>>55662264>>55662407>>55663400Do none of you research this franchise before posting here? Multiple interviews, from different people and sources, clearly illustrate that Poliwhirl was considered to be a forefront mascot, partially because he was Tajiri's favorite, but that they also admitted that, in the early days of its release, marketing tried throwing everything to the wall to see what stuck. (Look at the earliest commercials Western commercial, and they treat Pokemon like generic spooky monsters.) Pikachu being the mascot was a fluke, he just was popular (which one Dev stated to be because of the circumstances of Pikachu's introduction in the game. He specifically made Pikachu's encounter-rate low in Viridian Forest to make it more rare and special, just because he liked the creature and, to their claim, didn't want people focusing on it because then it'd be less special to them, but it backfired)
But to say, "Nah, I didn't experience personally, so it's not real," when we have both circumstantial evidence from the time period like
>>55663651 >>55662284 along with early commercials and merchandise, while also having literal interviews is asinine. If you didn't know that, that's fine, but why add to a discussion to say its fake or uniformed when you really don't have anything to add to the conversation? Obviously it's wrong to say explicitly that Poliwhirl was the old intended mascot, but he was a contender, as were many other Pokemon at the time, and to deny that is just as wrong.
