Masuda and Sugimori Explain Gen 5’s Development

Written by Dr Lava, November 18 2019

The following interview was conducted with Junichi Masuda, the director of Pokemon Black & White, and Ken Sugimori, who’s been lead Pokemon designer since Gen 1. It was published in Nintendo Power magazine in March 2011, although it’s stated in the interview it took place several months earlier, “prior to the holidays.” For reference, in Japan Black & White debuted in September 2010, then released stateside in March 2011.

In this interview, Masuda and Sugimori discuss Black & White’s development and design details. Highlights include the revelation that 400-500 Pokemon were created for Gen 5, with only 156 making the final cut; Sugimori’s thoughts on how Gen 5 Pokemon are different from earlier generations’ Pokemon; and Masuda’s response to being asked if he ever considers cutting older, less popular Pokemon from new games.

That last quote is especially relevant looking back now in 2019. As this is being written, Sword & Shield have just released, and many fans are still upset that lots of older Pokemon weren’t brought over. Game Freak’s decision to omit about half the Pokemon from generations 1-7 has split the fanbase, with many boycotting the new Switch entries in protest.

But you already know about all that — so let’s get to the interview. I’ve added some of my own commentary to provide context, which I’ll label in italics. If you like reading old Pokemon developer interviews, you can find lots more on this website’s homepage. They’re published here for the purposes of archiving and analyzing, or in some cases, because they weren’t available in English until I commissioned their translations. Okay, here’s the interview:

Breeding the Fifth

From photocopying a hand-drawn fanzine to conceiving one of the most successful entertainment franchises ever, few companies have experienced as meteoric a rise as Pokemon developer Game Freak. Pokemon art director and Game Freak cofounder Ken Sugimori joins director Junichi Masuda to answer our questions about Pokemon Black Version and Pokemon White Version, the fifth pair of mainline Pokemon role-playing games.

Nintendo Power: After years of progressively more exotic titles, is there any special significance to returning to basic colors with black and white?

Masuda: “We choose the titles to express the themes of each game. Like, diamonds are the hardest substance in the world, so that fit the theme of “ultimateness” in Pokemon Diamond and Pearl. This time we’re pursuing a theme of “polarity,” things that are defined by their opposition to each other. Take, for example, angels and demons, or light and shadow—if one didn’t exist, the other would lose all meaning. “White” is a blank slate with potential to become anything, while “black” is complete and unchanging. So our intention actually wasn’t to return to the basics, but to evoke that particular theme.”

Nintendo Power: Can you give an example of how that theme manifests in the game?

Masuda: “The Black Version exclusively features a metropolis called Black City, where the White Version has a very natural area called the White Forest. This contrast between cities and nature is one of the polar elements of the game. People who live in urban areas may long for open spaces and spend their vacations camping in nature, while people who live in rural areas may be intrigued by the idea of visiting a big city. I don’t think we could communicate that idea with just one game; it requires the contrast between the two.”

Nintendo Power: Pokemon Black Version and Pokemon White Version seem to include more new features than previous installments. How does the scale of the project compare to past generations of Pokemon?

Masuda: “In terms of development resources, it was certainly the largest game we’ve ever made. We had a staff of 70 people working on it here at Game Freak, and then there’s the Pokemon Global Link team on top of that, which featured dozens of additional developers.” [Pokemon Global Link is a new website that will launch this spring and allow players to link up their game data to experience additional online features. -Ed.]

Dr Lava’s notes: It’s worth noting, in a July 2000 interview with Nintendo Power, Masuda said the team that worked on Gold & Silver was only about 20 developers. Here he says about 70 people worked on Black & White — a substantial increase in manpower between generations 2 and 5.

Nintendo Power: Can you walk us through the history of the game, and what inspired its new features?

Masuda: “The project began about four years ago, but at that point it was just me doing the planning, and a team of around seven programmers who were researching what other sorts of things we could do with the Nintendo DS hardware. As for my role, I had the sense that there were a lot of people who think of Pokemon as being for children, and I wanted to find ways to broaden its appeal. I spent about a year thinking about how to design new aspects that would be perceived as cool and cutting-edge by adults… I decided to make all of the Pokemon completely new, so that everyone would start on the same page, whether they were a longtime fan or completely new to the series. We also added infrared capabilities to make it extremely easy to connect with other players. As I mentioned, by the end of the project, the internal development team had grown to around 70 people.”

Sugimori: “This is the second generation of Pokemon games on the Nintendo DS hardware. So from the visual side, we were focusing on the issue of “how do we make a game feel fresh when it’s on familiar hardware?” One of the ways was to use entirely new Pokemon, instead of mixing new and [existing] Pokemon the way we did in previous installments. Creating an entirely new ecosystem of Pokemon allowed us to return to square one in terms of design. So we already have Pokemon based on dogs, and horses, and deer, for example. But now that we’ve discarded our past work, in a sense, we can go back to the animals that have inspired Pokemon and study them with fresh eyes, and create new and different things.”

Nintendo Power: Do you feel you were successful in widening the games’ appeal? Do you have a sense of what age groups they have resonated with?

Masuda: “For Black and White in Japan, the majority of the players have been high-school and college students, but we expect the proportion of younger players to increase over the holidays.” [This interview took place just prior to the holidays. -Ed.] “Generally, the older players are more familiar with the series while the younger players are new to it. However, we believe most of the older players are “lapsed” Pokemon fans. Maybe they played Red and Blue Versions when they were younger, but have not necessarily been playing it consecutively since.”

Nintendo Power: Does that represent a change from previous generations?

Masuda: “Having so many older players return is a big change from previous generations.”

Nintendo Power: Why do you think that is?

Masuda: “From the very beginning of development, we tried to see the series through the eyes of older players who had “graduated” from the series. Does it seem too cute? Is the writing off-putting? Is it too childish? We wanted to change these things to make it more appealing to older players. For example, in Japan the text had been written without using kanji characters to make it easier for young children to read. So we added an option to have the game display kanji to make it more appealing to adults. We also wrote a story that we thought would be a little more interesting for an older audience.”

“As I mentioned earlier, we also added all sorts of cutting-edge communication features. Part of the reason for this was to make it easier for adults to communicate with other players. Younger kids are playing together all the time, but older players are a little shyer about such things. So we added infrared technology that makes it easier and more intuitive to link up with other players, and added the Internet functionality so that players don’t even need to see each other in order to trade [or battle] Pokemon.”

Dr Lava’s notes: Although Black & White were the first Pokemon games to offer trading and battling over wifi, Gen 2 was actually the first time Pokemon fans got the chance to go online. The Japanese version of Crystal was compatible with an accessory called the Mobile Adapter GB, which allowed a Gameboy to connect to a cellphone. You could then trade, battle, download mini-games, and even access the famous Celebi event via the Mobile System GB. Unfortunately, the service was never made available outside of Japan.

To hear more about the Mobile System GB, check out my video about Gen 2’s cut content — which also covers Japan-exclusive content.

Nintendo Power: The look of the Pokemon themselves also seems to have evolved quite a bit since the early games of the series. What inspired those changes?

Sugimori: “Mr. Masuda asked us to play up the ‘coolness’ of the Pokemon in Black and White. So we’re using a lot more sharp and angular lines, rather than more rounded ones. But a lot of it is just that we have different character designers working on the different generations of games. I think the group that worked on Black and White gravitated more toward ‘cool’ designs.”

Masuda: “Advances in the hardware have also impacted the style of Pokemon over the years. Higher-resolution platforms have allowed for more detailed designs.”

Nintendo Power: What is the process for designing new Pokemon? How do you decide which ones make the cut?

Sugimori: “We probably design around three times more Pokemon than we intend to actually use in the game. The way it works is, each designer brings in rough sketches of their designs. I meet with them individually to discuss certain features of their designs, and they bring them back with the revisions. If the Pokemon makes the cut, I will draw its official art.”

“In terms of how we decide which ones make the cut…hmmm. Well, in the games, Pokemon serve two roles. They fight for you, but they’re also your companions. So a Pokemon needs to seem ferocious enough to be potent in combat, while also looking endearing enough that you’d want it as a friend. It can’t be too ferocious. It’s difficult to strike that balance, so that’s probably the biggest criteria we’re looking for. Another is simply suiting the needs of the game: we know we’ll need a certain amount of Water-type Pokemon, and a certain amount of Flying-type Pokemon, and so on. If the designers submit too many birds, then some of them have to be cut, even if they’re great designs.”

Dr Lava’s notes: That’s quite a revelation — only a third of the Pokemon designed in Gen 5 made it into the final product. Since the Unovadex was made up of 156 new Pokemon, it sounds like Sugimori’s team must have submitted 400-500 designs for his approval. That sounds similar to what Sugimori said in a July 2000 interview in Nintendo Power: “We came up with several hundred new Pokémon [for Gen 2], but most of them got cut during development.”

In a series of 2011 interviews with Nintendo Dream magazine — the Japanese equivalent of Nintendo Power — Ken Sugimori described quite a few Pokemon scrapped during Gen 5’s development. I’ve summarized and analyzed those interviews’ highlights in this video.

But I suppose this raises the question — what should be classified as a “lost Pokemon”? I think we all agree the unused sprites in Gold & Silver’s 1997 demo are lost Pokemon. So is it when Sugimori approves a monster, then it’s discarded later in development? Is it only after it’s given a sprite, or that sprite is programmed into some sort of demo or beta build? That’s a question that deserves its own article, and at the end of the day, probably comes down to your own opinion.

As Sugimori alluded to in his above quote, at this point he’d been the artist responsible for every Pokemon’s official artwork since Gen 1. It seems this finalized art is only drafted after a Pokemon’s made the final cut and has its sprite programmed into the game. That’s why in earlier generations, Pokemon sprites sometimes don’t perfectly match their official art. Because Sugimori made some revisions to those designs while drafting their official artwork — after the sprite was already finalized. You can see a couple examples pictured above.

Nintendo Power: With the ever-growing size of the Pokemon roster, it must have required an incredible amount of work to animate and rebalance over 600 Pokemon.

Masuda: “It certainly did! We have a whole team that just worked on game balance and updating the parameters of all the Pokemon. But in the end, we can never compete with the effort the players put into coming up with new combat strategies. We’re always surprised at which Pokemon end up being used in high-level play, such as the Pokemon World Championships.”

Nintendo Power: And you don’t ever think, “let’s make our lives easier by cutting the least popular Pokemon out of the franchise”?

Masuda: “[Laughs] I think one of the joys of Pokemon is being able to use your favorite Pokemon from the Blue and Red Versions all the way through to the newest iterations. So no, I don’t think we can do that.”

Dr Lava’s notes: Considering the backlash following Game Freak’s announcement that only about half the Pokedex was going to make its way into Sword & Shield, I think it’s safe to assume a good chunk of the Pokemon fanbase agrees with this 2010 Masuda quote. Pokemon is a very nostalgic franchise for many of its fans, and having some of their favorite Pokemon cut from Gen 8 rubbed a lot of them the wrong way.

This website is about documenting lost Pokemon history, not badmouthing Game Freak developers… But with that said, I think it’s unfortunate that Game Freak forgot in 2019 what Masuda knew so well in 2010. The whole crapstorm could have been avoided.

Nintendo Power: After setting the previous games in a Japan-flavored world, why did you decide on a more Western setting for Pokemon Black Version and Pokemon White Version?

Masuda: “In Black and White, we decided to use New York City’s Manhattan as a motif. I visited New York for the launch of Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, and spent a lot of time wandering around. I was impressed with how many different nationalities of people lived there, and the individual communities with their special events and street festivals. It had such an international feel…like a world without borders. It seemed like it would be an ideal setting for a video game, and that inspired me to give it a try.”

Nintendo Power: What inspired the addition of seasons?

Masuda: In Pokemon Black and White, the season changes every month. We wanted to introduce an element that would bring some more gradual change to the game. Like, if you look at a plant every day, you don’t notice anything changed. But if you look at it after a month, you’ll clearly notice that it’s grown, or dried out, or its flowers are blooming, or whatever. We wanted players to experience something like that. So if a player puts down the game in December, maybe they’ll be curious about what might have changed, and be motivated to pick it up again in January. The seasons allow us to provide interesting new discoveries for the player over a period of months. For example, the coloring of the Pokemon Deerling changes every season.

Dr Lava’s notes: In a 2011 Japanese interview, Ken Sugimori further discussed Gen 5’s implementation of the seasons mechanic. He says “…having seasons affect every Pokemon would be too difficult, so we decided to use it on just one or two.” Those two Pokemon of course are Deerling and Sawsbuck.

Nintendo Power: In the months since the Japanese release of Pokemon Black Version and Pokemon White Version, what aspect of the fan reaction have you found most surprising?

Masuda: The biggest surprise was definitely the level of interest in Pokemon Global Link. [Laughs] There isn’t as much Wi-Fi access in Japan as there is in America, so we never imagined that it would prove so popular [in Japan]. We had over a million people register — nearly one in four people who bought the game — and it overwhelmed our servers. We had to significantly increase their capacity almost immediately.

Nintendo Power: One last question: before the Pokemon series, Game Freak was famous for making great side-scrolling action games. Do you plan to return to that genre one day?

Masuda: Yes. [Smiles]

Sugimori: We felt that way before, so we made Drill Dozer.

Nintendo Power: I’m surprised you haven’t done a side-scrolling Pokemon game yet.

Sugimori: If we hear from our fans that they would want one, we would love to do it.

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And that wraps up this March 2011 interview. By the way, Drill Dozer was a GBA action platformer directed by Ken Sugimori and produced by Junichi Masuda. It released in 2005 and received an average review score of 8/10. If you’d like to read more Pokemon interviews, check out this website’s homepage.

I owe a special thanks to Megmar, who scanned this issue of Nintendo for me so I could transcribe it. And as always, I’d like to show my appreciation to my Patreon supporters who help finance this website and my YouTube channel:

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Related Articles:

• Gen 5 Historia: Pokemon Origin Stories (Part 1)

• How a 1997 Sugimori Drawing Ended Up Becoming 3 Pokemon

• Gorochu: Developer Translations and the 2019 Leak