 Hi, I'm Joe Kat. Most of you may know me as the creator of the Crap Guide series, but did you know I'm also a designer? A graphic designer, specifically, but I dabble in all kinds of design. Illustration, animation, presentation, other things that don't end in Ashen. Heck, I even made a couple of small games while I was in university. I just really like studying design. And recently, the 8th generation of Pokémon was just announced. Pokémon Sword and Shield. And yes, obviously Nintendo consulted me on the name, seeing as I am the expert on the greatest weapon pairing of all time. Anyway, with the announcement of a new Pokémon game, there was also the reveal of the newest set of starter Pokémon. And as with every generation before, there are a lot of differing opinions on the matter. They're underwhelming. They're perfect. They all look the same. They're too different from the classic Pokémon designs. Now, I don't want to talk about what opinion is right or wrong or why you shouldn't feel the way that you do, but rather, I wanted to take this opportunity to analyze how I think the character designer, specifically the ones responsible for designing Pokémon, go about designing their characters. Now, keep in mind this is all going to be theories. I do not work at Game Freak nor do I know what goes on behind the scenes. This is just based on what I know about character design from what I've learned over the years of obsessively reading and watching hundreds of design tutorials. And also, four years of design college, FlexFlex. So let's say you were hired by Game Freak, brought on board as a lead Pokémon designer, and you have to create a new Pokémon for this generation. The company wants you to be able to stretch your creative muscles, but they also want to make sure that whatever design you come up with will be able to fit well in the Pokémon universe. So they hand you a list of guidelines. Again, I don't know what guidelines they have for sure, but based on what we see from existing Pokémon, we'll pretend it goes something like this. One, pick a creature or object. It can be real or fictional. Two, give it an element of some kind. This usually determines it to have an abnormal color as a result of the element chosen for the design, but not always. Three, give it a face, whether it be eyes, a mouth, or anything else. Four, add one or two extra features that you normally wouldn't see on that creature or object. If it's a fully evolved Pokémon or legendary, maybe even three or four, but no more than that. And there you have it. Those are your guidelines. No doubt there are some outliers in the 800 plus Pokémon out there that don't fit into any of these, but we can safely say about 90% of them fall under these principles. Now let's try to apply these to existing Pokémon as if we were designing them. And keep in mind this is a gross simplification of character design. Concept artists go through hundreds of iterations before coming to a conclusion on what design is best for the game. All right, so let's say we need a fire starter Pokémon. So let's pick a creature or object. Let's go with a chicken, specifically a baby chick. Then it needs an element. All right, we already have that it's fire. So let's make it a bright orange so that it's clear to the player that this is probably a fire Pokémon. It's already got a face so no worries there. Let's just make it all anime and cute. And finally a couple of features so it doesn't look like just any real world baby chick. Let's add a tuft of feathers on its head. No bigger. Nice. And maybe some little fluffy feather bunches on the sides of its neck. There we go. We'll call it Torchic. Cool. We got ourselves a fire starter Pokémon. How about another one? Let's say we need a Pokémon that will hang around industrial areas like a factory or a power plant. Let's go with some magnets. Those are neat. And let's make it electric and steel because electromagnets and we'll leave it gray because of its steel typing. By the way, I know steel was introduced in second gen. This is just for the sake of the exercise. But we can't leave it at just a magnet with a face. That would look kind of silly and boring. So let's give it an electrical ball. You know, those ones that make your hair stand up. And how about a second magnet so that it looks symmetrical? Now we can put a face on it. Two eyes looks a bit goofy though. Let's go with one. There we go. That looks good. Almost. But it's still a little too plain. Oh yeah, we still need to add a couple of features. Well, these are magnets and they do attract metal. Let's put some screws on there. Yeah, that's pretty clever. Good job us. What a cute little guy. We'll call him Magnemite. Now let's do one more. We need a sea based Pokémon but not a fish. We got enough fish already. Just no more fish. Jim, stop putting normal fish in the game and calling it Pokémon. Oh man. Anyway, how about the Loch Ness monster? We don't really know what Nessie's real color would be. So let's go with blue because water type. Let's add some eyes and a mouth and a nose and some ears and maybe even a horn. But this Pokémon is not going to evolve. So let's maybe we put one more feature in there. It's looking kind of naked. So let's go with a shell. Yeah, that's looking pretty neat. Oh, add spikes onto it. There we go. Nice. And you know what? Let's throw ice type in there because we have way too many purely water type Pokémon and ice is looking a little bit lonely over there. There we are. A Loch Ness monster. We'll call it Lapras. So what was the point to this exercise? Well, as with every generation, there are a lot of concerns that the newer Pokémon designs stray too far away from the originals and their philosophy. So how about it? Let's look at the new starters and go about them the same way we did with the older Pokémon designs. Grookey. It's a monkey. It's green based on its grass type. It has a face and it has leaves on its head that are held together by a stick that doubles as a hairpin. So it seems to fall in line with the rules we set. Score bunny. It's a bunny rabbit. And although there are plenty of white bunnies out there, they usually don't have red tipped feet and ears. So there's our typing color. It's got a face as most bunnies tend to and it's also got bandage patches on the bridge of its nose and its feet as well as this little red tube around its neck. So it too falls in line with the design rules. Sobble. It's a chameleon. Its color is blue to show that it's water. It's got a face. It's got a crest that is way taller proportionally than any real chameleon. And a tail that's also way larger proportionally than any real chameleon. It's got dark blue cheek spots resembling teardrops and tangible anxiety. So from what we can tell, all three of the new starters seem to be following the same hypothetical design guidelines as the older generations. So if we were holding them all to the same standard, then it should be fine, right? Well, there's been another hat thrown into the discussion ring that I hadn't thought of before. And it has a fair point that we should be holding the newer generations to a higher standard. That they should have more to them to set them apart from the older ones. And it does make sense. After all, technology and skill and design philosophies change and more often than not improve. So why stick to the same old worn out design guidelines when we can fit in more detail and features and pizzazz. Why not do more with what extra tools we have? And in fact, there is a game out there that does this. Another game with tons of character designs that's been around for a long time and is regularly adding more and more to its roster, of which its community also cares a lot about the design of said characters. League of Legends. There are over a hundred and forty League of Legends champions at the time of writing and the game has been around for such a long time that as the game is updated and more and more characters are added in, technology improves, design philosophies change, so obviously the designers are going to want to push the boundaries a little. And they have. However, this creates a new problem. The older designs look notably worse in comparison. I don't know if there's a term for this already, so let's just call it design creep for now. It's where newer designs begin to look more complex or impressive as a result of improved technology, skills of a designer, or the bending or breaking of traditional design boundaries, which results in the older designs looking less impressive comparatively. Any artist whose tried character design knows what I'm talking about. You ever tried creating a roster of a hundred characters? Odds are the later ones are going to look more impressive and experimental and stand out way more than the first few. The fact of the matter is that before older champions got visual overhauls when standing side by side with more recently released ones, their original designs looked kind of underwhelming. Fortunately Riot fixed this by updating the older characters with revamped models and splash art that both stay true to the original while adding more detail and complexity to them and keeping the style and design guidelines consistent with the newer champions that once looked way fancier and they're not the only ones to do this either. Blizzard does it with World of Warcraft as well. In fact you can still find older untouched models in the game that look just way worse when put next to the new more recent ones and it can be very jarring. So should Pokemon adopt this method? I guess it could. It would mean that the designers could break boundaries with what they could design for future Pokemon though at the cost of making older generations look way more boring comparatively. But then eventually they're going to run into the design creep issue where the newest Pokemon look so distinct and different that they don't even seem like they're from the same game anymore. So then they'd have to go back and remake any older generation Pokemon that look less impressive by comparison to alleviate it. But then I have to ask this how willing are fans of Pokemon going to be to accept if game freak redesign something like Abra? Will people not be up in arms if they designed a new Charmander to replace a comparatively plain looking one? Would the world really be okay with if there was a redesign for Jigglypuff? Pidgey? Beedrill? Bulbasaur? Pikachu? Other game franchises and heck media as a whole in the past have shown that messing with a well beloved design of a long running franchise can and will divide and upset fans. It's a very risky move sometimes it pays off and the majority of fans will appreciate the new style and what it brings to the table and sometimes not so much. Just make them better without changing it. I hear a lot of people say and that's not really as easy as it sounds. What's considered better when it comes to character design can be very subjective. As I said before concept artists go through hundreds of iterations sometimes in a single day and do so for weeks before having a whole entire team come to a conclusion on what design is best overall. Something as minimal as adding a couple of spots to Charmander's head could be fine for some people while also being completely disrespectful to its design according to others. So the next best solution would be keep the new designs as simple as they were originally. It keeps them looking like they fit right in with the rest of the designs. They still feel like Pokemon all while making sure the older classic and well loved designs will not look worse or more dull over time when put next to the newer more complex fancier flashier designs. Now is this a perfect solution? No of course not. There is no perfect solution. But considering how big Pokemon is as a franchise and how near and dear the original designs are to people's hearts this has got to be the best one. The franchise has been around for so long now over 20 years that I'm sure whatever other hundreds of ideas critics of the designs proposed have already been thought of and maybe even subtly tried by Game Freak. And that this was the overall best solution with the least amount of downsides. And it's always least never none. Because yes there are still downsides to this method. I just personally believe that of all the other valid ideas for Game Freak to try out this is their best bet. Yes there will always be the odd stinker design out there but that's just what happens when you have to create 100 plus fictional creatures every few years. They can't all be as perfect as Mimikyu. But hey maybe you don't care about all that stuff and just want to battle and capture some fantastical magical creatures and the Pokemon designs don't bother you either way. Hopefully whatever opinion you have maybe you come to a better understanding and appreciation of the thought and skill that goes into character design. Or maybe you did and I don't know I'm not your mom I'm not gonna say no supper for you just because you think Voltorb is a pinnacle of creativity. Hey thanks for watching. This isn't the usual content you guys are used to but I wanted to change things up a bit and reuse all those assets I made for the Klanoa video a long time ago. And if you liked all this design talk about Pokemon and want some more of it from an actual industry professional Dan from New Frame Plus made a video all about the evolution of the Pokemon games battle animations from red and blue all the way to sun and moon. Or if you like the whole exercise portion of this video then I'd highly recommend his other video on pose design which I shamelessly ripped off most of its format for this video. Dan and his work have been a huge inspiration to me for years and he is such a well-spoken and chill guy and it's really interesting to hear insight from someone with actual experience in the industry. He's part of the people who make these freaking things. How much cooler could you get? Thanks again for watching. I'll see you soon.