Period 4a was defined as all of the Pokemon that were created before April 1st, 1999, which is the first date following the reboot of development that we have data for. While we don’t have sprites for this period, we know which Pokemon have names and stats. Thus, we can come to a pretty good conclusion of the first and most important changes that the team made once development was rebooted. For instance, it’s clear that remaking the water starter was a priority for the team, which explains why Totodile and it’s relatives were substantially finished by April 1999. This second section, Period 4b, is composed of those Pokemon which were given stats, names, or sprites after April 1st but before August 1st. These Pokemon are harder to pin down: some of them have names predating April 1st (which would thus fit them in with Period 4a) but don’t have sprites until much later. Some have nearly completed sprites, but don’t get stats or names until much later. In general, this group is hard to define because they weren’t worked systematically. My best guess is that the mons in Period 4b were planned from the beginning of Gold and Silver’s rebooted development, but were lower priority than those in Period 4a, so they only got worked on later, and at a more leisurely pace. It’s harder to directly place these in order of creation, since they all seem to have been partially created, then left alone, then completed later. Still, we can group them all together as “worked on after April 1st and mostly complete before August 1st. If there's one uniting theme I can pick out in this era, these Pokemon seem to have been created as replacements for Pokemon that Masuda had rejected as unfit for the roster once he rebooted the game. While Period 4a leans towards priorities the team wanted to add into the game for one reason of another and found a space for them. Togetic and Granbull, for instance, needed to exist because Togepi and Snubbull were useless without evolutions; Tyranitar was a cool "wow" Pokemon to give Generation II its Dragonite equilivalent; Lugia was a new legendary and one that would tie into the film; Sudowoodo was added to create roadblocks. On the other hand, the Pokemon in Period 4b seem created as replacement for things that weren't working: that is, the creative impulse to make these Pokemon happened in the other direction. Rather than create a good idea (like Lugia) and then find a spot for it, instead it looks like designs were targeted for deletion, and then 4b Pokemon were created to replace them. Sentret and Furret were created because there were too many baby Pokemon and Monja and Gyopin were targetted for deletion; Ursaring and Teddiursa replaced the Kotora line which hadn't found a niche; Yanma and its evolution replaced the Manbo1/Gurotesu family tree that was clearly having problems. This is a very subtle difference though (the Piloswine family, for instance, looks like a flat out replacement for the Warwolf line), and we have to remember that the ordering of Era IV is something I've created on my own; as a result, we can't take these thematic divisions too seriously. In my initial plan for Era IV, I split Era IV into 4a, 4b, and 4c. However, after looking closely at Period 4b, it seems best to actually split it into four sections. It appears that between July 30th and August 1st, the development team inserted a whopping eight Pokemon into the roster all at the same time. While I was initially going to lump those in with Period 4b, it not seems to me that those Pokemon are better grouped as a second section. Thus, they will be the new 4c, and 4d will be all the Pokemon made after Spaceworld ’99, which was compiled on August 17th. It is also worth reminding you that Sentret and Furret belong at the beginning of this section, not towards the end of Period 4a. I didn’t quite realize as I was writing their entries, but given that they only get stats in mid-April 1999, there’s a good chance they weren’t worked on prior to April (though their names do seem to predate April, and their sprites might). Regardless, we know they didn’t get stats until after April, unlike everything else in Period 4a, which means they should probably be the first two Pokemon here. So just imagine their entries right after this! ID X20: Ursaring Our next Pokemon (after Sentret and Furret) is Ursaring, the Ring/Bear/Hibernation Pokemon. Game Freak’s second attempt at creating a Pokemon based on a bear, Ursaring (and Teddiursa) were more successful than their original try, Honooguma. While not an especially memorable Pokemon (at least for me) Ursaring, at one time, seems to have been created specifically to show off one of the new mechanics of the game. While that mechanic got deleted by the final, remnants of the idea remain in Ursaring and Teddiursa’s designs. According to Bulbapedia, Ursaring is based on the Asian Black Bear, which is known as the “Tsukinowaguma” in Japanese, or “Ring of the moon bear.” I'm not positive why it has that name (I guess its white crescent reminds some people of the moon?), but the connection to rings and moons helps us understand why Ursaring has a ring on its belly. It’s just a way of taking the name of the Asian Black Bear too literally, and thus being a subtle pun in Japanese that we miss in English. Likewise, Teddiursa has a moon on its head too, also referencing this black bear. Ursaring seems to have replaced Raitora, the evolved version of Kotora, the adorable electric tiger Pokemon from Spaceworld ’97 (which also has origins all the way back to Generation I). Though we don’t have any post-reboot sprites of Kotora or Raitora (maybe, see the Teddiursa entry), it’s a pretty safe bet that they survived as least briefly into the reboot. The main reason to think this is that both Ursaring and Teddiursa have the Electric type and completely different stats than their final ones as early as April 1999, which implies that at this point, they had probably overwrote a version of Kotora and Raitora that had been developed far enough to get actual stats, and not just the placeholder stats they had in Spaceworld ’97. TCRF says that Teddiursa and Ursaring's initial movesets in April 1999 look like only slightly edited versions of Kotora and Raitora’s SW97 movesets, and while I don’t have access to these movesets to double check that, I'm relatively sure that this is a typo, and they mean that these movesets are close to those of the discarded Fire Starter, Honooguma, which I mentioned in that entry way back when. However, if this isn't a typo, then it indicates that the first versions of Ursaring and Teddiursa we have are only slightly modified versions of the lost tiger Pokemon. To be clear, I’m not just saying that Teddiursa and Ursaring overwrote Kotora and Raitora. That’s a near certainty, given both the above evidence and the fact that the scratchpads for the bears have the old Kotora and Raitora sprites on them. What I’m suggesting is that they probably overwrote Kotora and Raitora very close to our first snapshot of the reboot; maybe even a few days or a couple weeks before. While we know that Teddiursa and Ursaring’s names already appeared in the data by April 1st, everything else by that point is Kotora and Raitora’s, and their stats suggest some work had been put into Kotora and Raitora very recently. We don’t have sprites for anything until June 1999, by which point Ursaring and Teddiursa’s sprites already appear in the data. But I’d be willing to bet that if we had a sprite sheet from April, maybe even from mid-May, Kotora and Raitora’s sprites would still be present, not the bears. So why get rid of Kotora and Raitora? Well, as we mentioned back in their entries, I think the team was probably having trouble finding a unique niche they'd fill in the new game: after all, their moveset is very similar to Pikachu's. It could also have just been a numbers thing: the designers could have felt there were enough Electric types planned for Generation II already: after all, Mareep is freely available and serves as a basic Electric type and Magnemite is easy to come by early in the game. But it was probably a combination of Kotora/Raitora not working and a need to find a new spot in the lineup to show off a new mechanic: the Honey Pot. The Honey Pot was an item that we have first record of on April 30th, 1999, but it could have appeared earlier: I think it is very likely it was first implemented at around the same time as Ursaring and Teddiursa got names (but were otherwise Kotora and Raitora clones). The Honey Pot was an item that the player could find in the basement of the Goldenrod department store, and it could be filled up with an item called “Sweet Honey.” Sweet Honey, interestingly enough, was given to you by the woman in the department store who gives you the awful “Sweet Scent” TM in the final game: it seems she used to have a much more interesting role in the game. We know that if you had Sweet Honey in your Honey Pot, you could slather it on headbutt trees, and if that tree had had honey on it for more than one day, the next time you headbutted it, you would always encounter a Pokemon, and it would always be a rare Pokemon. If this mechanic seems familiar, it’s because Game Freak eventually used it, in Pokemon Diamond and Pearl! It’s pretty fascinating that the idea of Sweet Honey was developed so many years earlier. The Honey Mechanic was probably created hand-in-hand with the headbutt mechanic. Headbutting trees didn’t exist in Spaceworld ’97, so it would have been one of the new ideas to be implemented after Masuda became the team’s director. Likely, Headbutting trees was an idea the team hand in tandem with slathering honey on trees, since the Honey modifies how likely it is to find a Pokemon. We even have hints in the unused text of the game that the Sweet Honey girl in Goldenrod City was the sister of the kid who gave you the Headbutt TM in the Ilex forest! The idea of having two different mechanics related to trees was probably too complicated, and removing honey simplified things in the end. But for about four months, the Honey mechanic was a big feature of Generation II. Of course, one of the traits bears are known for is that they love honey! Given how the Sweet Honey mechanic was first created right at the same time as the creation of Ursaring and Teddiursa, it seems very likely the bears were created to show off this new mechanic. If you examine the early and final Pokedex entries for Teddiursa and Ursaring, you'll also notice that liking honey is central to their identities. First, let’s look at Teddiursa’s Pokedex entries: Early Gold Entry: It has an excellent sense of smell and can easily track down the scent of honey. When it does, the ring on its head lights up. Final Gold Entry: When it finds honey, its crescent moon glows. It's always licking its paws, which are covered in sweet honey. Both of these Pokedex entries make it clear that Teddiursa is all about honey (even explicitly called sweet honey in the final entry) and the earlier Dex entry makes it clear that Teddiursa is always tracking down honey. Meanwhile, here are Ursaring’s Silver entries: Early Silver Entry: It's excellent at distinguishing odors. It's constantly walking around with its nose in the air. Final Silver Entry: It can sniff out any odor. It will find every last bit of food, even if it's buried deep underground. Likewise, Ursaring’s main trait, according to these entries, is its ability to sniff out different scents. While the final entry implies that it will search underground for food, the early one sounds more like a ‘mon that would wander through the forest seeking out honey. Notably, Heracross’ final Silver Pokedex entry also mentions that it likes honey: Usually docile, but if disturbed while sipping honey, it chases off the intruder with its horn. Given that Heracross was made around the same time (probably a bit earlier), it’s not a stretch to think that the team also wanted to make a Heracross encounter uniquely tied to the Sweet Honey as well. Heracross is found from headbutting trees in the final game: this is probably because it had been designed to interact with the honey mechanic. (As an aside, I could swear there was an unused text string in Spaceworld '99 that references the player being attacked by a bear, which would presumably have happened if you slathered honey onto a tree and Ursaring attacked. I checked backwards and I even mentioned this text in the Honooguma entry. But I can find no reference to this anywhere on TCRF now, and I'm starting to think I imagined it. If you know what the heck I'm remembering, please let me know.) This mechanic, of course, never got implemented in Generation II, probably because it was a lot of work for very little benefit: after all, why would you go to the trouble of slathering sweet honey on a tree when you could just headbutt a bunch of trees until you found one with a rare drop? But if the team initially wanted to show it off, then Ursaring and Teddiursa were probably created as to be the unique find you could make through the honey mechanic. Kotora was already facing identity problems. So when the team wanted to find space to add a new Pokemon to show off this new mechanic, Kotora and Raitora may have been the obvious two-stage Pokemon family to replace. (It’s likely also the case that the team liked the bear concept of the original fire starter and wanted to reuse it, but we’ll talk about that with Teddiursa). It seems that, at least initially, Ursaring was the Pokemon that the team started with. First of all, by June 1999, Ursaring’s sprite is completely finished, while Teddiursa’s was just a rough placeholder sprite until just a month or two before the final build. That suggests the team had a stronger concept for Ursaring than it did for Teddiursa, and that they had started with it. Secondly, though both Ursaring and Teddiursa already have names by April 1st, Ursaring’s Japanese name (Ringuma, or “Ring Bear”) was already the one they would use for the final, while Teddiursa’s name was Kokuma. Now, not only is that a pretty lazy name--It literally means “small bear” or “child bear,”—but it’s also obviously just a play on Kotora’s name. Kotora just means “child tiger,” after all, and all the designers did was change “tiger” (Tora) to “Bear” (kuma or guma). To my eyes, this is just an obvious placeholder name, implying that “well, we’ve got a bear Pokemon, so presumably it’s pre-evolution will be a baby bear.” It’s like if the team created Raichu, knew that Raichu would need a stage one form, and nicknamed that first stage “baby mouse” until they came up with an actual idea. It is interesting, however, that even after Ursaring and Teddiursa replaced Kotora and Raitora, it took them forever to gain their own unique stats. Until August 14th—just days before Spaceworld ’99—Ursaring was still an Electric type using Raitora’s old stats. Teddiursa had to wait a week later than that: it only got unique stats on August 22nd. It seems likely that Ursaring and Teddiursa were not really priorities after they were initially created: the team wanted bears in the game to interact with the honey, but didn’t really care what the Pokemon were like. The low priority of Teddiursa and Ursaring might also explain why Ursaring is found on no trainer teams, and Teddiursa is only found on one team in the final game. Since they had a low foot print on the gameplay of the games, the design team may have felt it was easy to ignore them. It’s also notable that at almost the same time as Ursaring and Teddiursa got stats, the Honey Pot was also deleted from the internal item list, and the honey mechanic was dropped. Did the decision to get rid of Honey make the team realize that they still had to figure out what these Pokemon did? Maybe. It’s also around this time that the team was choosing which Pokemon would be version exclusives, and so it’s possible that the team assigned new stats to the Ursaring family so that they knew it was relatively comparable with its version exclusive counterpart, Donphan. One last thing to note about Ursaring. Ursaring's stats got modified between August 14th and August 22nd, probably because the stats were made to better fit with those given to Teddiursa. Originally, when given stats, Ursaring was an all-around good attacker: it had 105 in both base Attack and Special Attack. However, Teddiursa had a different spread: 80 in Attack and 50 in Special Attack. As a result, the team decided to mirror this in Ursaring: they took 30 points away from its Special Attack and gave 25 points to its Attack power. While they succeeded in making Ursaring more of a physical attacker, I’m not sure if the team really realized how much of a beast they made Ursaring. 130 Attack power is ridiculous: at the time, only Dragonite and Tyranitar had more than it, and Ursaring was tied with Hooh, Kingler, Scizor, Rhydon, and Flareon. Of all of those Pokemon, it’s the easiest to obtain, and it’s the only one of them to get STAB damage with Normal moves like the powerful Return or Slash. As someone who recently played through Silver with an Ursaring on my team, let me just tell you: if you’ve never played with this guy, you’re not quite prepared for how trivial it makes the game. We’ll talk more about this development process when we get to Teddiursa. For now, let’s move on to Yanma! ID X21: Yanma I’m going to be honest with you guys. I don’t know why Yanma exists. Yanma was created to be a Bug Pokemon, in a game that already had a ton of Bug Pokemon. It got the Flying type, even though there were already a ton of Bug/Flying types. By the time Yanma was created, Spinarak, Ariados, Ledyba and Ledian already had secured places in the new games, and Butterfree, Beedrill, and their families weren’t exactly hard to come by. Besides, in the final game, Yanma’s only found in one place, at an exceptionally low encounter rate, and it has awful stats even when you do catch it. Not a single trainer even bothers with a Yanma, barring one obscure rematch. Even Yanma’s name is uninspired: Yanma is just Japanese for Dragonfly. It’s almost as if the designers themselves were bored by this guy. Why make this guy at all? My suspicion is that Yanma was created to fill a hole: it was initially created to replace a two-stage evolutionary line, that of Manbo1 and Gurotesu (see the next entry for more details here). Because that line wasn’t working, the team needed a new two-stage line to replace it. While I have no idea why someone (probably Sugimori) came up with a dragonfly Pokemon in particular, Yanma was the design that came to mind. And then the team did very little with it. Yanma’s name was completed even by April 1999, and it had finalized sprites by June, but it didn’t have stats, or even a typing, until late July 1999, much later than most Pokemon which had sprites this early. The lack of typing so early is especially odd: unlike Ursaring, which inherited the typing of Raitora, there was no typing or stats for Yanma to inherit from its spot. That suggests to me that Manbo1 and Gurotesu had been deleted for awhile by this point and only their sprites remained. When Yanma finally got stats, they were nothing to write home about. It’s highest stat is Speed, at a base 95, which is solid but hardly great. It then has a 65 in HP and Attack, a 45 in both its defensive stats (which is awful), and a 75 in its Special Attack. Which would be okay, except that it can only learn three Special moves in the entire game, and none of them are STAB moves: Giga Drain, Solar Beam, and Thief. Of those, it has to wait until the Kanto portion to even get Giga Drain or Solar Beam, and Thief is extremely weak at only 40 power. What’s the point of an okay Special Stat if you can barely use it? In fact, Yanma gets NO STAB moves at all. It learns no Bug attacks, and no Flying attacks in Gold and Silver (Fortunately, Crystal rectified this by replacing Swift with Wing Attack). Instead, its moves are almost all Normal-type, and of those, Swift is the most powerful, at a meager 60 base power. Through TM it can get Headbutt, and the afore-mentioned Giga Drain and Solar Beam in the post-game, but other than those it mostly just learns the generic TM moves all Pokemon get. It can learn Curse, Rest, and Return at the very least, if you decided to give it the stereotypical Gen II moveset. But if its moveset is unbalanced, there is a method to it. By examining each of its moves, it becomes clear that Game Freak assigned these moves based almost purely because of flavor. Yanma, they believed, was a fast, highly maneuverable Pokemon with good eyesight and strong wings; its eyes slightly resemble the helmet a jet pilot would wear, making it possible that pilots or helicopters were part of its inspiration. You can see these characteristics in its Pokedex entries: Earliest Gold Entry: It uses both eyes to look in all directions. When it spots its prey, it swoops down and attacks before it even knows it's there. Revised Gold Entry: It flaps its wings about 30 times a second, so it can stop in midair or even fly backwards. Final Gold Entry: If it flaps its wings at high velocity, it can generate shock waves that will shatter nearby windows. Clearly, even as they worked on Yanma’s entries, forefront in the mind of the designers was that it was fast and maneuverable. And as bad as its moveset is, most of its moves reflect that. Foresight and Detect play off Yamna’s strong eyesight and it’s ability to react to threats quickly. Quick Attack, Swift, and Double Team reference just how fast Yamna is. And even though Supersonic and Sonicboom’s effects don’t have anything to do with speed or maneuverability, their names clearly play off the ability of a fighter-jet to go so fast it breaks the sound barrier. In other words, it looks like who ever picked out Yanma’s moves didn’t really think about game balance, or typing, or anything gameplay-related. They seem to have just gone down the movelist, given Yanma anything that might fit this flavor, and then called it a day. I’m not sure exactly what we can infer from this. I don’t have enough information on how movesets were designed to come to any specific conclusions. However, three possibilities present themselves. First, this could just be a low effort moveset for a Pokemon no one on the team really believed in and one that got almost no playtesting. Second, it could be the case that someone devised a first-draft moveset, based upon vibes, and the team just never found the time to come back and revise it. Or, third, flavor-themed movesets like this might be far more common than I think they are, and it just so happens most of them usually end up working for the Pokemon better than this one worked for Yanma. A fourth option is that the team was pretty purposeful when they gave Yanma bad stats and a terrible moveset. Given that by late July there was not chance of it being a dual-stage Pokemon, and given that there were already so many Bug Pokemon in the game, the designers may have decided that Yanma’s niche had already been filled by others, like Ledyba, which could be more useful in battle (let’s ignore for the moment that Ledyba’s also awful in battles). By late July, when Yanma first got its moveset, the team may have decided they wanted Yanma to be another collectable Pokemon, like Delibird would become and the babies already were. The idea has a certain charm in it: make an extremely rare bug that trainers wouldn’t normally run into as a secret on the route. In the case of Yanma, being a collectable Pokemon would mean that its moveset didn’t have to be good: the team may have settled on an evocative moveset rather than a good one so Yanma was at least interesting and unique when people encountered it. UPDATE: Three commenters (KingPepe, Johtonian, and Thomas Bell) have all made the case that Yanma was used to show off the new "Swarm" mechanic in Generation II, a mechanic I'd honestly overlooked. In Generation II, particularly rare Pokemon--Dunsparce, Yanma, Qwilfish, Remoraid, Marill, and Snubbull--can be much more easily encountered when you collect the phone number of a nearby trainer. That trainer will sometimes call you up and let you know that a "swarm" has appeared, and if you go back to their route, the likelihood of encountering these Pokemon goes from 1% to 40%. It's another mechanic that makes filling out your Pokedex in Johto more interesting: you have to talk to fellow trainers to find some of the most obscure species. I'm almost positive that these three commenters are right, and that Yanma was made rare in large part to show off this Swarm mechanic. This helps me understand the weird design choices made for Yanma a lot more clearly: it wasn't hid away and neglected because the designers had forgotten about it. They probably realized it didn't have a niche compared to the rest of the bug Pokemon and decided to make it a rare reward for being thorough and talking to other trainers. END UPDATE. Whatever you think is likely, it is notable that Yanma is one of the rarest Pokemon in the final versions of Gold and Silver: there is just a meager 1% chance to encounter a Yanma, on only one route in the entire game, Route 35. Since no trainers use it, it would be very easy to play Gold and Silver all the way through without even realizing that Yanma exists. Is this because the team liked the idea of a hidden bug Pokemon which players would have to seek out to complete their collection? Or was Yanma simply buried somewhere obscure because the designers didn’t care enough about it to bother playtesting or balancing it? In other words, is Yanma another iteration of Porygon? Or is it just another Lickitung? ID X22: Yanma 2 If Yanma was a forgotten, ignored, or simply collectable Pokemon, it wasn’t always that way. In fact, Yanma was originally designed to have an evolution! Though almost nothing was created for this evolution, it’s worth discussing the empty slot that was once Yanma-2, and see what we can glean from it. First, let’s start out with everything we know. As far back as April 3rd, 1999, we have data that indicates Yanma was supposed to evolve at level ten into the Pokemon in Pokedex slot 171. We don’t know for sure what was there, but it had completely placeholder stats, and given that it had Gurotesu’s—the Angler Eel Pokemon from Spaceworld ’97—sprite by June, it seems safe to assume that it was using this sprite (or a earlier revision of that sprite) in April. It didn’t have anything else: no name (except for Mitei 03, or Pending 03), no typing, and no egg group. At the time, this wouldn’t have been anything more than what Yanma had. At the very least, Yanma had its final name by this point, though its name—Yanyanma, as I mentioned above—just means “Dragonfly” so the name could have easily been a placeholder. It also has only placeholder stats, no typing, and no egg group, so at least by April, both Yanma and its evolution seem no more than the vague of concepts. Yanma does have a sprite by June 1999, but I don’t think we have any reason to think it had that sprite in April 1999. Far more likely, it had the sprite for Manbo1, which appears on Yanma’s scratchpad and was an evolutionary relative of Gurotesu in Spaceworld 97 (though the middle evolution, Ikari, is nowhere to be seen). (Manbo1's palette is speculative and based on Gurotesu's revised palette in June 1999. Thanks to OrangeFrench!) By June, Yanma had a sprite, while Yanma-2 was still using Gurotesu’s old sprite—though it is a significant clue that Gurotesu’s sprite was, by this point, not the same as its SW97 sprite. Gurotesu’s shading on its jaw was different by June, and its backsprite has not only been cropped differently, but its jaw was edited to protrude less (We’ll come back to this). By July 18th, both Yanma and Yanma-2 managed to get their final Bug/Flying typing, and an egg group. But by July 30th, the two had diverged. Yanma got its final set of stats, but Yanma-2 didn’t; it still had placeholder stats. It is possible that by this point Yanma-2 had some sort of sprite—whether a placeholder sketch or one more finalized, like Yanma’s—but I think it’s unlikely: it is probably the case that it was using Gurotesu’s sprite, or a placeholder empty sprite. By August 14th though—just two weeks later—Yanma-2’s typing was deleted, its sprite was replaced with an early sprite for Chinchou, and Yanma no longer evolved into it. Clearly, between July 18th and August 14th, the team had decided that, for whatever reason, Yanma-2 was unnecessary and they got rid of it to make room for a new unique Pokemon family. It is the case, strangely, that Yanma-2 actually gained egg moves at the same time as it was disassembled: these egg moves were unique from what Yanma had, and the moves—Confusion, Poisonpowder, Leech Life, Flail, Whirlwind—are clearly designed for a dragonfly and not for the future holder of its slot, Chinchou. This is weird! TCRF suggests that the person making egg moves was probably disconnected from the rest of the team and hadn’t gotten the memo that Yanma-2 was out, and I think that’s probably the most likely explanation. Development was quite hectic on Gold and Silver, especially in the last few months, and I wouldn’t be surprised if different members of the team were doing different things. We’ll talk about Chinchou in Period 4d, right at the end of the Cryptodex, but for now, let’s just note that it was a last minute replacement for Yanma-2 and it seems like it was created right up to the wire before release. For now, instead, let’s discuss two subjects: why were Yanma and Yanma-2 created, and why was Yanma-2 deleted when it was? Let’s start by addressing the first question. It appears that when Masuda rebooted the development of Gold and Silver in early 1999, Manbo1 and Gurotesu were still on the roster, at least briefly. Their deletion must predate April 1999 (our first snapshot of the reboot), which means we can only speculate about this, but I think our evidence for this is solid. Like I said, we know from Yanma’s scratchpad that it overwrote Manbo1, which means Manbo1’s sprite was at the very least still being used long after Spaceworld ’97, unlike a lot of other Pokemon—the Tangela third stage evolution, for instance—which seem to be long gone, even in the sprite scratchpads. More significantly, like I pointed out above, Gurotesu’s sprite had been subtly but unmistakably edited, suggesting that the team put work into it even after the conversion to the Gameboy Color, which happened as part of the rebooted development. For both reasons, it appears that Manbo1 and Gurotesu were initially included in the new 1999 roster, even if they didn’t last long. For all we know, the fact that by April 3rd Yanma evolved into Mitei 03 could be a leftover from when Manbo1 evolved into Gurotesu, rather than something new that was programmed in for Yanma (though its unlikely, since evolving at level ten seems more typical for a Bug-type than a Water-type). Interestingly, it appears that Ikari, the shark-anchor Pokemon that served as their middle evolution, was not brought over into the rebooted roster. Ikari appears on Heracross’s scratchpad, suggesting that Heracross overwrote it, but Heracross’s Pokedex number was 214, which is miles away from the slots used by Manbo1 and Gurotesu, which were 170 and 171. That means that Ikari, if it did exist, wasn’t part of the Manbo1 evolutionary family anymore, and since Heracross already had stats (and probably a sprite) by April 1999, it’s very likely that if Ikari’s sprite was used at all, it was probably a placeholder sprite that was quickly overwritten. Conversely, the implication is that the closeness of Manbo1 and Gurotesu in the Pokedex suggests that the evolutionary line was amended to be a two-stage family. (Again, thanks to OrangeFrench for the revised palette!) That would make a lot of sense given the history of the Manbo1 evolutionary family. We know from the Korean Index that this evolutionary family was originally pasted together somewhat haphazardly from three different unrelated lines. Manbo1 was originally related to two bigger and meaner looking Sunfish Pokemon, ID 355 and ID 356. Gurotesu likely had an earlier evolution, a small, white eel Pokemon that was ID 301, and Ikari was probably unrelated to both and was probably a remnant of Jagg, a shark Pokemon rejected from Generation I. Before Spaceworld 97, all three lines were amended, probably because the team wanted to use the best designs of all three families, even if they conceptually had almost nothing related to each other besides living in the sea. (Speculative palettes once again thanks to OrangeFrench!) So changing the line again make it a two Pokemon was probably easy to do, given how there was already a precedent to edit this evolutionary family. There’s a lot of evidence that Masuda wanted to add a lot of new family lines when he took over (probably in part to steer the art style of Gold and Silver towards more “Cute” designs) and so turning a three-stage family into a two-stage family was probably an easy way to free up space for new species. But it also showed the weakness of the Manbo1/Gurotesu line. The fact that these two Pokemon have almost nothing to do with each other was probably still an unsurmountable problem, even after deleting Ikari. My guess is that Yanma and Yanma-2 were initially proposed to replace Manbo1 and Gurotesu with a two stage line that was conceived of as a single concept, rather than pasted together. A Dragonfly Pokemon may have been the perfect design to use: after all, there are tons of ways to design a bigger, meaner, and nastier dragonfly that would have more in common with its first form than Gurotesu ever had with Manbo1. (Tangentially, it’s worth noting that Gurotesu almost assuredly became Huntail in Generation III, and Huntail also evolves from a Pokemon—Clamperl—that has almost nothing conceptually in common with it. Either Huntail was just pasted last minute onto Clamperl because the design had a champion who had mourned Gurotesu’s deletion here, or else they just really couldn’t figure out a natural design for Gurotesu’s pre-evolution). If that’s why Yanma and Yanma-2 were created, then why was Yanma-2 deleted? That’s harder to figure out. We know that Yanma-2 was definitely on the table by July 18th 1999, and that it was definitely gone by August 14th. We also know that it didn’t get updated stats on July 30th, at the same time Yanma did. That’s suspicious, to say the least, and it makes me think that July 30th was the point in development when Yanma-2 was deleted. So what was going on then? Well, as it turns out, quite a lot. Eight Pokemon were added to the Pokedex at that exact date (See Period 4c), and tons of other Pokemon got updated stats and typing. Probably, the team had come up with a lot of changes they wanted to implement since July 18th, and July 30th was when all those changes were implemented in a new build. So Yanma-2 was probably deleted as part of a major update of Pokemon stats, typing, and movesets. However, of the changes that were made during that build, a few are conspicuous. July 30th was the day that the team decided to give Scizor and Plux the Steel typing in addition to their Bug typing. It was also the day that Heracross gained the Fighting type. Spinarak and Ariados also got slight stat increases this day too, though those were minor, and Pineco was created, though it was initially just a mono-Grass type. Again, there was a lot going on on July 30th, so this could be coincidence, but Yanma got its stats the same day that Heracross, Scizor and Plux were finalized and given a second type to make them formidable bruisers; it was also the same day that the Spinarak family were tweaked to better fit into the early game. My thought here is that if the team had decided to get their Bug-type house in order around the end of July, they may have made a determination that Yanma and Yanma-2 just wouldn’t fill an important niche as either an early game Pokemon—Spinarak already filled that—or as a late game Pokemon—since Scizor, Plux, and Heracross would fill that role. As a result, it became clear that Yanma didn’t have a niche, so the team gave it middling stats and decided an evolution would just be a waste of space: after all, Yanma-2 wouldn’t compete very well with monsters like Heracross. It probably didn’t help that Yanma-2 probably still didn’t have a sprite at this point (it could have, but odds are against that), which would have made it an easy mark. Of course, Yanma did eventually get an evolution in Generation IV. It got Yanmega! Based on a giant prehistoric dragonfly, Yanmega was part of a three part trio of old Pokemon that evolved when taught Ancient Power, and were based around prehistoric designs: Mamoswine and Tangrowth were the other two members of this crew. Yanmega is probably the best designed of the three, and it really gives lives up to the idea of a giant, terrifying dragonfly out to murder you. They even gave it Bug Buzz and Bug Bite, so that it finally learned some STAB Bug moves! I don’t think the decision to give Yanma an evolution in Gen IV was related to the death of Yanma-2, however. Instead, I think Yanma-2 left a very obvious hole that the designers of Gen IV noticed and capitalized on. Yanma, as a single stage Pokemon, is a creature dripping with unrealized potential. It’s no good in battle, but that’s just because it doesn’t evolve into anything: with a cool evolution it could find a place on someone’s team. I get why Game Freak may have decided Yanma-2 didn’t really fit into Generation II, but in deleting Yanma’s second evolution, Yanma ended up orphaned, a Pokemon without a purpose. It’s not surprise that in a different context, the designers of Pearl and Diamond tried to give it one. ID X23: TeddiursaAnd now it’s time for the cute bear cub before it becomes a monster! We’ve already talked a lot about Teddiursa in the context of it’s evolution, Ursaring: how both were probably created to showcase the Sweet Honey, how they both overwrote Kotora and Raitora, and how they were based on Asian black bears. But we neglected one important topic during our discussion of Ursaring: Teddiursa’s family resemblance to Honooguma. As a reminder, the original fire starter family line was a collection of fire bears. Honooguma, the first evolution, was a cute bear cub, while Volbear and Dynabear grew increasingly magnificent manes of lava as they grew. This family was replaced by the beginning of the reboot of development: by April 1999 Honooguma was replaced by Cyndaquil, and the other two are completely gone by our first snapshot of sprites, in June 1999 (though their names were still in the data by April—more on them in future entries). There’s at least a conceptual similarity to the final Cyndaquil line. Both Volbear and Quilava have names referencing volcanoes while Dynabear and Typhlosion both have names referring to explosions; the way their manes of fire grow also loosely resemble each other. But they’re distinctly different Pokemon, and as we discussed much earlier, Cyndaquil was repurposed from a discarded Pokemon in the Korean Index to replace Honooguma (or replaced Honooguma right before the development hiatus—the data could point to either). It isn’t clear why the fire bears were removed from the game; it’s possible that Masuda didn’t like their aesthetic and wanted something quirkier; maybe the team just found fire bears boring. Or, as I suggested in the Honooguma entry, there is also a notable tendency away from "Animal+" designs and towards more abstract and interesting designs as development progressed: Cyndaquil is obviously a more complex design that "bear with a fire tail." In any case, the most interesting legacy of Honooguma was that Teddiursa’s original sprite is an obvious edit of Honooguma’s, as seen above. Teddiursa’s is the exact same sprite, except with a ring on its head, a yellow palette, and any reference to fire removed. It also looks notably rough: the edits are not done particularly skillfully, and the shading on Teddiursa’s sprite feels pretty basic. Importantly, the yellow palette was not chosen for it on purpose: it's just the Kotora palette, reused, which further emphasizes how much of a placeholder the sprite was. I would normally say that the team used this sprite as a placeholder, but at the very least, the team kept using this sprite even past August 1999, and they even drew an alternate silver sprite in this style. Now, this may not mean anything: Shuckle, and Sneasel both got unique Silver sprites in SW99 as well, despite having sketchier sprites showing off earlier designs. Still, this is at least some suggestion that Game Freak may have considered using this Honooguma sprite for the final game if they ran out of time to edit it further or replace it with something new (if they did decide to keep it, at the bare minimum they would have given Teddiursa a brown palette, since it stole its yellow one from Kotora). Fortunately, by the final build, someone (looks like Sugimori to my eyes) developed a much more finished sprite; one that showed off Teddiursa’s whimsical, cute nature much better than the Honooguma sprite. (Even in the palette of the final sprite, the early Teddiursa looks pretty incomplete: it would've needed a bit of a touch up, at the very least. Thanks to OrangeFrench for the palette experimentation.) That isn’t to say, however, that Teddiursa was a entirely a repurposed Honooguma: like I mentioned in the Ursaring entry, Teddiursa’s typing, stats, palette, and Pokedex number owe themselves to Kotora, not Honooguma. By all indications, it appears that Teddiursa and Ursaring were designed to replace Kotora and Raitora, and their origin stems from the team being unhappy with Kotora and Raitora (probably because they didn’t fit a unique niche—see the Kotora entry). That being said, Honooguma definitely played some role in the way Teddiursa turned out. As mentioned in the Honooguma entry, Teddiursa's moveset appears to be an edited version of Honooguma's, with the fire moves replaced with more appropriate Normal moves instead: As you can see, Honooguma's fire moves went to Cyndaquil, and its regular ones went to Teddiursa (including the rarely-learned-by-level Rest, which seems perfect for a hibernating bear). There are three possible reasons that Teddiursa and Ursaring were the designs chosen to replace Kotora and Raitora. The first explanation, and the one I stand by more than the others, was that they were created to show off the Sweet Honey mechanic that I outlined in the Ursaring entry. If the team had wanted the player to catch Pokemon by slathering honey on trees, bears made obvious sense to be something to make use of the mechanic. Given that the team already had some designs created for bear Pokemon, they may have decided to repurpose Honooguma’s design rather than draw an entirely new sprite. But there are two other explanations for the creation of Teddiursa, which are plausible enough to talk about here. First, it is possible that Teddiursa—and then Ursaring—were in fact created because the team decided Honooguma would make a better addition to the roster as something other than a starter Pokemon. Maybe someone on the team really liked bears and wanted to keep Honooguma around even after it no longer fit as a starter; maybe the team wanted a Normal type line and at the same time someone decided Cyndaquil should be the starter, so they moved Honooguma. Maybe Cyndaquil was added in as a Normal type before the reboot, and when Masuda took over, he decided to swap their positions and types in the Pokedex. The main reason to doubt this is because, if I had to guess, it seems to me that Ursaring was probably the first of the two created. After all, by June 1999, Ursaring has the final sprite it would use in the final game, and the sprite looks pretty heavily worked on. Meanwhile, Teddiursa is using a rough, quickly edited sprite reused from earlier in production: one is finished, the other clearly isn’t. And even if Teddiursa was created first, why didn’t they also repurpose Volbear or Dynabear for Ursaring’s sprite? If the point was to preserve Teddiursa, why not also borrow one of those sprites too? Saying that, maybe the story goes the other way: maybe a designer wanted to save Honooguma, so they edited the sprite and created Teddiursa. Meanwhile, that sprite was deemed “good enough” for the time being, so someone focused their attention on the evolved sprite, and created Ursaring’s from scratch. Teddiursa, in this version of events, was the first conceived, but since it already had a sprite, more time and effort was spent on Ursaring’s. Another explanation is that the need for a two stage Normal-type family came first, and the designer of this line appropriated Honooguma’s old sprite after trying, and failing, to make Kotora fit the Normal-type need. On the scratchpads, after all, there is a strange sprite of Kotora: not only was its lightning bolt on its chest removed on this sprite, but if you look closely, its eyes were slightly edited to look cuter. This could have been an idle experiment, just done for fun before Kotora was discarded. It could also have been an attempt to see what Kotora looked like as a Normal type. Kotora doesn’t work as a Normal type, at least if this sprite is what we have to go by: its tail still looks like a lightning bolt, and even if you took that away, Kotora wouldn’t really have any interesting design hooks without its electric theme. Thus, the designer could have tried to make Kotora into a Normal-type, failed, and then looked around for other discarded designs which might be better suited to a Normal-type facelift. And thus Teddiursa was born. Notably, if this is the explanation, it is very odd that Teddiursa and Ursaring took months to actually get changed to Normal type. In fact, the team seemed remarkably unconcerned with their stats: even though Teddiursa and Ursaring seemed to have been conceived very soon after the reboot, their stats don’t change from the old Teddiursa sprites until August 14th, in the SW99 build. Now, it could have been that their stats just weren’t Game Freak’s priority: they knew what these Pokemon would do, why change them before they had to? Still, if the main point of creating the Teddiursa line was to make a new Normal type family, why take forever to actually make them Normal? And if they experimented with making Kotora Normal type, why didn’t they change its typing back when they made that sprite?
All three of these explanations are plausible, and none of them are contradictory: it could be the case that a combination of all three led to the creation of Teddiursa. But if I was betting money, I’d bet on the Sweet Honey explanation. The timing and coincidence of honey being a mechanic the team was trying out, and the way honey is highlighted in Teddiursa’s pokedex entries seems like too much evidence to discard the idea. But again, there could have been competing reasons why the bears made their debut. In a perfect world, I think it’d be awesome to see a regional Fire-type Teddiursa in a future Pokemon game. Or even an Electric-Teddiursa, given how long it was an electric type. In any case, I’m still sad that Kotora and Raitora were removed in favor of these bears: I don’t think it was worth it to lose those designs before the bears, even if Ursaring is an absolute beast while playing through the game. Still, at least we can piece together why we lost those adorable tigers.
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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 ArchivesCategories |