With Pokémon X and Y having just released over the weekend, the creative process behind it deserves to be examined, especially when the developers willing to be so open and forthcoming about it.
Speaking with VG247, GameFreak director Junichi Masuda recently said that a fair amount of work goes into designing each and every pokémon, and a lot more than you might think. As you load up X or Y in your 3 or perhaps your new 2DS, and toss your various pokéballs, consider Masuda's words:
"It's not just about the design, as a lot of thought goes into creating each individual Pokémon. On any particular, individual Pokémon the process to creating it can be anywhere between three months, and in the longest cases up to half a year."
Three to six months. With Pokémon X and Y out now, the number of total pokemon is now up to a massive 646. Let's do some math. Assuming that GameFreak designed all the pokemon in the briefest amount of time, like Ekans, arguably the most basic of the various pocket monsters (it's "snake" backwards for crying out loud) 3 months. 646 x 3 = 1938, or, roughly 161 years of development time. At most? Over 320 years.
Obviously, that's divided up over the amount of staffers, but that's still a lot of work. Masuda described the process further:
"We have a team of 20 different graphic designers who are responsible for coming up with the Pokémon design themselves, and then there's a team of five people who actually judge the designs, and are responsible for deciding which Pokémon go into the final games," said Masuda.
"Then they consider what goes into making a Pokémon, their various aspects, but they look very deeply at the characters to see where we think a Pokémon would live, what kind of things it would eat, and what characteristics are very particular about the Pokémon.
"When it comes to how we maintain the balance in the game and knowing what features to include, we always consider very carefully who is actually playing the games. Is it girls or boys, adults or children? When we consider who is playing the game, we make decision as to which features to include and how to maintain the overall balance of the game so it's appealing."
Speaking to Gamasutra designer Hironobu Yoshida said there is a system in place to prevent overlap.
"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."
While designing 650 plus creatures certainly makes GameFreak no slouch, what's amazing is there there's been even more designs that sadly never made it to the games. "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."
Both Pokémon X and Y are out now, playable on Nintendo's handheld 2DS and 3DS. You can check out our review round up here.