The day ideas run dry is the day humanity ends; other than opposable thumbs and big brains, we don't have much
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I'm surprised this slipped under the radar, but in February of last year Gamefreak was the first developer period to get Nintendo's dev kits for the 3DS (or some unnamed Pokémon developer, perhaps Game Freak though because of it's favorable financial ties with the Nintendo). In fact it was cited that they were toying with accelerometers/gyroscopes in the system that no one had mentioned publicly before, when the system's specs were just mere rumors. Following that, Satoru Iwata came out and
deliberately announced new Pokémon games were in development both the 3DS
and Wii, so the ideas are never in short supply, it's always just a matter of what and when… And as far as Pokémon designs go, for every single Pokémon in public existence there's probably 100 more
like the misfit toys from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer; not to deter the focus here that much, but Game Freak has a fairly large design department relative to its overall size (the people working at Game Freak usually have a wide variety of technical and creative skills, so the company can keep the workforce small), and they spend an
insane amount of time going in depth with the design process. The Sinnoh basic starters for example took well over a
year to fully complete, to put it in some sort of scope. Albeit, they're the prominent Pokémon for Nintendo's PR, but I'm sure they've given royal treatment to all of the 649 out now, and at least some thought to the hundreds more. I can't help imagining if they have like, a Disney Vault (with the Diamond Edition DVDs) where they keep all the design sheets, haha
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