"Notable Game Freak staff who did not work on LGPE"

Now that LGPE is out, I thought it would be interesting to see what regular faces didn’t work on the game. It might give us a good indication of who the development leads are for Gen 8. Ken Sugimori – One of the most well-known people from Game Freak. He is actually credited in LGPE, but only as a creative supervisor and had no significant role in its development. Sugimori has been the Pokemon Design lead for most the main series since the beginning, the exception being SM where he essentially swapped positions with regular Trainer Design lead and fellow Pokemon designer Yusuke Ohmura. Ohmura has since left Game Freak, leaving Sugimori to take over the reins again. However, Sugimori has been commenting on his artist’s block since XY, which is likely the reason why Ohmura took over for Gen 7 (Ohmura drew the official art for all SM Pokemon with the exception of Magearna, the Zygarde forms, and the Alolan forms). Hitoshi Ariga, a TCG artist has been working on the main series since XY and has been drawing more and more official art. I wouldn’t be entirely shocked if he takes over. Even so, Sugimori will be involved in Gen 8 in a large capacity. His designs include Gengar, Venusaur, and most cover legendaries. Shigeki Morimoto – Another member of Game Freak who has been there from the start. Morimoto is one of, if not the only person credited as both a programmer and Pokemon designer in Red/Green. He took over as the Battle System Lead starting in Gen 3 until Gen 7 where he let Kazumasa Iwao handle that portion and was involved in the overall Battle Planning instead. He’s also well-known for directing both Emerald and HGSS, though it’s important to note that these games had more development time than most third versions/remakes and were obviously built on an existing foundation. The only other main series game where he was absent from was ORAS, which led to some speculation back in the late Gen 6 days that he would be the director for Gen 7. Obviously this didn’t happen and I don’t really expect it for Gen 8 either, for reasons I’ll get into at the end of this post. Morimoto’s most known Pokemon design is Mew, who he infamously added after debugging was finished. Like Sugimori, Morimoto’s involved in Gen 8 will no surprise nobody Go Ichinose – Originally a programmer turned music composer, Ichinose has been with the series since Gen 2, assisting Masuda with the soundtrack. As Masuda started directing and producing, Ichinose essentially became the music lead for the games. He was absent during Gen 6, as he was just coming off of leading the soundtrack for BW2 and had a larger role in Pocket Card Jockey which released a few months before XY in Japan. I assume he was assigned the SM Sound Director position soon after this. Given that Shota Kageyama handled the soundtrack for LGPE on his own, Ichinose will more than likely be returning as the sound director for Gen 8. Toshinobu Matsumiya – Matsumiya has been the main writer for the series since Yellow. He even wrote the base story for the first Pokemon Ranger game, which is why it has more references to the main series than its sequels do. In addition to LGPE, he was also absent for the story of FRLG and ORAS. Oddly enough, the main writer for LGPE was actually Hitomi Sato, who is more known for working on the series’ music. Although, she wasn’t specifically hired for this and has been involved as a scenario writer for multiple titles. Takeshi Kawatchimaru – Kawatchimaru started working on the series as a game designer in Gen 3, and was also the director for Platinum. Starting with Gen 5, he started to become more involved with the network side of the games, being heavily involved with the Pokemon Global Link and becoming the Network System Director for SM. He is the only person on this list that did not work on USUM, instead acting as a planner for Pokemon Quest. However, looking through the credits of Quest shows that very few people worked on it outside of localization and debugging, so he’s clearly been working on something else. Makes sense, as LGPE had very little online features compared to previous entries. James Turner – Known by many in the Gen 5 era as the “American who designed the dumb ice-cream Pokemon”, even though he’s actually English and was asked to design something like that by Masuda. Turner’s history in the series and in Game Freak itself may surprise you. He originally worked at Genius Sonority, who is responsible for the 3D console spin-offs (Colosseum/XD/Battle Revolution). Turner served as the art director for the latter two of these and even designed Shadow Lugia. He was eventually hired by Game Freak and has since served as a Pokemon designer and the Digital Movie Director, which I assume involves the cinematic cutscenes (actual cutscenes, not the ones where you’re just taking to characters). He also directed both HarmoKnight and Tembo the Badass Elephant. HarmoKnight is significant as it was the first non-Pokemon game developed by Game Freak in 7 years. I haven’t ruled out him working on TOWN, but I’d be pretty surprised if he wasn’t heavily involved in Gen 8’s development. Turner’s other Pokemon designs include the Golett line, the Poipole line, Buzzwole, and Guzzlord. Hironobu Yoshida – As Yoshida has usually worked as a Pokemon designer, it makes sense that that he had a pretty small role in LGPE. Only he and one other person are credited for Pokemon design, which makes sense as the only new designs are Meltan, Meltmetal and technically the new Pikachu/Eevee haircuts. Though he has recently worked as development lead for the UI graphics. Nothing huge, but he’s been working on the series since Yellow. His previous designs include Deoxys, Celebi, Dunsparce, and Wobbuffet. Maiko Fujiwara – Fujiwara’s first project was HGSS for graphic design. She has since rose up in the company and been the lead for the 3D graphics for the game map in both XY and SM. In USUM, she was in Graphics Director, a position usually handled by Takao Unno. However, since Unno worked on LGPE, I think Fujiwara returning for Gen 8 seems likely. Hopefully we go back to a more realistically scaled map like in SM (I expect this will happen regardless). Kazumasa Iwao – These last two are the most recent additions here, but nonetheless have had important roles. Iwao joined during the development for BW and worked on the map and trainer battle design. For SM, he became the battle design lead, a position usually held by Morimoto and then became the director for USUM. This may have been a strange choice for some over some of the previous directors, but I think GF is trying to get its younger developers to become more prominent in the company. We know thanks to Go Ichinose that USUM only had around a year of development time, which I think may be the shortest development period since Gen 2. Personally, I think USUM was an overall improvement over SM besides the story, but shouldn’t have released as soon as it did. Minako Adachi – Being the only composer at Game Freak with an actual music education, Adachi joined GF very late into the development of BW. As such, she contributed very little to its soundtrack, with the most notable tracks being Lostlorn Forest and the Plasma Victory theme. It wasn’t until XY were we would see what she was capable of, composing themes such as Route 8 and Team Flare/Lysandre battle themes for XY and most of the battle themes in ORAS. Her best work is arguably in SM, where she composed the majority of the soundtrack and was responsible for pretty much every Lillie, Team Skull and Aether Foundation related track. She also worked on the soundtrack for HarmoKnight, so she may also be working on TOWN (unless the music work gets outsourced like for Quest and Tembo), but I’m 99% certain that Ichinose and Adachi will be headlining the Gen 8 soundtrack. As expected, most of the staff I listed here had important roles in the development for SM and were also involved in the development of USUM. The main question is who is actually going to direct the game? I mentioned in Morimoto’s section that I don’t believe he will be directing. I think Shigeru Ohmori, the director for ORAS and SM will return. Even before Masuda’s recent comments that he probably won’t be directing anything after LGPE, Ohmori has been Masuda’s right-hand man since XY, being pretty much always seen together in interviews. He was the first person since Masuda and Tajiri to direct the first game in a generation, as opposed one of the older staff members (Ohmori’s first game was Ruby/Sapphire). He being a director for the first game in a generation and a producer for the rest is essentially what Masuda did up until SM. I feel like each generation has been pretty distinct, so it’s difficult to know what direction Gen 8 will take at the moment. via /r/pokemon https://ift.tt/2L5VKfq