>>39845865>>39847449>>39847849>>39847954Found a translated interview on the Unova starters' designs:
http://lavacutcontent.com/ken-sugimori-nintendo-dream-3/>Ohmura: “I started working on the Oshawott design after we’d already decided it was going to be based on an otter. Everybody drew lots of sketches, but we couldn’t come up with any good ideas for an otter’s evolutions. It wouldn’t be very interesting if the evolutions were just bigger otters that stand on two legs.”>Ohmura: “Well, I’m the type of person who can’t draw without looking at the real thing, so I went to see a live otter exhibit. When I was visiting the otters, there just happened to be a sea lion show nearby, and when I saw how powerful the sea lions look when they move around, I thought ‘they look so strong!’ And that’s how I came up with the concept for Samurott, which I then linked to Oshawott. It was Samurott’s design that came to me first, even before Oshawott.”>Sugimori: “Then we do another division of roles for the evolved forms. This time around — because the Unova region has a racially diverse human population — we decided to make the starter Pokémon’s evolutions symbolize the cultures of Japan, the West, and China. Snivy’s final evolution, Serperior, was designed with the concept of a European knight in mind, kind of like Lady Oscar from The Rose of Versailles. Tepig’s final evolution, Emboar, stands up on two legs and becomes humanoid, so we imagined him as Zhang Fei from the Chinese Romance of the Three Kingdoms. After we decided on the Fire and Grass types, we still had to decide on Oshawott’s evolutions — so we made them into Japanese Samurai. When we came up with the idea that Dewott can remove the shell from his stomach and use it as a weapon, we felt we’d succeeded in making him a Samurai.” 