ID #X05: TogeticTogepi was designed to be a cute baby Pokemon. Thus, from the very beginning, the designers must have known that it would have to hatch into something. There’s not indication that they worked on a Togepi evolution before the development hiatus, but upon Masuda taking over development, I’m sure it was one of their biggest priorities. Togetic—better translated as “Togechick” to indicate that it’s a young hatched bird—seems to have had a spot in the rebooted Pokedex reserved from the minute they reordered it, even if the designers took their time to figure out exactly what Togetic would be like. Our earliest data from the reboot begins in April, 1999, though we only have name data, stats, and typing from that point, not sprites. In the first collection of sprites we have—from June 1999—Togetic’s sprites are already complete, and would remain exactly the same until the final versions of Gold and Silver (In Crystal, they tweaked its palette to better reflect the white color of Sugimori’s artwork, and the backsprite got tweaked to make clear that Togetic’s crown went all the way around its head). It’s got to be said: Togetic’s got a strange design. Like Togepi, it has a yellow palette, though its body is a darker shade of yellowey orange than Togepi’s. It’s got a strange, hunched over pose that looks a little like a chick, but it’s neck is far too long to make this look natural. And though Togetic no longer has the eggshell that its baby form had, it still had the blue and red symbols on its belly that were on the eggshell. That last part’s a curious choice: it makes no sense biologically for Togetic to keep the design on the eggshell on its skin, except that the design serves as a visual identifier to link it to Togepi. (Sugimori's official Togetic artwork for Generation II) Its body is also a strange shape: its more or less the exact same shape as the eggshell was, as if the eggshell was exactly covering Togetic’s torso like a glove, and the limbs and head just sprouted out of it. Something about Togetic’s design feels off and a little bit strange to me, though it’s difficult to point to exactly what. I do have a guess at the reason though. By the time the team was designing Togetic, Togepi’s design was already locked in. Togepi had already shown up in the anime already, and had appeared on some of the promotional materials. Made after the fact, Togetic had to grow naturally from a design that already existed, both being a logical evolution of Togepi's aesthetic as well as keeping visual reminders that made it look enough like Togepi. Thus, I think the designers just took the most obvious route. Taking Togepi’s basic body shape as a starting place, they just extended each of Togepi’s limbs, to give it a more grown up look. In fact, on the scratchpads, there’s an early sketch of Togetic that seems to be exactly this. In the sketch, Togetic’s basic silhouette is drawn out from a rough oval about the size of Togepi’s original body. Notice how the things they really wanted to get right in this initial sketch was Togetic's face, which is basically Togepi's but now on a neck and with a nose, and the shape of the body. Though these sprites are completely finished by June 1999, other indicators suggest that they weren’t done much earlier than this, unlike say Heracross and Totodile. Mainly, if you look at the data in the slot Togetic takes up circa April 1999, what you find is that Togetic exists, but its stats and typing are just copied over entirely from Togepi (it does, at this point, have its final name). So it seems likely that the origins of Togetic went something like this: --(Late 1998/Early 1999) The reboot team reorders the Pokedex, and determines that Togepi needed an evolution. They designate Pokedex slot #210 for this evolution, and copies over Togepi’s stats into the new slot. --(Early 1999, up to April) The team comes up with the name “Togetic.” --(Between March and May 1999) Someone (Probably Sugimori) designs and edits Togetic’s sprites. --(July 30th) Togetic’s is given unique stats. It is also given Normal/Flying typing for the first time. This might seem straightforward, but I bring it up because (as I alluded to in the last article), it seems to be a very different style of creation than the early development of Pokemon 2. During 1996 and 1997, the development of new Pokemon seems to go like this: --Artist brainstorms common animals, and comes up with a Pokemon-esque twist. They design sprites of this and put it in the communal sprite bank. In some of the latter stages of 1997, these may have been created after a vague design need from Sugimori or Tajiri: “Design an ice-type” or “design an evolution for x” --These sprites are put into a developing Pokedex. Similarities between different designs lead to the developers connecting them evolutionarily. --Types are determined by the look of the sprites; movesets are created to reflect that typing. --Names are created. It’s a completely different process. Early in development, the sprites came first, everything else second; by 1999, the Pokedex slot was designated to a particular type of ‘mon, with the sprites being one of the very last things finished. Part of this may have been how late they were in development and much the goal was now to fill in gameplay niches they needed. Part of it might be that Masuda’s style was different than Tajiri’s. Probably a bit of both. One’s not worse than the other; however, I do find the drastically different approach in Era IV interesting. One regret I have is that no one has systematically documented the moveset data we have between Spaceworld ’97 and the final build. As a result, I have no way of tracking the thinking of the designers as they tweaked the movesets, so the best we can do is speculate (see the Gligar entry, below). But one thing worth mentioning here is that at some point in this period, Togepi and Togetic got a drastic moveset change. In Spaceworld ’97, Togepi got a pretty decent moveset. It got two Flying moves, Peck and Mirror Move (Japanese: Parrot Mimicry) (which makes a good case that the name “Togechick” would have been a much better translation) along with Protect, Recover, Spike Cannon, and Skull Bash. It’s a balanced and pretty unique moveset. Few other Pokemon use Spike Cannon, and Recover is rare among Pokemon that aren’t Psychic-type. At some point—probably after the creation of Togetic—the team decided that the Togepi line should be almost purely defensive, and the team took away all of the family’s offensive options, though they gave it the incredibly inconsistent Metronome, which could technically do damage. My guess is that this was in response to the anime: Togepi first appeared on the anime during the development hiatus, on June 25th, 1998. That meant that by the time development restarted in early 1999, the anime had had months to establish Togepi’s personality. Given that Togepi never attacks in the anime, except to wave its fingers, cast metronome, and cause a giant explosion, the development team probably chose to align the new moveset with what the anime had built. However, this also meant that Togepi lost the Flying-type bird moves that probably inspired Togetic’s design in the first place. Sure, Togepi may not look like a Pokemon that can Peck, but Togetic certainly feels incomplete without at least one Flying move! I think in modern Pokemon, this is the sort of thing the team would fix by giving Togetic a move it learns upon evolution (And that’s exactly what they do, now that I check—it gets Fairy Wind, a damaging move, upon evolution). But it very much does feel to me like Togetic got the short end of the stick when they changed Togepi’s moveset. The only other notable thing about Togetic’s development is a slight change in it’s Pokedex entries. It’s original (or at least, earlier) Silver entry was sort of melancholy: "It softly flies through the air, searching for a kind person that will make it happy.” I honestly kind of love that entry: it’s cute and evocative of a Pokemon searching for a friend. The team downplayed the sad parts of this in the final entry: “If it's not beside a kind person, it loses its pep. It floats in the air without moving its wings.” This version is less likely to be a downer, but I think the first one was much more evocative and elegant. Togetic’s the kind of Pokemon that’s no one’s favorite. If you like it, you'll like Togepi more; if you don’t, you probably still like Togepi more. It’s not surprising that Togetic was designed to an existing need: there’s very little passion in this design, and a huge feeling of “well, this baby needs an adult version, let’s see what we can come up with.” I have a feeling that the design of Togekiss, in Generation IV, was an attempt to revise this, and give Togepi an evolution that feels much more like it has an idea behind it and wasn’t just made to a menu. As much as I don’t like Generation IV designs, at the very least Togekiss looks like a design the team was excited to create. (Fanart by Loadez) ID #X06: GranbullNext up is Granbull. Granbull’s got a lot of similarities to Togetic, and was probably designed for much the same reason, and as part of the same process. As a result, my guess is that these two were probably made very close together. In the end, they were probably both made so that Snubbull and Togepi--the two mascots of Generation II--would be useful in the later parts of Gold and Silver. It's not clear which of these evolutions came first. On the one hand Togetic’s sprites were completed by June 1999, while Granbull was still missing its backsprite by that point. Still, Granbull’s front sprite went through no changes until the final, so the team may have already iterated that a few times by June. On the other hand, Granbull’s stats were complete by April 1999, while Togetic’s were still just copies of Togepi’s by that point (it didn’t get its real stats and its typing until July 1999, three months later). So who knows which came first—the bulldog or the egg. Take these two entries as more or less simultaneous. Togepi needed an adult form, given that it was the poster child for the new baby mechanic. But there was something else going on as well. If you’ll remember back to Era III, Togepi and Snubbull were added to the Spaceworld ’97 Pokedex at the last second; we can be pretty sure of this because they both are in an unorganized section at the very end of the Pokedex. This final section, after the Legendary Pokemon, contained a bunch of 'mons that clearly didn't belong there: in addition to Togepi and Snubbull, Sneasel, Aipom, and Leafeon were in this late section. This suggested that this whole group were very late additions to that build: they were probably thrown in so late that the team hadn’t yet had time to reorder them into more logical positions. While I'm sure these late additions are all there for varying reasons, I'm pretty confident that Togepi and Snubbull were added because of their cuteness factor. By Spaceworld 1997, when the game was first being shown off, the team probably planned for to show off the new games with these guys: they probably already knew that Togepi would appear in the anime as a recurring character, and at least according to one of my commenters, Snubbull was used prominently in the promotional materials for the new games at Spaceworld. Thus, while Snubbull appeared pretty early in the Korean Index—in Period 2a, a large chunk of Sugimori’s earlier designs—it had probably been scrapped for a decent period of development, only to be added in at the last second when the team needed a few more Pokemon to fill out the Spaceworld ’97 roster.* Note as well that Snubbull’s moveset (below) is a pretty generic at the time: it has Sing, Safeguard, Double Edge, and Sweet Kiss, all moves that were given pretty liberally to pink puffball Pokemon at the time and an indication that its moveset wasn't deeply thought out. Thus, even though Snubbull had been around for a long time, it never really had a chance to get an evolution. Given that the team had already used it in promotional materials and it had appeared prominently in “Pikachu’s Vacation” which debuted in July 1998, Snubbull was a must include even after Masuda’s reboot of development. So they probably decided it needed an evolution then, and Granbull was one of the first Pokemon they worked on. Granbull faced the same sort of restrictions on it’s design as Togepi, in that since Snubbull was already released to the public, Granbull had to fit awkwardly around Snubbull’s design, rather than the two of them being made in concert or Snubbull being edited to better match its evolution. Despite this restriction, I think Granbull came out a lot better than Togetic. Granbull obviously builds on Snubbull’s design, but not in an awkward or crowbarred in way like Togetic: Snubbull has big lower teeth, so they grow in giant tusks for Granbull; Snubbull is pink, so Granbull is a shade of purple; Snubbull is grouchy, so Granbull is irate. Though Granbull is a very simple “larger, fiercer version of the original” type evolution, it works quite effectively here. *Strangely, though, even though Snubbull looks like a last-minute addition, it was one of the few Generation II Pokemon without placeholder stats. Though its stats at that point aren’t much different from the placeholder 50s across the board (70 attack and special attack, 65 HP, and 60 defense), you’d think the team wouldn’t have bothered to update these in the limited time they had. My guess is that the team may have considered giving one of the demo trainers a Snubbull, to tease its existence in the demo, but eventually decided against it. Beyond these discussions of Granbull's initial origins, Granbull's a pretty straightforward Pokemon. The team already had its final stat distribution by April, 1999: they had decided it would be a massive, 150 point boost over Snubbull, which included the huge 40 point boost to its attack stat, which was already a respectable 80 under Snubbull. Clearly, the team knew what they wanted Snubbull to grow into and stuck to it. The moveset did change by the final, but nothing interesting got added: the final version of Snubbull and Granbull got Roar and Rage, which fit their personality better than Double Edge, but otherwise the moves are about what you’d expect for a Bulldog Pokemon. The team originally gave Granbull Pokedex entries which stressed its timidity and cautiousness (or, as TCRF puts it, anti-social nature): It's usually unsociable. However, it seems that it can smile in the presence of its trainer. When it picks up an odor that it's never smelled before, it emits a low-pitched growl. In the final, the team went all out and made Granbull and outright coward, which is honestly much cuter and gives a much more vivid sense of its personality: It's actually a scaredy-cat. When attacked, it frantically flails its limbs around in an attempt to fend off foes. Honestly, who wouldn’t want to raise a cutey like that? Finally, there’s only two trainers in the entire final game with a Granbull: a Lass on Route 24, and the rematch with Pokefan Beverly, who only had a Snubbull in her first fight. Once again, this seems like an incredible waste: Granbull feels like a Pokemon a ton of late game Lasses should be using! One more example of Gold and Silver not using their own roster. Anyway, that’s all there is to Granbull: Snubbull needed an evolution, and it got one. Gligar, on the other hand, is much more interesting… ID #X07: GligarThere’s something odd going on with Gligar. We don’t have enough evidence to know exactly what, but there’s something very off about its constituent parts. I honestly don't know if these oddities will lead to anything at all, but I'll show them all off and you can judge it yourself. Before we get there, let’s go over Gligar’s design. Gligar didn’t appear at all in Spaceworld ’97, but it popped up at some time during the reboot. We don’t know exactly when it was first created, and honestly, I wonder if Gligar’s first design showed up before the development reboot, but after the end of the Korean Index. Part of the reason I think that is because we have an early sprite of Gligar that seems to be before even its June 1999 sprites; this could indicate that I should have put it even earlier in Era IV. This early version of the sprite is facing directly towards the camera, and lacks any sort of shading. It's also mirrored directly down its center (except for its tail), suggesting it was mocked up quickly and was quite rough. It doesn’t look at all like a Sugimori or Nishida sprite, and makes me wonder if it was created by one of the new designers. It’s mouth also bears a slight resemblance to Animon’s, which was the Pokemon it replaced, and I can’t help but wonder if that was intentional. This version of Gligar was replaced by June 1999 with a new sprite that kept the same design but was rotated to a 3/4s view, a camera angle much more naturalistic and more typical for Pokemon sprites. Here, we can see that it has a red and grey palette. It’s a much more polished sprite—notice that the designer put some shading on its belly, and there's a sense of perspective now—but it still doesn’t look much like a Pokemon, especially the cute and rounded designs that were common to Generation II. What exactly is this version of Gligar supposed to look like, anyway? I mean, it definitely has a scorpion tail and what kind of looks like pincers on its wings. Not to mention a mean-looking face. Gligar’s early name was “Sasoriga,” and “Sasori” is scorpion in Japanese, so there was definitely scorpion influences in this early design. Some people have theorized that the unused scorpion design from Period 1b in the Korean Index was actually an early design for Gligar, and it’s vaguely possible to see that strange design evolving into this one after it got iterated enough. On the other hand, I really doubt there was any connection. These sprites, for instance, were definitely made by different people; their styles are completely different. Furthermore, I don’t really see any similarities between these two Pokemon except for a common scorpion inspiration. Bulbapedia also suggests a pretty likely origin story. The Gazu Hyakki Yagyou, an illustrated bestiary of Japanese yokai written in 1776 by Toriyama Sekien (kind of ancient ancestor of the idea of a Pokedex) features a brief entry on a yaokai called “Amikiri” with an illustration making it look like a flying crab or lobster. There’s some suggestion that “Amikiri” derives from a corruption of the yokai “Kamikiri,” a better known mischevious Yokai which looks a bit like a kappa and secretly cuts people’s hair. Whatever the case, “Amikiri” seems to be a pretty rare yokai, and it isn’t actually clear they come from any old Japanese legends, but made have just been imagined because Kami sounds a but like "Ami" which is a type of shrimp with pincers. There’s another, more interesting, explanation for Gligar’s design. Doesn’t this early Gligar look like…well, an Alien? In the movie Alien, the eponymous Aliens hatch from eggs into a flying monster with finger-like limbs. It latches onto someone's face (hence their nickname, "facehuggers") and injects new Alien DNA into the body of the host, which eventually leads to an Alien bursting out of the stomach of the aforementioned host. It's an incredibly scary concept that plays on ideas like sexual assault and pregnancy. And I'm not the first to point out that a facehugger has an incredible similarity to the initial design of Gligar. Yeah, that’s really dark. It certainly feels like an inspiration that’s just a bit too adult for a Pokemon game. But let’s sit with it for a second. Do you know the name of the famous horror designer who came up with the concept art for the movie Alien? Oh yeah, that guy’s name is H.R. Giger. What if “Gligar” was just a portmanteau of “Glide” and “Giger”? It certainly matches that early design. That’s the point at which the coincidences get too much for me. As weird as it is, I’m pretty confident that this must absolutely be the origin for, at the very least, Gligar's name. My guess is that maybe one designer created “Sasoriga” from the idea of an amikiri, and then later someone else noticed that the original design looked a lot like a facehugger, and changed the name to be a pun on Giger as an in-joke. With an origin like this, the design might have looked a little too close to Alien. Thus, by Spaceworld 99, Gligar has a completely new sprite (and palette). What’s interesting about this new sprite is that nothing about the body of Gligar has changed all that much. It still has the wings, with the same six prongs—the pincers have been deemphasized on the middle two arms, so that it now just looks more like part of the wing—the same scorpion tail, and a head that looks remarkably similar. However, the entire body, from tip to tail, has had a makeover. Rather than looking aggressive, Gligar is now sticking its tongue out. Rather than a scary bat, Gligar’s entire body now has cartoonish proportions, giving it a silly appearance. Rather than growl, it now smiles. Gligar’s been completely domesticated by its final design. The weirdest thing, and the main issue with Gligar I want to discuss, is its typing and its moveset. Gligar’s unique in that it’s the first Ground/Flying type Pokemon. To this day, it’s basically unique in this typing: the only other Pokemon who share the typing are its evolution, Gliscor, and some weird thing from Gen V called Landorus. There’s no proof, but my guess is that it was originally designed to fill the hole left by Bombushikaa, which was the unique Fire/Water typing. My hypothesis is that Bombushikaa was initially created as part of a sequence in the Korean Index where the team was trying to create unique typings, and I’ve speculated that the strange megaphone-bird next to it in the Index might have originally been an attempt to create a Flying/Ground Pokemon to compete with the “opposites attract” theme of Bombushikaa. If I was right in that case, then Gligar could have been a second attempt at a Pokemon of that typing. Which presents us with a mystery. Have a look at Gligar’s moveset: Uhhhh…is something missing here? Gligar doesn’t learn any Flying moves, nor does it learn any damaging Ground moves (In Generation II, Sand-Attack is technically a Ground move, but many things learn it). Instead, it has one Poison move (Poison Sting), one Dark move (Faint Attack), and then a bunch of Normal moves. Why give Gligar this typing if it learned no moves of its types? Okay, but in Generation I, there were lots of Pokemon like this. Voltorb and Electrode, for instance, couldn’t learn any Electric moves naturally; the Rhyhorn family learned no Rock or Ground moves; the Sandshrew line learned no Ground moves either. All three of these Generation I Pokemon, however, learned a bunch of same-type attacks through TM; in fact, it seems like the Generation I design philosophy was to make most of the strongest moves only available through TM, in the same way that in the early Final Fantasy games, you needed to find or buy the strongest spells. Sandshrew and Rhydon, for instance, both learned Earthquake and Dig, the best (in fact, two out of the only three) Ground moves by TM. So what about Gligar? Gligar learns two more Poison moves (Toxic and Sludge Bomb) a Fighting Move (Rock Smash), one more Dark move (Thief) and even a Bug move (Fury Cutter). But not a single Flying or Ground move! What's going on? As the youtuber Scottsthoughts has made me especially aware, Gligar can’t even learn the TM for Mud Slap, an early game Ground move given by the first gym leader that just about every other Pokemon in Gold and Silver learns. In fact, Gligar is the only Ground type Pokemon out of all 252 existing Pokemon that can’t learn Earthquake or Mudslap. Not to mention its inability to learn the HM for Fly. Okay but maybe Gligar learns Flying or Ground moves from breeding? Well, it learns Counter, Razor Wind (though it's impossible for it to learn this move without trading from Generation I), Metal Claw, and Wing Attack. So yes, it finally learns one single Flying move, if you go through the trouble of breeding a new Gligar. Through a convoluted method, it learns one STAB move. What's weird about that, though, is that it turns out Wing Attack was a late addition to its Egg Moves--it didn’t learn this egg move prior to August 30th, 1999, only a few months before the final. Instead, prior to the end of August, it learned Psybeam and Giga Drain; earlier than that, Psybeam, False Swipe, and Leech Life. Instead of learning Ground and Flying moves, the designers gave it indirect access to a Psychic move, a Grass Move, and a Bug move. What the heck is going on? Unfortunately, though the data’s out there, I don’t have a record of Gligar’s moveset from earlier builds; no one on The Cutting Room Floor has compiled this data and I don't know a thing about coding to check myself. Because Gligar didn’t yet exist in Spaceworld ’97, the only version I have to go off is the final moveset. But I’d kill to take a look at versions of the moveset going back to earlier in 1999. Did it have any Flying and/or Ground moves in earlier iterations? Did they, for some reason, remove these moves from Gligar’s roster? Or did it have a bunch of moves from a different typing originally, as if the team had actually planned for Gligar to be some other typing entirely? What we do know is that Gligar was a Ground/Flying Pokemon from the earliest data we have: by its first appearance in April 1999, it already had these types. So it's very unlikely that Gligar was original some other typing and it got changed to Gound/Flying late in the day. It could be the case that, late in development, the team decided to change Gligar to a new typing (Say Poison/Dark or Poison/Flying) and got a new moveset ready, but forgot to update its actual typing. The team was under lots of pressure towards the end of development, and the people who were working on movesets could have been working at a different speed than everyone else. Likewise, it’s absolutely possible that there was a miscommunication between the person in charge of Gligar’s moveset and the design team: one group could have planned for Gligar to be Ground/Flying, and the other could have thought from Gligar’s palette and design that it was obviously a Poison-type or Poison/Dark—hence why it learns Sludge Bomb by TM and starts with Poison Sting and Faint Attack. UPDATE: GoldS_TCRF, in the comments, checked this moveset out for me, and it turns out that Gligar's moveset was identical to the final starting all the way back in April 1999, the first snapshot of the rebooted development we have! So unless Gligar's typing and/or moveset predates April, it seems that it was always designed to be a Ground/Flying type without Ground or Flying moves. Again, I'm not sure what to make of this. Was this intentional? Did the team just forget about Gligar and overlook this glaring problem? Did Gligar just get accidentally lost in the shuffle? I have no idea. If some mix-up like that happened, it may have been hard to catch. Gligar is a version exclusive to Pokemon Gold, and it's only found late in the game on the last route of the Johto region, a route that many players ignore entirely because it just connects the final town to the beginning town. Thus, it would have been easy for the team to overlook it during playtesting and just not notice the strangeness of its moveset. Or, as odd as it sounds, maybe Game Freak intended Gligar to have such a bad and unusable moveset. After all, in Pokemon Stadium 2 (released the same day as Pokemon Crystal), one of the rewards you could get from beating the game was a Gligar that had Earthquake already learned, even though it could not normally learn it. Another prize was a Gligar that knew Wing Attack. Depending on how you view it, the strangeness of gating these two moves behind Pokemon Stadium 2 could mean two things. First, it could be the team issuing a corrective after they made a mistake with Gligar: by giving it access to Earthquake and Wing Attack here, they could be implicitly admitting that they overlooked Gligar in the original release. Of course, remember that Crystal version released the same day as Stadium II, and that Crystal had already tweaked a few Pokemon’s movesets—notably, for some reason the developers thought that Sneasel was substantially incomplete without learning Metal Claw. If the team thought Gligar’s inability to get Earthquake was a mistake, why didn’t they just add Earthquake to its moveset in Crystal? But what if leaving off these moves was the point? A few commenters have argued that the developers saw Pokemon Stadium II as the true endgame of Generation II, and if Stadium was designed way in this fashion, maybe an Earthquake-using Gligar was an incentive to play Pokemon Stadium? It's possible that the designers left Gligar without any STAB moves on purpose, so that a decent Gligar could be the reward for beating your rival on Pokemon Stadium. Gligar, thus, would be a Pokemon designed to sell the functionality of Pokemon Stadium II. Personally, I find the design philosophy of “make something unusable on purpose, just to give a competent version of it as a reward later” to be completely baffling, but who knows what Game Freak was thinking here. I wish we had more information here to know exactly what they were going for with Gligar. I really like the theory that the moveset was mistakenly designed with a Poison/Dark Pokemon in mind, but I admit that with what we have, there’s very little evidence for it. On a different subject, since I mentioned Sneasel, it's worth lightly discussing the relationship between Gligar and Sneasel. In Generation II, there was no relationship: they were simply two new Pokemon introduced. The two Pokemon have little in common in Generation II—they both have odd typings and the same incredibly low Special Attack stat (35), but that’s about it. In fact, it appears that the version exclusive counterpart of Gligar was Delibird (potentially Mantine, it’s a bit unclear) in Gold and Silver. I’ve always felt a little bit bad for the kids who got Silver and got the useless Santa Claus penguin instead of this guy, though now that I’m analyzing Gligar I’m coming to the realization that it isn’t much more useful than Delibird in a typical game. However, it appears that in Generation IV, the designers decided that Sneasel and Gligar should be counterparts. Both Gligar and Sneasel got evolutions in Pearl and Diamon: Gligar got Gliscor, and Sneasel got Weavile. They were both bad Pokemon held back by terrible stats, so these additional evolutions made a lot of sense to help them gain new life in a new Generation. To drive home how similar they were, the designers gave them almost the exact same evolutionary method: Gligar needs to level up at night while holding a Razor Fang to evolve, while Sneasel needs to be holding a Razor Fang while doing the same. Given that Gligar and Sneasel have some of the most memorable designs in Generation II, I understand why Game Freak would have retroactively made them counterparts. Both are sneaking, mischievous Pokemon with something to prove. (Image by LucasPireArts!) By this point, a pattern should be emerging. Pokemon designed or refined (such as Sneasel or Dunsparce) during Era IV are often pretty unusable in the final game, due to either weird stats, horrible movesets, or being available exclusively in Kanto. Gligar’s a great example of this, but Yanma, Slugma, Pineco, and Shuckle are all upcoming. Gligar’s a cool design; it’s a shame the team made it so unusable, by choice or by mistake. ID #X08: PiloswineThe next Pokemon, Piloswine, had completely finished sprites by June 1999 and has drafted stats as early as April 1999; both lead me to confidently place it here as one of the earlier Pokemon of Era IV. While there’s much more to say about Piloswine’s evolutions (that’s right, plural), there’s still a bunch that’s interesting to cover with the OG Ice Pig Going to be honest here, I love Piloswine’s dopey look. It’s one of my absolute favorites designs, to me a bit like the Totoro of the Pokeverse. On the other hand, my wife thinks it looks like a highland cow and is much less positive about the design. Piloswine, as you may have guessed, was based on a pig, or on a boar. We know for certain it was designed by Shigeki Morimoto, who was probably busy working on other games for most of Eras I, II, and III; in fact, this might be one of the first Pokemon he worked on for Gold and Silver, depending on if his other work completely precluded designing Pokemon for the Korean Index era. He explained in an interview that he liked the idea of having a Pokemon for each of the animals in the Chinese Zodiac; Piloswine, obviously is for the year of the boar. Which was 1995, not 1999, so obviously Morimoto was a little late. We know that Piloswine was created first, before Swinub, and that in fact, Swinub took a long time for the team to design. However, it's clear from the very beginning that Morimoto had been asked to make Piloswine part of an evolutionary family: two more slots in the Pokedex, both before and after Piloswine, had already been carved out and were using placeholder graphics by June of 1999. There’s a few theories that link Piloswine back to an earlier moment in development. Some people think that the boar Pokemon found at the beginning of the Korean Index (ID 319) could have been a very early precursor to Piloswine, but I doubt it. In addition to having none of Piloswine’s distinctive traits—they both have tusks I guess—the most distinctive part of 319 were its antlers, which have no continuity with Piloswine. In addition, as I said, Morimoto was absent, working on other projects for most of this early part of development, so it’s unlikely he designed this boar (I may have said differently earlier on in the Cryptodex, but since then, I’ve talked to people with more knowledge of Game Freak’s products than I had). More plausible is that there was a tenuous connection between the Wolfman and Warwolf line from Spaceworld ’97, which were replaced very soon after the 1999 reboot. They seem to have survived at least for a small time into the reboot, given that post-SW'97 updated versions of their sprites were being used as placeholder graphics as late as June 1999. But they were cut by at least April 1999, for some reason. My guess was that they were counterparts of the Houndour line and the team liked Houndour more, but others have suggested that their design, which depicts a Pokemon hiding in the pelt of another killed Pokemon, might have been too dark for the games. In any case, there’s a decent chance that at least Wolfman was repurposed into Snorunt by the next generation. But when Wolfman and Warwolf were cut from the lineup, it left a huge Ice-type hole in the entire roster. Sure, the team had Delibird, Smoochum, and Sneasel, but Sneasel naturally learned no Ice moves (and was conceptually more of a Dark-type), Smoochum doesn’t exist except if you get deep into the breeding system, and while Delibird hadn’t yet been made into the useless gimmick Pokemon it became, it still wasn’t, shall we say, good. They knew by this point that the game would have an Ice-type gym leader who needed a new Pokemon to show off the type, and they knew there’d be a Dragon-type gym leader and so the player would need something besides Dewgong to counter it with. So I’m sure when Warwolf and Wolfman got the chopping block, an immediate concern of Masuda’s was to make sure an Ice-type Pokemon family replaced them. In this case, three Pokedex slots were set to the side for a new design, and Morimoto was likely told to design a new Ice-type three-stage evolutionary line. Morimoto started with Piloswine, though by June 1999, Piloswine seems to be the only one of the three complete. The slot before Piloswine, #221, has an empty placeholder sprite, while the one after it, #223, uses Warwolf’s sprite, but was likely also being used as a placeholder given the absence of Wolfman. Importantly, all three slots already have stats penciled in by April 1999, the Ice/Ground type, and evolution data that says they evolve into each other. They had placeholder movesets: each of the three forms just learned Powder Snow and nothing else until August, suggesting that initially the line was defined only by the need for an Ice-type evolutionary line. Beyond just the missing movesets, these Pokemon were substantially complete if you ignored their missing sprites. The stats of the Piloswine family, by the way, are a bit interesting: (Data and formatting taken from The Cutting Room Floor) Notably, all three have higher defense and special defense in the early stages of design, and much lower Speed, Attack, and Special Attack. This would have made them slow tanks, like Slowbro, but honestly, with those stat distributions the Piloswine family would have been a dud. As it is, the Ice/Ground type combination is weak to five different types—Fighting, Steel, Fire, Water, and Grass; with that incredibly low Speed, the Piloswines would be taking huge hits before they were even able to move, regardless of how high their defensive stats were. At least when the stats were modified to make them faster and with higher attack, they’d have a better chance of sweeping the opponent after they took a hit. My guess is these stats were improved so that Piloswine could serve as a decent counter to Claire, especially as Swinub only appears in the Ice Path, which just so happens to be right before her gym. But let's move on. We've still got two more pigs to get through... ID #X09: SwinubBy June 1999, Morimoto had created his Piloswine design. The team was clearly happy with it, because it existed unchanged until the final game; even the Crystal sprites only had minor changes to the palette and back sprite. However, Morimoto had no clue what the other two stages of the Piloswine family would look like, and they remained without sprites, possible as last as August 1999. Eventually, one of those Pokemon became Swinub. The other was lost to time. What’s especially interesting about the Piloswine line was that we have evidence that suggests that Morimoto wasn’t sure what stage Piloswine would actually be in the family. In fact, Morimoto drew multiple iterations of Piloswine as a first stage, a second stage, and a third stage Pokemon, probably assuming that they’d slot it in at whatever level it worked best, and then design the other two evolutions later. He very likely never meant for all three of these sprites to be used, but it does mean we have this funny proto-Piloswine family lineup of a smol Piloswine, a regular one, and an XXL Piloswine: They're all adorable and I love them so much. Smol Piloswine is like a tubby little piglet, and XXL Piloswine is roaring its heart out. I know it wouldn't have made sense to have all three in the game. But think about the possibilities! One thing that I really like here is that if you look close, there’s been a number of subtle changes to the base Piloswine design. The third-stage sprite is the most obvious: the tusks are much larger, and it’s now roaring angrily with its mouth agape. But the smaller first stage version is interesting too: though its feet aren’t much different from Piloswine’s, its smaller stature and nose makes them more prominent on the sprite and really makes it stand out as a four legged creature, whereas vanilla-Piloswine looks more like a mass of fur. Notably, I see a lot of similarities between this sprite and the eventual sprite Morimoto settled on for Swinub, but the biggest difference is he did away completely with the feet, making Swinub almost look like a pig-caterpillar. Again, this is a really good example of just how development of Pokemon designs was different under Masuda than it had been under Tajiri. By this stage, Morimoto was designing a Pokemon to fit the Ice-type needs of the game; his Piloswine design wasn’t being forced into the roster, like earlier designed Pokemon, but instead he’s actively redesigning it to better match the design needs of the game. In addition, the team seemed unsure about whether the Piloswine family even deserved three slots in the Pokedex. While we know that the third evolution was the one eventually cut—was this potentially because Morimoto couldn’t come up with a third sprite he was happy with?—for about two weeks in August 1999, the team almost cut the first form, which eventually became Swinub. Notice how Swinub gets reverted to placeholder stats for two weeks if I bring up the stat charts again: From July 30th to August 14th, Swinub’s stats were completely wiped, though it didn’t quite lose it’s typing. After the fourteenth, the team realized they had made a mistake, and reinstated the stats; at the same time, they gave Swinub and Piloswine movesets very close to their final ones. Then, by Spaceworld 1999 (compiled three days later, on August 17th), Swinub appears in the Pokedex, still without a name (It was Mitei 09, or “Pending 09”) but with its final sprites already complete. Notably, it has the same sprites in both Gold and Silver, even in the final. This heavily suggests that the team was too rushed by this stage to come up with two separate designs for Swinub. Swinub's incomplete in a few more subtle ways in Spaceworld '99 as well: for instance, it still has the generic Rhydon menu sprite, showing that they hadn’t yet finished transitioning the Pokedex slot over to Swinub. Meanwhile, Slugma’s sprite had replaced the third evolution of Piloswine by this point, demonstrating that the team had conclusively decided on Swinub only by this late point in development. From our standpoint in the present, it seems odd that Swinub was ever on the chopping block. After all, Piloswine just doesn’t look like a first form, even in the mini-version that Morimoto created. But clearly that just wasn’t the case for the designers. Maybe this is a case of hindsight being 20/20, because clearly the imposing bulk of Piloswine didn’t immediately convince Game Freak that this guy should be a fully evolved dude. Saying that, by the time they had created Swinub’s final sprites, it was much more clear. Swinub, the sleepy, unimpressive pig-caterpillar was a perfect design for the first stage of this family, immediately drawing a similarity with Piloswine while also being cute and adorable in its own right. They took awhile to figure this out, but it was definitely a winner that helped focus the designers while they thought through Piloswine’s place in Gold and Silver. Adorable. ID #010: Piloswine-3But if Swinub was completed, and the line was scaled back to two evolutions, what about the last boar? What about the one that got away? Of all the unused Pokemon in Era IV, Piloswine-3 is the one that was the closest to completion before it was deleted. Most of the others—only Kageboozu is an exception, and that’s a weird case—do not have any surviving sprites we can access, and I’m doubtful that most of them ever had sprites at all. While the XXL Piloswine sprite was probably not intended to be a final sprite, at this guy has something. In addition, Piloswine-3 got a fully established moveset and TM list (though it’s moveset is just Piloswine’s, of course, but later moves are learned at higher levels) and it got its own set of stats. If they team did create a unique Piloswine-3 sprite at any point that we just don't have, then Piloswine-3 was completely done before Game Freak decided to delete it. Like I said above, in June 1999, when only Vanilla-Piloswine’s sprite was finished, Piloswine-3 had stats and a typing, but was using Warwolf’s sprites. It’s unclear if the sprite above was ever assigned to it, or if that sprite was just a sketch Morimoto did to get ideas for what Piloswine-3 might have looked like. Personally, I love the ferocious roar that Piloswine-3 is diplaying, and I hope that would have been carried over into whatever unique sprite they gave it. Piloswine-3 existed until at least the middle of July 1999 before the team started to erase it. By Spaceworld ’99, there are substantial portions of Piloswine-3 that are still unchanged, but it’s clear the team has already started transitioning away from Piloswine-3. By SW'99, early Slugma sprites had replaced whatever was there for Piloswine-3. However, almost everything else still screams Piloswine. The typing is still Ice/Ground, it still retained the same moveset, and Piloswine still evolved into Piloswine-3 at this stage (a strange transition, from a furry boar into a puddle of slime). In addition, the faux-Slugma still has a footprint that looks like a larger version of Piloswine’s, and it has a unique cry that resembles that of Piloswine’s. I think it’s very likely that if we just had a slightly earlier build of the game—maybe just three days earlier—we’d see some sort of unused sprite for Piloswine-3 that we don’t have access to now. So what happened to it? Why get rid of a Pokemon that was so substantially complete? I think the answer is just that the team decided three stages to this evolutionary family were taking up too much space. They’d already created Magcargo by this point, and I think there was a realization setting in that Magcargo deserved an earlier form. Piloswine-3 was the easiest thing to cut, because the team didn’t lose a lot of Pokemon diversity in the roster by cutting it. While, like I said above, they considered cutting the Swinub instead, Piloswine-3 obviously made more sense to them. Probably because, echoing above, Piloswine just didn’t look like a first stage Pokemon on its own, but it certainly could play the role of a final stage. After that, Slugma was moved to earlier in the Pokedex, in order to be next to Magcargo for the final. Corsola was moved into slot #222, but by this point it no longer had anything in common with its fluffy boar predecessor beyond taking its old Pokedex slot. When they cut Piloswine-3, Game Freak also significantly raised Piloswine’s base stat total, to make it more formidable as a final stage evolution. While Piloswine had a 380 Base Stat Total as a second stage—pretty low and unimpressive, honestly—it gets buffed to 450 after Piloswine-3 was deleted, making it more attack oriented and giving it some speed. As welcome as this is though, this feels a bit like it was robbed, given that Piloswine-3 had a 500 BST, which was substantially better. Swinub was rebalanced after Piloswine-3 was removed, mostly to make it less defensive and speedier, but it didn’t get a similar stat total buff. In fact, it went from 260 BST to 250, making it quite weak, even for a first stage Pokemon. Given how much I love Piloswine, I’m honestly crushed that Piloswine-3 made it so close to the final but was cut at the last minute. A third Piloswine evolution would be amazing. Now, obviously, the team probably agreed with me, because in Generation IV, they brought the idea back. Behold: Mamoswine. On the bright side, Mamoswine is an absolute beast. If Piloswine-3 was going to have 500 BST, Mamoswine exceeds it, at 530 BST. It’s hard to compare their stats, since we know Piloswine and Swinub were made more less defense oriented and more aggressive after Piloswine-3 was removed. Presumably, a final version of Piloswine-3 would have lost some defense stats and gained some Attack and Speed. Still, comparing the two shows just how much better Mamoswine is: On the negative side, well, Mamoswine is a Generation IV design. And I know this is just personal preference, but man, I do not like the choices the designers made in creating new evolutions for Generation IV. Swinub and Piloswine are adorable because they’re giant balls of fluff: you can barely make out limbs of any sort, nor can you read their facial expressions. So of course they ruined all that in Mamoswine’s design. Why give it weird creepy eyes? Why make it less a ball of fur?
Interestingly, Mamoswine was made a counterpart of Tangrowth and Yanmega in Generation IV: all three of them only evolve if they know Ancient Power, and all three take on traits of pre-historic species when they evolve. Tangela becomes a cave-man, Yanma becomes a giant prehistoric insect, and Mamoswine becomes a Wooly Mammoth. Alright, this is vaguely neat that the designers came up with theme. I just wish it didn’t completely ruin Piloswine’s look in the process. I doubt Piloswine-3 ever shared any aesthetic similarities with Mamoswine. First of all, like I always say, these were developed about six years apart, and probably by different designers. Any similarities would be odd coincidences. On top of that, Mamoswine looks the way it does because of it’s inclusion in the Ancient Power trio; since that didn’t exist when Piloswine-3 was being invented, I doubt the Wooly Mammoth inspiration was present in its design. Thirdly, though its tenuous, the Piloswine-3 sprite we do have shows it with its mouth bellowing a roar. While that could easily have changed, it hints at an entirely different personality than Mamoswine: one that was meaner and more aggressive. Unfortunately, Slugma got created, and Mamoswine took away any chances for Piloswine to have an evolution befitting its greatness. Piloswine-3: What could we have had?
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AuthorMy name's Aaron George, and I'm both a historian and a fan of Pokemon, especially of development. Reach me at @Asmoranomardic Archives
February 2024
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