Many people think that the new Pokemon Black and White characters look weird. But why is this? I think the reason is that the Pokémon company changed their design team. The biggest loss is the fact that Satoshi Tajiri hasn’t worked games since the Gold and Silver days. This is probably the main reason that Generation III and Generation IV Pokémon looked so different from Generation I and Generation II Pokémon. The Gen V, which just came out, will probably look just as weird.

There is a team of people who are in charge of designing the monsters. They come with all the ideas. They decide which ones are the best and refine them into the final characters. After that, Ken Sugimori draws the chosen designs. In the first generation, there was a group of four people, including Ken Sugimore. Satoshi Tajiri, the creator of Pokémon, had the role of approving the monsters and suggesting changes after designing the basic ideas.

Currently Junichi Masuda took over after Ruby Sapphire. Since then, Satoshi Tajiri has not been working on the games. He appears as the CEO in most of the games. What this means is that he is the original creator. He approved of this game but was not an active part of its development. He is sometimes listed as an executive producer, meaning he financed it but was not an active member in its development.

So, long story short, Satoshi Tajiri isn’t putting much effort into monster designs anymore. D/P/Pt Pokémon” design was in the hands of thirteen people. Ten of these people did not work on the first generation Pokémon. Shigeki Morimoto (added Mew to the game) also stopped doing monster design during D/ P/Pt. “So the people who came up with the ideas for Pokémon are, for the most part, different people in each generation. R/S hired a lot of people, and that’s why the style of the third generation was so different. Black and White also hired a different staff.

Look for some Pokemon that look really different in Generation V and beyond.