>>56891486Fell unconscious before I could post Maxie yesterday, here he is
>>56892209Thanks! They're fun to make.
>>56893099>From the human characters, the biggest surprise for me were probably those full sketches used for Stadium portraits (which Ken Sugimori occasionally shared on Twitter), with nearly full design of Cal finally revealed.Yes, I'm so excited that we got (hopefully) all of those! I adore Sugimori's older art style and often admired the bits and pieces he shared of those sketches in particular.
>Max was based on the character present in R/S, where he has an OW that matches his animé apperance more, whereas in Emerald your rival has a younger brother, but he uses the generic small child sprite that the Ninja Boys use.I think the reason for that are some changes in overworld sprites in Emerald. I'm 99,9% sure that the blue-haired little boy overworld sprite with glasses that was used in RS was deprecated in Emerald, hence why the rival's little bro uses the Ninja Boy one. At the same time, I'm 99,9% sure that the deprecated RS sprites (at least the overworld ones) are still present in Emerald's code. So, if someone wanted to switch him out quick via Advance Map, it should be possible kek
Come to think, some overworld sprite decisions in Emerald always had me curious and still do. Fitting with picrel: Joy, female Elite-Trainer I think? and the small boy's overworld sprite where some that were changed/deprecated, yet Maxie's kept the coat from his beta battle sprite even in Emerald. Makes me wonder what prompted the changes in other NPC designs & what their criteria for "good" sprites were.
Juan's is also a little enigma to me. It's just a low effort edit of Steven Stone's, for some reason. Wonder if Juan was a very late implementation and this was the best they could do with the time they had before having to push out the final build, or if that bootleg Steven was a forgotten about placeholder that ended up being never fixed.
