Gold/Silver Beta Reviews

I'm back, and I want to talk about those un-used beta designs, from the 1997 Spaceworld demo. I'll be looking at the actual sprites, as well as artistic interpretations. I'll keep this post floated, so everybody knows what's going on.

some other clarifications and qualifications -

• All the Sugimori-style artwork was taken from this video, and you can check out the links in that description to follow the artists.
• We only know the mono-color palettes for these Beta-mons. The actual Gold/Silver games would use multi-colored sprites, but we just have to guess at what the actual intended colors would have been for these.
• The names are also unofficial, obviously. But there's really only one set of fan-translated names people use, so I'm rolling with those. If you want to know the original Japanese names, you can look 'em up.
• I wanted to wait until the beta got fully translated so I could play it, but that didn't happen, so I have no say in terms of stats or usefulness or anything.
• I won't be tagging these as "pokemon", or including them in the type tags. This is because they're not actual Pokemon, and so I don't want people confused if they go searching through the archives.
• The most interesting ones are of course the completely un-used Pokemon, but I'll also cover the beta-designs of existing Pokemon, if I think the differences are significant.

And finally, while I may rag on some of these designs, I'm not criticizing the artist at all. For the most part, the artwork does a great job of bringing the sprite to life (er, to paper) and the shit I talk is directed at Gamefreak's concept, not the drawing itself. The reason I don't bother to temper my rage with the actual official artwork is because Gamefreak has no excuses if something looks dumb. They've got all the money and time in the world to polish a design and then render it perfectly in art and model, so when they make a mess of things I have no sympathy.