>>45803091Actually, that's not quite the case. Pokemon tried to be cuter and more marketable even before release. It's why they brought in Atsuko Nishida to make more cute designs. In addition, while Kaiju were one inspiration, it was also clearly inspired by monsters from other JRPGs at the time, notably the more goofy and marketable designs seen in Dragon Quest.
>>45802549You know I find it interesting that in the games, 11 is and has been the default youngest age for the protagonists, but given how marketable the anime is and how much content they're using from it, I imagine that's what TPCi designed this guide around. Of course, stuff like this isn't necessarily canonical. Have you seen the drafts of the Sonic bible? Shit was pretty wild, and wildly inaccurate (outside of the UK anyway, that's the only place that followed it closely). Going further back, the Transformers production bible is full of lots of useful information that wasn't always used. I dunno, this sort of thing is interesting.
>>45803196After Penders, they've been a lot more protective over him, and yet they still let the movie design happen so I dunno if Sega of America is still pissed at Sega of Japan or they were given some real Pepsi Logo redesign shit (you should really read that, it's fucking whack) to convince them it was a good idea or what. Even Sonic Boom, despite all the seemingly random changes, was more on-brand than some of the shit Penders did.
