>>35581007>Given we know that gamefreak most likely took some inspiration from these games and dragon quest,It's also pretty similar to the Cactiball from Dragon Quest, which first appeared in V, where there was also monster recruitment. You mentioning the segments also makes me think that Pokeys from Mario might have also been an influence.
I'm going to guess this actually eventually became Cacnea and Cacturne.
Maybe, but I'd say they're loosely based off them if anything. What I think might have happened was that they always wanted a cactus mon, hell we even got Maractus in gen 5, but due to the game boy limitations they couldn't really get a desert environment to work properly or look any
good.It wasn't until the GBA that we started getting deserts in the game, and notice that almost all the mons in them are from gen 3 and onwards bar Sandshrew.
>>35581014>There's also the fact that Grass/Poison is one of the most repeated type combinations in the game, along side Normal/Flying and Rock/Ground.It might have contributed to it being cut, think the lack of desert areas contributed more though.
>I'm also going to make a even wilder guess here and say that it might have originally been a counterpart to Exeggutor. Both have a similar theme of plants from hot environments (Cacti/Palm trees) and both possibly have the multiple head thing going on.That's also very believeable, and I could see that being the case, and Exeggutor was picked due to its preevolution being easier to throw in the safari zone. Something else to consider is that the last mons added were the Oddish and Bellsprout lines, which became our version exclusive grass types instead, maybe they were added to replace the cactus mon as a version exclusive, as it's easier to throw them on most grassy routes over a cactus?
