>>56883285Not necessarily true. Chikorita was clearly a relatively new addition, they were in the middle of replacing their previous Grass starter line.
>Chikorita is called Happa ("Leaf"), it's clearly a placeholder name>Evolves into the completely different Hanamogura, the name meaning "Flower Mole", probably because it's a creature that lives inside a flower>Final evolution is clearly Meganium, but the name is Hanaryuu. This is a continuation of the name pun for Hanamogura. The word mogura (土竜; mole) is the characters for Earth + Dragon. Hanaryuu is likely to be 花竜 (Flower + Dragon)>>56883293We had known about them for decades, a Japanese fan artist even recreated them, but there was almost no footage of Spaceworld 97 that we knew about. None of us had ever seen demo gameplay, only official trailers and magazine screenshots with Pokémon like Slowking and Donphan. It was such a surreal experience when the ROMs actually leaked, kind of like the 64DD version of MOTHER 3 leaking or an Ocarina of Time build with the Triforce room. It was one of the holy grails of that era of Nintendo.
