2 Hours of Pokemon Facts to Fall Asleep to

did you know in the first draft of Mewtwo Strikes Back Mew could talk and it was actually kind of a jerk in one of his Japanese blog posts we translated the movie's head writer Takeshi shudo said there were lots of points where mu told Mewtwo after all you're nothing but a copy this triggered Mewtwo's inferiority complex in a burning hatred towards the original Pokemon these lines were meant to needle at Mewtwo and defend its ego it was like a drama where they debated Mewtwo's right to exist Muse personality is violent and unpredictable and yet it looks innocent cute somehow and doesn't appear to be threatening so in a way it's both cruel and effective for Mew to incessantly chip away at Mewtwo's self-esteem shudo goes on to say they had a hard time making Muse voice sound both innocent and offensive so they just changed it so Mew just flies around looking cute saying its own name but even though it can't talk in the final script it's still just as much of a jerk shudo made that clear on his personal blog saying I don't think Muse lines in the first draft were wasted what Mew wanted to say was a copy is just a copy I can't tolerate the existence of copies made by humans both Mew and Mewtwo feel anger towards humans for creating a connection between them without their consent I think that first draft was necessary to make sure the director and staff understood both Pokemon's motivations so if you've been thinking of Mew as sweet and innocent you thought wrong that's just its soft exterior hiding a quote cruel violent and unpredictable personality in another blog entry we translated shudo says the first Pokemon movie was originally planned as a follow-up to an anime episode he planned to write himself that would have established Mewtwo's backstory and a confrontation against Ash that's why the movie is called Mewtwo Strikes Back it's a Revenge story for what happened in the TV show that said they actually came up with the name of the film before anything else shudo said according to the Japanese TV schedule Mewtwo is supposed to have already already appeared on TV by the time the film releases he's supposed to have faced off with the anime protagonist once already maybe the protagonist even beat Mewtwo somehow so let's make it a story about Mewtwo's Revenge one of the Star Wars movies was called The Empire Strikes Back which shudo thought sounded cool so that's what they titled the first Pokemon movie pre-production was getting started but soon after a Porygon episode with flashing lights gave thousands of Japanese kids seizures in an incident now known as the Pokemon shock due to health concerns the Pokemon anime got pulled off Japanese TV for four months and by the time it returned to the airwaves The Writer's initial plans were so far behind schedule that the episode with Mewtwo's backstory never got made to be clear Mewtwo did appear in a few episodes that aired a few months after the movie came out but these were not the episodes shudo originally intended that one never even got written and the reason Mewtwo is striking back was changed from getting revenge on ash to getting revenge on Mewtwo's creators them um [Music] when shudo was still in the early stages of writing the movie The higher-ups at the studio hired masachika ichimura to play the voice of Mewtwo ichimura was the actor who played The Phantom of the Opera in the Japanese theater production and shudo was Starstruck and super excited to hear he'd signed onto the film with that in mind he wrote Mewtwo to basically be a Pokemon version of the Phantom having a dark past that leads him to isolate himself from society controlling secretive intelligent and seen by the outside world is scary and evil even though in his heart of hearts he's really just tortured by his own existence and overwhelming sense of solitude shudo even gave Mewtwo a castle to mirror the Phantom's opera house as ichimura was getting in character to voice Mewtwo he turned to Judo and asked Mewtwo's character is the Phantom of the Opera right shudo nodded and whispered you're exactly like the Phantom of the Opera most fans outside Japan have never heard ichimura's performances Mewtwo although it's really quite good and you should definitely check it out but him being cast had a profound and Lasting influence on the series not just in the movie but but how fans around the world perceive Mewtwo to this day with nothing but his appearance in gen 1 to base the character on Judo could have very easily written Mewtwo as a comic book super villain or a Monster who couldn't even talk but thanks to the Phantom of the Opera and how it inspired Judo Mewtwo will always be known as dark brooding and isolated foreign speaking of Mewtwo's castle and Mewtwo Strikes Back it's in a movie exclusive location called New Island but where exactly that is in the Pokemon world is never explained however some Japanese books published a couple years later featured a map of the orange Islands which revealed new island is actually Southwest of Cinnabar in 2020 a scientist named Yoon shayao discovered three new species of beetle in Australia he named them binburum Articuno binburu Moltres and binburam Zapdos we got in contact with Yoon to ask about them and he told us I always feel it's nice to connect popular culture to biotaxonomy to raise awareness for conservation of the amazing diversity of our Earth's ecosystem and I really appreciate the biodiversity of the Pokemon world which is actually based on real world diversity when we identified three new species at one time an idea of three legendary Pokemon who always appear in each generation came to mind and as my first contact with Pokemon the first Generations the one that left the deepest impression that's why I chose these three birds I won't say playing Pokemon is the only thing that inspired me to become a biotaxonomist but it must have had an influence apparently these beetles were sitting in a museum since the 90s unidentified until June discovered them it's unknown where they were actually found in the wild so it seems fitting that beetles named after Legendary Pokemon on are classified as habitat unknown their Rarity was another reason you name them after the bird Trio he told us their quote as rare as legendary Pokemon in fact they're so rare that video of live specimens don't even exist all there is is this single photograph we also want to point out that in red blue and green all legendary birds had eight toes except Zapdos who only had six but later on it sprouted two more toes in a stealth update making it equal with Articuno and Moltres speaking of early designs the November 1996 issue of korokoro magazine was the first time Pokemon Blue was ever announced and the magazine showed off some beta Sprites that were planned to appear in blue but ended up getting replaced at the last minute including one for Mewtwo we actually think it's a pretty big improvement over the Mewtwo Sprite that did end up getting used not only in Japanese blue but the versions of red and blue that released internationally this unused blue Sprite for Mew was discovered in a 2019 leak of prototype assets but a couple even more interesting Sprites were discovered in leaks dating back to gen 2's development revealing a couple early designs for Celebi the first is pretty clearly modeled after the Native American fertility God Kokopelli who's known for being a bit of a trickster with Origins dating back over 1 000 years Kokopelli presided over childbirth and Agriculture and also represented the spirit of music and playing as flute was said to chase away winter and Usher in Spring while a little less obvious the later Celebi appears Kokopelli inspired as well and displays a strong native American Motif game freak never commented on these leaked Sprites but fans have speculated the designs were scrapped possibly to avoid controversy Kokopelli was primarily a god of the Hopi tribe who still exists today but were mostly wiped out during colonization and game freak might have realized that turning their God into a Pokemon wasn't the best idea or they may have simply decided to take Celebi in a different direction although they never talked about those beta Sprites game free cast talked a bit about celebi's development junichi Masuda wrote on his blog that they decided it would have a nature theme not much else was officially explained until 2018 when an interview was posted on game freak's official YouTube channel it's in Japanese so we translated it into English in the video hironobu Yoshida explains that he was a new Pokemon designer brought on for Gen 2 and his first task was creating Wobbuffet Dunsparce and Celebi presumably celebi's nature setting was part of the design design specifications handed down to him in the video he says so when I got to work I realized Celebi was at the bottom of the Pokedex list I asked why that was and they told me it was going to be a legendary Pokemon it's the same as Mew so I aim to design a small cute fairy-like Pokemon like Mew that's how Celebi came to be Yoshida Morimoto and Uno go on to say that similar to the Mew under the truck Rumors in gen 1 after gold and silver launched a new rumor started to spread that Celebi could be found at The Shrine in ilex Forest shigeki Morimoto was the guy who added Mew into gen 1 and he's known as a bit of a rascal so everyone at game freak accused him of hiding Celebi at The Shrine saying you didn't add that in there did you what'd you do what'd you do but Morimoto was innocent it turned out the rumor was completely made up and they had no idea how it started but then they thought huh that's kind of interesting so when they made Crystal a year later they added an in-game event where you actually could catch Celebi at the ilex forest Shrine so the mysterious fan rumor actually became a reality it's at this point the interviewers realized the shrine literally had zero purpose in gold and silver and asked so why did it even exist according to the developers that's a question even they don't know the answer to which just makes the Celebi rumor all the more mysterious foreign did you ever wonder why it appeared in the first episode of the anime years before gold and silver even launched in Japan according to Takeshi shudo it was just marketing simple as that and a couple blog posts he wrote when I started writing the script I was informed that the second generation of Pokemon games was nearing completion some felt that Ho-Oh should be shown as a draw for the whole series if only for a few seconds so the scene was added in over a year ago we made a 20-minute video entirely dedicated to Lugia where we talked about how shudo created Lugia and before it had a proper name and was simply referred to as Pokemon X after the video was already published our friend aleph sent us this early concept art made by Ken sugimori revealing it literally had an x on its belly early in development which was shown off at the Pokemon the Movie XY exhibit in Tokyo in 2014 in our Lugia video we also talked about some connections Lugia has with ryogen the Japanese god of the sea one of y'all in the comments pointed out one more connection that we missed in Pokemon X and Y there's a small cave where you can find the legendary bird Trio in the English version this cave is called the sea Spirits Den but in Japanese it's called watatsumi's Den watatsumi is ryujin it's the same God just by another name the legendary bird found inside strengthens the Cave's connection to Lugia and also strengthens Lugia's connection to the Japanese god of the sea and as we noted in our previous video in the Japanese version of the second movie Lugia is literally called quote the god of the sea now let's talk about the relationship between Ho-Oh and Lugia you've probably already heard about their connection with the real-life temples in Japan we already talked about that in a video about six years ago so for today's video we're just going to focus on all the opposing forces HoHo and Lugia represent in a 2009 issue of Nintendo dream magazine we translated all the top developers sat down for an eight-page interview promoting the release of heart gold and soul silver the interviewer said this one's a deep question about the world so Groudon and Kyogre present land in Sea Dialga and Palkia are time and space and it seems like every legendary Pokemon has an exact opposite our Ho-Oh and Lugia opposites they reply there's no direct relationship between HoHo and Lugia in the story but as far as their motifs they represent the sun and the moon or day and night that's how I picture them like light and Shadow the sky and the bottom of the sea above and below that's their meaning so basically they're opposites in the sense that they represent day and night and the sky and the Sea that's pretty interesting in itself but it's what they said next that piqued our interest Kenji matsushima who was game designer on gold and silver and the remakes said when Ho-Oh and Lugia first appeared on Game Boy they had time related abilities that idea remains unchanged in heart gold and soul silver so what's he mean by time related abilities after all it's Celebi who's the time traveling Pokemon not Ho-Oh and Lugia Ho-Oh can learn sunny day and Lugia can learn rain dance but those are really more weather related so that's probably not what they're talking about looking through their Gen 2 Learn sets there are two other attacks that Stand Out Future sight and ancient power it's worth noting that in Japanese ancient power translates more closely to primeval power meaning not just ancient but even older the earliest stages in the history of the world future sight and ancient power were both added in Gen 2 as was the concept of time itself with gold and silver introducing a real-time clock and day night cycle even more interesting Celebi also learns future sight and ancient power and all three Pokemon with these time-related abilities are grouped at the end of the Pokedex together Lugia representing Knight Ho-Oh representing day and Celebi representing time travel so the argument could be made that together all three legendaries comprise a sort of time Trio gen 3's Weather Trio gen 4's creation Trio and gen 5's Tau Trio also have a pair that are more closely linked and a third Pokemon that's a little more of its own thing time Trio isn't a term currently in use by the fandom and it doesn't even have a Bulbapedia page but it's worth noting that even though the weather creation and Tau Trio do have Bulbapedia Pages none of those terms are actually official they were all created by fans to refer to groups of Pokemon so in that regard the concept of a Time Trio is just as official as all the rest of them which is to say not at all but a fun and potentially useful method of categorization speaking of fan made terms let's move on to the legendary beasts which even though it's not an official term you probably know exactly which Pokemon we're talking about there's been a long-standing argument between fans about whether they're legendary dogs or legendary cats their early Sprites from gold and Silver's 1997 space World demo leaked online in 2018 showing much more dog-like designs but they underwent some drastic changes over the next two years of development resulting in three Pokemon that are almost unrecognizable as the same species in 2012 their designer muneo Saito shed some light on the famous cat vs dog question in a Twitter thread we translated art director Ken sugimori he said let's try asking muneo Saito do riko and Tay and suicun have any animals they're based on like people say they're based on dogs or something Saito replied at the time I already had kind of a vision in my head for Entei I was rolling that Vision around in my head for a while trying to figure out how to connect suicune and ryko's Designs but it wasn't really coming together I'm a manga artist so I tried approaching things from the perspective of character creation I thought of the story behind the Pokemon and worked backwards from there to figure out what features they needed so a king with a majestic mustache and a rock-like body covered in thick hair and Volcanic smoke rising from behind its head and Tay's design was taking shape it basically looked like a lion but I didn't want it to look too much like any one animal so I settled on a silhouette that could look like either a dog or a cat or neither after that I settled on tiger-like and leopard-like designs for ryko and suicune suicune came together easily but ryko's design took a lot of twists and turns to get right there was even a blue thunder version with a drum on its back so so basically there are direct tiger and lion motifs but the main idea is that they're designed to be Spirits responsible for each element or rather I aim to make them like distinguished Gods so there you go they're based primarily on cats and Tays a lion riko's a tiger and suicunes a leopard but Saito also said their Silhouettes were made to look ambiguous so there's still a little wiggle room for fans who don't want to believe they're cats although we should also note that 2022 is the year of the Tiger in the Japanese zodiac which is why Pokemon designers like Saya saruta and Ken sugimori tweeted out brand new ryko artwork to celebrate New Year's because it's a tiger cats guys they're cats we swear to God they're not dogs in that thread muneo Saito also mentioned an earlier riko design a blue thunder version with a drum on its back some YouTubers have claimed this Saito artwork is that early design but that doesn't appear to be true for one thing there aren't any drums Saito probably doesn't mean these kinds of drums by the way he's talking about the Japanese style drums carried by the Japanese god of thunder and also Saito responded to one of our tweets a few years ago saying he actually made this artwork to promote a character design class he taught in 2014. this was the website that promoted his design class and it also features saito's artwork for a bipedal Dragon these jellyfish fruits a popcorn family and a psychedelic Orchard they're all interesting and possibly even inspired by unused Concepts from his time working on Pokemon but this doesn't appear to be the Blue Thunder riko he told sugimori about blue ryko's never been made public not even in a leak and doing so himself would put Saito in very very hot water with Pokemon's legal team so it seems fans will probably never get a chance to lay eyes on that long-lost legendary design moving on to gen 3 you probably already know that deoxys's design was inspired by DNA in the Pokedex it's even classified as the DNA Pokemon but you might not have realized its four forms actually spell it out the Defense form neutral form attack form and speed form together form an acronym for dnas in gen 3 Deoxys can only be found on Birth Island which is geographically isolated from other sevi Islands it's based on the real-life island of Minami Tori Shima which is also geographically isolated with the nearest Japanese island more than 700 miles away a far-flung island with no inhabitants it was claimed by the U.S government in 1889 because it was covered in guano basically just poop but valuable at the time for its use in fertilizers the Japanese and American governments argued over who owned the tiny poop-covered islands for decades especially when its location became militarily strategic so America bombed the crap out of it in World War II the U.S took control of Minami Tori Shima soon after but eventually decided they didn't really care about it after all and gave it back to Japan in 2015 the now deserted island mysteriously vanished off satellite images with the Japanese Coast Guard saying quote there is a possibility that the islet has been eroded by wind and snow and as a result disappeared conspiracy theories spread that a government cover-up was in the works may be centered around military technology but the island quickly reappeared soon after making headlines for an even bigger reason huge deposits of rare earth minerals were discovered in the Island's mud which could be enough to supply the world for centuries there's a good chance that someday the screen on your smartphone will be made from minerals on Minami Tori Shima not to mention key components in hybrid cars and missile systems in other words the real-life home of Deoxys is one of the most mysterious and important Islands on the entire planet ever wonder why Latias and Latios are psychic and dragon types in our Lugia Origins video we heard shigeki morimoto's explanation for why Lugia's half psychic instead of half water basically because psychic Pokemon were super powerful back in the early Generations so it was made psychic flying not for design or lore reasons but just to make it strong in a 2018 interview Morimoto explained that essentially the same reason Latias and Latios aren't flying types saying when we were deciding the types for them we wanted to give them psychic type and dragon type to really Express their strength but once we did that we looked at them and knew they needed to fly but couldn't give them the flying type too so we ended up giving them the levitate ability instead Rayquaza's got a pink tongue in all its official artwork but early Sprites actually depicted with a blue tongue the blue tongue can be seen clearly in all the Gen 3 games pinball Ruby and Sapphire and even gen 4's beta but after Diamond and Pearl hit store shelves Rayquaza's blue tongue was never seen again here's what that official artwork would look like if it kept that early coloration again on the topic of its color a special Shiny Rayquaza was released exclusively in Japan nobunaga's Rayquaza Pokemon Conquest was a tactical RPG spin-off released in 2012 with the feudal warlord Nobunaga essentially acting as the game's villain as he seeks to conquer the ransei region by force in the last mission he calls upon black Rayquaza to serve as the game's final boss to promote Pokemon Conquest release in Japan a black Rayquaza with its original trainer identified as the warlord Nobunaga was distributed over Wi-Fi but only to Japanese copies of black and white we don't have much to say about gen 3's other legendaries that hasn't been said before so let's go ahead and move on to the generation most focused on its legendaries according to the game's director junichi Masuda I decided that ultimate was the theme in the beginning of gen 4's development the key element was to create the storyline around the Pokemon in Sinnoh mythology the relationship between all these Pokemon is the key element I wanted to express the importance of the balance between substance Dialga the ruler of time and Palkia the ruler of space and spirit uxi Mesprit as elf if the substance becomes too large the balance of the spirit collapses I wanted Dialga and Palkia to become counterparts for a sense of balance infinite time and Infinite Space that to me is the ultimate in another issue of Nintendo Endo dream magazine art director Ken sugimori explains that Dialga and Palkia were created based on instructions from Masuda and they went out of their way to make dragons that unlike earlier designs like Dragonites Salamence and even Charizard were a drastic departure from the conventional look of fantasy world dragons which is why they don't look anything like the scaly lizards you'd see in western or even Eastern mythology to make giratina's origin form and the Distortion world the developers borrowed a concept from Japanese culture after directing Diamond and Pearl as the ultimate Pokemon games Masuda felt they had to go even bigger for platinum so he instructed platinum's director Takeshi kawachimaru to use antimatter and sakasa Fuji as inspiration to create the Distortion World sakasa Fuji translates to reversed Mount Fuji and it's the concept of a reversed Mount Fuji the reflection in the lake underneath a distorted reflection of reality trying to explain it Masuda said it exists but it actually doesn't it doesn't exist but it does that sort of thing the mountain exists on the lake through human eyes but it's only a reflection and doesn't exist it's a diverse world you see it only because you're looking at it with your own eyes when designing guarantine as origin form we paid meticulous attention to the character's details our designer redrew giratina's image again and again to make it a Pokemon from the antimatter world when Pokemon Legends Arceus released fans were perplexed at the new origin forms for Dialga and Palkia but they finally made sense when Japanese fans realized if you combine them with origin form Giratina all three fit together to make Arceus there's actually some lore about their origin forms that wasn't included in the game itself but was published on the game's official website for Palkia it says they say that the very space in the world where origin form Palkia resides is in shreds as if it had been torn to ribbons and for Dialga the flow of time is said to be in constant flux in the world where origin form Dialga resides always moving in different directions and different speeds Dialga also got a unique form never included in the mainline line series Primal Dialga who only appeared in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon explorers of Time darkness and sky in an alternate future timeline the time gears are stolen from dialga's home the temporal Tower which strips Dialga of its powers of time control along with its ability to express logic reason and even Mercy in other words it's not as powerful as normal Dialga but it makes up for it with Mindless villainy driven only by its Primal Instinct besides its unique lore attributes it also differs in color Primal Dialga was also the antagonist in the Blazing exploration team manga and made a brief appearance in the Beyond Time and darkness anime Special but since he's only been seen in the PMD side series and not in over a decade he's probably not considered Canon to the mainline franchise and since we're already on the topic of non-canon legendary forms let's wrap up with a couple more from the series's history first announced in a 2015 teaser trailer Shadow Mewtwo was designed first and foremost by Bandai Namco the developers of Pokemon tournament but game freak and the Pokemon company contributed as well after a plot device called The Shadow Synergy Stone merges with and corrupts Mewtwo it becomes Shadow Mewtwo and flies around the Ferrum region draining Gaia to become even more powerful also it can essentially mega evolve into its mega X form although the game doesn't call it that according to pokken's producer masaki hoshino when we were originally coming up with the design we worked very closely with the Pokemon company and Game Freak to make sure everything was right what happened was we at Bandai Namco had the idea of making a really cool dark colored Mewtwo so we had one of our designers take a crack at it and then presented that to the Pokemon company in Game Freak they all thought it looked really cool so then we worked together to brush it up because everyone really liked Shadow Mew too I have a personal hope game freak will continue to use it but it's not really our decision unfortunately sadly for those designers Shadow Mewtwo never appeared in any other games after Pokemon tournament and when polygon asked the Pokemon company in 2016 if Shadow Mewtwo was Canon or not they were met with a very non-committal reply no comment an even lesser known variant is fragment mu it was created by famous Japanese designer and musician Hiroshi fujiwara in a partnership with the Pokemon company they called the Thunderbolt project fujiwara is famous for making streetwear fashion so his Mew design was plastered on shirts hoodies hats and turned into plushies even Muse original Creator shigeki Morimoto was a fan and appeared on game freak's official Japanese YouTube channel wearing a fragment Mew t-shirt that was actually the episode where Morimoto explained how he made Mew back in the 90s fragment Muse official artwork was never released digitally so he commissioned artist Rachel Briggs to trace the hoodie design for use in this video and will post it on Twitter for folks who want to use it Mew was kind of the Project's mascot and got the most unique artwork but a few other Pokemon appeared on Thunderbolt merchandise too like Mewtwo the Kanto starters and Pikachu you could say Thunderbolt Pokemon are sort of their own special variants kinda like Shadow Pokemon but even though they're officially licensed Pokemon products they probably can't be considered Canon although there's certainly an interesting footnote in Pokemon history unfortunately they're also incredibly rare pieces of History A lot of them were sold at limited time pop-up shops in places like Japan and New York so if you want to get your hands on one nowadays you'll probably have to fight like a wild dog for it on eBay did you know Mew was inspired by an invisible F4 Phantom fighter jet and a dog that never existed we know this sounds bizarre but it's the truth so buckle up for about 15 years worth of backstory it's often said that gen 1 programmer shigeki Morimoto inserted Mew into red and green as a prank but that's only a very small piece of the story and it's not even entirely true the idea for Mew actually came from Satoshi Tajiri game freak's founder and the creator of the Pokemon franchise Tajiri is incredibly reclusive and rarely grants interviews but he did sit down for one gigantic interview at game freak headquarters in May 2000 which was later published as 34 pages in a Japan exclusive book called Pokemon story in our search for Pokemon secrets we recently had those 34 Pages translated into English and what we found was tajiri's rather bizarre but also completely ingenious explanation for why he came up with Mew so let's get into it as a teenager Tajiri frequently skipped school to spend all day at the local arcade he fell in love with games like Space Invaders and xevius two space Shooters he obsessively played in massive Marathon sessions in the interview he said I would really try and take these games on going at it for 12 hours at a time at the time I thought I'm the only guy who's doing this but in reality guys like me were springing up all over Japan and we started to wonder what made the game tick when that information started to make the rounds as schoolyard rumors there was a big mixture of truths and half-truths xevius was originally designed as a game about the Vietnam War but adopted a Sci-Fi theme during development an F4 Phantom fighter jet remained in xevius's internal data as a leftover from its Vietnam Roots but it could never actually be seen by the player this led to urban legends that while playing xevious there was a one in a million chance you'd see an F4 Phantom a space invader's Legend claimed you could fire a perfect shot down the middle to hit the Invader in the back for 1500 points video game magazines heard these rumors and reported them as fact which convinced Tajiri and his peers that the rumors were true Tajiri explains further there were tons of surreal rumors out there like a dog running across the screen nobody could confirm most of these rumors you'd hear a friend of a friend down in Chiba says he totally saw the dog and you'd think did he really there were always things you couldn't verify I had tons of experiences like that so when I was making Pokemon I wondered what kind of Legends might spring up I heard this or that could appear if you do this or something let people's imaginations run wild with those urban legends in mind I came up with Mew a character that exists but doesn't appear just like the F4 Phantom Legends get talked about and live on it's these kinds of urban legends that spread through Word of Mouth that you really feel in your bones he goes on to say that what makes Mew special is that unlike the F4 Phantom players can actually actually catch and keep it for themselves or trade it to a friend so it lives on forever instead of appearing for a brief fleeting moment so Mew was actually tajiri's idea not morimoto's but what about the design itself to hear muramoto's side of the story we need to move over to game freak's official YouTube channel the channel was created in 2018 and top developers like junichi Masuda practically beg their fans to subscribe to it but as of 2021 they've still only managed to pull in 40 000 subscribers but despite its low view counts there are actually some hidden gems in there including two interviews with Morimoto where he revealed some secrets about Muse creation they're all in Japanese without subtitles so we translated both videos as well according to Morimoto game freak wanted a Pokemon that could serve as Mewtwo's origin red and green already had references to Muse scattered throughout cinebar's Pokemon mansion but Mew didn't have a Sprite stats or anything tangible in that sense it was sort of like the original dragon from gen 5. a creature you hear stories about but only exists for the sake of the game's lore and you never get to see it after Pokemon's sixth year development Nintendo spent a fortune debugging the game in another interview Tajiri says it was the most expensive debugging process in Nintendo history game freak was under strict orders not to tamper with the game after debugging was complete but removing the debug features freed up a tiny amount of space on the cartridge about 300 bites game freak already had to cut lots of Pokemon so red and green could fit on a Game Boy cartridge but now they had just enough space left over to squeeze in one more Pokemon originally it was supposed to be Ken sugamori who would design Mew after all he was the guy who designed Mewtwo and the art director so it was natural that he'd do the honors then as the programmer it was morimoto's job to physically add Mew into the game but as Muramoto explains it I asked sugamori if he could design it but he never made time to do it for me there was no time left like Mew had to get put into the game now or it wasn't gonna happen I had no choice but to design it myself I made its pokedex entry and it stats and all that then I just put it in he goes on to explain why Muse design is so small and simple 300 bytes just wasn't enough space for a large and detailed Pokemon Sprite so while Mewtwo and the legendary birds have Sprites that are 56 pixels squared Muse Sprite is only 40 pixels Morimoto says there wasn't even enough space to color it in which is why the Mew we know today is pretty much one solid color Morimoto notes that even though the law says Mewtwo was created as Muse clone in reality the opposite is true Mewtwo came first and Mew was created essentially as a simplified clone of Mewtwo everyone at game freak was in on the plan but no one told Nintendo they eventually found out when fans started encountering a glitch that made Mew appear in their games Nintendo was Furious but their anger subsided pretty quickly as urban legends about Mew lit up the imagination of fans just as the dogs and Phantoms had done for xevius a decade earlier red and green sold decently right out the gate but sales exploded as rumors about a secret 151st Pokemon started spreading around Japanese playgrounds according to Pokemon company president sunakazu ishihara the monthly sales we had had up to then began to be equaled by weekly sales before increasing to become three then four times larger by the time it ranked number one in weekly sales more than a year and a half had gone by since the game was first released Pokemon might have never become such a huge hit if it wasn't for Mew and probably never would have been localized into six languages and become the worldwide success it is today one of the biggest urban legends was that Mew was hidden under a truck near the SSN which you could only reach by engaging in a mild amount of tomfoolery that was just a baseless rumor of course in reality there was nothing anywhere near the truck but the rumor eventually made it all the way to Game Freak HQ so in honor of the urban legends that inspired Mew in the first place they hid an invisible lava Cookie by the truck as an Easter egg in fire red and leaf green and in let's go Pikachu and Eevee they left a revive that respawns once a day in the exact same location the rumor was also referenced in Pokemon XD Gale of Darkness where there's a beauty who says there's no Pokemon under a truck maybe you'll just find a muck fans seem to have fixated on that particular spot because it's the only truck in Kanto which led them to believe it must have some significance but actually it's nothing more than a leftover from earlier in development in 2019 red and green prototype assets were leaked and then published by preservationist group Helix chamber including this Proto map of Kanto which includes a small City in the center that was cut from The Game's final build this Proto map matches the 1990 concept art that labels the lost city with the letter c if we zoom in on the lost city we can see the exact same truck parked right out front so after reworking Kanto it appears game freak just never bothered to remove the old truck tile set from that rarely visited corner of the map or they might have even forgot it was there the legend of the truck and all the other urban legends about Mew were just a bunch of schoolyard rumors the truth was that Mew could only really be seen with a glitch in those video interviews Morimoto admits that he programmed the glitch into the games himself although it was completely by accident the mistake was mostly due to the fact he had virtually zero programming experience before working on red and green but luckily it turned out to be a blessing in disguise as the Mew glitch was arguably the best thing that ever happened to Pokemon once the secret about Mew became public knowledge game freak decided to host a Mew giveaway through Japanese magazine korokoro Comics more than seventy thousand fans mailed in letters hoping to acquire one of the only legitimate Mew in existence but only 20 lucky winners were chosen the number was kept so low because Morimoto had to personally create each Mew on his computer then manually transfer them to the Winner's cartridges with a standard Game Boy Link cable he gave each new unique ID numbers ranging from zero zero zero one to zero zero two zero making them the rarest Pokemon to ever exist to this day he still says Muse his favorite Pokemon Morimoto even made new part of his signature here you can see what it looks like when he signs his autograph so Tajiri came up with the idea of Mew and Morimoto made the design stats cry and pokedex entry but the Mew he snuck into red and green was still far from finished like all gen 1 Pokemon Muse Sprite was designed first then art director Ken sugamuri came back later and made revisions with his watercolor artwork sugomori discusses this in depth in his 2014 art book which we also translated into English he says each artist's Sprites retain their individuality the appeal of Pokemon comes from the wide range and diversity of designs there's so many designs mixed together that couldn't have possibly all come from the same mind but the only images for Pokemon we had were their Sprites so I had to draw them all Anew based on the pixel art I also modified design elements that I was displeased with that's how they all became my characters in a way and since then I've been in charge of unifying the designs of all Pokemon apparently the part sugamori was displeased with was the fetus aesthetic which he dialed down significantly and through tsugamori's revisions and unification process moromoto's original design gradually evolved into a Mew that's barely recognizable as the same creature in fact we never even got to see morimoto's Mew in the west since that original Sprite was only ever used in the Japanese red and green but even after Tajiri Morimoto and Sue gamori's contributions Mew was still just a collection of images showing what it looked like from the front and from behind who created its three-dimensional appearance its personality and its trademark floaty movements no one at game freak can take credit for those details they were actually made two years later by olm Inc the animation team who worked on Mewtwo Strikes Back On gamefreak's official Channel Morimoto looked back with amazement at how they brought his 40 pixel Sprite to life saying you know that was the first Pokemon movie ever made so I went to go see it and I was like whoa Mew is moving Mew has such a huge role in this movie I made that Pokemon it was very emotional so much so that I watched it in America too when you think about it all I did was make the Sprite to see it move around was so cool during this video's production we got a chance to speak with olms syuri ichishi who confirmed for us that she was the one who drew Mew from every angle she made these reference sheets for the first movie A along with mew's iconic animations so Yuri was also animation director on the very first anime episode and a big part of her job is taking sugamori's still images and Faithfully bringing them to life and he must be pretty satisfied with their work because they've brought her back again and again and as of this video she's done animation for pretty much every Pokemon movie ever made from the 80s arcade to the first movie's release in 1998 it took about 15 years for four creators driven by the urban legends spread by millions of fans to create the Mew we know today in Pokemon lore Mew gave birth to all life but in reality you could say it was all life who gave birth to Mew this is Nab ogasawara descended from Japanese emperor seiwa the ogasawaras are a samurai Clan who once ruled over the shinano province as well as parts of Kyushu the real-life basis for the hohen region born into Japanese nobility and as the eldest son of an eldest son knob would someday inherit his father's title as feudal Lord but after Japan's defeat in World War II a series of reforms stripped the ogasawaras of their land and gave it to commoners making their nobility entirely symbolic with no actual relevance in post-war Japan in 1968 knobs family moved to Canada to start a new life knob would grow up to become a translator and one day be hired by Nintendo of America to translate a new Game Boy game called Pocket Monsters red and blue over the next decade he localized 26 Pokemon games into English almost single-handedly and to memorialize his efforts 14 Pokemon games have non-playable characters named after him he translated all of the game's small text but the big text like City and Pokemon names were mostly handled by his boss Hiro Nakamura with some help from Nintendo Treehouse but knob did name some Pokemon and also came up with some names in development that were never used knob officially left the franchise after Pokemon Platinum but today we've asked him to make a return in an unofficial capacity because there were some Pokemon who never got English names Pokemon that game freak created and gave Japanese names to but scrapped in development before they ever went through the localization process so in this video we'll be discussing these lost Pokemon their development history lore and entertaining A what if scenario where they were never cut and knob got the chance to name them he just had one stipulation for us that he'd only name lost Pokemon who had official Japanese names because that's how the process worked back when he was Pokemon's official English localizer that means some lost Pokemon who never had a name at all won't be covered but before we get started for clarity and legal purposes we need to stress one more time these are unofficial English names we'll also be using unofficial artwork by Rachel Briggs some of which we commissioned specifically for this video to recreate the beta Sprites in the art style of their respective generations and will include game freak's official beta Sprites as well and now that we have all that out of the way let's begin according to Pokemon's creators Satoshi Tajiri and kensukimori the first 20 or 30 designs they came up with were all based on the Kaiju they saw on TV as kids most notably in Godzilla movies and the Ultraman TV show with an index number of one this Godzilla inspired design might have been the very first Pokemon Sprite they ever made game freak named it gyaoon the Japanese word for Godzilla's roar so knob gave it the English name gowarhead retaining that original Roar reference while also alluding to a warhead the weapon humans frequently used to try and kill Godzilla along with gowarhead these next five lost Pokemon were all revealed in a biographical manga telling the life story of Satoshi Tajiri released in Japan in 2018 the manga included some real-life design documents from red and Green's development like the shark Pokemon with a harpoon on its snout that knob calls sharpoon most official Pokemon names like Blastoise and rk9 are part man toes the combination of two or more words mashed together and many of knob's names follow that precedent this Pokemon's name was just Cactus so knob named it cactormus a portmanteau of cactus and torment and this one in Japanese was simply named deer though it appears to be more of a moose so knob named it ramus a portmanteau of RAM and moose This creepy crocodile he calls govalin which is gavile a type of fish eating crocodile combined with the word villain interestingly the manga shows that designers sketched spikes onto its beta Sprite but a back Sprite that leaked in 2019 shows us a slightly different Goblin with spikes in place of of hair so it appears the wacky hair version was made first then gavilan's hair was later replaced with spikes before ultimately getting scrapped altogether this balloon Pokemon was likely cut in favor of Jigglypuff whose Pokedex classification is the balloon Pokemon this lost Pokemon's Japanese name was balanda so just like many Pokemon whose names aren't portmanteau's knob simply anglicized the original name to make its English name balamba another kaichu Pokemon seems to be inspired by Mechagodzilla an extraterrestrial mechanized villain that first appeared in 1974's Godzilla vs MechaGodzilla one of the few times fans got a peek inside the Forbidden Vault its beta Sprite was officially revealed by Pokemon Company CEO sunakazu ishihara on a Japanese TV show in late 2018. its Japanese name was Omega so knob calls it omegaj to incorporate the word Gadget a nod to Mecca Godzilla's ability to launch finger missiles and various other weapons first appearing on gamefreak's web site in 1997 two of the earliest lost Pokemon ever made public were scrapped Weedle Evolutions the middle stage is a pupa so knob named it pupal combining the word Pupa with pal as in a friend and the final stage appears to be some sort of beetle according to its designer atsuko Nishida it ended up being replaced with B drill because the original just wasn't cool enough knob calls this scrapped final form karapthor derived from kerapis the exoskeleton covering A Bug's thorax we asked him where the suffix Thor in karap Thor came from and knob said nowhere in particular he just thought it sounded cool many official Pokemon names are portmantos and anglicizations but lots of them just like karap Thor were chosen for no other reason than sounding cool this flying fish Pokemon was found in leaks files from early in gentu's development and it was the only beta Sprite in that particular leak that came with a name attached Sato which may have translated to fishbird Knob gave it the self-explanatory name sail Wing in 20 18 gold and Silver's 1997 demo leaked online revealing dozens of lost Pokemon the fan base had never seen before Chikorita was the grass starter in the demo but instead of Cyndaquil the original fire starter was hanuguma which roughly translates to Bear Knob calls it kubern another portmanteau this time for Cub like a baby bear cub and burn thanks to a series of leaked Sprites we can see that Coburn was gradually revised into Teddy Ursa over the next two years of gold and Silver's development kubern evolves into flambear a combination of flame and bear which together also sounds like flambe a cooking method involving setting your food on fire the family's final stage is bruinous a reference to Bruin a folk word for bears as well as ruinous instead of a crocodile the original water starter was based on a plesiosaur a type of marine reptile that first came into existence about 200 million years ago and went extinct the same time that the dinosaurs did nub calls it palcio derived from please as well as the word pal because as a starter it would have been your little buddy its first evolution is pressio and its final form is Don Marine referencing a head honcho like a mafia Dawn as well as submarines some fans believe they were scrapped in development for looking too much like Lapras who's also based on a plesiosaur but since game freak never officially addressed this leak we can only speculate the 1997 demo also introduced baby and fully evolved forms of Tangela which knob dubbed burglar and jungler virgila uses tengela's Gela suffix and the prefix Berg derives from Burr a type of seed as well as the word burgeoning which means to grow or flourish quickly and jungala is derived from Jungle quillfish also had a scrapped Evolution kozapolin the kazap part comes from the lightning bolt on its forehead and the overall name references its visual similarity to Zeppelins interestingly another Gen 2 leak contained what appears to be an even earlier beta Sprite for kazapolin with a more simple Blowfish design this three-stage family consists of a sunfish a shark and a gulper eel with each stage representing a real-life animal that lives progressively deeper in the ocean the first stage molambino takes its name from the Sunfish molemola as well as Bambino the Italian word for a baby or child the shark's Japanese name was ikari which translates to both anchor and rage its Discovery in the demo LED some fans to speculate that it was the original namesake for the lake of Rage which in Japanese is called ikori nomizu Umi and if that's the case the lake probably would have been full of ikari the anchor-tailed shark Pokemon knob calls it angor a mix between anchor anger and Gore like a gory shark attack and its final evolution he calls L'Oreal a portmanteau of lure surreal and eel in the 1997 demo girafforig also had a pre-evolution appearing to be a pair of conjoined twin ghosts nub calls them bipolar derived from the words bipolar and polar since they're pulling in two different directions a leak from later in development actually shows a more refined design for bipolar where they're still twin ghosts but no longer attached the leaked file was dated June 1999 just five months before gold and silver released in Japan so it seems bipolar almost made the cut but ended up getting scrapped in the 11th Hour bipolar's design makes a little more sense when you realize that in the demo giraffore rig originally had two equally sized giraffe heads which was pretty clever since both the English and Japanese names are spelled the same backwards and forwards just like the design itself the demo also contained a ditto Evolution nub calls mimeo named after mimographs machines that duplicate text as well as the word mimic it also ends with the o sound to match ditto's name Style just like its pre-evolution mimeo could only learn one move transform so its redundancy was probably why it didn't make gen 2's Final Cut it would have evolved from ditto when it was traded holding a metal coat so some fans have speculated that mimeo influenced the design of Melton two decades later these two Pokemons true forms are kept intentionally mysterious since they hide their real selves underneath the skin of a wolf this may be why they ended up getting cut as the existence of wolf pelts can raise some dark questions about the Pokemon world knob calls the first stage warfars a combination of war and Furs and its evolution is where Lakin a mashup of wear and lycanthropy which is a word to describe werewolf Transformations both names are also a play on beauforts and orlikon Fleck cannons two brands of flak Cannon common in World War II warfarers and wherelican were originally Brown in gold and Silver's 1997 demo but game freak changed their colors to Blue later on in production presumably to reflect their ice typing this Pokemon appears to be the creature latched onto slowbro's tail although its data in the demo doesn't indicate it was actually related to the Slowbro family which could mean it was entirely independent or game freak simply hadn't gotten around to programming the data just yet its Japanese name was taban suggesting it's the turbine that Slowking wears on its head so knob gave it the English name disturban a portmanteau of turban and disturb as its very existence is somewhat disturbing just like real turban snails a family of dark type felines had a Bell theme and were only capable of being female so knob named the first stage moybell a combination of Mademoiselle and Belle and its Evolution he calls Bell down a mashup of Belle Dame and Bedlam their signature move was heal Bell which can also be learned by the Skitty family a moon themed cat family introduced in gen 3 who some fans suggest are sort of spiritual successors to the moybell family if it hadn't been cut this bomb carrying seal would have been the series first dual type water and fire Pokemon knob calls it grenmar short for grenade marine and Amar an old-fashioned word that means to inflict serious bodily harm or to destroy a fitting description for what a bomb does this one knob called bellignin derived from Belle Bell belligerent and malignant it would have been a branch Evolution for Weepinbell when it touches a poison Stone in the final game Sprout Towers only three stories tall but the internal data reveals lots of unused floors that would have made it nine stories tall this might explain why an NPC in the final game still says the tower's Central pillar is a 100 foot tall dead Bellsprout some fans speculate that malignant and the poison Stone were originally meant to play a prominent role in this much larger version of sprout Tower in the game's final build however the lignan and the poison Stone got cut entirely and the tower got shrunk down to just a third of its original size there was actually an alternate belignan design discovered in a leak from much later in development so it seems it was one of the last Pokemon to get removed from the game these electric tigers are what knob calls tiger and strigar tyker is a portmanteau of tiger and Tyke a word for a small child this was a name suggested to not by our artist Rachel Briggs years ago and when we saw that he chose it for the video we asked him not to use a fan name but he said if a name was good he actually would have been fine using a fan name back in the 90s strigar is a combination of strike tiger and tiger the winter forest biome where you can find Siberian tigers one leak revealed tiger and strigar were created during red and Green's development which means they actually got cut from two generations back to back they even had an additional evolution in gen 1 but only its back Sprite was found in the league so we can only speculate about its frontal appearance the leak also didn't include a name for the final stage which means it won't be getting a name from knob since he's only giving English names to Lost Pokemon with Japanese names two decades before far-fetch'd got an evolution in generation 8 game freak almost gave us one in gen 2. Nob calls it luck Swan a combination of the words luxury and Swan it first appeared in gold and Silver's 1997 demo and later got an updated Sprite with a new color scheme But ultimately luxwon didn't make the final cut perhaps the creepiest Pokemon in the demo were these two ghosts based on Asian culture the first stage is based on a bear and waraningo which is a straw doll that originated in Chinese rituals they're also used in Japan where they're nailed against trees to curse people similar to how voodoo dolls work it appears the attack curse was created as its signature attack even though the straw doll Pokemon ended up getting cut Curse still made it into the final game knob calls this one strowman derived from straw man and Omen like how bad Omens foreshadow tragic events its evolution is both a panda and a zhangshi also known as a Chinese hopping vampire though their depictions vary from story to story Zhang XI often wear traditional Chinese clothes and hop around with their arms outstretched searching for victims to kill and absorb their Chi you can kill a jiangshi by writing a spell on thin yellow paper and sticking it to their foreheads which explains the little piece of paper incorporated into its design knob calls it fandorin a mashup of phantom Panda and Mandarin as in Mandarin Chinese strowman and fanderin were cut pretty early on in gen 2's development probably due to their occult Origins and being a little too creepy for the Pokemon brand Scyther got a new Evolution in Gen 2 in the form of scissor and pincer was originally planned to receive one as well which knob calls tricules due to its three horns and the fact that it's based on a Hercules beetle these colors were changed from brown to Pink later on before ultimately getting cut just a few months before gold and Silver's release possibly to make room for Heracross who's also based on a Hercules beetle the demo had a total of 17 baby Pokemon but apparently gamefreak decided that was too many so they ended up cutting it down to just seven in the final game one of these lost babies was a three-tailed Vulpix pre-evolution knob names Volpe with the three eyes referencing the Roman numeral for three knob actually would have preferred to theme the whole family in their style telling us I wish I could go back in time and convince them it could have been volpv and make nine tails Vulpix with Roman numerals representing the number of tales volt V was actually created and then cut during gen 1 and later got cut again during gen 2's development just like these next three babies who also all got cut from both gens as well starting with coin purr a Meowth pre-evolution who gets its name from coin purse and purr coin purse Sprite has three different coins above its head but they're not present in its back Sprite this has led some fans to believe that they weren't actually a part of its design but were placed there by designers as options so they could later pick which coin shape would appear on its forehead baby Ponyta was culta derived from coal and Colt the word for a young horse it also ends with tub to match Ponyta and or fry was baby Goldeen whose name comes from ore which means gold because the Goldeen family are all goldfish as well as fry the word for a fish that has just hatched the rest of these scrapped babies were only cut from Gen 2 and as far as we can tell from all the leaks were never intended for Gen 1. baby Doduo is doteri beginning with DOD to match its Evolutions followed by Arie which means bird's nest and in Old English refers to a family of birds even though its three heads make for an interesting bird's nest Motif the fact that its evolutionary line would have gone from Three Heads to two heads to three again May raise some uncomfortable questions about where that third head goes as Doduo which might have been why it got cut paraspore gets its name from its Evolution Paris and also the word Spore Paris and parasects show a parasitic mushroom increasingly taking control over its host insect but paradoxically paraspore appears to be growing out of its mushroom this runs counter to The evolutionary Narrative of its evolutions and similar to dotary the fact that it doesn't quite make sense might explain why it didn't make the cut baby grimer is called smudge whose name and design are both pretty self-explanatory smudge was originally pink but in a later build had its color changed to gray possibly to make it look less like ditto before the developers decided to remove smudge from the game altogether there's also a Growlithe pre-evolution pupparron derived from the word pup and also pepperoni because it's a hot and spicy fire type another leak from earlier in gentoo's production contained what appeared to be an even older design for pepperon unfortunately that particular leak didn't include names or Evolution data so it's impossible to be 100 certain that it is in fact an early pupparron and there's only one lost Unova Pokemon discovered so far that has a name a dual type grass and ground Pokemon labeled nakoyagi which is Japanese for root goat it was shown for only a few seconds in a slideshow at Tokyo's Meiji diversity in 2010 with the help of Helix chamber member luminosis we enhanced and translated that slide to get a better understanding of its concept which may have eventually evolved into gen 5's salzbach or gen 6's Gogoat or possibly both knob calls it Tubac Opera named after root vegetable tubers and also copra the scientific word for goats and just as importantly it rhymes with Chupacabra the mythical blood-sucking goat monster that was supposedly first spotted in Puerto Rico in 1995. the last Pokemon on our list is none other than gorochu the Raichu Evolution cut from gen 1. according to gamefreak's Koji nishino the developers had no choice but to remove several Pokemon from the game as they'd run out of cartridge space as a result some three-stage families got cut to just two stages not only gorochu but also some of the babies like volpi and coinpur no concept art or front Sprite were ever leaked or officially revealed by Game Freak this artwork is based on its back Sprite and a description by its create who told Japanese newspaper yomiri that it had fangs and horns and looked like a god of thunder since Pikachu and Raichu kept their original Japanese names in virtually every language around the world it seems fitting to leave this one unchanged as well and refer to it simply as gorochu did you know there's actually several Japan exclusive Pokemon games on one of Nintendo's most beloved handhelds the Game Boy Advance Nintendo created several mini games based on the Pokemon series for the GPA but these weren't part of a standard retail release they were distributed through the Pokemon Trading Card Game special edition cards were released for the TCG that could be scanned into the Nintendo ecard reader this was a device for the Game Boy Advance that could read encoded strips of data similar to a magnetic strip reader on a credit card machine which could scan a line of code from cards and then send that data to the GBA some of these cards would hold additional content for full retail titles but in the case of Pokemon some cards were released that held their own exclusive fully fledged mini-games we say fully fledged but they weren't exactly going to stun the audiences with their incredible gameplay though we wouldn't call them a waste of time either a fair amount of these cards were released internationally but Japan had a collection of promotional cards which never had any publication outside of the region these include exciting hide and seek this one's less of a game and more of a simple animated cartoon likely based on the animated short Pikachu's peekaboo known in Japan as Pikachu's exciting hide and seek there are two different possible versions of this animated skit involving Pikachu and Larvitar hiding from one another next is imakuni's ball based on the Ball Game and Watch title it involves juggling balls by using the left and right buttons though in this instance the player's character is replaced by tomoaki imakuni a Japanese musician who performed several songs for the Pokemon anime and promotional material for the TCG he was even featured on several Pokemon cars including the card required to play this game there's also whooper's juggling game taking on the role of Woopa the objective here is to use the wooper's water gun attack to keep Poliwag and Totodile off the ground after a short while Psyduck then gets dropped into the mix with Poliwag falling faster than Totodile and Psyduck taking two blasts before being projected higher then there's big fruit strategy here the player controls Totodile as the mon swims in the water with the goal of collecting as much fruit as possible while avoiding a number of Tentacruel the player then obtains different point values depending on which fruit is collected and the game finishes once the player crosses the finish line of the course and last but not least there's tokotoko truck this game has two pichu's riding a hand car while passing different train stations their final destination is the Pokemon Center in Tokyo but they have to get there before the time Runs Out by jumping over Boulders left on the track along the way there are plenty more Pokemon games exclusive Japan which we'll be covering in this video as usual will be extensive but we won't be counting demos or games that later got a comprehensive release in other regions such as Pokemons and Stadium or great detective Pikachu birth of a new duo or even Pokemon green as the original green and red were basically just less polished versions of what we got in the west we also won't be counting apps that have no game-like elements like Pokemon PC Master which essentially just taught kids how to use a PC we'll also have one pretty unique game we want to talk about at the end of the video so stay tuned for that now we're trying not to be biased on this channel but the next game we're talking about is definitely our favorite game in this video the Pokemon Trading Card Game On The Game Boy was a huge change to the original games developed by Hudson these games translated the mechanics of the Pokemon Trading Card Game into a video game format the game received an international release to wider claim so it was surprising to learn that the game's sequel remains exclusive to Japan even into this day also by Hudson Pokemon card gb2 here comes team gr boasted several new features and improvements over its predecessor an optional choice of the player's gender was added a training mode was included to teach people how to actually play the game well and a deck diagnosis system was introduced to rate the player's crafted deck compared to the first game which had 228 cards gb2 was bumped up to a total of 445 cards probably the most iconic card added to gb2 was great rockets Mewtwo which was featured prominently in the game and a real-life version of the card was distributed in Japan bundled with special edition Celebi themed Game Boy advances which means gr Mewtwo was Japan exclusive both physically and digitally here's a translation of the card text as you can see its abilities essentially make it the captain of all dark Pokemon it wasn't just the card count that was increased but the size of the entire entire game was increased massively rather than a simple collect all the badges plot a rival team was introduced known as team great rocket led by King birichi this group kidnaps the club masters from around the island featured in the original release and steals everyone's cards so the player assumes the role of a hero that sets off to rescue the Masters and restore the status quo similarly to how Pokemon Gold and Silver introduced the second island TCG gb2 is also made up of two different islands the island featured in the first game and a second island called gr Island this was partly to address a common complaint with the first game it's rather Short play time the game's Graphics were also noticeably improved with areas having much more deep theming characters having more animations and a new selection of coins for the player to use during the match's initial coin toss another introduction to the card game sequel was a game center where the player is able to play a variety of minigames similar to that of the main Series this may be our bias speaking as fans of the Pokemon TCG game on the Game Boy but this title is actually very enjoyable as a sequel holding up even today but this begs the question as to why it never saw an English release and sadly this isn't a hard question to answer Pokemon card gb2 released at the late date of March 28 2001. this was just a week after the release of the Game Boy Advance and with the original Pokemon TCG Game Boy release taking years to be localized outside of Japan if this title was localized into English it probably would have been released in 2002 or perhaps even 2003 meaning this sequel would have been in direct competition with Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire and with gb2 essentially being twice the size of the original game it would have been more prudent for Nintendo to put those localization resources towards a GBA Game instead lucky for the Pokemon franchise the collectible creatures managed to become such a strong brand they didn't have to be constrained to one genre or even popular genres the World of Sports saw its own Pokemon game with extremely limited availability poker Park fishing rally DS was available for just a few months in 2005 and could only be obtained through the DS download play kiosk these kiosks could originally be found in poker Park a theme park dedicated to the franchise though they would later be placed in Japanese Pokemon Center stores and at Pokemon Festa an annual Pokemon convention the title's gameplay takes place on a river flowing into the sea with the area changing over time the top screen would display the shadows of different Pokemon underwater and the player must cast their line onto the screen pressing the a button when the floater is Pulled Under and then repeatedly tapping to pull the catch each Pokemon court is displayed on the touchscreen with their different scores being shown on the top screen based on the size of the Pokemon level and Rarity scores would be tallied at the end of play with the top 50 scores being sent back to the kiosk and placed upon a score list shown on screen not only is the game Limited in its release only being available via a Region's specific kiosk but there was also no means of actually storing the game meaning that should the player's DS be shut down it could no longer be played while one could in theory keep their DS powered up and the game Left running at all times it would still be unavailable long term as the game was also restricted to a 12-hour time limit partly due to its limited distribution and semi-permanent State the title has now become lost media with the only known ROM being held by a private collector who refuses to make the ROM public despite constant requests from the community although he did at the very least record himself playing the game to give us a better look at how it functioned but some of Japan's Pokemon exclusives were on popular Hardware very popular Hardware the region received three versions of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon created exclusively for the Nintendo Wii made available as we wear download mode on the Nintendo Shop Channel in late 2009 for 1200 Wii points or about 12 each these titles were Pokemon Mystery Dungeon keep going blazing Adventure Squad let's go stormy Adventure Squad and go for it light adventure Squad developed by chunsoft these entries Mark the only time that mystery dungeon has appeared on a Home console they're also the only entries in the sub-series not to receive an international release often referred to as the adventure Squad series and contrary to other Mystery Dungeon games these three titles put little emphasis on storyline The Game's plot starts with a group of Pokemon being sent by Slowking to rescue a lost chuckle after returning to town he explains that he was searching for some delicious food a story that will continue to unfold as progress is made this then opens up the game's bulletin board where Pokemon post requests for the player to undertake in exchange for a ward depending on which of the three iterations of the game is being played The Hub world will differ for blazing Squad the low location is a Pokemon Village near a volcano in stormy Squad the player is based at Pokemon Beach and for light Squad The Hub is a Pokemon Garden which is held within Forest the game's made use of the same 3D Graphics featured in my Pokemon Ranch another we Wear release which simplified the graphical style of each Pokemon and according to IGN the game's developers were aiming for something which resembles a picture book additional missions can be added to the game through the Wii's Wii Connect 24 feature which will download while the Wii is in sleep mode for a short period after the game released several promotional codes were distributed as well which could be entered through the game's Wonder Mail menu these codes could be used to unlock unique Pokemon who the player could then use throughout the dungeons these titles never saw a release outside of Japan but this doesn't mean that they were never intended to be translated copyright filings were made in the US for each game's title not just with their direct translations but also a sec can set of filings for reimagined subtitles which put the elements at the end of their names the names were forward adventurers of flame let's go adventurers of storm and Aspire adventurers of light during development IGN reported on the games multiple times assuming that they'd receive International localization but this never came to fruition to many the lack of a Stateside release was surprising seeing as the Pokemon franchise has always had a strong following in the west the Wii had a massive install base in 2009 and 2010 so why the game never surfaced in the west remains a bit of a mystery in a positive turn of events though a team of people at project Pokemon release translation patches for all three games making them playable in English over a decade after their original release these translation patches not only aim to localize the game in a similar manner to that of previous official English releases but also brought back almost all of the online features including download loadable event missions and legendaries moving on from Pokemon games on popular Hardware to Pokemon games on a console which some people have never heard of the Sega Pico saw an exceptionally limited release worldwide but was particularly popular with Japanese school children despite their association with Nintendo the owners of the Pokemon brand the Pokemon company aren't exclusively controlled by Nintendo they have the option to create products branching across multiple video game platforms which allows the series to reach a wider audience than just those interested in Nintendo Hardware before we explain the Pico's Pokemon games we should first give a brief introduction of what on Earth the Sega Pico even is and where it came from the Pico was released in Japan in 1993 and saw an international release a year later in 1994. the system held some mild success for a number of years though it was ultimately discontinued outside of Japan in 1998. in Japan however the system was see continued support until as late as 2005. as of April 2005 3.4 million Pico consoles had been sold at retail with over 11 million software sales across 300 different pieces of software the Pico Hardware was derived from that of the Sega Mega Drive or Genesis though differed dramatically in control and function the Pico is shaped somewhat like a laptop but without a screen or full keyboard instead having a pad controlled by a quote Magic Pen as well as some colored directional buttons cartridges for the console aren't actually cartridges in the traditional sense either referred to as story where each game comes in the form of a picture book with a slot on the bottom which connects to the top half of the system with the game progressing as each page of the book is turned while the system saw a limited International release none of the Pokemon titles made for the system were ever localized in the west one of these region-long titles was Pokemon catch the numbers which really released July 23 2002 and featured the second generation of Pokemon it was designed to teach children numeracy skills with the story following Pikachu and Togepi after Team Rocket steals all of Ash Misty and Brock's other Pokemon the player is faced with a selection of mini games that must be completed in order to retrieve the Lost companions as a side note within the data of capture numbers a Sprite of a wheezing can be found which would ultimately never be used in game another title is Pokemon advanced generation I've begun hiragana and Katakana which released November 17 2003 and used the third generation of Pokemon it was designed to teach Japanese children how to read and write hiragana and Katakana script the story again involves Team Rocket with them deceiving Ash Brock May and Max by disguising themselves and telling them that they need 25 Pokemon to progress to the Pokemon stage each Pokemon is caught by correctly drawing five Kano if Pokemon on the Sega console wasn't enough the Pikachu Pico was a Pikachu branded Pico released in 2004 a year before the end of the Pico's life cycle this system had no technical differences to its standard Pico console and of course was made solely as a way of boosting the system's sales the console came bundled with a copy of Pokemon advanced generation I've begun hiragana and Katakana and the last game published on the standard Pico was Pokemon advanced generation Pico for everyone Pokemon loud battle released on July 13 2004. the game again includes the third generation of Pokemon the game Stars Ash Brock May and Team Rocket and the game is mainly based around reading and playing mini games the title came with a Pikachu themed controller featuring various mini games that were playable in a competitive two-player mode with both players using either side of the controller inevitably the Sega Pico would come to the end of his life cycle in 2005 but the Pico brand wouldn't be entirely scrapped instead a new and improved follow-up to the console was created for the Japanese Market this successor the advanced Pico was released in 2005 and is often referred to as simply the the two systems were very similar in design though the features an additional set of buttons on its right side to accommodate left-handed children as well as built-in speakers and New Ports for add-ons such as an SD card reader which can be used to save game progress and store images and of course the got more Pokemon titles Pokemon advanced generation Pokemon number battle released on October 1st in 2005 the game uses the third generation of Pokemon the game mostly involves finding hidden Pokemon in various scenes as well as solving math questions and puzzles after this intellectual training drill Pokemon Diamond and Pearl letter and number intelligence game was released on the 21st of April 2007 and featured the fourth generation of Pokemon the game was geared towards teaching children General knowledge words and numbers asking them to do tasks such as counting Pokemon and grouping them together based on on-screen prompts Pokemon Diamond and Pearl search for Pokemon Adventure in the Maze was released on September 17 2009 again using the fourth generation Pokemon this title seems to focus more on the Pokemon brand itself with the player having to use the book to highlight Pokemon either based on their Silhouettes or finding them in on-screen mazes the game also encourages children to learn the Pokemon by name alone rather than relying entirely on images and lastly Pokemon best Wishes intelligence training Pokemon big Sports meet was released on December 4th 2010 and included generation 5 pokemon the player takes on the role of Ash through various games which involve learning hiragana numbers and English as well as completing a number of exercises in order to win medals through the use of the SD card reader sold separately it is possible to save and print images is created in game our next game that never left the Land of the Rising Sun was also educational well sort of after the success of the first generation titles Pokemon had solidified itself as a huge player in gaming Nintendo naturally wanted to capitalize on the series Fame and ejected Pokemon into its new series of picross titles the picross NP series the series was exclusively available via download using the Nintendo Power service in 1999 in Japan the service allowed players to store a game on a blank super famicom cartridge using the in-store kiosk and take it home with them picross NP volume 1 the first in the series kicked things off by putting Pokemon front at Center in total the game features 12 different Pokemon based puzzles one each for Meowth Mr mime Psyduck the clefairydoll Togepi electrode Gloom Pikachu Zapdos Rapidash Poliwag and Snorlax since the picross NP series was made exclusively for the Nintendo Power service and the service never left Japan it's safe to bet that this is why the series never came to the West You could argue that Nintendo could have just slapped all eight picross MP titles on a cartridge in English for a quick Buck but 1995's Mario picross was a flop in both U.S and Europe this would make an English localization of piccross NP a risky move one that probably wasn't worth it remember that awesome trading card game we talked about earlier well there were a couple more trading card games that stayed with Japanese audiences exclusively though they lacked a fully fledged Adventure Mode like Pokemon card gb2 one of these TCG titles was a Japanese exclusive browser game called Pokemon Card Game Online which released in 2009 be sure not to mistake this game for a similarly titled Pokemon Trading Card Game Online which is entirely different built-in flash this massively multiplayer online card game is simply a means of playing the physical card game with others across the internet utilize using unique access codes included with Leafeon versus Metagross expert deck CD-ROMs for users with a Pokemon daisuki Club account signing up for the service also deposited 2 000 action points the in-game currency into their account for use via the club's action point system this game would allow players to use fixed decks against players made up of cards included in their pack purchase the service only ran for about a year before being discontinued a few years later the West would get the aforementioned Pokemon Trading Card Game Online making a localization of this original title redundant yet another card game entry was Pokemon card game how to play DS in 2011 which served unsurprisingly as a means of teaching the player the rules of the card game but on Nintendo DS the game includes a digital rule book covering how to play along with a variety of tutorials once completed five CPU controlled opponents will become available to practice with the game boasted a pretty neat feature however making use of the DS download play function allowing two players to compete against one another with only one cartridge the title even came packaged with 90 real Pokemon cards so you could take that sweet TCG knowledge you just learned out into the real world with you though Pokemon is at home on handheld many in the west didn't realize that the Pokemon franchise actually had moved to the mobile market earlier than the launch of smartphone not only that but the first mobile application for the series wasn't even created by Nintendo but rather Square Enix released in 2006 pokermate was a phone application that let players send and receive messages with friends or participate in live chat but also catch and store Pokemon when starting the game the player is given a random Pokemon along with 10 pokeballs to capture more rather than utilizing mechanics of fighting or leveling instead the game serves as a virtual pet simulator with the player caring for their Court Pokemon just like like a Tamagotchi players were encouraged to sign up for the game's Subscription Service which would grant them additional pokeballs extra media features and the ability to catch more than just three Pokemon while only released in Japan the game was demonstrated in the US during E3 2006 with many assuming the worldwide launch would be coming at some point as the result of low interaction from users the service was discontinued in 2008. around the time it would have been unlikely to see an international release the game can no longer be accessed and All That Remains are a limited number of videos and screenshots making this another piece of Pokemon Lost media Pokemon's return to the mobile market came with the launch of smartphones in 2011 Pokemon Say tap became the second Pokemon mobile game after poker mate and is even more limited in scope developed by creatures Inc the application is a rhythm game based on the trading card game with the goal revolving around tapping cards displayed on screen in time to the music and icons as they pass a circle more points are awarded according to accuracy for the Player's timing this simple feat becomes less impressive after finding out there is only a single song available to play and it's the ending theme to the Japanese anime at the time of its release can you name all the Pokemon BW in a similar vein just a few years later in 2015 dancing Pokemon band took the concept A step further the player takes control of a Pokemon summoned by Hooper and must tap three different icons doning different Pokemon faces as musical notes pass over them with more points being awarded for better timing each correctly timed tap fills a meter at the top of the screen which when maxed out causes two additional Pokemon to jump on screen for a 10 second dancing round where buttons can be tapped freely before the song finishes after the game ends the player is given a rank and a picture very worth different amounts depending on score these can then be spent to unlock additional Pokemon to play across the game's selection of 4 songs and three stages there are also three additional Pokemon that could be unlocked by entering special passwords revealed across Pokemon shows on TV Pokemon Say tap and Pokemon dancing Pokemon band were only made available for a few month in 2011 and 2015 respectively and as such were never brought to the West one could assume that around the mid-2010s limited releases of internationally renowned series would become an outdated practice but that simply wasn't the case for Pokemon the series continued to see more games that never got localization despite the clear appetite for their availability among fans a free downloadable Pokemon game limited to Japan was released for the 3DS in 2014 developed by marvelous called the thieves and the Thousand Pokemon The Game's plot revolves around recovering stolen diamonds supplementing the plot of the 17th Pokemon movie The antsy and the Cocoon of Destruction essentially a group of Thieves has been using their Pokemon to steal valuable diamonds from the diamond domain where they are used as a form of energy the player takes control of a squad of Chespin Fennekin and Froakie with one designated as their leader to recover the stolen artifact and return them to their rightful place players are are initially given 50 of whichever starter Pokemon they choose which can then be taken into a stage as a spendable resource with additional Pokemon being obtained through Street pass or by spending the Nintendo 3DS's play coins the Pokemon obtained via Street pass will be whichever starter Pokemon the passing player chose as their leader while the play coins are redeemed to obtain more of the player's initial Choice before selecting a stage the player must designate how many Pokemon they intend to take with them with any remaining Pokemon after a stages completion being lost stages are made up of different challenge types with three different types in total battle sneaking and obstacle clearing battle stages involve the player defeating Pokemon in order to advance through a stage with a battle gauge on top of the screen indicating how the fight is going if the bar reaches the left the player loses well if the bar reaches the right they win this is manipulated by sending additional Pokemon into the fight while the enemy may also send in additional reinforcements with type Effectiveness having influence over ovary squad's power after each fight the player may lose a number of their Pokemon sneaking challenges have the player attempt to use stealth to bypass a fight by holding down the X Y or a button Chespin Fennekin and Froakie will attempt to sneak past the opponent only successfully getting past if they cross a threshold if the button is released before they make it they will Retreat back to their starting position the guarding Pokemon May stir and check behind them if they see any of the player's Squad making an approach the stage will change into a battle scenario if they don't spot anything they will move closer to the player's starting position until eventually they spot the player's team and commence in a battle obstacle clearing stages face the player against objects which must be cleared by sending Pokemon in a gauge on top of the screen will indicate progress though unlike a battle there is never any pushback no Pokemon allows during these challenges either so it's more a sort of gate that can only be passed by having enough Pokemon to meet the threshold if at any point during a stage the player chooses to stop their progress the group of Pokemon that had been sent in will remain at the point at which the player quit being able to rejoin the squad once they've reached that point of the stage again as a result of the Pokemon being expelled after a stage a player's Pokemon count will become limited before long leading to them needing to seek out other players to obtain more via Street pass or bolstering their initial leader Pokemon via play coins this results in the game being almost impossible to complete in a single sitting forcing it to be played over multiple days at least in order to progress initially only stages 1 through 16 are available to the player covering the story of Marilyn and Riot who appeared in the 17th movie additional stages surrounding Argus and Millis are unlocked after stage six while four additional stages could be downloaded by players that attended a screening of dancing in the Cocoon of Destruction in theaters or other special events by completing these lock stages a code is awarded to the player to unlock an additional master ball that can be used in Pokemon X and Y the thieves in the Thousand Pokemon is the most recent Regional exclusive Pokemon title in this video but there's one game we didn't mention yet and it comes with a request for help and a 550 Bounty a demo for a PC edition of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon subtitled gold rescue team was released in the midst of 2007. it was available exclusively in Korean with the demo being distributed as a free download to anyone who made an account on the Korean Mystery Dungeon website the demo size invokes an interesting possibility being 450 megabytes the demo took up far more space than what is needed for the limited segment that is playable leading many in the community to believe that this data may actually contain the full game information on this game is immensely scarce with the only real discussions around it being held on Korean message boards with essentially no preservation of the original files did you know Blaziken was the first Hoenn Pokemon not only that but it was intentionally created to make players stick it in a PC box according to gen 3 art director Ken sugimori I thought about how wide the variety of Pokemon could be and wanted to push the envelope of what would be accepted so the first one I made was Blaziken I wondered if people would go for such a humanoid Pokemon I was intentionally testing the waters over the years we've developed an image of what a Pokemon looks like but this time we decided to push those boundaries and weaken the idea of what can't be a Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire was about taking on new Inspirations for Pokemon unlike anything we used before Blaziken was in fact one half of this Pokemon which was designed early in development and appears to have been split in two with the other half becoming Latias just like Charizard in gen 1 Blaziken was created first then its pre-evolutions were designed by working backwards Ken sugimori went on to say that Torchic is based on painted chicks back when he was a kid it was pretty common to see them for sale at fairs and festivals parents bought them in the same way they might buy a goldfish sort of like a toy they don't actually have plans to care for long term when a painted chick grew up and wasn't cute anymore a lot of kids would just throw them out like a broken toy tsugimori said I think people from our generation have certainly experienced buying painted chicks so this one's orange and just like a real painted chick it starts out cute then grows into something fierce and hard to look at we wanted to recreate that experience which led to Torchic Combusken and Blaziken we wanted people raising them to feel that sense of disappointment while also acquiring something more powerful so if you're the kind of kid who didn't like what your starter grew into and shoved it in a PC box you're like the Japanese kids of sugimori's generation who threw out their painted chicks but if you kept Blaziken in your party you're probably a pretty good pet owner this tale of hoenn's Fire Starter comes from a 2003 issue of Nintendo dream magazine which feature a nine page interview he recently translated into English inside these exclusive translations we found lots more info not previously known to Western fans like that Ruby and Sapphire weren't originally planned to include any Pokemon from past Generations game freak eventually used this strategy to make Gen 5 feel like a soft reboot but the idea initially started with Gen 3. tsugimori said the goal was to make something that felt new a lot of people said that not much had really changed in Gen 2 and we kept wondering why that was and I think it's because there were too many familiar Pokemon appearing in gold and silver the first Pokemon you encountered was a Pidgey and while nostalgia's fine and all I wanted to draw lots of new Pokemon the game's director junichi masudo was also present in that interview and said from the early stages of development until past the halfway point we planned on Ruby and Sapphire featuring nothing but brand new Pokemon since Ruby and Sapphire weren't compatible with the earlier Game Boy games there would have been no way to trade Kanto and Johto Pokemon up to gen 3 well at least not until fire red leaf green and Pokemon Coliseum released a year later this would have made gen 3 a pretty hard reboot even more so than Gen 5 where old Pokemon could still be found in the post game but game freak ultimately decided to scrap the home and reboot idea due to balancing issues basically there just weren't enough Pokemon of certain Elemental types so they peppered in older Pokemon to quote fill the gaps but because the change was made fairly late in development the game's Origins as a reboot still ended up leaving some pretty significant impacts on Ruby and Sapphire's final builds for one thing it explains why there's so many new Pokemon in gen 3 and also why older Pokemon make up such a small percentage of the Hoenn decks and according to sugimori and masura it's also why you see nothing but brand new Pokemon until after you've made it past the third town because originally it was all supposed to be a Pokemon reboot the scrapped reboot idea is also the reason some of the new Pokemon exist in the first place as sugimori explains it when we decided to have only new Pokemon in these games it became necessary to make Pokemon that fill the same role as Pidgey and make a weak caterpillar Pokemon like Caterpie for some people Ruby and Sapphire will be their first Pokemon game and showing them a caterpillar turning into a cocoon then a butterfly is the easiest way to introduce the concept of evolution so we intentionally made Wurmple to be like Caterpie but a little different in other words Pokemon like Wurmple and talo would have never existed if gen 3 hadn't spent a chunk of its development as a reboot other Pokemon came into existence by working backwards from their names game freak came up with the name Zigzagoon and slack off and thought they were so hilarious they just had to design Pokemon around them their names are essentially the same in both Japanese and English by the way with Zigzagoon coming from zigzag raccoon and slack off derived from slack off and sloth then the design team gave them families based on themes sugimori said slack off goes from a sloth to being motivated then deciding it wasn't worth it after all then the raccoon goes from being a zigzag to a straight line which is how they got linun 15 years later sword and Shield's art director James Turner continued that theme with an obstacle-based Pokemon James posted all this art on Twitter just in case some fans didn't catch the word play just as their initial idea to exclude old Pokemon was a reaction to fans criticism of gold and silver being two been there done that the actual designs of hoenn's Pokemon were very much a response to criticism of Gen 2 as well according to sugimori gold and silver had a lot of kitty designs and some fans were starting to say Pokemon had become too babyish so one theme for Ruby and Sapphire was returning to the coolness of the monsters we added more and more cool tough looking and monstrous Pokemon which is exemplified by Groudon sugimori also says his team Broke Free of limitations hoisted upon them by the anime and Merchandising sides of the business when they made gen 2's Pokemon they kept the design simple so they'd be easier to animate in the cartoon and also cheaper to make toys out of but for Gen 3 sugimori said quote screw it as an example he points to the complex lines covering Groudon and explains that his new attitude definitely resulted in Groudon and lots more Pokemon looking cooler than if he was still restrained by the anime and merchandise but for Gen 3 there was another restriction on the design team that most fans probably would never have expected here's how tsugamori explained it a lot of the Pokemon had a troubled development like at one point I said the tail on that Pokemon was annoying me so I got rid of it then someone else shot back what but I already programmed in some tail moves so we had some constraints where we couldn't get rid of a Pokemon's tail and as a result we had to change their shape or find some other work around he goes on to say the same thing happened with Pokemon's horns where he wanted to get rid of them later in development but couldn't because other developers already gave them horn moves we were curious who he might have been talking about so here's all the Pokemon in gen 3 who learn tail moves by leveling up we think the most likely culprits are LaRon and Agron they're pretty easy to imagine without their tales and they can both learn the attack Iron Tail interestingly their pre-evolution auron can also learn Iron Tail even though it doesn't have a tail as for the Pokemon who weren't supposed to have horns Ralts curlia and Shuppet fit the bill visually but none of them have horn moves so they couldn't be the one sugimori was talking about in fact not a single Pokemon added in gen 3 can learn horn attack horn drill or megahorn and the ones who can learn Peck all have beaks so honestly we're a bit puzzled which Pokemon might have had their horns on The Chopping Block so let us know in the comments if you've got a hunch speaking of Unfinished Pokemon designs tsugimori also says they sent early builds of Ruby and Sapphire to Nintendo for testing purposes this included unfinished designs for lots of Pokemon there's been quite a few leaks of Pokemon beta Sprites in recent years including a text-only pokedex that described an early version of Rayquaza as the white dragon Pokemon but so far there hasn't been a leak of the actual beta Sprites it seems there's at least two sets of beta Sprites the batch sent to Nintendo for testing and a later batch used in a Japanese demo about four months before Ruby and Sapphire released in Japan Nintendo toured an event called Pokemon Festa around a few Japanese cities several screenshots were published showing slightly different designs for Pokemon like Sharpedo but to this day what else could be hiding inside those Festa demos remains a mystery maybe someday these two beta Sprite sets will leak and will finally get a chance to see white Rayquaza the grass type sprinklermon and countless more scrapped monster designs now let's talk about why the games are called Ruby and Sapphire according to Masuda and sugimori part of the reboot concept was a desire to return to the series Roots so they were looking for titles that could be represented by the colors red and blue to match the Gen 1 games but beyond that simple concept the details got pretty complicated because game freak staff couldn't agree on the exact titles and some of the titles they could agree on were already trademarked by other companies as a result they didn't come up with the names Ruby and Sapphire until four months before the game's release date The reason they picked those titles specifically was because the previous game was Crystal and they wanted to continue the theme of crystals by using gemstones by the way if you've ever wondered why Crystal was named after a mineral instead of a color game freak explains why in this Japanese magazine Masuda says Crystal's title came from the crystals used in electronic Transmissions so he picked a title that fit with the game's contents with sugimori adding especially since Crystal was meant for the mobile system GB they're talking about the internet features of Japanese Crystal where you could hook up to a cell phone and battle and trade online get news updates and access a special event to catch Celebi back to gen 3 though so there's a type of Crystal called corundum red corundum are called rubies and every other color are called Sapphires blue sapphires are the most valuable and Game Freak thought the Dual nature of corundum crystals seemed pretty clever and also gave them the red and blue colors they were looking for so they finally came to an agreement but then the Pokemon Iman company actually objected saying they didn't want more games named after crystals but it was already super late in development and ultimately they had little choice but to give it their blessing as for the eventual Third Edition green corundum do exist but they don't have a special name they're still just sapphires so game freak picked another kind of Crystal called an emerald it's not a corundum but it brought them back to their roots with Gen 1's colors of red blue and green which was their initial goal from back when Gen 3 was planned as a reboot speaking of gen 1 when the interviewer asked Masuda where hoenns located in relation to Kanto and Johto he basically said they aren't connected quote I think it's more fun to think of them as separate worlds when we designed Hoenn we also made a rocket launch pad and we had ideas like maybe that's where Team Rocket came from but we decided it was better not to spell things out concretely especially as far as the media is concerned in other words even if that's how they thought of it in development they didn't want to make it Canon probably so they had the freedom to change their minds at some point in the future as Ruby and Sapphire's development was nearing completion masuda's wife went into labor with their first child he rushed her to the hospital but the games were in such a critical final stage of development he kept getting messages on his phone asking to sign off on last minute revisions she was born in September which as Masuda notes on his blog makes Sapphire her birthstone even as he held her for the first time he could still hear emails arriving in his phone's inbox Masuda named his daughter Kiri and to commemorate her birth secretly added her into the game she's a young girl in sootopolis City who gives away free berries and unlike most NPCs her name was left unchanged in the English localization if you talk to her she'll say her parents named her Kiri so she'd grow healthy and warm-hearted and also says she was born in autumn just like the real Curie but there was more to gen 3 than just Ruby Sapphire and emerald Pokemon's third generation featured over a dozen spin-off games but we just want to focus on the big one the series first Home console RPG G Pokemon Coliseum Coliseum wasn't made by Game Freak or even Pokemon fans at all it was mostly made by a small team of top talent that Nintendo poached away from Sony at the same time game freak was wrapping up development on Ruby and Sapphire Nintendo spent about a million dollars opening a new studio called genius sonority the man they put in charge was manabu yamana who up to that point was best known for directing Dragon Quest games some of the most popular RPGs on Playstation many of coliseum's other core developers came over from Dragon Quest as well in an interview on Nintendo's Japanese website coliseum's lead programmer said I hadn't played any GBA or gcn Pokemon games before we started there actually wasn't a true Pokemon Expert in the entire Studio but that didn't change our deadlines the Pokemon company approached this brand new team of non-pokemon fans and asked them to make the series first 3D RPG thinking about what kind of game they wanted to make they thought well most of the kids who played the original Pokemon games were about 11 years old gen 1 was a coming-of-age story and these kids have been coming of age in the real world too so let's make coliseum's protagonists the same age as the fans who've been along for the ride since the very beginning six years have gone by and the fans are 17 now so let's make the protagonist 17 as well in that same Japanese interview the game's concept lead akihiko Miura said I wanted to produce a game that was different and also targeted a slightly older audience than previous Pokemon games therefore the main characters are about 17 years old and they wear a lot of dark colored clothing we wanted to make the hero into a kind of dark hero someone that the gangs are actually afraid of but as you go through the game you'll learn that he's really not a bad person even though he steals other trainers Pokemon genius sonority wanted a more mature setting to go along with their older protagonist something totally different from every other Pokemon game all the mainline games were set in Lush environments based on Japan so they decided on a dry Urban world in a desolate desert so basically the opposite of what had come before they created The Ore region and based it on Arizona which made it the first Pokemon region based on the United States according to composer sukasa tawada we actually tried to make a lot of the game resemble Phoenix Arizona in a loose way there's a city in ore called fenak which was founded when the first mayor of the Town Drew water into the city Fenix origin story actually draws from the real-life lore of Arizona's capital city Phoenix which was founded when a guy named Jack swilling had canals built to bring in water the new canals followed an ancient Canal system built by the hohokum people and the communities that sprung up were built on top of the hohokum's ancient ruins the city was born From the Ashes of a former civilization so they named it Phoenix by the way we know some fans pronounce it or but the only audible reference for the Region's pronunciation is a TV commercial where they pronounce it ore so we're gonna follow their lead Darkness Has Fallen over the land of oray back to the game though you can even see a small piece of Arizona in the game's cutscenes when West drives his motorcycle from one town to another you can spot a rock form in the distance but only for a brief moment this appears to be an homage to the mittens two famous rock forms in Arizona to us it looks more like the West Mitten Butte but it could also be the Eastern Butte seen from the opposite side you can see the Mitten on ore's Horizon and several more cutscenes but it's always so quick blink and you'll miss it in issue 85 of the German magazine End Zone The Game's director identifies one man as the Visionary behind the ore region shinichi hiromoto at the time he was most famous for illustrating the Star Wars Return of the Jedi manga and he'd later say that as a non-pokemon fan the only reason he was willing to join the Coliseum project was so he could introduce that grittier element into the world of Pokemon a stylistic mismatch cute Pokemon in a decaying world the very existence of Shadow Pokemon was his idea as well along with how they looked very little concept art for Pokemon Colosseum was ever made public in fact there's only three pieces and they can only be found in a limited edition strategy guide that guide came bundled with an art book that's mostly just 3D renders but also includes that rare concept art we tried to find a copy for sale but they're pretty hard to come by nowadays so a big thanks to one of our viewers davogato who scanned his copy for us the first piece is pyrite Town's initial concept where the town's Coliseum was originally a raised planetary globe and there's the Arizona Mitten right there present from the very beginning the next one appears to have been made later showing a much more detailed version of pyrite town in addition to the more mature plot and setting Coliseum also catered to an older Audience by being a lot more difficult than the mainline games one detail that made pyrite especially difficult was that it didn't have a Pokemon Center but this concept art reveals it was originally designed to have one also pyrite's final build has a bridge that lets you you cross the chasm but it's missing from the concept art with arrows indicating the only path to the Coliseum was through the long Cave System packed with gang members otherwise the concept art matches pretty closely with how pyrite appeared in the final game the only other piece of concept art is Myra B one of the main villains and still the only character in the entire series whose trainer class is Wanderer Coliseum has one of the series best soundtracks which sukasa tawada mostly wrote in just 10 days now almost 20 years later we recently got in touch with tawada and asked about the time he spent in ore he said not all the songs are inspired by Arizona but some are especially the harmonica solo music which was clearly inspired by the dry air feeling like a sandstorm in Phoenix Arizona actually I made some music which didn't get used in Coliseum or XD Gale of Darkness but I'm not allowed to share it with you now hopefully someday we'll get a chance to hear it although there's actually one piece of Coliseum music that did get released but only in Japan and that's what you're hearing now in fact there's an entire virtual reality mode that fans in the west never got to experience which unlocked a few Japan exclusive Shadow Pokemon those were the days when Nintendo was cross-promoting their Hardware by encouraging fans to connect GameCubes with gbas and also connect their gbas to scan e-reader cards the Japanese e-reader cards unlock the VR mode and three difficulty settings if you beat all 23 trainers on easy you unlock one more who's got a shadow Togepi you can catch beat them all on normal and you'll get a chance to catch Shadow Mareep in hard mode all the trainers are about as strong as the game's final boss but even more difficult because there's 24 of them if you can make it all the way to the end Shadow scissors your final prize there was also a Japanese bonus disc that gave you a Celebi and you could transfer it over to your gen 3 games as well pretty much all this extra content is still on the disc in American versions of Pokemon Colosseum and Nintendo already went through the trouble of localized most of it into English unfortunately all that content is artificially blocked off so you can't access it in game those e-reader cards were never released internationally but they could have just as easily made the Japanese VR mode accessible in the base game for free adding it all back in would be a great bonus for a modern day re-release like say on Nintendo switch where they could also make it widescreen and bump the resolution up to HD a big upgrade from the gamecube's Aging 480p Coliseum got a sequel in 2005 Gale of Darkness but the aura Series has been dormant ever since no re-releases and no sequels in 2016 junichi masudo was interviewed by the Spanish edition of Nintendo official magazine who asked here's a question that many fans who've been around since the beginning of the series have been wondering is there a possibility that we'll see one day a game in the style of Pokemon Stadium or Pokemon Coliseum masudo replied with just one word no and then he laughed it seems game freak and the Pokemon company aren't too interested in ore nowadays but there is still one man keeping a candle lit Coliseum and xd's composer sukasa tawada in 2017 he performed a live piano rendition of the fennec City theme and uploaded it to his YouTube channel and in 2021 he composed an arrangement of The Relic Forest theme [Music] even if everyone else has moved on it's nice to know that at least one member of the team still has a place in his heart for the ore region in this episode we'll be talking about an add-on to the Pokemon series called the Pokemon mini not to be confused with the pocket Pikachu you may be wondering just what this thing is and we wouldn't blame you for that so allow us to give you a little rundown the Pokemon mini was a console designed and manufactured by Nintendo specifically made for Pokemon Centric mini-games the system was unveiled in September 2001 at a Nintendo event called the Nintendo show held at Westminster Hall in Merry Old London England it was advertised as a major Pokemon announcement the mini was released in North America in November of 2001 with a Japanese launch nearly a month later and later still in Europe being released in March of the following year it's possible that Australia may have been the first Market the mini was available in with classification for the system's launch title cited as October 3rd 2001 though the release in the region isn't well documented the Pokemon mini aptly holds the title for the smallest cartridge-based Nintendo system ever made with it weighing in at a grand total of 70 grams battery and game cartridge included the cartridges themselves are roughly the size of a postage stamp even with its small stature the console boasted some impressive features especially for the time it included an internal real-time clock and timer being able to keep track of time even when the system was off it also had an infrared sensor for multiplayer games with one game in particular able to support up to 10 players at a time it also came with a built-in Rumble feature as well as a shock detector which lets you control Pokemon on screen by rattling your hand like a quote poker fan possessed the console's battery life also clocked in at a whopping 60 hour lifespan with the use of a single AAA Battery the mini came with one game and was available in three different colors Wooper blue chicorita green and Smoochum purple a few of the most popular Pokemon according to Nintendo UK the console wasn't as big a success considering it carried the Pokemon name marketing was practically non-existent for the system and it came out the same year as the Game Boy Advance despite some of its technical prowess it couldn't compete with the gba's capabilities and was seen as more of a toy than a gaming system the Pokemon mini could be found stocked in stores for roughly a year factoring in all markets only 10 games were developed for the console and off that total only Japan received the entire library four games made their way to North America and five were released in Europe North America saw the likes of Pokemon pinball mini a pinball Style game where Pokemon like Diglett took the place of a pinball plunger the self-explanatory Pokemon Puzzle collection and Pokemon zany cards a collection of card games featuring characters from the Pokemon anime Pokemon party mini came bundle with the system and served as a Showcase of what the console could do utilizing all of its features across six mini games games that were Japan exclusive included a platform racer hybrid called Pokemon race mini an adventure game called togepi's Great Adventure a sequel to Pokemon Puzzle mini featuring 18 new puzzles and a follow-up to party mini featuring The Pichu Brothers characters that made their debut in the anime short Pikachu and Pichu shown alongside the third Pokemon movie the last game released for the system was Pokemon breeder mini in December 2002 a virtual pet Style game similar to a Tamagotchi the mini was released during the second generation of the Pokemon series with gold and silver having released the year before in North America with breeder mini in particular the system briefly overlapped into the third generation as it features the starter Pokemon from Ruby and Sapphire which released in Japan a month prior there's evidence showing a couple mini titles working considered for a wider release but it's likely these plans were hampered due to the system's low sales puzzle collection Volume 2 had been classified by the ESRB under e for everyone and would have gone under the similar title Pokemon Mini Puzzle collection Volume 2 but It ultimately stayed in Japan similarly Pokemon Tetris the game which received localization outside of Japan but did not see release in the United States also received an ESRB classification and would have been titled Pokemon mini shock Tetris while every other game for the mini was developed by Japanese Studios Jupiter or denuca Pokemon Tetris is the one game in the minis library to be developed by Nintendo themselves as an aside it's also the last game where Jinx is depicted with its original skin coloring this version of Tetris is regarded as one of the best games released for the mini and has a high asking price on the second hand Market the European release is especially elusive with only a few thousand copies ever being printed the Pokemon mini concept would be tackled one more time the following year showing up on the Nintendo GameCube release of the game Pokemon Channel where it likely received the most exposure the game has a built-in emulator for the mini and games are obtained through the shop and Squirtle Channel where the player can buy various items the games available for play are altered or stripped down from their original versions half of the games came from Pokemon party mini and it's likely the remaining three from The Collection weren't ported over due to the unique nature of how they controlled and played on the original Hardware Pokemon Channel also featured an all-new game exclusive to the title called snorlax's lunchtime where the player helps a Snorlax decide what's edible and what isn't if Snorlax tries to Chow Down on a Pichu the game ends while the mini didn't leave much of an impression it did find another lease of life in a different Realm of the gaming scene with the Advent of the console receiving an emulator on the GameCube it allowed people to understand the hardware better eventually leading to a Homebrew scene among hackers a group of coders under the name team poke me went under the hood and developed a flash cart demo called chisel in 2004. this demo was first shown off at German demo scene break point in 2005 and excited the community showcasing 3D effects and many other features previously thought Impossible on the mini they've since made the tools available for others to create their own games and a number of titles are available for the system with a few more in development at the time of this video all games are featured on team Pokemon's website pokemonmini.net the community has also taken the time to preserve the original Hardware with scans of some of the original game's instruction manuals as well as enhance the console itself with customizable colors and even a mod to enter produce a built-in backlight over the years the team has also taken the five Pokemon games released only in Japan and given them full English translations with the final game being translated in May 2019 all games are available via flashcart or emulation including the GameCube exclusive snorlax's lunchtime the team also covered news of a Pokemon mini prototype that was up for sale on eBay in 2016. the seller had said the system wasn't working anymore and it came with a cartridge reading sample 01011 it's not known what this cartridge might have held be it an early prototype of a final game an unreleased game or possibly something else entirely as the person who bought the system has remained Anonymous ever since [Music] thank you did you know the Johto region was heavily inspired by the Kansai region of Japan with Equity City the Region's Cultural Center being based on Kyoto Kyoto is famous for its traditional Japanese architecture and sites of historical and religious significance among these sites are the two Buddhist temples that lie to the Northeast and Northwest of the city to the east lies gin kakuchi or the Temple of the silver Pavilion known for the Statue of a silver bird that sits atop its roof to the West lies kinkakuchi or the Temple of the golden Pavilion which has a statue of a bronze Phoenix on top kin kakuchi was actually burned down by a novice monk in 1950 but was soon repaired in 1955. if you've played Pokemon gold silver or Crystal this should sound familiar to you the two towers of equity city were based on these two real-life Buddhist temples and they're famous for the legendary birds that were said to roost on top of them how well perched Atop The Bell Tower to the East and Lugia perched Atop The Brass Tower to the West however Lugia fled to the World Islands when the brass tower burned down under mysterious circumstances which is a clear a reference to kinkakuchi something worth noting is the fact that Ho-Oh and lukia seem to have swapped places from their real-life counterparts Paul associated with the bell tower to the east while the bronze Phoenix sits Atop The Western Temple Lugia was associated with the brass Tower to the West while the Silver Bird is located to the east in a previous episode we mentioned that the legendary Pokemon Groudon Kyogre and Rayquaza were based on the Behemoth Leviathan and ziz of Jewish mythology these were said to be gargantuan monsters that dominated the land sea and sky respectively there are differing accounts of the creature's eventual Fates some stories say that God will slay their creatures and serve them at the Messianic banquet a bank would share between God and the righteous other accounts state that the Behemoth and Leviathan will slay one another before they are served at the banquet this latter account seems to be the inspiration for the battle that takes place between Groudon and Kyogre in Pokemon Emerald additionally ziz is said to be the messenger of God this is perhaps reflected in the game's depiction of Rayquaza as being the only thing that can quell Groudon and kyogre's wrath if that weren't enough generation 3 also included Regirock Regice and Registeel Pokemon that are based on the Jewish myth of the Golem the Golem was crude image of a man constructed from clay and brought to life in the Middle Ages it was commonly believed that the Golem could be brought to life and controlled by using any one of God's names God's name was to be written on a piece of paper and either inserted into the mouth of the Golem or placed on the Golem's forehead this Legend evidently had an impact on the design of the Pokemon as well as each of the legendary Golems has writing on their heads that bears a resemblance to Braille the Pokemon Arceus is said to be the creator of the Pokemon world having created Dialga Palkia and Giratina three Pokemon that control time space and antimatter respectively Arceus also created the late guardians of Sinnoh yuksi Mesprit and Azelf that brought knowledge in motion and willpower into the world appropriately Arceus appears to be based on various creation myths from World mythology most prominently it appears to be Loosely based on the creation myth from Shinto mythology which states that before Heaven and Earth were divided they were a chaotic formlessness described as a cosmic egg eventually the pure part of this egg was drawn out to become Heaven and the impure part became Earth after words Divine beings were created starting with the being kunitoko tachinomikoto this being created two more deities known as Izanagi nomikoto and izanami nomikoto these two beings using the Spear of Heaven created the mythical Island known as onogorojima and erected a great pillar in the middle of this island the Shinto creation myth and cenos creation myths share many similarities arceus's pokedex entry in Pokemon Platinum wreaths it is said to have emerged from an egg in a place where there was nothing then shape the world arceus's creation of Dialga and Palkia to rule over time and space is similar to the creation of izanaki and izanami finally Dialga Palkia Giratina and through hacking even Arceus itself are all encountered at the top of Mount Coronet in an area called the spear pillar the spear pillar sits at the center of Sinnoh and was said to be the point of sinnoh's creation onokorojima was created by a spear and a great pillar was erected at its Center hence Spear Pillar Arceus also takes some inspiration from Buddhist mythology it's Pokemon Diamond pokedex entry States it just described in mythology as the Pokemon that shaped the universe with its 1000 arms the image of a deity with 1000 arms is evocative of avalokateshwara the personification of perfect compassion in Buddhism avalokateshwara aspires to help all sentient beings be free of samsara the endless cycle of reincarnation another possible connection between Arceus and Buddhism is the wheel on its back which is reminiscent of the Dharma chakra the wheel of the Dharma which represents the path to Nirvana two of the starter Pokemon from Generation 4 are also based on world mythology Torterra is based on the myth of the world turtle that can be found in many mythologies around the world for example Chinese mythology states that the Creator goddess new Gua used the legs of a giant tortoise to prop up the sky certain Native American mythologies tell of a giant turtle that supports the entire Earth upon its back torterra's HeartGold and soul silver pokedex entry reads ancient people imagine that beneath the ground a gigantic Torterra dwelled explicitly referencing Its Real World inspiration Infernape baby based on Hanuman a Hindu god that appeared in the Hindu epic poem ramayana Hanuman was a monkey that was granted immunity to burning by the deity of fire Agony he famously caused massive destruction to the mythical city of Lenka when he was held captive and his tail lit on fire as the fire could not harm him he escaped and he used his tail to burn down large parts of the city while the legendary Pokemon celtia was based on dartanian from The Three Musketeers and may have also been inspired by Scottish mythology the Kelpie was a water spirit that often took the form of a beautiful horse in order to lure people into a watery grave its methods of doing so differ between accounts but would generally lure men into riding on his back before Galloping across the waves Keldeo is also able to run across water it's pokedex entry in Pokemon white states that it crosses the world running over the surfaces of oceans and rivers there's over 30 Mario video games that America never got or that there's a canceled Zelda game for the DS that no one had ever heard of until a few weeks ago for more on those click or tap one of the videos on screen and thanks for watching [Music] thank you

Channel: DYKG Clips

Views: 363,356

Keywords: pokemon, pokemon games, pokemon red and blue, pokemon red, pokemon blue, pokemon yellow, pokemon gold and silver, pokemon gold, pokemon silver, pokemon crystal, pokemon ruby and sapphire, pokemon ruby, pokemon sapphire, pokemon emerald, pokemon diamond and pearl, pokemon diamond, pokemon pearl, pokemon platinum, nintendo, game freak, pocket monsters, sleep to, fall asleep, asmr, sleep aid, sleep

Id: bw22ZgG_zqQ

Length: 124min 25sec (7465 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 24 2023