ID 436: BellossomBellossom is more or less one of the most memorable designs created for Gold and Silver; to this day, I think that next to the Eevees, Pichu, and maybe Hoothoot, more casual Pokemon fans would recognize Bellossom than any other designs from Generation II. Clearly, the team did something right with this cute hula-dancer. So let’s take a look at what went into Bellossom. As I’ve mentioned many times by this point, Period 3b of development had a very clear mission: take Generation I Pokemon and extend their evolutionary family in some way. We’ve seen a number of different ways to do that: Steelix, Plux, and Scizor were trade-only evolutions that added the Steel-type, giving each of these a unique identity. Madame and Porygon2 both took mostly unused Pokemon with middling stats from Generation I and buffed their stats up. Beyond stats, Madame and Porygon2 were more or less identical to their progenitors. And then there’s a whole bunch of baby Pokemon which tried to extend a Generation I family by creating a weaker and cuter version of the original. These babies could potentially be encountered earlier, allowing mid-game Gen I Pokemon to gain a new life as an early game encounter. The main thing that’s missing from this section, so far, is branching evolutions. By branching evolutions, I mean what we've previously seen with Politoad and Slowking: split evolutions in which the player has a choice to evolve the second form into on of two unique final forms. To some degree, the Eeveelutions in the three previous entries we discussed are examples of branching evolutions, but given that Eevee’s distinction has always been that it evolves into multiple forms, I don’t think this quite counts. Still, I don’t think its coincidence that Bellossom and Tsubomitto directly follow from the three Eevees—I think it’s quite likely that, reminded of the concept of branching evolutions by creating the Eevees, that same creator (probably Nishida) decided to fill the gap in Period 3b by designing two more branching evolutions. We’ve seen branching evolutions in the Korean Index before, but it was a long time ago: Politoad was created by either Nishida or Sugimori in Period 1c and Slowking was in Period 1d. These designs were probably at least a year to a year and a half old by this point in development, and it’s a bit strange the team hadn’t followed up on the idea of branching evolutions since then: it’s a pretty cool concept and a natural one for a sequel. But given Era III’s mandate to round out ideas created earlier in development, it’s natural to find two more branching evolutions right before 1997’s development was completed. Naturally, the development team focused on two parallel families from Generation I: The Bellsprout family, and the Oddish family. In both Bellossom's case, and it's Bellsprout counterpart Tsubomitto, both alternative evolutions are far more humanoid than their alternatives, Vileplume and Victreebel. In Bellossom's case, the team decided on a female appearance and made Oddish's leaves sprout and become flowers on its head! It also grew more leaves around its hips, which resemble a Hula-Skirt. And Bellossom was born! The Oddish line (and as we’ll talk about, the Bellsprout line) were good candidates for a new branching evolution: since they already evolved via evolutionary stone, the developers could pretend that they always had the ability to branch into a separate evolution, using an evolutionary stone that simply wasn't available in the first games. In the case of Bellossom (and Tsubomitto, the Bellsprout branching evolution), the decision was made to have them evolve via the newly introduced Poison Stone, which wouldn't have been possible in Generation I. As a quick aside, the Oddish family and the Bellsprout family have an interesting history in Generation I. They were the last Pokemon designed for those games, excluding Mew. As far as we can tell, when the choice was made to change the central elemental triad in Generation I from Fire/Water/Electric to Fire/Water/Grass, the team realized they needed more Grass Pokemon to give the players more choices, especially if they chose a starter other than Bulbasaur. Atsuko Nishida seems to have designed both families at the last second to fill this gameplay need. It's also interesting because these two families were potentially the only ones created with the idea of version exclusives in mind. While the idea of different games that had different stories or Pokemon was around since the very beginning of development, the idea of two different games with Pokemon that were exclusive to one or the other game probably only came together very late in development. Oddish and Bellsprout may have been designed as version exclusives, while the rest of the exclusives were pieced together at the last second. Anyway, given their places at the very end of the Korean Index, that Bellossom and it's counterpart Tsubomitto were designed close to the end of Spaceworld '97's development as well. In fact, by the time of the Spaceworld ’97 build, Bellossom was clearly only a vague idea. In the demo build, it's identical to Vileplume. Bellossom has the same typing as Vileplume—they’re both Poison/Grass—and they both learn the exact same four moves, all at level one: Absorb, Stun Spore, Acid, and Petal Dance. Almost none of the new Pokemon have stats in Spaceworld ’97, and Bellossom was typical, with only placeholder stats that don't suggest any differences from Vileplume. The only difference between them was that Bellossom evolved with the Poison Stone (which didn’t yet work) and Vileplume used the Leaf Stone. At this stage of development, the team either hadn’t figured out a way to distinguish Bellossom as a new and interesting choice for a Pokemon trainer to make, or they hadn’t had time to implement their ideas. Which makes sense. Given how late we are into the Korean Index, Bellossom was probably only added to the Pokedex months--maybe even weeks--before the Spaceworld 1997 build, and it isn’t a surprise the team just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Tsubomitto has the exact same problem that Bellossom does, more proof that the ending of the Korean Index was finalized right before the Spaceworld ’97. Another part of Bellossom's problem, though, was more fundamental. In Generation I, most Pokemon which evolved through an evolutionary stone didn’t learn any new moves after they evolved (minus a few exceptions, like Exeggcutor learning Stomp because Exeggcute clearly couldn’t). Vileplume and Victreebel technically do, but I'll talk about that technicality in the next entry; suffice to say, it isn't meaningful. The reason stone evolutions were designed this way was to create tension between evolving the Pokemon the first chance you get, or waiting until your Gloom learns the right moveset before you get the raw power of Vileplume. Evolve Vileplume too early, and you might miss out on some of its best moves. I know the first time I played the game I went through the entire game with a Clefable I evolved instantly: as a kid I had no idea this was the wrong thing to do, and that poor Clefable only knew Pound and never got Metronome. This is a good balancing conceit, but it creates an obvious problem when you want to design new branching evolutions. If neither Bellossom nor Vileplume can learn any different moves after evolving, then how are you supposed to make them different from each other? There’s only two strategies: change their typing, or change their stats. However, a change in typing is difficult to pull off if the Pokemon can’t learn new moves: a Generation I Poliwrath can’t learn fighting moves except by TM, for instance, making its new type more a detriment than anything else; even with its stronger stats, most players of Gen I opt to keep Poliwhirl because Psychic isn't super effective against it. The second option, giving the two counterparts different stats, is fine, but pretty subtle to casual players who might not encounter both evolutionary forms and not really know the differences. The development team made a minor change to these rules about movesets by the final release of Gold and Silver, giving some stone evolutions a few moves to make them unique. Poliwrath, for instance, now learned Submission and Mindreader despite being a stone evolution (though poor Clefable was still moveless). In the Oddish family’s case, Bellossom at least got to learn Solar Beam at level 55, to differentiate her from Vileplume and Gloom, which cannot learn that move. The team slightly differentiated Bellossom’s stats from Vileplume—Bellossom has 100 Special Defense and 90 Special Attack, while Vileplume flip-flops them—but surprisingly, they let most of the stats identical, and even these differences over Special are incredibly minor. It’s honestly bizarre to me that even with all that extra development time, Bellossom and Vileplume ended up so similar to each other. The main way they differentiated the two was by making Bellossom pure-Grass type rather than Grass/Poison, like Vileplume and the rest of the Oddishes. In retrospect, this was a good idea. For reasons that are unfathomable to me (but are almost assuredly due to some quirk of how the Grass type was originally invented in Gen I development), almost every single Grass type in those games is dual typed with Poison, and the Oddish line is no exception. In Gold and Silver, there are some modest experiments with Grass types that aren’t Poison-type: the Hoppip line is Grass/Flying, and the Sunflora family is pure Grass (Grass/Psychic in SW’97). By letting Bellossom lose the Poison-type, it at least switched up some of the match-ups for the Pokemon, giving the player a reason to choose it over Vileplume. They couldn’t have done this in Spaceworld ’97, for a simple reason: Bellossom evolved via the Poison stone. But that stone got scrapped and the team replaced it with the Sun Stone, which was used to evolve both Sunkern to Sunflora and Gloom to Bellossom in the final games. So you were free to make a choice between Vileplume and his new counterpart. EXCEPT—And I didn’t quite realize this when I was discussing Sunflora—the developers of Gold and Silver made another incomprehensible decision that make Sunflora and Bellossom more or less impossible to use in a regular run. Because there’s only one way to get a Sun Stone: win the Bug Catching Contest. Which you’d think is easy, but the way it is scored, is more or less nearly impossible. In the games, another one of the competitors is a blue haired trainer named Cool Trainer Nick. He always wins: he gets a minimum of 349 points in the contest, which is almost the maximum you could get with a perfect IV, full-life Scyther, which would have 386 points. Thus, unless you win the lottery, Cool Trainer Nick will always beat you in the Bug Catching contest, making the Sun Stone more or less out of reach for any casual player. As a result, without gaming the system and knowing exactly what you’re doing, no normal player is ever going to get a Sun Stone. And thus Bellossom, like so many other new Gen II Pokemon, is basically off limits for the player. Let’s also talk about Bellossom’s looks. I have a bone to pick with Bellossom. I’ve always disliked how these branching evolutions look nothing like the rest of their family. I mean, c’mon: Poliwag, Poliwhirl, and Poliwrath all have a design consistency: they share the same palette, the same whirl on their belly. And then Politoed is a completely different color, completely different sillouette, completely different body shape. Bellossom, likewise, looks nothing like the rest of the Oddish family and it will continually annoy me. (Of course, we have two reasons for why Politoed looks so different from the rest of its family. First, according to interviews, the design team heard a lot of criticism from Japanese players who wanted the tadpole Poliwhirl to grow up into a frog, so they made Politoed actually become a frog. Secondly, as I commented before, there’s good reason to think that Politoed was designed from the alternative cut frog line from Generation I, and probably inherits some of its dissimilar looks from that origin). Bellossom is even more frustrating than Politoed. The final Bellossom looks absolutely nothing like the Oddish line. It’s the wrong color, it is shaped differently, it doesn’t drool like Gloom and the flowers on its head look nothing like the Rafflesia flower that Gloom has (okay, okay, they've got five petals and the same center as Vileplume's, but they're much smaller, the wrong color, and lack the dots Rafflesia are known for). It has none of the defining features of the Oddish family. Honestly, as a kid I thought Bellossom was a completely new Pokemon and I was amazed it evolved from Gloom. I mean, do these look anything alike? What makes this so frustrating is that we now know it wasn’t always the case! Early Bellossom looks obviously like an Oddish evolution! Even the palette they had chosen for Bellossom by June 1999 obviously looks like an Oddish evolution! It's not perfectly in line with the rest--in the SW97 sprites Bellossom's flowers are a different color, and in the June 1999 sprites, its skin is a lighter shade of blue compared to the rest. But both clearly at least look like part of the Oddish family! Okay okay, so obviously the Spaceworld '97 sprite isn’t great, and needed to change. Given that during development the team became aware of the racist implications of Jynx’s design, a black-faced hula dancer was…probably not the right direction to go. It’s good that the team continued to iterate on this original design. I'll champion them for dropping this pretty racist sprite and trying a different direction. I will say one thing about that Spaceworld '97 sprite: I really like how it has a continuity with the "scent particles" that surround Gloom. Unlike Gloom's smelly gook surrounding it though, early Bellossom seems surrounded by sparkles, maybe suggesting that it smells much better than Gloom. (Thanks to @OrangeFrench for pointing this detail out!) The team tried changing the color of Bellossom to a light blue in by the time the Gameboy Color had given them a much wider palette to play with, and this looks a lot, well, less racist. It’s not quite the same color as the rest of the Oddish family, but you can still easily see the family resemblance. Moreover, with this palette, Bellossom’s leaves were red, which made it more in line with Vileplume’s red flower. I like this palette; it solves the racism problems but still makes Bellossom look like the rest of the family. And it appears that the team was happy to go with this color scheme for an awful long time. Sugimori’s early artwork of Bellossom uses this color scheme, for instance. But by Spaceworld ’99 (and probably right before that build, given how Sugimori’s artwork still used the old palette) someone chickened out. While nothing’s confirmed, I think it’s safe to say that someone in Game Freak (maybe a Nintendo executive, still very sensitive to the Jynx controversy) worried that the blue skin was still too close to blackface. By Spaceworld ’99, the blue color scheme became Bellossom’s shiny color, but normal Bellossom had been changed to a light green. Crystal, in turn, cemented this change by giving Bellossom and even darker shade of green as its skin color. I hate this. I'm fully in favor of fixing Pokemon designs to avoid offense. That's not the problem here. But the green color they chose ended up ruining Bellossom's design aesthetic completely. While if you trace the development of Bellossom from the beginning you can see its resemblance to Oddish, viewed in isolation it makes no sense; it’s completely at odds with the rest of the family. Combine this terrible choice in palette with the virtual impossibility of a player using Bellossom, and it feels to me like Bellossom was just a real missed opportunity in Gold and Silver. It’s a good idea, and the anime certainly popularized Bellossom enough to make it mildly iconic. However, the choices Game Freak made concerning this Pokemon were such obvious mistakes in retrospect. It’s a real disrespect to Bellossom, a Pokemon that could have been so interesting, and turned out to be an inaccessible, badly colored, near clone of Vileplume. ID 436: TsubomittoThe final mistake the designers made with Bellossom was giving it a spot in the final games but cutting its much-superior counterpart, Tsubomitto. Tsubomitto’s great! If Bellossom is the happy-go-lucky goody two shoes of the Oddish family, then Tsubomitto is the bad boy Bellsprout that doesn’t take shit from anyone. Don’t run into this guy in a blind alley, or you might not make it out. Tsubomitto is, obviously, an alternative evolution for Weepinbell, competing for Victreebel’s place in the family line. Victreebel takes after Weepinbell, accentuating the deadly mouth it has and foregoing legs and arms. Tsubomitto, on the other hand, takes after Bellsprout and has a full two legged body: unlike Bellsprout’s tiny wisps of roots for legs, Tsubomitto has chunky legs that may be tubers repurposed for movement. It's unclear exactly where Tsubomitto’s name comes from. “Tsubo” appears in Bellsprout’s Japanese name (and sort of in Victreebell’s, if you mash two words together). In Bellsprout’s name, it’s part of the word “Tsubomi,” or “to bud.” Maybe it’s a reference to the same verb in Tsubomitto’s name, or maybe the "Tsubo" means “pot,” which is what the word can mean without the “mi” attached. “Pot” in its name could designate the pitcher plant part of its face; I don’t really know. “Mitto” is probably a transliteration of the English word “Mitt,” like a catcher’s mitt; given that the Bellsprout line are pitcher plants, a pitcher holding a mitt would be a funny pun. I’m not sure where’s Tsubomitto’s mitt is actually located, but this origin seems plausible to me. While we're talking about Tsubomitto's sprite, can I also just point out that I love the way it seems to have a superhero cape made out of one of its leaves? In the Spaceworld '97 version of the sprite, the large leaves Tsubomitto has on its sides are its hands, but in the revised one seen above, the artist added smaller root hands under the leaves, making the leaf around its neck look majestic or part of Tsubomitto's superhero identity. Another reason it and Madame are the two coolest lost Pokemon. Like I said in the previous entry, Tsubomitto is more or less identical to Victreebel in Spaceworld ’97. Like Bellossom’s relationship with Vileplume, Tsubomitto learns the exact same moves as Victreebel, it has the same typing as Victreebel, and it has placeholder stats. The only difference is that it evolves (like Bellossom) using the newly created Poison Stone, which doesn’t work in the Spaceworld ’97 demo. Again, I think the stark similarities between Tsubomitto and Victreebel might be an indication of just how close the end of the Korean Index was to the Spaceworld ’97 build; it could also just be the case that it’s difficult to differentiate two branching evolutions when the rules the team was using said that stone evolutions typically didn’t learn many new moves (if any at all). Quick note about the moveset, by the way. I mentioned in the previous entry that Victreebel and Vileplume only learn four moves at level one, exactly mimicked by Bellossom and Tsubomitto. Which is true for Generation II, but apparently in Generation I, each of them did learn three level up moves, though these level up moves were all learned before Bellsprout and Oddish evolved into Weepinbell and Gloom, thus before any player could legally obtain either Victreebel or Vileplume. For instance, while in Generation II Victreebel only learns Vine Whip, Sweet Scent, Sleep Powder, and Razor Leaf, in Generation I it also learned Wrap at level 13, Poison Powder at level 15, and Sleep Powder at level 19. You've never know this though, since a Bellsprout doesn't evolve in Weepinbell until level 21, by which point it'd be too late to learn those moves. Those moves are probably there so that Erica’s Pokemon have a slightly better moveset, but otherwise no player would ever notice these level up moves exist at all. Strangely, these level up moves were completely taken away from Vileplume and Victreebel in Generation II, though I don’t know why any developer would both making a change to something so minor as to be unnoticeable in regular gameplay. Tsubomitto did make it through the 1998 development hiatus, unlike so many other SW’97 Pokemon. But by the time we next have a snapshot of it, Tsubomitto’s gone through some changes. Most noticeably, its got a new fabulous striped look, with new hands and a cool leaf-cape. Secondly, by April 1999, the team actually removed Tsubomitto’s evolutionary method, so that Weepinbell doesn’t evolve in it at all! Tsubomitto will eventually evolve via the Sun Stone, just like Bellossom, but not until three months later, at the end of July. This, to my mind, suggests two possibilities. First, the team briefly planned to removed Tsubomitto, and the development team started the process by removing its evolutionary method before changing their minds. Secondly, it makes me wonder if Tsubomitto was rebuilt from the ground up in the 1999 reboot, and the team just hadn’t bothered programming in an evolutionary method. It could also be simpler than that: maybe they just hadn't programmed the Sun Stone into the game by April, but they had cut the Poison Stone, so there was briefly no option for Tsubomitto. (This section was updated to reflect info provided by GOLDS_TCRF in the comments! Thanks!) Let’s also put the history of Tsubomitto’s moveset back-to-back with this. In April 1999, when it didn’t evolve from anything, Tsubomitto had a slightly different moveset: strangely, it had Victreebel’s moveset from Generation I, which meant that it learned the same four moves at level one as it always did… plus Sleep Powder, Poison Powder, and Wrap at a level too low for a player to ever encounter. Weirdly, Victreebel still doesn’t have these moves, so for some reason Tsubomitto’s moveset was pulled from Generation I, not copied from Victreebel like it was in Spaceworld ’97: some evidence that, for whatever reason, Tsubomitto was rebuilt from scratch in April 1999. Maybe the team had planned on deleting Tsubomitto initially when they were rebuilding the game in 1999, but changed their minds when they had an extra slot Tsubomitto could fit into? By July 1999, it’s got an entirely full moveset, though it’s just a copy of Weepinbell’s, with a couple of notable changes. Instead of Slam, Tsubomitto learned Solar Beam (maybe a change made because it now evolves via Sun Stone) and instead of Sweet Scent, it learned Lovely Kiss, Jynx’s signature move. Which is honestly wonderful: the image of Tsubomitto suctioning an enemy Pokemon with that face is priceless, and it gives Tsubomitto some badly needed character. This is still a weird moveset: while it would work to let Weepinbell choose when to level up and thus choose which moves it got, that’s normally not a pattern we find in Stone evolutions. The team agreed, because by August 16th, it’s back down to four level one moves and only Solar Beam as a level up move. The Solar Beam is learned just a level before Bellossom’s, and it now has Lovely Kiss as one of its level one moves. On the one hand, great: I'm glad they kept this flavorful move on Tsubomitto. On the other hand, boo: if the move is learned at level one, there would be no way for the player to ever get it! Lovely Kiss would appear purely on enemy Tsubomitto. Definitely an odd choice that still feels unfinalized. As the team was figuring out the moveset, they were also trying to make Tsubomitto feel distinct from Victreebel by differentiating the stats of the two. By April 1999, Tsubomitto no longer had placeholder stats; instead, it has stats which were mostly distinct from Victreebel’s. Tsubomitto had an extra 15 points in Attack and Special Attack compared to Victreebel (120 vs 105 and 115 vs 100), but lost five points from Defense, Special Defense, and Speed, and 10 points from HP. Overall this made Tsubomitto a bit of a glass cannon, but given how small those stat drops are compared to the stat gains, Tsubomitto would have been significantly better than Victreebel with that distribution (aside: again, its stats don’t seem built on Victreebel’s, implying again that it was built from scratch). By July 30th, however, the team decided against this, and instead made Tsubomitto mostly the same as Victreebel, except that Tsubomitto had 15 more Attack and Victreebel had 15 more Special Attack. Given that—by this point—Tsubomitto’s only really unique difference with Victreebel was learning the Special Move Solar Beam at level 54, this feels like a pretty crippling downgrade. The back-and-forths the team went through with Tsubomitto’s moveset and stats highlight two things. First, it stresses that Tsubomitto was a very likely candidate for the final game. Given how much work the team put into tweaking its stats and its moveset, there was clearly a lot of attention and love for this guy. Beyond just the stats and moveset, Tsubomitto also got a redrawn sprite for June 1999. Even Steelix and Plux, other Pokemon in the same vein as Tsubomitto, more or less had the same sprite until the final (or when Plux was deleted), and yet Tsubomitto’s leaves required a touch-up. It even existed long enough to have a Pokedex entry! “It lives by absorbing nutrients in the ground through its root-like feet.” Okay it’s an incredibly boring Pokedex entry, but it’s cool that one exists at all! (Thanks to @RacieBeep for her take on the SW'97 Tsubomitto) Tsubomitto—alongside Plux—is more or less my candidate for “Most likely 'mon to make it to the final.” Like Plux, Tsubomitto survived it all the way to Spaceworld ’99, and if you just looked at stats, footprints, typing, name, etc, you wouldn’t be able to tell that Tsubomitto was going to be cut. The only clue is that Tsubomitto’s SW99 palette was now blue and yellow and its front sprite (but not its back sprite) was replaced with a very early version of Lanturn. This had to have been a very recent change, given how heavy Tsubomitto’s footprint still is in the game—Lanturn even still has its moveset!—which strikes me as about the last moment a Pokemon could feasibly have been cut. On the other hand, the second thing demonstrated by the back-and-forth Tsubomitto went through is how doomed it was from the start. As much as the team seemed devoted to Tsubomitto, it seems like they struggled with finding a way to make Tsubomitto unique from Victreebel. Unlike Bellossom, which was able to lose Oddish’s Poison-type, at no point in development was changing Tsubomitto’s type ever on the table. Instead, the team first tried to differentiate its moveset by giving Solar Beam and Lovely Kiss, then by making it into a glass cannon. Neither worked: maybe Lovely Kiss and Solar Beam were not deemed distinct enough, and the stats they had given Tsubomitto made it too much of an upgrade to Victreebel. Fixing either of these just made it more of the same, and by late July, it feels as though the team had given up: the Tsubomitto of July 30th technically learns Lovely Kiss, but only if it was an opponent’s ‘mon, and its stats are, at best, a minor tweak of Victreebel’s. Maybe an alternate evolution which was still pretty close to the original was good for one slot in Generation II’s Pokedex, but not for two slots. And in the end, the team liked Bellossom a little bit better. The final straw was Chinchou. Chinchou sprung up for the first time in Spaceworld ’99, filling in an empty slot of the Pokedex that had once been (briefly) held by Gurotesu but had been unused since at least June. Once the team came up with Chinchou, there was an incentive to give this new guy an evolution, to make him more interesting in the new game. Given that Tsubomitto wasn’t really a new idea (it just added onto a Gen I family) and that it was already in a troubled place, removing it and giving its slot to Lanturn was probably a no brainer. It's a shame, I love this guy. In another life, it was Bellossom that got the chopping block. In our universe, Tsubomitto never got a chance to throw a strike or make the critical pitch in the 9th inning. ID 438: ParaClosing out Period 3b is another baby Pokemon! Like most of the babies of Era III, Para was created to be an early evolution of a early-game, mid-popularity Pokemon from Gen I. Honestly, we’ve been through so much of these guys by this point, I don’t have a lot more to say about Para. But we’ll look over the phenomenon of Era III baby Pokemon one more time. Like I've said before, I think the babies of Era III were not chosen based on any criteria like popularity, or how well they'd fit into the gameplay; I think we're witnessing a brainstorm in which the team tried to make as many possible baby Pokemon to see what worked and what didn't. Because, if we're being honest, Paras is probably the last Pokemon on anyone's list that needs a new evolution. Look, I like Paras, but he’s probably not anyone’s favorite Pokemon, alright? I doubt Paras got much use in Generation I. You can find him rarely in Mt. Moon in Red and Green, at level eight; if you miss him there, you can find him in the Safari Zone at a more reasonable level. In Gen II, likewise, Paras can be caught pretty early, in the Ilex Forest, or in the bug catching contest. Since Paras is so rare in Mt. Moon, I doubt very many players bothered with it: after all, a weak dude with Leech Life is more or less outclassed by even Zubat at that point in the game. Likewise, maybe people caught it in the Safari Zone, but by that time, the work evolving it to Parasect feels a bit like a waste of your time. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that Para feels redundant given how niche it's evolved forms were. In the final game, I could see them given to the play in the Ilex Forest instead of Paras, but given how painful it is to use Paras in Generation II, I doubt this would have been a welcome change. Maybe the designers agreed with me, given that Para didn’t last past Spaceworld ’97. What’s slightly odd here is that most of the other baby Pokemon found in Era III—Monja, Pudi, Hinaazu—are derived from Pokemon much more solidly found in the middle of the game, at a high enough level that there could conceivably be a pre-evolution of these guys lurking around. Doduo and Growlithe, for instance, are found in their mid-twenties and could conceivably have had a earlier form at levels below that; Tangela is found in the mid-thirties. So Paras is a slight outlier in that it's caught at level eight, too young to conceivably have a pre-evolution. It kind of makes Para feel like an odd choice for a baby. I doubt the designers were thinking this far ahead about Para and its potential usefulness in a playthrough, at least not initially. Like I said above, I get the sense that all of the baby Pokemon in Era III were the result of a brainstorming session in which the team tried to come up with a design for babies of any Gen I family that could conceivably have one: they’d decide later which ones, if any, fit into the larger game. That’s probably why so few from Era III survive into the 1999 reboot of development. And I don’t think Para had enough of an interesting hook to support its inclusion in the final. There’s not a lot else that’s interesting about Para in Spaceworld ’97. It’s moveset is identical to Paras, just learned at a lower level. It lacks the Grass-type, implying that Paras only gets the type when it evolves; this is a little strange, given how Para is almost entirely a mushroom. You’d think, if anything, this little guy would be pure Grass-type before gaining the bug-type. On the other hand, @OrangeFrench suggests that the mushroom in Para's sprite isn't actually part of the creature: it's emerging from an egg left by the parent inside a mushroom. Thus, it's pure bug type because Para hasn't been infected yet. Probably the most interesting thing about Para is its sprite, and the lore that goes behind it. As I’m sure most of you know, Paras and Parasect have a particularly dark origin story. Based on a real-life fungus that takes over insects and turns them into zombies, Paras and Parasect are apparently insects that have a parasitic mushroom on their backs. According to the Pokedex, when Paras evolves into Parasect, it actually loses complete control of itself, becoming entirely moved by the mushroom on its back. A bit unnerving, right? It’s strange that Parasect is the series’ only zombie Pokemon (Insert here when someone delves up some obscure Gen VII Pokemon from an alternate timeline or whatever it is happens in those games UPDATE- It was Greavard I had forgotten! Thanks CainNKalos!). Except that story doesn’t really jive with Para, does it? If the idea of the lore is that the mushroom gets bigger and bigger until it envelops the Paras, then why is there a baby Para coming out of a huge mushroom? My personal guess is that these mushrooms are the spores that a Parasect leaves behind, and that the Paras actually grows out of the spores. But again, if that’s the case, then it isn’t really possible for the mushrooms to be a parasite on the back of Paras; instead, wouldn’t they be in a symbiotic relationship? The life cycle looks a lot more like this: Mushroom creates Para -> Para grows a mushroom on its back and becomes Paras -> the mushroom completely takes over -> the Parasect shoots out spores, growing more Paras It seems like a completely different understanding of the relationship between Paras and the mushrooms. On the other hand, if @OrangeFrench is right and the mushroom isn't actually part of Para, the life cycle looks more like this: Parent plants eggs inside a mushroom -> egg hatches, and the baby Para eats the mushroom for nourishment -> Para matures into Paras, but is infected by its initial food source -> Paras matures into Parasect. The parasite has fully taken over -> The zombie Parasect then lays eggs inside small mushrooms, repeating the cycle. Again, maybe they hadn’t thought this far, but were just sketching ideas for what a baby Paras looks like. This is all probably overthinking it. Interestingly, by the time of the final game, Paras' Gold Pokedex entry gives its own explanation about how Paras reproduces: "It is doused with mushroom spores when it is born. As its body grows, mushrooms sprout from its back." By the final, there's no more room for Para in the lifecycle: Paras is just covered in mushroom spores from birth. One last thing about the sprite. It’s not a big deal, but if you look closely at the mushrooms on the front and the back sprite, they look like they’re based on the same drawing. Both have the exact same angle, they share orange dots in the exact same places (though on the front side there’s some shading) and their outlines are colored in the exact same places. It’s pretty clear to me that the back sprite was just drawn on top of the front sprite, or vice versa, and then they were both touched up and the front was given a face. This could be an indication that there wasn’t a lot of work spent on these sprites, or it could just be part of the artist’s style, but it’s interesting enough to point out. UPDATE: On twitter, "The Ordinary Guy" alerted me to a second backsprite for Para, found on the Scratchpads for Togetic. Take a look! The new sprite, found on the left, is probably an updated backsprite, made later than the one in Spaceworld '97. I didn't notice it at first, but it's significantly improved: the hands are better and match the front sprite, there's better shading on the mushroom, and it isn't just a hastily edited version of the front sprite. For all those reasons, I'm relatively sure this backsprite was probably created after Spaceworld '97, not before. Which is interesting, because it suggests that Para had at least a little bit more work done before he was scrapped in the 1999 reboot. It also is more evidence of how the end of the Korean Index is noticeably unpolished. Anyway, Para was removed, eventually replaced by Togetic, which will be a story all of its own when we get there. I doubt there’s any relationship between the two: Togetic just happened to take over a slot that had previously housed Para. Otherwise, that’s all for this unused baby ‘mon. Next time, we start up Period 3c, and begin finishing up the Korean Index!
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AuthorMy name's Aaron George; I'm a Historian, and interested in Pokemon's development as a hobby. Contact me at @asmoranomardicodais Archives
July 2023
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