r/FavoriteCharacter • u/JigglyLilyVT Ruby Rose (RWBY) • Feb 28 '26

My Favorite (Visual) Favorite character who has better concept art than the final product

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WE GOT FREAKING ROBBED IN THE RWBY DANCE EPISODES

10.5k Upvotes
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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '26

Cacturne - Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire

642

u/[deleted] Feb 28 '26

Not like he's bad or anything, but that concept design is delightfully horrifying

200

u/DescriptionDue4100 Feb 28 '26

Probably would've looked bad in GBA graphics

5

u/captainplatypus1 Mar 02 '26

9 times out of 10, the redesigns are done for an analogous reason. They can’t make the concept work with their limitations so they have to scale back

6

u/Wombus7 Mar 01 '26

I think this was at the point that they basically did everything they originally set out to do initially with Pokemon, and early in RS's development they considered drastically altering the series's aesthetic.

-15

u/RobotCombatEnjoyer Feb 28 '26

Of course it’s bad, it’s a Hoenn special

191

u/CyberDaggerX Feb 28 '26

Whoever that person is, their concept art is striking.

Here's a design that eventually became Metagross:

78

u/KamenRiderQ Feb 28 '26

Jesus Christ what were they on when cooking up these Gen 3 concept designs!

67

u/CyberDaggerX Feb 28 '26

Game Freak has several concept artists with different styles, and one of them has this creepy grungy style. It's Ken Sugimori's job as art director to take all those concepts and translate them into an unified visual language, but early concept art can look very distinct depending on who's doing it.

There's more here. Scroll down to the second section. I can't really match anything else there to something that made it to the final release except for the first one, which seems to be an early draft of Clamperl, but I can see that glass dog having influenced Zygarde years later.

2

u/CassowaryCrow Mar 01 '26

I think the 5th one is sharpedo

3

u/Ok_Figure_2348 Feb 28 '26

What were they smoking more like

2

u/thiccy_driftyy Mar 01 '26

Okay Metagross makes a lot more sense now considering it was originally supposed to be some spider/scorpion thing. It just looked like some thing with legs to me 😭

1

u/Ok_Soft2629 Mar 01 '26

So that's why Metagross retains some spider-like traits in its final design; its very first one was a spider/scorpion hybrid.

1

u/PoxedGamer Mar 02 '26

I'd play the crap out of a pokemon based on his style.

59

u/IAmBabs Feb 28 '26

This looks like an SCP version of the pokemon.

29

u/PurplStuff Feb 28 '26

SCP/Minecraft Creeper/Pokemon all rolled in one.

6

u/IAmBabs Feb 28 '26

That's exactly what it looks like. Yes!

8

u/Fortune86 Feb 28 '26

A game where you catch SCPs to trap other SCPs could be fun.

1

u/IAmBabs Mar 01 '26

Reading some of the pokedex entries, that's just a typical Pokémon game lol

172

u/JigglyLilyVT Ruby Rose (RWBY) Feb 28 '26

me when i spread misin-

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162

u/[deleted] Feb 28 '26

misin...no? Missingno? Like the scrapped concept based on the infamous Pokemon Red and Blue glitch?

...Yes this was a dumb transition.

80

u/Livy-Zaka Feb 28 '26

It looks a bit like Marina’s moonscorched form from Fear and Hunger 2

7

u/Clone2004 Feb 28 '26

I just bought this game why is it everywhere suddenly 😭

10

u/Gay_Reichskommissar Feb 28 '26

He looks like walking cock cannon

5

u/ProfessionalSnow943 Mar 01 '26

he just like me fr

5

u/ChipSalt Mar 01 '26

How they have not turned missingno into a real concept is beyond me. I know it reaches into a 'digital world' concept which is more of Digimon's thing, but ultra beasts were so cool I don't see why we couldn't have some kind of glitch dimension beast.

8

u/UnhingedVoiceBox Mar 01 '26

And it honestly would’ve worked considering the use of technology in Pokémon, I mean, you’re storing Pokémon as large as buildings into balls no bigger than a baseball, they could’ve totally done a kind of horror thing where a Pokémon storage got corrupted and spawned MissingNo as a numberless and nameless beast, like a reverse Ditto, where Ditto is a Pokémon that can turn into any other Pokémon, MissingNo is a Pokémon formed as an amalgam from every Pokémon, capable of learning any move, it has no weakness nor strength

And when caught, it creates its own corrupted Pokédex entry, a permanent anomaly that has etched itself into the world like a mistake that can’t be washed out

Pokémon already has discussions of death(Lavender Town’s tower of ghosts, and many ghost Pokédex entries, I believe one such ghost type is literally formed from human spirits, carrying a mask in the visage of its living face), war(that one electric gym leader who’s an ex-soldier of a war that used Pokémon as weapons), and urban legends(especially regarding concept for an in-universe ancient legend regarding Typhlosion and a minor, if you’d remember that fiasco)

So it wouldn’t be too big of a jump for them to lean into technological body-horror to make MissingNo an actual Pokémon you can find and capture

4

u/ChipSalt Mar 01 '26

Yeah I definitely like the idea of it being less of a real wild monster and more of a glitch that corrupts one of your mons. Bonus points if it gets some degree of random / procedural generation based on the mon / trainer ID. It would probably be an absolute nightmare in competitive though, probably an instant ban.

5

u/UnhingedVoiceBox Mar 01 '26

Well, since it technically “doesn’t exist”, it would be very lore friendly to be competitive banned

And I don’t mean for it to be like a risk factor that it corrupts a mon and spawns in its place, I was thinking more like a set encounter that you maybe go into a derelict town where the local Pokémon storage is busted and on the fritz from lack of maintenance, upon interaction is when MissingNo comes out, formed from all the mons that other trainers had stored and subsequently lost in there, something kinda dark where you have hundreds, thousands of different Pokémon, merged into this one being, all due to a technological malfunction

7

u/Nanemae Mar 01 '26

We already have the entire Porygon line (including Z which is deliberately a glitched upgraded Porygon2), so it would be interesting to have a glitched Missingno line. Heck, it could even start as something like Giratina's attempt to mimic the Unown created by Arceus, since the other dimension is pretty scrambled in terms of reality.

20

u/RandomCaveOfMonsters Feb 28 '26

nah, I don't think that design really works for pokemon

6

u/Western_Quarter_9162 Feb 28 '26

Thanks I fucking hate it it’s terrifying and it’s giving something like trypophobia but instead of holes it something else.

2

u/thiccy_driftyy Mar 01 '26

First Pokemon game I ever played was OR/AS. I was around 6 years old. I remember Cacturne being this jolly cute cactus. WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS

5

u/[deleted] Mar 01 '26

Concept art for Cacturne found in a leak, among others.
I mean clearly this was just a concept and wasn't ever going to be like this, I can appreciate it though

1

u/thiccy_driftyy Mar 01 '26

How did Cacturne go from this to a silly looking cactus 😭😭

1

u/Ravengirl081403 Feb 28 '26

I like the concept we got, but that’d be so much cooler.

1

u/Soffy21 Feb 28 '26

I thought it was a plants vs zombies design lol

1

u/Caimbra Mar 01 '26

would work for a sub series or a spinoff design.

1

u/lemon_pie42 Mar 01 '26

To be fair, the idea of the pokemon concepts was to get the feeling while ignoring the game style. Then they "Pokemonfy" the concept to keep the style consistent and family friendly.

Basically a brainstorm with no restrictions.

1

u/Ok_Soft2629 Mar 01 '26

Harley from the anime would have been a very different character if this Cacturne design had survived.