>>43400163>>43400229I have something more to spice things up.
Here is the sketch of Gym Leaders that Sugimori posted on his Twitter.
It's made of two separate sheets with four GLs each.
The first one has Falkner, Bugsy, Jasmine and Morty (with the last one still known as "Enoki", his SW97 name). They are incidentally also the four Leaders that have sprite data in SW97 (albeit the designs are totally different).
The second sheet has remaining four - Whitney, Chuck, Pryce & Clair. All signed with their final Japanese names, no beta stuff going on there. No sign of "Okera" there, even though that list implies that one was redesigned/renamed into Yanagi as the last.
But it all makes sense now - Falkner, Bugsy, Morty and Jasmine were designed first and the remaining four were created and named (except for Akane, who had her name in SW97 but no design) much later into development, that's why they're drawn separately.
