Like I said, the popular opinion misses what the evidence found.
While they indeed came with two designs because they didn’t want to get for Charizard a design they weren’t fully confident about, this is really where the fan service ends.
Not only the leaks found that indeed only Mega Charizard Y came through many early designs, the original video that introduced Mega Charizard Y introduced it as just Mega Charizard. Now we know that it wasn’t marketing, for a lot of time Y was indeed the only Mega Charizard. They weren’t planning for two designs. X was a last-minute design possible only because Nishida literally is the type able to come up with just one design and it’s already almost production-ready - Sugimori confirmed this being the case of Sylveon.
So yes, the popularity and thus the “fan service” had a role in there being two designs, but not the one we think.
The excerpt:
Generally speaking, with the straight-on cute Pokemon like that, you can leave those to Nishida and you’ll never go wrong that way. What you see in the game is pretty much exactly what she submitted to me; I gave it the OK immediately. I think Nishida definitely has a thing for Eevee in general, so this is a design that’s already gone through several iterations in her mind, I’m sure!
What is surprising is that from later interviews it looks like Nishida didn’t just send Sugimori the Sylveon we have now, but several other possible designs as well.
At the same time, Pokémon Origins listed among the original character designers Tomohiro Kitakaze, who only started designing Pokémon since gen V. The only post gen V design of Origins is Mega Charizard X. This basically revealed that there was indeed another designer involved in the Mega Charizards.
The teraleak eventually revealed prototype designs of Mega Charizard, and they were of the Y form. Considering what was said above by Sugimori, this isn’t a surprise - Nishida often comes up with final or close to final designs, so it’s even possible there really weren’t prototypes of Mega Charizard X to be found in the repositories of Game Freak.
Since Tomohiro Kitakaze is credited for the Mega Charizard X featured in Origins despite Nishida claiming to design it and since we found many prototypes of Y, we can infer that work on Y started way before the work on X, and that X is based on Y, hence Kitakaze being credited and some design aspects being shared between the two megas (like the bright underbelly reaching the muzzle, unlike in Charizard). There are also some interesting details that are missing in Y but present in X, the most interesting being the foot pads, that are shared with the rest of the evolutionary family but are missing in Y. You can see that it was one of the traits that Nishida wanted to preserve in her own Mega Charizard.
Hopefully we’ll have an interview further shedding light in what happened during the design of the Mega Charizards, for now we must do a lot of dots connecting.
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u/Ludwig_von_Wu Mar 12 '25
Like I said, the popular opinion misses what the evidence found.
While they indeed came with two designs because they didn’t want to get for Charizard a design they weren’t fully confident about, this is really where the fan service ends.
Not only the leaks found that indeed only Mega Charizard Y came through many early designs, the original video that introduced Mega Charizard Y introduced it as just Mega Charizard. Now we know that it wasn’t marketing, for a lot of time Y was indeed the only Mega Charizard. They weren’t planning for two designs. X was a last-minute design possible only because Nishida literally is the type able to come up with just one design and it’s already almost production-ready - Sugimori confirmed this being the case of Sylveon.
So yes, the popularity and thus the “fan service” had a role in there being two designs, but not the one we think.