>>50398728Yeah, I specifically said lugia wasn't originally planned for the games while ho-oh already existed. I figured most people around here already knew lugia's whole deal of being intended as something only to exist in the movie until someone decided it HAD to be in the games because kids couldn't handle a pokemon they couldn't catch. Considering how relatively late in development it was added as silver's mascot my guess is they decided to swap ho-oh's shiny and default color pallets so the gold and silver theme wasn't what everyone saw since it was now going to be just gold version's mascot instead of the main legendary for both games as originally intended. My theory is it went from a gold and silver bird with whatever random shiny->ho-oh has an appearance in the anime debut where the original sprite is misinterpreted as just gold due to the lack of a cooler color in its pallet bordering the white(silver) feathers, beak, and tallons-> game freak learn of lugia and decide to include it, anime/movie staff already made it a legendary and it happens to be white/silver with blue/purple bits so they make it Silver's mascot since ho-oh on both boxes wouldn't differentiate them enough on store shelves->ho-oh loses the gold and silver theme and its new colors are all over the place so they roll with the rainbow association from when it was first shown at the end of the first episode in spring 1997 to explain why it's not mostly gold.