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Masuda, Yoshida on the importance of Pokemon starters, difficulties of creating new Pokemon

by rawmeatcowboy
10 October 2013
GN Version 4.0
On the importance of starters

"I think they're absolutely necessary to the Pokemon games. Personally, I think they're the ones that should be on the packaging. They're really the face of that generation, and I think even as designers, they feel a bit more special to us than some of the other pokemon." - Hironobu Yoshida
With the starter pokemon, they always evolve twice, and a lot of players will use these pokemon until the end. They teach the players a bit about the basics, so we need to make sure the designs are at the same time easy to understand -- the way they evolve, for example -- and of course making them appealing is very important to the games." - Masuda


On the difficulty of creating new Pokemon

"Since there are 20 of us and we're working all on our own ideas, we want to make sure we're not overlapping ideas. At Game Freak, we have an internal server where we can upload our designs and share them with everyone else on the team. This allows us to see what everyone else is working on and get ideas from each other. It's very difficult work every time. There are probably five to 10 times the number of ideas that are rejected as the ones that make it into the final design, so it's a very difficult process.

They also will leave feedback on all of the designs, even the ones that are rejected, to say why they got rejected or why they didn't choose a certain one. What that lets us do is improve for the future, so we can use that knowledge for the next series of titles." - Yoshida
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