Gastrodon is a fairly interesting Pokemon, and I don't often cover Pokemon beyond Generations 1 and 2. This Pokemon has quite a bit of interesting information about it, so I thought I'd compile it all so you can have a look. In Nintendo Power May 2007, it was said by Junichi Masuda that two "sea slug" Pokemon were meant to be in Ruby and Sapphire, but were cut. It's an interesting topic. There are actually two cut Pokemon in the Cry Order from the German Debug ROM, with fully functional cries. You can get the actual ROM here. Many often talk about Gastrodon and Shellos being in Gen 3 at some point, citing this magazine. However, this is false. The exact statement is; "There's also a sea-slug Pokémon that we weren't able to put in Ruby and Sapphire that we were able to put in this one, Pokémon Diamond and Pearl" It is highly likely that these unspecified Pokemon indirectly inspired Shellos and Gastrodon, like how Gyaoon inspired Tyranitar. I don't believe that these were the two Pokemon we got due tot he statement, though. There is also more evidence for this than one would think, so let's have a look. One case of a concept being completely revised for a game is Mantine, who was originally Haneei. This Pokemon was likely based on Glaucus atlanticus, or the Blue Sea Slug. In the end it became a stingray, more befitting its name (haneru means jump, hane means feather/wing, and ei implies stingray, thanks to TCRF). So it could be theorized that the concept of sea slugs being used for Pokemon could date back to Generation 2, given the appearance of Haneei (although you could say from the name that the evidence is a bit weak). Anyway, let's move on a touch. In August 2006, Pokemon Diamond and Pearl was in a debugging phase. How do we know this? Well, it leaked in June 2019. In this ROM, Shellos and Gastrodon had different Japanese names; Siiusi and Siidorugo, rather than Karanakushi and Toritodon. Gastrodon's name appears to be a reference to Dolgo, a Kaiju (thanks to Helix Chamber). These names were considered a mainstay it appears, as they made it into Pokemon Battle Revolution. In fact, the names made it into the final game under debug options. You may have also seen these sprites before, which are unused in Pokemon Diamond and Pearl as well. It is likely that these are our "Siiusi" and "Siidorugo", the old Shellos and Gastrodon, before they were changed into what they are now. You may notice that Shellos has the East Sea's back. This is because, well, at one point that concept wasn't exactly founded yet. The final game has a debug function talking about the forms. I like to think that they had a bunch of designs for these sea slugs that they liked, and chose to make multiple forms based on, well, the different sea's sea slugs. The Gastrodon here may have been one of the designs that they chose to cut. It makes a lot of sense, as compared to the final game and early Shellos, it's a bit out there. It would have been a bit redundant to have more than 2 forms as well, although the East's head patterns have no record of presence at this time. It could have been in their little Shellos-Gastrodon war chest, though! So there you have it, multiple generations of wanting sea slugs in Pokemon, amounting to the creation of Gastrodon and Shellos. And honestly, I'm glad it came out. It's a well-known competitive Pokemon in the VGC sector for its Storm Drain ability, and frequently finds its way onto teams to counter Rain. While it rarely ventures out of the lower tiers in Smogon, it has an OU tiering under its belt for Gen 5 and frequently travels through every tier above it in every game for one reason or another. While Shellos has significantly less competitive history, it's nice to see all of its development history, providing a deep inside look at how Nintendo designs their Pokemon.
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Oh, my! I haven't posted since last year! What is wrong with my consistency, man? Anyway, Papa Plague is back with something newer than usual, with a promotional disc from Gen 3! GAME is essentially the UK's equivalent to GameStop, acting as our retailer over here. I picked up this old CD from uhhh...either a Charity Shop, or by an employee when I was getting a Midnight Forme Lycanroc Event from said store. It was one of the two, not sure which. I've had so much stuff come in and out of this collection it's silly. Sorry, I don't know which! I know it came from Staffordshire, though. I own quite a few promotional pieces from GAME, including demos of Star Wars Rogue Squadron II and Splinter Cell on the GameCube. This just happens to be one of the things I've picked up in the past, and I never actually thought to upload it online. For starters, here's the cover. I had to compress it to JPEG quality as my scanner, once again, saves gigantic images with pristine quality. You can find a high res raw scan right here, clumsily put together by myself. Now, this disc is dated on the files to be from 11/6/2003, or 11th June 2003 (note this is BritSpeak we're talking). So, a month and a week or two before release. GAME has been doing this for years, so it's nothing too out there. This IS licensed and copyrighted by Nintendo, and is probably one of the most haphazardly made advertising ever. I can't believe I didn't even open it until now. The amount of work put into this is kind of nutty though, as you usually never see discs like this put together for customers. In fact, I don't think these were even meant to leave the store, as if you try to run the files extracted (as in, not on a disc you've burned the files to), it'll mention a projector being turned off. Maybe I'm looking a bit too much into it though. So, what's actually ON the disc? There are 6 trailers for what I assume is given to consumers to watch when they get back from their trip to the store. I believe this as the 2nd video mentions the 6th one being included on the CD. Weird system though, especially considering that they could have put these into one big video. So as you can see, you can select those 6 trailers to have shown on a projector. In my case, it showed up on my monitor, with an option to click Space for full-screen watching. The videos are all in MPEG, dated 11/6/2003, all edited in a very small time frame. The EXE File to open this application was made the next day at 5 AM (poor advertisers). Each trailer features a poor British soul trying to talk about Pokemon, although he sadly doesn't seem to quite understand it. What, you want to watch these trailers now? You can! I dumped the disc and uploaded all the videos to a nice tidy playlist. Go here! Or if you want to see it in its original format, I extracted all the files on the disc and uploaded them to Dropbox! Now, I'm going to sum up the videos for you! Because of course I'm going to needlessly look into content made a month before the release date! Who do you think I am?!
That's all I really observed while screaming at all the inaccuracies, and I really don't want to watch it again. I'm kind of shocked this was copyrighted by Nintendo at all, as there wasn't much quality control done at all.
So that's all I have for now. What do you think of this? Interesting, no? |
About meSo I really, really like researching Prototype Pokemon information. That's about it. I also do things on Smogon, I guess. Archives
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