Masuda: "I decided to make all of the Pokemon completely new, so that everyone would start on the same page, whether they were a longtime fan or completely new to the series."

Sugimori: "This is the second generation of Pokemon games on the Nintendo DS hardware. So from the visual side, we were focusing on the issue of “how do we make a game feel fresh when it’s on familiar hardware?” One of the ways was to use entirely new Pokemon, instead of mixing new and [existing] Pokemon the way we did in previous installments. Creating an entirely new ecosystem of Pokemon allowed us to return to square one in terms of design. So we already have Pokemon based on dogs, and horses, and deer, for example. But now that we’ve discarded our past work, in a sense, we can go back to the animals that have inspired Pokemon and study them with fresh eyes, and create new and different things.”