>>56625233I do want to note that everyone from Team Flare except for Malva has full scale models. Even the admins, who are very forgettable and irrelevant otherwise, have these models. Malva does, however, have the news caster model.
The only other prominent NPCs with full scale models are your friends, AZ, and Sycamore. Not even the Champion of the region has a full scale model. While AZ and Sycamore definitely required full scale models for the ending ceremony segment, them having such models, alongside Team Flare, indicated that their models were given priority over other models, supporting them having stronger or more well defined roles in earlier versions of XY.
>The group of friends who come across as mostly extraneousness in the final version originally were intended to showcase a feature where players could form "Teams" among other real-world players, these Teams basically combining their various stats together like how many Pokemon they caught, battle scores, etc., and the NPC Friends would basically be an in-game version serving as a tutorial for this feature. This idea didn't make it in the final version, but the friends were kept in regardless to make things more lively. The described Teams is different, but forming teams with other players and NPCs would be realized in Gen 8 with Raid Battles. One of many uncanny predictions XYsider made, as we'll see later.