have worked. In Red and Green, Doduo first appears midgame, after the fourth gym leader; Grimer appears even later, while Jynx, Electabuzz, and Magmar are rare encounters that are found right before the 7th gym leader, if at all. You could extrapolate this to Tangela and Mr. Mime as well, as they’re two Pokemon that are more or less absent Generation I except in a few cameos. Imagine that in Johto, all of these Pokemon were found in early routes: make Doduno and Monja (Tangela’s baby) available right after beating the 1st gym; make Baririina the first available psychic Pokemon instead of Abra or Drowzee; give out Elekid and Magby as early electric and fire types right before the gyms where they would come in handy. It would create a completely different play experience, since the player would be using Pokemon they’d barely have been able to touch in Generation I; furthermore, this wouldn’t work without these babies, as Pokemon like Grimer or Magmar don’t learn any moves at low levels so you couldn’t just insert low-leveled versions of them into early encounter tables. Honestly, I think this would have been really cool: it would allow the player to see the Pokemon world at a completely different angle, and would allow the reuse of older Pokemon in a fresh light. Of course, if they had gone with this idea, than babies couldn’t have been connected to breeding; they’d have to be available in the wild as a substitute for their evolved forms. And they’d have to learn the entire moveset of the adult, like they did in Spaceworld ’97, rather than just part of it, like most of the surviving babies in the final. And there’d be a tradeoff: this change would mean more Generation I Pokemon being used overall, and less space for new designs, especially because this would encourage players to use the fully evolved forms in the endgame. In the data we have from Spaceworld ’97, Mikon—the Vulpix relative—is actually found in the wild, which leads me to think that the team actually considered this alternate world. While no other babies are found in this encounter data, the encounter tables feel very sketchy and incomplete, which means it’s possible more would have been added as they finished the design. However, it was not meant to be. Design halted sometime in early 1998 and when it resumed the new additions to the design team had their own ideas they wanted to explore. If the team had ever considered using baby Pokemon like I’ve explained, the team soon decided that babies couldn’t be both encounters and linked to breeding, and for whatever reason the team decided that they were better suited as obscure easter eggs for players experimenting with the Daycare. In this world, Doduno no longer looked like he even could serve a purpose. It was never a big loss, because honestly there were better designed Pokemon that got the cut. Still, one can’t help but feel sad for these screaming chicks. (Credit to @RacieBeep) ID 415: ???ID 415 is unused but looks like it could have been. Easily one of the most polished sprites in the Korean Index, 415 has a good pose, completed shading, a backsprite that perfectly matches the front, and has an interesting concept. As far as I can tell, this guy was probably slated for use right up until Spaceworld ’97. Either he was deleted just to make room for one of the last few Pokemon inserted into the game, or he was part of an evolutionary family and was taken out when his relative was removed as well. There’s a lot going on with ID 415’s design. First, it appears to be based on an ankylosaurus, which is known for the armor on its back and the club on its tail. There are seal-like characteristics to him as well, though I think a plesiosaur or another type of swimming dinosaur is the most obvious inspiration for the body shape. And then on top of that, the armor on his back seems strange, almost artificial. If you compare it to a xylophone, the screws on the end of his armor look very similar to the ends holding the pieces of a xylophone together as well. Given that he has a long tail with a club looming over his armor, it’s very plausible that this guy was also meant to be a xylophone crossed with an ankylosaur. (Colorized by @OrangeFrench) We don’t have much to go on here, but it seems like ID 415 would definitely been a Water-type, and possibly a Rock or Steel type, depending on how much the armor on its back was emphasized. Iron Tail, interestingly was a new move invented for Generation II that happened to be Steel-type and could have fit really well on this guy. In Spaceworld '97, it is otherwise only found on the Onix and Manbo1 families. Could this guy have been the original reason the team created this move? The big question about 415 is whether it was a single-stage Pokemon, or if it was designed to be part of an evolutionary line. On the one hand, most of the discarded designs in the Index were one-off designs unconnected to any other Pokemon; on the other, remember that almost all of Era III was designed to connect to another Pokemon in some way. Thus, it’s odd to have five of the ten Pokemon in Period 3a be disconnected to anything else. So while it could be a single stage Pokemon, I think it’s worth considering what could have been its evolutionary relative. The first, and most plausible theory is that 415 is an evolved form of 412, the proto-Dunsparce from Period 3a that also didn’t make it into Spaceworld ’97. Consider the case in favor of this: -Both of these designs are very close together in the Korean Index, and so they might have been made at the same time with the same idea in mind. -Both of them have very similar shading, and similar style eyes. I’d go so far as to say that I’m pretty confident they were sprited by the same artist. -Both even have the same pose! If you look at them, 415’s head is in the same position as 412’s, and both have a tail that curves above their body. It’s an unusual pose, and yet the artist decided to use it twice. Viewed together, it gives the impression 415 is a grown-up and chunkier version of 412. The case against these two being related is simpler. As much as the two might look visually similar, their concepts couldn’t be more different! 412 is a Tsuchinoko, a Japanese mythological snake creature; a xylophone/ankylosaurus/seal has almost nothing in common with this concept. I doubt they’d even be the same types: final Dunsparce is normal, and Proto-Dunsparce could easily have been that or possibly Poison type. But I don’t see any way 415 isn’t Water type, and without them sharing a type, I doubt they could be related. Maybe the artist used the same pose to try out a completely different concept; maybe the pose is a coincidence. The second theory is that 415 is related to ID 344, the Viking ship Pokemon design from Period 2a. Though these two are further apart in the Index, and they’re more visually distinct, they at least seem to have the same typing, and it's possible to see 415’s armor reflected in the black lines on 344’s top. Given the way 344 is sandwiched between a bunch of other used Sugimori designs (and was potentially designed by Sugimori), it seems very likely to me that 344 was under heavy consideration for Spaceworld ’97, so it would have been a prime candidate for the team to reference back to in Era III. Plus, while the pose isn’t exact this time, they both still have flippers and a long tail hanging over their body. Saying that, if I were to guess, I think it's more likely 344 already had an evolutionary relative in the Index: 351. 351 shares the headress and the black stripes of 344, and they're a lot closer in the Index. On the other hand, 351 was part of Period 1e, which looked likely to be throwaway designs, making it less likely it was connected to something else in the Index. It's hard to say for sure, but for my money, the family resemblance between 344 and 351 is far more convincing. Of course, none of these theories could exclude the rest. For instance, Proto-Dunsparce could have been the first-stage of the family, Xylophonesaurus the second, and Viking Ship the third. Or 351 could have been the first stage. While still just as unlikely, it’s not like 415 has to be only connected to 412 or 344 and couldn’t connect to both. Like I said in the entry on Proto-Dunsparce, the relative placement of ID 415, the spritework itself, and the way five Pokemon were, at the last minute, shoved into the last few entries of the Pokedex makes me think that this guy was probably one of the last Pokemon cut from the Spaceworld ’97 Pokedex. Depending on the relationship between 415 and 344, that could also be a hint that 344 was cut late as well. It's pretty enticing to think we could have had a name and a moveset for this guy, if only Game Freak hadn't shoved in Togepi or Snubbull at the last second. Unfortunately, we’ll never know. This guy holds mysteries; but this is all we get out of him. ID 416: SatoWell, next up, we've got one of the more bizarre designs in the Korean Index. Feast your eyes on a dumbstruck, ugly looking, fish with bird wings. It's certainly something. Whatever I may think about the design, Sato is quite interesting. Sato breaks all the rules for what we know about the discarded designs in the Korean Index. Most notably, of course, we know the name of this flying fish. There’s some strange stuff going on here, so we’ll deal with it all in turn. In slot #416, the Korean Index treats us to this odd sprite. His eyes goggle at the viewer, and his big lips take up most of his face and make him look even stranger. He certainly doesn’t look much like a Pokemon; at best, he seems like he better fits the undercooked unused designs of Periods 2d and 1e than he does 3a. At least his concept is pretty clear: he’s a literal interpretation of the idea of a “flying fish.” What’s unique about Sato is that we have more information about this guy than we usually do. In a trash folder in the source code that contained the Korean Index, there’s a few deleted sprites that were thrown away by the designers; most of them with things like the Generation I fossil sprites, which were probably deemed unnecessary in Gold and Silver. However, one of those trashed sprites was an earlier version of ID 416. This is one of the few chances we have to see an earlier version that predates even the Korean Index, so it’s exciting! Except, well, all it was was a fatter version of what we had: I wish it were more exciting, but this is what we got. More important than its sprite was the filename, which named the back sprite “SATO” and the front sprite “SATOF”. That’s super interesting, because it seems like this could be this guy’s actual name! That’s far more than we know about a lot of these, so having a name is pretty neat! It’s even a name that makes a lot of sense with its design: as TCRF hypothesizes, “Sato” could be a portmanteau of “Sakana” (fish) and “Hato” (dove). Saying that, this isn’t the only explanation. First of all, “SATO” could be an abbreviation. It’s hard to tell, since the other sprites found in the source code tend to be named with a different schema than this one. Usually they’re named “PM2F_” followed by their Korean Index number, but sometimes, as with the early Ampharos, they have something other than the index number (in early Ampharos’ case, PM2F_DEN). This is simply an abbreviation for “Pocket Monsters 2 Front”; the “DEN” for Ampharos are the first three letters of its Japanese name. For whatever reason, the old Sato sprite doesn’t use this formula, which is odd; instead the front sprite seems to use four letters to spell out the name (SATO) and then an F to designate that it's the front sprite. That could be an indication that this is the full name, but the fact that the normal naming scheme uses four letters before indicating the Index number could also indicate that “SATOF” is only the first four letters of its name, like Denryuu was abbreviated to "DEN". All I’m saying is that the name could be longer than Sato. One of my earliest hypotheses for this guy was that “SATO” was short for “Satoshi,” which could refer to Satoshi Tajiri or another developer with that name. If that were the case, my guess was that this guy was never actually considered for inclusion in Gold and Silver, but the sprite was some in-joke about Tajiri (or someone else) that we simply aren’t privy too. It was such a weird sprite, and I hard a hard time believing it was taken seriously by the team. Plus, we already know that Snorlax was a joke about Morimoto, so maybe Sato was a joke about something Tajiri had said about fish, or about his physical features? Maybe they revised the sprite to make it less tubby as a way of apologizing to Tajiri? That’s very unlikely; I still wanted to cover it just in case. If I spoke Japanese, I might also be able to find other words or plausible names that start with “Sato,” but as it is, I don’t have any. Sato could also be referring to the sprite artist, rather than the name of the Pokemon as well, giving us a clue who some of those mystery designers were. I’m pretty sure none of the new Pokemon designers had a name that included “Sato” in it though. There’s also the question of why this sprite revision was found in the trash folder, while none of the other Pokemon in the Index were found there. This is, honestly, a mystery. The obvious answer is that this was the last revision done to the Korean Index before the team moved over to their second system of assigning sprites (After May 1998, the team seems to have found a way to directly add sprites to the game from the scratch pads, making the intermediate step of adding them to the Index obsolete). So Sato could be the last Pokemon they worked on before discarding the index, and that slightly-thinner Sato the final design worked on. But that seems to defy logic in a lot of ways. We have good reason to believe, for instance, that the Elekid sprite and the Stantler sprite were both edited post-Spaceworld ’97, and so if any work was done on the Korean Index, certainly it should have been one of their older sprites we found in that trash folder. The most logical hypothesis was that this Sato sprite was from before Spaceworld ’97, since it didn’t appear in that build of the game—if it had already been discarded by SW’97, why in the heck did the designers continue tweaking his sprite into mid 1998? Furthermore, this Sato sprite is incredibly rough, and is far from the style of the other Pokemon that made it into Spaceworld ’97. That suggests that it’s older and wasn’t worked on as much. And yet, here we are, with evidence that it was touched up after most of these other sprites. Like I said, maybe this sprite was a joke; it got touched up because someone got bored at work and they decided to tweak it a little bit. Or maybe the way their computer system worked was weird and it somehow preserved this sprite but deleted other sprites left in the trash. Or, more plausibly, Sato could have been added to the Index only after Spaceworld ’97, erasing something else that used to be in this slot. It’d be a weird addition, but that would explain why it was being worked on so late in the day, and it would also explain why this guy and not Stantler was found in the trash folder. This theory could also explain both why the sprite looks so rough, and why it seems to be in a style dissimilar to the rest of Period 3a. If it was worked on after Spaceworld ’97, then the sprite might have been relatively new before the team stopped using the Korean Index; thus, we could have a very early sprite for it. And if it was added in to the Index after SW’97, then the artist who added it in might have been completely different than the artists who mostly worked on Era III (in fact, this could be a late addition, by the artist who did 1e and 2d). Maybe that means that Sato's the far, far removed early concept for something that got added to the game after development restarted in 1999? I wonder: in a world where Sato got reworked and completed, what would he look like? Maybe something like Goldeen, with wings? Or maybe a version of the SW’97 design of Mantine? This guy looks about as threatening as a Pidgey—could this have been an early game Pokemon like the birds on the first couple routes in most games? Or, given that Sato would have definitely have been a Water/Flying Pokemon, could this be an extremely early idea that eventually morphed into Wingull? Who knows. A literal flying fish is a cool idea, and definitely one that the team could have worked with. The design clearly wasn’t figured out here; but it could have been only a matter of hard work and iteration. ID 417: SunfloraThe final Pokemon of Period 3a in Sunflora, the walking, talking sunflower. It's the second-to-last Pokemon in the Korean Index that doesn’t have an evolutionary relative; everything else except Togepi is related in some way to another Pokemon! Funnily enough, Sunflora did get an evolution in the final game, making it one of only four Pokemon who gained an evolutionary relative between Spaceworld ’97 and the final. 19 Pokemon actually lost an evolution as the games underwent revisions! Sunflora is arguably the most obvious Grass Pokemon design out there; when Game Freak designed the menu icon for Grass Pokemon in Generation I, after all, they made it a flower with eyes. I’m honestly surprised Sunflora wasn’t a holdover design from Generation I’s development, since it feels like such low-hanging fruit; surprisingly, Generation I didn’t have a flower Pokemon, though Bellsprout and Bulbasaur get close to the idea. But if the team was trying to use Era III to round out the game, then adding Sunflora at this point makes sense. Up until this point in the Korean Index, only the Hoppip family, the Chikorita family, and five unused designs—all of which were likely to have already been discarded by this point—show any potential to be Grass types. Given that the Index is literally overflowing with Flying and Water types, this seems like quite an omission, somewhat addressed by Sunflora. (The entirety of Grass-type designs up to this point: Whatever that discarded snow bunny line was supposed to be, Hoppip, Chikorita, this tree guy, and Sunflora) Beyond just being another Grass design, Sunflora was probably also inspired by the new day/night system in Gold and Silver. It was initially named “Sanii” or “Sunny,” which only makes this connection more obvious; and though you can’t catch Sunflora directly in the final games, its pre-evolution Sunkern can only be caught in the daytime. Furthermore, Sunflora’s Pokedex entries focus very closely on its relationship with the sun: Sunflora’s Gold entry states, “It converts sunlight into energy. In the darkness after sunset, it closes its petals and becomes still.” Like the rest of Era III, this isn't a new innovation. We already saw a few experiments with the day/night cycle mechanic, most notably through the creation of Hoothoot. Since Hoothoot, however, there hasn't been much use of this mechanic; any other Pokemon that were connected to day and night were only done so incidentally, not as part of their design. If Hoothoot was supposed to demonstrate a type of Pokemon which could be captured only at night, then it makes a lot of sense to expand upon the idea by making one heavily connected to the day half of the cycle. Sunflora’s movelist also, sort of, reflects this focus on sunlight and daytime. It obviously learns Solarbeam as its final move, but in Spaceworld ’97, Sunflora also learned Morning Sun, an interesting move that recovered more HP if it was used during the morning hours. Otherwise only learned by the Chikorita family and Leafeon, it’s a perfect move for a daytime-themed Pokemon, and it makes me wonder if maybe the team considered having more daylight-only moves in the game, possibly ones that interacted with Sunflora. My guess is that they figured that if they added moves that worked better in the daylight, they’d have to go back and change how things like Solarbeam and Growth worked for consistency. And since that would have been confusing to players and a pain to change, the team eventually settled on the idea that moves like Sunny Day. While the day/night cycle was an older idea, weather effects like Sunny Day (or Rain Dance) are a new idea, something that was probably only decided upon right before the Spaceworld '97 build. A weather move, to be clear, is a move that creates an ongoing weather effect that changes how certain moves work: Rain Dance creates rain which makes water moves more powerful and fire moves weaker; Sunny Day creates harsh sunlight that makes fire moves stronger and makes it so Solarbeam only takes one turn to use. Rain Dance and Sunny Day are the very last regular moves in the Spaceworld '97 movelist (the moves after it are either HM moves or moves that weren't fully programmed in). While I discussed the oddities of the movelist's ordering in the Smeargle article (the short version is that it looks somewhat chronological but a lot of moves were probably shuffled around or repurposed), this makes me think these moves were ideas that the developers implemented very close to the Spaceworld '97 build. This is further confirmed by the fact that Sunny Day is fully programmed into the game but no Pokemon learn it (Rain Dance is learned by a number of Pokemon, on the other hand). Sunflora doesn't learn Sunny Day in SW'97 (nothing does!); instead, it learns Morning Sun. Morning Sun is also late in the movelist, only five spaces before Sunny Day, which makes me think it was also made late in the process (with the caveats I mentioned in the Smeargle article). It's my guess that Morning Sun was an early experiment that got made obsolete by weather moves: maybe the developers felt it was too arbitrary for moves to do better or worse depending on when they were used, or maybe they didn't like how this interacted with multiplayer battles. Whatever the case, Morning Sun is almost completely absent in the final game. In the final game, Morning Sun is bizarrely, is only learned by Espeon and nothing else, despite it still fitting Sunflora’s aesthetics perfectly. Instead of Morning Sun, most Pokemon (not Sunflora, unfortunately) learn Synthesis, which does the exact same thing as Morning Sun, except it interacts with weather effects while Morning Sun does not. Synthesis also still interacts with the time of day (healing more in the daytime), so maybe, on the other hand, the team thought a move that only worked in the morning was too limited. Like I said, though it is fully programmed into the game, Sunny Day isn’t learned by anything in Spaceworld ’97, suggesting it was programmed so late that the team didn’t have a chance to include it in any movesets. Although Sunflora only learns it in the final, I can’t help but wonder if it was created with this ‘mon in mind; in fact, since Sunny Day is at the end of the movelist and Sunflora's towards the end of the Korean Index, that might indicate they were made in concert with each other. The rest of Sunflora’s moveset changed as well, though not as drastically. It learned Sing and Leech Seed in Spaceworld ’97, while it learns Pound in the final. Honestly, Sing seems to fit the aesthetics of a smiling plant a lot more than Pound. Aesthetically, Sunflora stayed pretty similar through development, with two notable changes. First, its palette changed: in SW'97, it's a bright yellow that kind of obscures its details; in the final, Sunflora has green and a darker yellow in its palette (though interestingly, the yellow was kept for its shiny palette). Secondly, in SW’97, Sunflora has roots for feet, but by the final, its roots have been more clearly differentiated into actual feet for the creature. As I’ve said before, Ken Sugimori takes seriously the question of how these Pokemon would survive in their ecosystem, so maybe he worried that Sunflora should naturally be more mobile than those roots would allow. The last major change to Sunflora’s actual design is that, in Spaceworld ’97, “Sunny” was actually a Grass/Psychic Pokemon, rather than pure Grass. Honestly, the Psychic typing doesn’t make a lot of sense for Sunflora, and the team seemingly knew it, because even in SW’97, Sunflora learned no Psychic moves. There’s something very vaguely “mystical” about Sunflora’s design, so maybe the team had an idea to go with the Psychic typing that never quite came through in the sprite? Regardless of what happened, Game Freak noticed the mistake because Sunflora quickly became a regular Grass creature. The most interesting change to happen to Sunflora didn’t actually happen to Sunflora at all. By April of 1999 (the first data we have since development restarted after the hiatus), Sunflora has a first stage evolution. Interesting, the evolution is named “Bayleef,” but it probably was never Chikorita’s middle evolution, but an early version of Sunkern. However, even by June, the proto-Sunkern didn’t have a sprite, and by July and August of 1999, it has lost its stats; evidently, the team planned to delete Sunkern and use the slot for something else. Sunkern finally did get a basic, sketchy stand-in sprite by Spaceworld ’99, so the team clearly changed their minds; it’s possible they either didn’t have any ideas for its replacement or they simply had their hands full with Sneasel, Wobbuffet, Dunsparce and the other last-minute designs. Maybe, given time constraints, the team just decided to revert this slot back to whatever they had before, which happened to be Sunkern. Some have wondered if ID #404 was the original design for Sunkern, and that it was made to evolve into Sunflora. I think this is unlikely, mostly because the earliest version of Sunkern that appears in the June 1999 sprite collection only has a placeholder sprite; if 404 really was an earlier version of Sunkern, I'd expect to see it there instead. Saying that, given that Sunkern was left out of SW'97, it could be the case that the team just didn't want to go all the way back to discarded sprites from earlier than SW'97. Furthermore, since the team went back and forth so many times on including Sunkern, it could be the case that they deleted this sprite completely from the build earlier than June 1999, before we have any sprite collections. So it isn't impossible that 404 was a very early concept. Sunkern is its own story completely, so we'll come back to this mess once we get to that part of the Cryptodex. But I think it's also worth telling here, because of how it effects Sunflora. Sunflora's stats were shuffled up an down constantly through development in 1999, as the team tried to decide whether it would be a one-stage or a two-stage Pokemon. Furthermore, even in the final game, Sunflora learns some of its moves very early, at an earlier level than you can possibly catch a Sunkern. This shows how close Sunflora was to being a single stage Pokemon; in Spaceworld '99, it's even found in the wild at low levels where Sunkerns would otherwise be found in the final! On top of that, unlike other Pokemon that evolve by evolutionary stones (Sunkern is one of the few Pokemon to use the new Sunstone to evolve into Sunflora), Sunflora continues to learn all its moves after it evolves. In most other cases, like Poliwrath and Clefable, any Pokemon that evolves by evolutionary stone stops learning moves in its evolved form; the fact that Sunflora doesn't follow this pattern demonstrates how it still had a learnset more befitting a single stage Pokemon!
That's all for Sunflora, and for Period 3a! Next time, we'll face a bunch of evolutionary relatives and one of the weirdest mysteries of Spaceworld '97.
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Era III OverviewThe final stretch of the Korean Index is perhaps the most focused, and the most coherent. If Era II ended with a rough draft of a complete Pokedex, Era III was clearly a period of development in which the team was refining that Pokedex into a usable roster. Era III is heavily focused, for instance, on making connections between designs. 35 of the 41 designs in Era III are evolutions of existing designs (either earlier in the Korean Index, or from Generation I). Of those, the last 31 designs in Korean Index, with the sole exception of Togepi, form a string of unbroken evolutionary relatives. In addition to that, 27 of these 41 designs were meant to extend Generation I evolutionary lines, and thus create connections between the first games and this new sequel. Very few Pokemon designed at the end of the Korean Index were completely new ideas; instead, almost all of them purposefully tried to build on existing creations. In addition to that, only three of the 41 designs in Era III don’t appear in Spaceworld ’97. This shows two things. First, it means that all of these final 41 designs were worked on and developed into usable designs, unlike Periods 1a, 1b, 1e, and 2d, which felt much more like brief sketches of ideas. More importantly, it probably also indicates that these were all made right before Spaceworld ’97. After all, if basically all of these designs appear in Spaceworld ’97, the team probably didn’t have time to replace them with anything: these were probably the last designs meant to finish off that build of the game. Thus, the patterns we find in Era III are some of the best evidence we have that the Korean Index is somewhat chronological. That so many of these designs were used in the 1997 build suggests that they were made very close to the date of the Spaceworld event. In fact, the evidence we have is that Hitmontop was very likely designed, at the earliest, in April 1997; since Hitmontop is at the beginning of Period 3a, we can likely date the rest of the Korean Index from this date. The Spaceworld '97 build of the game is dated November 15th, 1997, which means that all of Era III was made in just that eight months before the SW'97 build. That's not a lot of time to create a large chunk of the roster! Era III cleanly divides into three sections. Period 3a, from 408 (Mareep) to 417 (Sunflora), was the last gasp of the designers making wholly new creations, rather than adding on evolutionary relatives to other families. Some of these are evolutionary relatives of other Pokemon, but four of the ten are unique. This is also the last section to have designs that aren’t found in SW ’97; saying that, even these designs are more interesting than those of Period 2d, and it's very likely that all three were cut from Spaceworld ’97 at the last minute. Period 3b, from 418 (Turban) to 438 (Para), is entirely composed of designs that add an evolutionary relative to a Pokemon from Generation I (Turban is an interesting pseudo-exception and we’ll discuss it when we get to it). This is probably the most disciplined part of the entire Index—with only one possible exception to the pattern in the entire sequence—and my suspicion is that this entire group was designed very quickly as part of an initiative to create as many links to Generation I as possible. Interestingly, babies make a return in this sequence; there’s also a focus on giving underwhelming single-stage Pokemon from Generation I a powerful second form, to make them more relevant. Period 3c, from 439 (Flaafy) to 448 (Tyrogue) still has some designs that extend the evolutionary lines from Generation I, but the focus has switched to instead fleshing out Generation II lines. These last ten designs were probably the final tweaking of the roster the team did before the end result of Spaceworld ’97: these designs were probably quickly produced to fill last-minute gaps in the Pokedex. On top of that, Period 3c has one strange exception—Togepi—that wasn’t designed as an evolutionary relative. Instead, it was probably snuck in at the very last second of design, so the team would have a cute, lovable, mascot character that they could use to get fans excited for the sequel. Period 3a: 408 (Mareep) to 417 (Sunflora) Like I noted above, Period 3a is a bit of a mix. Like the rest of Era III, Period 3a focuses on evolutionary relatives of Generation I Pokemon; unlike the rest of Era III, this section doesn’t only cover evolutionary relatives, but still introduces new designs as well. It also, unlike the other sections of Era III, has a few unused designs: Proto-Dunsparce, Anklosuarus Seal, and Sato the flying fish. Saying that, it’s obviously a divergence from Era II, and Period 2d in particular. Despite featuring new designs, the additions in Period 3a are not introducing new gameplay mechanics, unique type combinations, or Pokemon designed to fill some gameplay niche, like was distinctive of Era II; instead, the additions here seem to expand upon previously introduced concepts. Even the three designs in this Period that are unused in SW ’97 are drastically more complete than the ones in Period 2d: not only are they (mostly) higher quality sprites, but we even have a name for one of them. Despite the lack of focus in Period 3a, these ten Pokemon are very clearly the beginning of the larger themes of Era III: evolutionary families and expanding connections between Generation II and Generation I. Era II introduced all the new concepts that Generation II would use; Era III, starting here, defines exactly the direction the team would take these concepts. ID #408: MareepIt’s Mareep! Everyone’s favorite sheep! Or at least mine. Mareep is adorable, a slam dunk of a design. The design team clearly agreed with this assessment, because although it got a palette change, and its sprite was touched up, Mareep remained pretty much the same (static, you might say) from the moment of conception to the final game. Still, there’s one key mystery worth being discussed with Mareep. But first, basics. Mareep’s a sheep. The idea of making it electric type probably comes from the idea that wool can generate a static shock if rubbed together; thus, a sheep with tons of wool could conceivably have its own electric field. It might also come from the famous Phillip K Dick book, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” a story set in a dystopian future in which most animals are dead and the only way to tell apart a human from an android duplicate is that humans can feel empathy for animals. As much as I’d like Mareep to have a weirdly-dark origin story, at best the designers were aware of this sci-fi title and took it literally. Mareep’s original Japanese name was “Pachimee,” which, according to TCRF, is a portmanteau of Pachipachi (Spark) and Mee (Bleat). A very cute name that perfectly describes Mareep. Sometime in early 1999, when development on Gold and Silver restarted, its name turned into Mareep. This name is less clear; it’s definitely a portmanteau of sheep and something else. Bulbapedia suggests Mary from “Mary had a little lamb” but I think “Merry” like it’s happy is more likely. Or maybe Maa is another transliteration of it bleating, like “Baa”. Mareep is also an anagram of Ampere, a unit of measurement for electricity, so maybe they chose the “Ma” part to make the anagram work. Whatever the reason, it’s still a cute name. Mareep’s Spaceworld ’97 backsprite doesn’t match its frontsprite, a minor difference that I find interesting because it implies there was an earlier version of this frontsprite. In the backsprite, Mareep has little pink hooves on each of its feet, while in the frontsprite its legs are simple black stubs. The back sprite is also noticeably lower quality, in that the proportions are odd and it isn’t visually obvious what the tail and the feet are supposed to be at first glance. Clearly the hooves didn’t work, because the designer cleaned up the frontsprite. From there, it basically stayed the same the rest of Mareep’s life. The big unanswerable question about Mareep is its original relationship to Ampharos. We know Ampharos was one of the first Pokemon created for Gold and Silver, and the team quite liked him. But Ampharos is clearly not a sheep: depending on how you interpret the information we have about Ampharos, it might have been originally conceived of as a space alien or a dragon. So was Mareep designed to be its evolutionary relative, or did that come later, when Flaafy was created? And was the plan always for it to have three stages, or was there a brief time in which Mareep and Ampharos were a two-stage family? Since Era III is almost entirely made of evolutionary relatives, the evidence seems to point to the idea that Mareep was always made to be related to Ampharos. But it isn’t conclusive. Remember that while Periods 3b and 3c are only evolutions, Period 3a still has its share of new single stage creations, such as Sunflora, Murkrow, and Sato. On top of that, Mareep’s palette, a pink color, looks quite different from Ampharos, and even with both of them lined up it’s hard to see how one evolves into the other. If we change Mareep’s palette to Ampharos’s, it really helps to make them look a little more related; maybe this was Mareep's original palette, and is was only made pink when Flaafy was created? Mareep does look quite good in that yellow palette, and it went back to a similar yellow palette before the final game. (All speculative recolorings by @OrangeFrench!) What really convinces me that Mareep was made with Ampharos in mind (and not as an independent Pokemon first) are its ears. While everything else about Mareep and Ampharos look completely different, they share the exact same ears. While on Ampharos they look like some sort of horns, on Mareep they look a little more like a strange exaggeration of a sheep’s floppy ears. Ampharos’ ears are distinctive enough that I can’t really put this down to coincidence. It could conceivably be the case that Mareep had an earlier sprite without these ears, and they were added on later on when Mareep was redesigned to evolve into Ampharos. If that were so, we'd have no evidence, however, because any earlier sprite without those ears would have been overwritten by the SW'97 sprite in the Korean Index. Wait a second. What about that backsprite we looked at earlier, with the hooves. That sprite was from an earlier iteration of Mareep. What did its ears look like? It... didn't have ears? Oh that's interesting... Instead, the back sprite just seems to have a circular protrusion where the conical ears should be. Could this be a remnant of an earlier design of Mareep, before it was made into a relative of Ampharos? Or is the angle just a little bit strange and we just can't see the ears? It's also hard to see, but Mareep's tail--which looks just like Ampharos' in the front sprite--instead is a different shape here, like a lightbulb. It's another way this backsprite shows a less Ampharos-like earlier design. I’m not sure what to think. Draw your own conclusions. To add to this debate, let's also take into account Atsuko Nishida's personal style in designing evolutionary relatives. Both Mareep and Ampharos' sprites were clearly designed by her, and Nishida has said in interviews that she likes it when the third stage of an evolutionary family is completely different from the first two stages; she’s said she likes to surprise the player with how the Pokemon turns out. The archetypical case of this is Dragonair and Dragonite: Nishida specifically designed Dragonite to look completely different, so it was a surprise for the player to end up with this dopey dragon. So it would be completely within her regular style for Mareep and Ampharos to look so different. If Mareep was designed to be related to Ampharos, my hunch is that Flaafy was also already in the works, but it just didn't quite have a sprite yet. Flaafy’s not much further in the index, and given the huge gulf between Mareep and Ampharos, it makes sense that even at this stage the team knew a three stage family would work better aesthetically. There isn’t really any evidence either way, just a guess based upon the sprites themselves. After Spaceworld ’97, when development restarted, Mareep’s sprite got a makeover and a palette change, but its design (and its pose) stayed basically the same. Now its face was blue and its wool was yellow, subtly making it look more similar to Ampharos. It also got an updated moveset after Spaceworld ’97, and its Pokedex entry in Spaceworld ’99 got mildly updated before the final; however, both changes were minor, and didn’t really change anything about Mareep. Sometimes you create perfection, and there isn’t anything to fix, I guess. ID #409: Hitmontop Adding a third brother to the Hitmon family line was a great idea. It doesn't feel like the most obvious move Game Freak could have made--Hitmonchan and Hitmonlee feel like they cover the binary between fighting styles pretty well, and neither are super popular--but the fact that a third Hitmon is so unexpected is part of what makes Hitmontop work. Pokemon loves trios—the Legendary Birds, the Eeveelutions, whatever the Magmar line is—almost as much as it loves version exclusive duos, and turning a duo into a trio is something that they otherwise didn't try in Gold and Silver. I also like that unlike Slowking, or Crobat, or Politoed, Hitmontop wasn't just an evolution of a Generation one Pokemon. Though the team eventually made it related, evolutionarily, to Hitmonchan and Hitmonlee, the idea of making a connected Pokemon like Hitmontop is an underexplored way of building on an earlier game. I also like how the design of Hitmontop fits its concept: if Hitmonchan was had high attack and Hitmonlee had high defense, then Hitmontop was supposed to be right in the middle of both of them, with balanced stats. And what could be more "balanced" than a top? I’ll just start with it right from the gate: I think that Hitmontop wasn’t initially created to serve as an alternative evolution for the Hitmon family. Given that Tyrogue is the very last Pokemon in the Korean Index, my suspicion is that Tyrogue was a last minute idea to unite all three into one family, rather than let them be a trio like the Legendary Birds or the Jynxmarbuzzes. One reason to think this is because the evolutionary method by which Tyrogue (Gong in Spaceworld ’97) evolves into each of the three Hitmons is clearly incomplete in Spaceworld '97. In the final game, Tyrogue evolves based on which of its stats are higher: attack gives it Hitmonchan, defense Hitmonlee, and if they're the same, it becomes Hitmontop. But in Spaceworld '97, this evolutionary method was not implemented. There, it evolves into all of them at level twenty, at the same time: first it’ll turn into Hitmonlee, and then into Hitmonchan, and then into Hitmontop, but only if you cancel each evolution. Obviously, this is unintuitive and lacks any clear flavor; it was likely just a placeholder before the team figured out exactly how they wanted Gong to evolve. Now, this isn’t conclusive by any means: the team could have meant for a Pokemon like Tyrogue to exist as early as the creation of Hitmontop, but just didn’t manage to get to designing it before the final push right before the SW ’97 build. After all, Era III almost entirely made of evolutionary relatives. But given the way Hitmontop appears earlier than Tyrogue, and how it’s found in Period 3a and not later (where we do still have a sizable amount of designs which weren’t evolutions), it seems plausible that it was originally designed just as a new connection to Gen I, rather than explicitly as an evolution. While it was a good idea to add a third Hitmon and make a trilogy, Hitmontop seems like it was a bit difficult to design. First of all, the team didn’t fall back on the same naming scheme of Hitmontop’s brothers. In English, Hitmonchan and Hitmonlee are named after famous martial artists—Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee, respectively—and in Japanese Sawamular is named after the kickboxer Tadashi Sawamura, while Ebiwara was named after Hiroyuki Ebihara, a boxer. As far as I know, there’s no famous martial artist named “top,” and Hitmontop’s Japanese name—Kapoera—is named after a style of martial arts from Brazil named Capoeira. It’s a fitting name, since practitioners of Capoeira tend to fight by doing acrobatic stunts, like kicking from a handstand position. Eddie, from Tekken, fights with a Capoeira style; why didn't we get Hitmoneddie? Then there’s Hitmontop's sprite. The Spaceworld ’97 sprite for Hitmontop is a really fascinating concept. Shaped like a top, it has three legs on its head that seem to be spinning around and a needle of a top below its body. But it also has a devious look on its face and is holding its hands like it’s meditating while its legs spin (Notice that in its SW ’97 moveset, Hitmontop even learns the move Meditate, but doesn’t learn the move by the final). It’s also, strangely, got another eye around where its belly-button would be, giving it the appearance that it might have a second, upsidedown, head that it’s spinning on. Or maybe the eye is a mystical third eye, to go along with the meditation theme? Also notice that on its frontsprite, Hitmontop’s legs are equidistant from each other, while on the backsprite they seem to be clustered around one side. Maybe that’s to give the sprite a sense of movement? Or maybe this was an artifact from an earlier design? It’s a really complicated concept for a fighting Pokemon: it has two faces, it doesn’t walk on its legs, it seems to be meditating, etc. Why does Hitmontop have feet on its head, and if that’s how its supposed to be oriented, how does it move around? It also looks nothing like the other Hitmons, except for its palette and some similarities on its feet-talons and its upside down head. It all feels too high-concept for me. It looks a little more like the other hitmons when you turn it upside down, but even then it's a big of a stretch: It’s no surprise to me that Hitmontop was heavily reworked before the final version of Gold and Silver, given its strange design. You can see the team were thinking this through by June 1999, the next time we have a sprite for Hitmontop. Its palette is weird, and I’m not sure exactly why that is: it seems to be using the palette that Tyrogue uses in the final game. Which is strange because Tyrogue is using this palette already in June 1999, but with its old design, and it looks wrong on that sprite too. So I’m not sure where that palette initially came from, and it's strange Hitmonstop still uses that palette in the final, even though it doesn't match the palette for the other two Hitmons at all. But that’s all an aside, beside the point. The important thing is to notice how the team have changed Hitmontop’s face in this sprite: It’s subtle, but now its face looks more like the final version, and it’s clearly spinning upside down! You can see that Hitmontop now has an open mouth and that its extra eye has been moved up on its body. Hitmontop is no longer meditating, but now it also doesn’t seem to have legs sprouting from its head for some reason. By the final version of the sprite, Hitmontop got a complete revamp—probably by a new artist—but the design was still moving in the same direction started earlier that year. By the final, Hitmontop no longer looks like a bizarre top, and instead was redesigned to be a Hitmon which can spin upside down to kick its opponents. Its legs and body now look humanoid, and its head looks like the rest of the family. It isn’t unique because of how its body is composed anymore, but because of how it fights. There’s another strange oddity regarding Hitmontop’s visual design, but to understand it, we have to go back before Spaceworld ’97. About seven months before the Spaceworld ’97 demo was shown to the public, a Japanese video game magazine, Microgroup Game Review, featured a cover with new Sugimori artwork, plus an interview with Ken Sugimori about the upcoming Pokemon 2. The artwork looked like it featured new Pokemon designs next to Pokemon trainers, but Sugimori denied that was the case at all. In the interview, Sugimori explained that the three Pokemon-like creatures featured were not Pokemon designs, but something similar to Pokemon. The cover showed “another world, like Pokemon, but not Pokemon.” But that’s clearly a lie, because if you look at the cover, Tyranitar is right there, clear as daylight: (Credit to Dr. Lava for the high resolution scan of this artwork) This magazine cover has become infamous among Pokemon fans, and I’ll talk about it a lot more when we eventually get to Tyranitar. But the reason I bring it up now is because of the Pokemon to the bottom-left of Tyranitar. It’s a bit of a weird design, but it looks a little like a merger between Clefairy and Hitmontop. When you consider the original Spaceworld ’97 design of Hitmontop, the similarities are even more unarguable. So what’s going on here? The best explanation is that when Sugimori drew these designs, he meant what he said: these were just concepts that could have been Pokemon, but at the time weren’t planned to be Pokemon. However, as development continued, the team would have needed more designs, and Sugimori may have reached back to this magazine cover for new ideas. Sugimori says later in the same interview that he gets the ideas for his designs by looking back at his earlier concepts and constantly revising them; it seems absolutely possible that this design inspired the team to come up with Hitmontop, or that they came up with the idea of a new, "balanced" Hitmon, and Sugimori's mind went back to this top concept. If that were the case, we know that Era III can be dated past April of 1997. This, interestingly, means that all the rest of the designs in the Korean Index were done in a hurry, probably all within eight months or even less. No wonder Hitmontop looks odd: the team probably had time to get a basic concept sprited, and then had to move on to other designs. So this strange design on the cover, then, was possibly an inspiration for Hitmontop, but reworked drastically when the team wanted to create a new Hitmon. Despite the connection, it's unlikely that the cover design was ever programmed into the game. The only other thing worth noting is Hitmontop’s movepool. Honestly, it’s not very focused in either Spaceworld ’97 or in the final. In both, Hitmontop has a smattering of moves that the other Hitmons also learn: Pursuit, Rolling Kick, Detect, and Focus Energy. On top of those, it has Rapid Spin—quite flavorful even if it’s a bit of a bland move—and Triple Kick, which was a signature move created just for Hitmontop, to match the way its three head-legs would spin and hit the opponent in succession. In modern games, Hitmontop has a bit of a priority-move theme going on: it has a lot of moves that go first, like Quick Attack, Sucker Punch, Helping Hand, Quick Guard, and Counter, and some that go last, like Revenge. But this theme doesn’t really exist yet. Unlike Hitmonchan, which gets a flexible assortment of punching moves, and Hitmonlee, which gets four kick moves of increasing power, Hitmontop lacks a lot of identity, being a mostly middle-of-the-road Pokemon with the signature Triple Kick. Which makes sense given that its supposed to be the balanced of the three brothers, but it feels a little bit lame to play. Its clear that Hitmontop’s strange concept was hard to execute as a theme, even though the team had a lot of time to make it work. Overall, I like Hitmontop. I used to like its Spaceworld ’97 design a lot more, since the final looked kind of bland to me, but on reflection, I think they made the right choice: a weird meditating creature with legs for hair was too strange a theme for this Pokemon. Hitmontop is stronger for the redesign, even if it became a bit blander. ID 410: BetobebiiWe’ve seen baby Pokemon before this point; at this stage in the Korean Index, we’ve seen Elebebii, Pichu, Cleffa, Puchikoon, Gyopin, and Mikon. But Betobebii’s something new. It demonstrates how the team, in Era III, had decided to move in a new direction with baby Pokemon. While almost all the baby Pokemon that follow from Betobebii didn’t make the final cut, Betobebii shows that baby Pokemon don’t have to be cute or iconic Pokemon; the team was willing to try to make almost any two-stage evolutionary family into a three stage one. Previous to Era III, you can basically divide the baby Pokemon designs into three groups. Pichu and Cleffa are smaller, cuter versions of already cute mascot Pokemon; their purpose is presumably to build upon the popularity of Pikachu and Clefairy by creating new variations in the sequel. The second group was the most interesting sequence in Period 2c: Puchikoon, Gyopin and Mikon were all discarded designs from Generation I repurposed into baby Pokemon for Generation II. Thirdly, Elebebii falls into a strange category all on its own: probably not designed to be a baby Pokemon originally, Elebebii was later retconned into one once the team decided to create Magby and Smoochum. But Betobebii doesn’t fit any of these categories. Given its cuteness and where it appears in the Index, it was clearly designed to be a baby Pokemon, unlike Elebebii. It’s not a design discarded from Generation I, at least as far as we know, and given the elements in its design that make it cuter than Grimer, it seems unlikely it was made for the previous games. And thirdly, Betobebii was not designed to take advantage of the popularity of an existing ‘mon: Grimer is rarely listed as anyone’s favorite Pokemon and it hardly had any sizable appearance in the anime. Instead, Betobebii is the first in a line of baby Pokemon which seem to have been created just to create a more sizable and diverse lineup of baby Pokemon in the new generation. Era III has eleven separate designs for baby Pokemon in it, and of those, only Igglybuff and Koonya are related to particularly popular Pokemon. Instead, the team seems to have found as many one-stage and two-stage families from Generation I that could potentially have another relative, and created whatever design they could think of. (ID 400, if I’m right that it was designed as a Drowzee pre-evolution, might actually be the first pioneer of this new type of baby Pokemon; if so, Betobebii is an acknowledgement that this was a good idea, even if the team didn’t like ID 400’s design.) Why would the team start designing babies out of seemingly random Pokemon? First, baby Pokemon could have proven popular with the team working on the games, and thus they decided to mine this design space to see what they could come up with. Secondly, maybe it was an attempt to revitalize some of the less popular 'mons from Generation I: if they were unpopular, maybe a cute baby version would give them a fanbase? Or third, the team was getting close to end of development of the Pokemon roster (remember, it was probably only seven or six months until Spaceworld ’97), and the team may have been making a lot of baby Pokemon because it was easy to design smaller versions of existing creatures. While the Pokedex was theoretically full after the end of Era II, the team could have already grown unsatisfied with a lot of those earlier designs; baby Pokemon might have been quickly iterated to fill those slots, at least until a better idea came around. That could partly explain why so few of these baby Pokemon survived to the final game. Of the eleven baby Pokemon which appear in Era III, only four of them survived past Spaceworld ’97 (none of the three that appeared in Period 2c did). This could suggest that these were all concepts that the team was only lightly devoted to, and that most of them were seen as easily cut when a better idea came along. Another explanation is that the team discovered that, despite how cute and adorable baby Pokemon are, they’re don’t really contribute anything to the gameplay of the games. They aren’t found in the wild (mostly, although Mikon is found in some encounter tables in Spaceworld ’97), they are incredibly weak, they share the same movesets with the adults (making them redundant), and they evolve so quickly that most players wouldn’t have babies in their team for long. The biggest problem is that these flaws are all baked into the idea conceptually: babies, by design, have to be bad in battles and somewhat redundant. After the team restarted development in early 1999, they may have simply decided that the slots devoted to baby Pokemon could be better devoted to new ideas that would flesh out the world they were building. Betobebii survived slightly longer than the other deleted baby-mon’s. This guy’s sprite can still be found hanging around by June 1999, with ever-so-slightly tweaked eyes, and a completely gray palette. At that point, it doesn’t have a name, or a moveset, and that gray palette makes it feel like they didn't bother coloring the guy! It’s in the Pokedex slot that was eventually filled by Magcargo and then Slugma, and so my guess is that the sprite is just there as a placeholder; they had scrubbed the data clean of Betobebii but didn’t yet have sprites to overwrite it with. None of the other deleted baby-mon appear in this June 1999 sprite collection; only Betobebii. Maybe there was something special about this guy, or maybe all the other ones were deleted only after the team had come up with a new Pokemon. Betobebii’s name, by the way, is actually pretty cute. “Betobeto” is a Japanese word that can mean “sticky;” it’s also an onomatopoeia, for the sound a sticky thing makes (maybe when you walk on it and it sticks to your shoe?). The word is used in the Japanese names of Grimer and Muk as well—Betobeta and Betobeton—so it makes sense to use it for the baby version. And, of course, the second half of Betobebii’s name is just a transliteration of the English word “baby,” making this Pokemon literally “Sticky baby.” If it had gotten an English name, it probably would have been some like “Grimy.” (As a quick aside, I just noticed that Betobebii doesn't have quite the same palette as Grimer and Muk. Maybe that's a sign they were sprited by different people?) I find its sprite a little bit adorable; its amazing how the team were somehow able to make Grimer of all things precious. However, there is a little bit of ambiguity about its sprite: namely, what is the dark circle at the center of Betobebii's face? Some people think it’s a pacifier in the baby’s mouth, but I feel like if it was a pacifier, the sprite would have looked more explicitly like one. It could also be a nose, possibly like Diglett’s nose, or the nose of a clown. That’s personally what I see when I look at this guy. Finally, the more outlandish among us see it as a really tiny mouth, with maybe a single tiny tooth. While I like this interpretation a lot, and it certainly seems fitting for the Grimer family, I’m also skeptical; it feels like the shading is implying the “mouth” actually protrudes outward, rather than inwards. We’ll never know, unfortunately, since I doubt we’ll never hear more about Betobebii from Game Freak. Poor mystery baby. ID 411: Murkrow Murkrow’s a simple guy. His English name is a mix of “murky” and “crow,”; his Japanese name is a mix of “yami” (darkness), and karasu (crow). Can't get more straightforward than that. The feathers on his head look like a witch’s hat, and his tail is supposed to resemble a witch’s broom. He was made to be a Dark/Flying Pokemon, and he shows off exactly what a Dark/Flying Pokemon should do. Everything about Murkrow is right there on the tin: you get exactly what you’re asking for with Murkrow. Murkrow looks like a Sugimori design to me, in that its proportions are mostly well-drawn, its concept is simple, and it didn’t go through much changes over the course of development. The main difference between the earliest Murkrow we have and the final version is that his theme was a lot more obvious in Spaceworld ’97. There, Murkrow is clearly wearing an actual witch’s cap, rather than its feathers just looking a lot like a cap. It’s also got a slightly more malevolent grin, which was toned down as well by the final. (Credit to @Raciebeep for the great beta Murkrow art!) Sugimori has gone on record as not liking Pokemon that look too obviously like they have human tools, or if they don't look like they'd fit in the wild. Many of his other designs from Generation II that were based on real objects-- Remoraid, Octillery, Mantine, and Delibrid, for instance—all had their themes made more subtle by the final game, so the change to Murkrow’s hat fits with the same changes that were being made elsewhere. The change to his grin fits larger patterns as well: even though Dark-type was characterized as “evil” early on in development, Sugimori has made a point to say that he didn’t think any Pokemon should be evil, since any of them have the potential to be the player’s friend. It’s possible that maybe making Murkrow a little less mean looking helped turn it into a more appealing companion. If you look at Murkrow’s early movepool, it suggests that the team hadn’t yet fleshed out how Dark-type Pokemon should act. Murkrow’s initial moveset is all over the place, filled with “sneaky” or “dirty trick” type moves: it gets Sand Attack, Spikes, Detect, Foresight, Faint Attack, Stalker (ie, Mean Look), and Perish Song. All of these moves, to some extent, could be themed around sneaky behavior: Detect dodges an attack, Sand Attack throws sand in their eyes, Spikes punishes them for switching out, Perish Song punishes the opponent for not switching, and Mean Look is, well, mean. Detect’s an especially weird move that the team also gave to Sneasel, one of the few other resident Dark-types in Spaceworld ’97 (Twinz, Girafarig, Rinrin, and Berurun being the others). In the final, the legendary birds and some fighting Pokemon learn Detect, but not much else. Instead of coming up with a single theme for Murkrow, it seems like this early moveset just decided to try everything. If a move seemed sneaky or underhanded, just hand it to Murkrow. Why not? It's dark type. It doesn't seem like the team got much past "Dark-type bird" in concept for early Murkrow. In the final, Murkrow’s moveset underwent a huge revamp. It lost most of its moves except for Peck, Faint Attack, and Mean Look, but it gained Haze and Night Shade. The final Murkrow was a lot less tricky, and now its main form of attack was a Ghost-type move. The team must have trying to make Night Shade much more of a staple for “mysterious” style Pokemon: they also gave it to the Natu line and the Spinarak line in the final games. Final Murkrow seems, to me, to be much worse in combat. Which, I guess, makes sense, given that it’s unusable by the player for most of the game. I’ve mentioned this before, but it blows my mind how Dark-type Pokemon were basically unusable by the player prior to the post-game in Gold and Silver, with the only exception being Umbreon. Like Houndour, Murkrow is only found on three Kanto Routes, after the Elite Four and way past when it would be useful to have this guy available; unlike Houndoom, which at least has the stats to be vaguely useful in the late game, Murkrow’s designed much more like something you’d get in the early-to-mid game, compounding its uselessness by the time you get it. At least Murkrow has a little more representation than Houndour: four trainers use a Murkrow in Gold and Silver, while only two bother to use and Houndour or a Houndoom. But it’s still not a lot. Again, it feels bizarre to introduce a whole new type into the game, and then make it this scarce. Maybe they were trying to make the new type feel special if you finally found one, or like I’ve suggested before, maybe the team wasn’t confident about the balance for Steel and Dark types, and so they hid them in the end game, where they could do minimum damage if they were overtuned. A commenter, Paul, has also suggested that maybe the Pokemon team saw Pokemon Stadium 2 as the true endgame of Gold and Silver, and left a lot of rarer or more unique Pokemon in the Kanto portion of Gold and Silver so you could collect them specifically to beat that game. While absolutely possible, I don’t know of anything interviews or other evidence that could confirm or deny this theory. The only real oddity concerning Murkrow is its placement here in Era III. It sort of fits the larger theme of Era III, in that Murkrow was clearly designed as a way to have one more example of a Dark-type in the Pokedex; I mean, looking at its sprites, Murkrow feels almost as if it was the first idea that anyone had when asked “what would a Dark/Flying type look like?” Era III seems to have been a period to expand upon existing ideas in the Pokedex, and Murkrow is doing exactly that. On the other hand, Murkrow is one of the few Pokemon in Era III not to evolve or be designed as an evolution for something else. That’s not entirely out of keeping for Period 3a: after all, next up is Dunsparce, and four and five designs further down the Korean Index we find Sato and Sunflora, both of which didn’t evolve. Still, given how Murkrow has pretty low stats—compared to Gen I single-stage evolutions, its stats are higher than Farfetch’d but lower than Tangela and much lower than Tauros—and how it looks unimpressive as it is, I wouldn’t be surprised if the team had at least floated the idea of giving Murkrow an evolution later in Era III and just never got around to it. Murkrow, like Sneasel, Gligar, and Misdreavus, was a Gen II single-stage Pokemon that got an evolutionary relative in Generation IV, and we know that some of the Pokemon which had an evolution in Spaceworld ’97 but not in the final—Tangela and Lickitung—got a revised version of those evolutions in Generation IV. There’s no evidence anywhere for a Murkrow evolution in Generation II, but all of this leads me to speculate that the team may have briefly considered the idea. (Credit to enumise for the art!) That’s all I’ve got for Murkrow. Next up, everyone’s favorite snake…thing. It’s Dunsparce! ID 412: Dunsparce? (Note: I can’t confirm that this sprite was the sprite it had before Spaceworld; this sprite could have been updated between November 1997 and May 1998. However, given that it didn’t appear in the Spaceworld ’97 demo nor the spriteset from June 1999, I doubt the team spent much effort updating it in this period). ID 412 is an odd one. It’s probably an early version of Dunsparce, but it didn’t appear in Spaceworld ’97, so we can’t be sure. Furthermore, if it was an early Dunsparce, then Dunsparce went through quite a journey: Dunsparce didn’t appear even in June 1999 and was nothing more than a thrown together concept by Spaceworld 1999, only a few months before the final game. So what happened here? First of all, lets talk a bit about what this early sprite is, and what Dunsparce is based on. ID 412 is definitely based off of the Japanese mythological creature called a Tsuchinoko, which translates to “child of gravel,” “child of the earth,” or “child of the hammer.” It’s a strange creature with a ton of random mythology surrounding it. First of all, the Tsuchinoko looks like a fat snake; it’s not very long compared to other snakes, and has a fat lump in the middle of its body, almost like its digesting something. Some legends say that it will bit its tail and turn into a wheel to travel more quickly; others say that its venomous and jumps at its prey; others say that the Tsuchinoko loves getting drunk on alcohol; others say that this little snake guy can even talk, but spends most of its words lying and being generally untrustworthy. Like the Tanuki, it’s a creature that could plausibly exists (though Tanuki definitely exist, and a real Tsuchinoko has never been spotted), but both of them have so much magical backstories attached to them that a real-life version would be almost completely different from the imagined one. One touch I like about the final Dunsparce is that in mythology, Tsuchinoko’s are only found in secluded mountains of Japan; In the final game, Dunsparce’s are an extremely rare encounter only in the Dark Cave, which happens to be a secluded mountain cave in Johto. It’s small, but its nice that you find a Tsuchinoko Pokemon exactly where you’d expect it to be. On top of its obvious Tsuchinoko-like characteristics, ID 412 also has an eye-like pattern on its forehead, which suggests to me that the initial concept could have involved 412 having psychic or mysterious powers of some sort. It’s also a pretty well-done sprite that looks pretty finished, making it even stranger that the sprite doesn’t show up in Spaceworld ’97. It’s possible that the sprite could date to after Spaceworld ’97, but like I said above, I’m not sure why they’d bother updating it very drastically if 412 didn’t even appear in the Pokedex as late as June 1999. ID 412 isn’t the only design from Era III that doesn’t appear in Spaceworld ’97, but it’s close: of the next 37 designs in the Korean Index, only 415 and 416 also didn’t make it into Spaceworld ’97. And 416 was probably cut from SW’97 only at the last minute: we found a revision of the sprite in a trash folder in the internal files, named Sato, indicating that it was worked on a significant amount before it was dropped. It’s my belief that all three of these designs—Proto-Dunsparce, Xylophone Seal, and Sato—were in the Pokedex until the very last second before Spaceworld ’97. We have evidence that five designs were cut right before SW'97: there are five Pokemon in the Spaceworld ’97 Pokedex that weren't in a logical spot in the Pokedex, but were haphazardly dropped into the Pokedex in the last few slots, after the legendary Pokemon. The way these Pokemon just seem appended to the end of the list suggests that were dumped into the game at last second, as a late change to make sure some of the designers' favorites were included. These five out-of-order Pokemon were Sneasel, Togepi, Snubbull, Leafeon, and Aipom. it’s probably the case that those Pokemon overwrote the three unused Pokemon from Era III, plus two others that got cut (I suspect Stantler and ID 334) in the final revision before the demo. If not for the developers dumping those five into the game at the last second, we might know more about early Dunsparce and its colleagues. As an aside, some people theorize that ID 415, the Anklyosaurus Armored Seal, was actually designed as an evolution for 412. Looking at them above, I can see the reasons you might think that: they were definitely sprited by the same person, they have very similar shading, and their poses look almost the same. Not to mention how close they are in the Index. Let's save this line of thinking for the entry on ID #415, but also keep it in the back of our mind. Anyway, if Dunsparce was so close to appearing in Spaceworld ’97, then what happened to it? It’s likely that by the time production on Gold and Silver restarted in early 1999, the team had decided to create new Pokemon rather than draw from the Korean Index; the only sprites from the Korean Index that show up for the first time in June 1999 are the early Cyndaquil sprite, the Elekid sprite (and we’ve discussed what probably was going on there), and Stantler. Meanwhile, June 1999 is filled with completely new designs to replace the ones they’d already discarded: Gligar, Granbull, Ursaring, Piloswine, Tyranitar, Sentret, Furret, etc. It’s very possible that the team designing new Pokemon had been shuffled up since Spaceworld ’97 and the new designers were more interested in inserting their own ideas than pulling old discarded designs. It certainly seems like the new designs in 1999 have a different style than the unused earlier designs. It's also possible that ID 412 was added into the game after Spaceworld ’97, like Stantler was, but I don’t think that’s likely. If that were the case, we’d have likely seen that sprite used somewhere in June 1999, even as a placeholder, but it’s nowhere to be found. We do, on the other hand, find something odd going on in the sprite that Dunsparce would eventually fill, but it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Dunsparce yet. Instead, Pokedex #206 is a strange, in-between amalgamation. It’s named “Mitei 06,” (Mitei means "Pending") which meant that the team hadn’t yet come up with a name. It uses the sprites of the discarded evolution to Rinrin, Berurun (again, if 412 was ever inserted into the game, I’d expect its sprites to be used as placeholders here, not Berurun’s). 206's typing is Rock/Ground, and it evolves from Pokedex #205 at level 22. Which is strange, because #205 is Shuckle, and at this time in development, Shuckle was Rock/Ground. (Shuckle and...Super Shuckle?) So there’s almost no chance the team were thinking about Dunsparce by June 1999; instead, they were clearly thinking about giving Shuckle an evolution! We’ll talk more about this once we get to those two Pokemon, but the long and the short of this is that the evolution idea didn’t get very far; Shuckle’s evolution never got a sprite or a name (as far as we know). I have no idea why they decided not to give Shuckle an evolution; maybe the team couldn’t come up with a good visual design, or maybe the team decided to make Shuckle into a gimmick-mon and an evolution was no longer required. But when the Shuckle evolution fell through, the team still had an empty slot in the Pokedex that needed filling. As a slight tangent, I do want to mention that 206 did have one thing in common with Dunsparce: it shared the same palette that Dunsparce would use in Spaceworld ’99 and in the final games. That palette looks natural for Berurun, so it was probably chosen originally for Berurun and then repurposed for Dunsparce. Which is weird, if you think about it: was Dunsparce designed to fit an existing palette because they didn’t want to bother with changing it? Or did they come up with some early sprites, decide the old palette still worked, and gave Dunsparce its color scheme completely by coincidence? Dunsparce finally makes its glorious debut into Gold and Silver in Spaceworld ’99, but it’s…odd. Dunsparce is very incomplete at this point, and its sprites are no more than jokey sketches of a Tsuchinoko with its tongue sticking out. On the one hand, this tells us that Dunsparce was still very unfinished just a couple months before the game was finalized, making it one of the very last Pokemon to be completed (alongside Sneasel and Wobbuffet). But secondly, it’s always struck me as strange that the team was using these sketchy sprites, because they already had well polished ones available in the Korean Index! Why not just go back to those sprites, and use them as placeholders while they redesigned Dunsparce? (So majestic!) Here's what happened: Hironobu Yoshida joined the team. Yoshida’s really important to the Pokemon franchise: he’s been working on the series since 1997, when he first joined Game Freak, all the way to the present. Outside of Ken Sugimori and Atsuko Nishida, Yoshida’s probably the most influential artist for the series, and many of the more modern designs, especially those in Generations V and VI, owe much of their sensibilities to Yoshida’s ideas. He’s absolutely important to the Pokemon franchise, but he only becomes important at the tail-end of Gold and Silver’s development. Sources online say that Yoshida joined the team in 1997, but if he did, I doubt he was working on the Pokemon designs; instead, he was probably working on another aspect of the game. Because in interviews, Yoshida has said that his first assignment was to design Celebi, Wobbuffet, and Dunsparce. Those are three very interesting Pokemon for him to mention, because two of those were only sketches in Spaceworld ’99, and the last, Celebi, was far from its finalized design. There’s only a few other Pokemon in this state of unfinishedness: Larvitar, Wooper, Forretress, and Sunkern are rough sketches in Spaceworld ’99, and Slugma, Azumarill, and Lanturn are still very different from their final design. That Yoshida was working on three Pokemon that were at their least finished in Spaceworld ’99 hints that they were unfinished because he was only put in charge of designing them recently by that point. Given that none of the three exist in June 1999, I think that Yoshida was brought onto the Pokemon design team between June and August of 1999, and he was given these three Pokemon to start out with. In interviews, he mentions asking what the Pokemon at the very end of the Pokedex was, and being told it was supposed to be a legendary Pokemon like Mew. That would make perfect sense, given what we know about the sprites done by June 1999: there is a slot for Celebi, but it uses a placeholder graphic and has no other information attached to it. If Yoshida joined the team about this time, that’d be the first thing he’s logically ask about. So imagine that, in June or July 1999, Yoshida was introduced to the rest of the Pokemon designers and told to remake Twinz as a single-stage Pokemon, figure out to do with their Mew analogue, and told to come up with an idea for Pokedex #206, which no longer had a Shuckle evolution in it. Given the short timeframe he had, I suspect Yoshida would have gone back to the old designs the team had discarded prior to Spaceworld ’97. And what did he find there? The very first sprite was a nature spirit, Kokopelli, which may have matched his brief for Celebi, which was already conceived as a nature spirit. He also found a Tsuchinoko, probably made by Sugimori. And, given the time constraints, he decided to use those for inspirations. Those old sprites for Celebi and Dunsparce weren’t used because they weren’t Yoshida’s initial sprites in the first place, and because he probably just drew inspiration from them when he needed ideas for his very first Pokemon designs. By Spaceworld ’99, he had worked enough on Celebi that he had a rough first draft that looked a bit like the old Korean Index design. More importantly for our purposes right now, Yoshida had also sketched out, in his own style, what he thought a Tsuchinoko Pokemon would look like. It looks pretty obvious to me that he based it on the old sprite. The giveaway here is the pose: although the SW’99 sprite is very different than ID 412, it’s clear Yoshida used the first as a reference for the camera angle and the pose. I don’t know where Yoshida got the idea for Wobbuffet, but based on how sketchy its design was in SW99, it was the Pokemon of the three that Yoshida had worked the least on. My guess is that he didn't draw an inspiration from the Korean Index for it, but came up with his own idea after he had finished the other two. I like this theory as it provides a plausible explanation why those sprites for early Celebi and early Dunsparce appear in the Korean Index. While Sugimori, Nishida, or Morimoto probably had no interest in returning to old designs by 1999, a new designer with a very short deadline, looking for ideas? That I can buy. The relative lateness of Dunsparce’s design explains a lot about its final appearance in the games. Dunsparce is beloved and kind of infamous in the Pokemon community for being an awkward and more-or-less useless addition to Gold and Silver. It’s an incredible rare encounter, but it has pretty low stats and a mediocre movepool. It has tiny wings, which suggest that it might evolve into a majestic beast, but then it…doesn’t. On the ratio of “difficult to catch” to “usefulness in game,” Dunsparce is maybe the most disparate example we have. But if Dunsparce was an extremely late addition, I’m not surprised that the team didn’t have time to make it into something unique or helpful. With the amount of time they had, Dunsparce was probably thrown together, put on a single encounter table in the Dark Cave, and then the game was shipped out. You can see just how late Dunsparce’s concept was worked out by checking out its early Pokedex entries. In Spaceworld ’99, Dunsparce was an almost entirely different creature! Early Gold: “When it attacks its prey, it strikes them with its head so hard that it knocks them senseless.” Early Silver: “It has a vindictive personality. Once it has set its sights on its prey, it will hunt them unceasingly.” Final Gold: “If anyone sees it, it digs into the ground with its tail and burrows away backwards.” Final Silver: “If someone spots it, it escapes by digging into the ground with its tail. It can uses its wings to float for a bit.” Quite the difference! In the original version, Dunsparce sounds like a horror movie villain, stalking its prey without sleep nor rest as they run desperately for safety. When it finds its victim, terrified and exhausted, it beats them senseless with its head! In the final…if you spot a Dunsparce, it borrow into the ground and runs away from you. Overall, a much less threatening foe. (Fanart by Uluri) The reason for this change seems obvious to me. When these Pokedex entries were written, Yoshida hadn’t finished drawing the sprites; his first concept was much more in line with the Tsuchinoko, which is a hunter according to legends. But when he finished the sprites, the team realized that the final Dunsparce was far too dopey and goofy to be taken seriously as a predator, and so they changed the entries to match. Interestingly though, Dunsparce’s movepool still better reflects this early lore: the very first move Dunsparce learns is Rage, and it also has Pursuit (to chase after its prey) and Spite (for its vicious nature). Its most powerful attack is even Take Down, which matches the description of how Dunsparce strikes its prey with its head. I think that’s so interesting! What was a strange movepool in the final game turns out to have been based on an entirely different concept. Its sprites were probably finished so late that the team either didn’t have time to brainstorm a new movepool, or they simply overlooked it in the rush to put the finishing touches elsewhere. Because of its last-minute nature, Dunsparce has always been a strange oddity in the Pokemon world. People admire its dopeyness, fangames design bizarre dragon-type evolutions for it. (Credits, in clockwise order from top left: From Pokemon Uranium fangame, Wooden Plank Studios, Runesparce by AgentKirin, @thelastshaymin) Generally though, poor Dunsparce has been ignored, a forgotten weirdo from an generation with lots of forgotten weirdos. Except, finally, just last year, there was justice for Dunsparce! After twenty years, Dunsparce got an evolution that could finally make it useful. Did it turn into a majestic dragon? Did its wings grow into falcon’s wings? Did he finally become the predator that he had always been supposed to be? Nope. He became a slightly longer Dunsparce. After being a mystery for twenty years, Dunsparce became the longest shaggy dog story in Pokemon history. And, honestly, I love it. It’s the perfect design for a perfect weirdo.
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