A Naming Revolution

Pokémon Battle Revolution doesn’t particularly stand out nowadays, despite being one of the first ways to Wi-Fi battle in full, beautiful 3D. It has no story mode, mini-games, or trade functionality, but it does have something that other Pokémon games lack: an exclusive look into the development of Diamond and Pearl. Wait, what?

While looking for possible connections to a list found within Pokémon Home (you gotta go all the way back sometimes), we meandered into the files of the NTSC version of Battle Revolution and peeked into the sound folder. If you happen to have a backup of PBR, you can take a look for yourself, too. There among the music and sound files are, naturally, all 493 of the Pokémon cries.

Yes, a sort of… “cry list”. Oh, how we love our cry lists. This time, however, it isn’t about what order the Pokémon were placed in. The cries are neatly organized in Pokédex order, and labeled with their romaji Japanese names. What is so important about this list is that, well, several of the names of the Generation 4 Pokemon are different. Some of them, in fact, are oddly familiar…

Many of the names are incredibly short and/or basic. They sound like placeholders before better names were created for them. For your convenience, we’ve recreated the list:

These names shed some light on the interesting process of naming Pokemon, and inspire a lot of questions about how these Pokemon were thought up in the first place. Monsters with particularly intriguing name changes include “Kimairan” Giratina, who perhaps once resembled a chimera, the mysterious “Eurisu” Shaymin, and “Zimezou” Hippopotas, potentially having been a different species altogether.

Battle Revolution came out in Japan in December 2006, only 3 months after Diamond and Pearl’s release. It’s likely that Genius Sonority worked in tandem with the DP team as both games were being created. Due to the division of labor and the creative process of ‘coming up with better names,’ the cries were probably finished before all of the names were finalized, and then the same list was imported into Battle Revolution to use for the cries there. The files may or may not have been updated with the final names before Diamond and Pearl came out, but that’s for Game Freak to know, and not us.

In addition, we noted in the list that Minomesu, Siiusi, and Siidorugo exist in in the Diamond debug cart’s text strings. You can’t find it in the debug functions or interface at all, but here is a screenshot from dumped text:

To push the envelope, “Siiusi Save Data” is a debug string still present in the final game, most likely related to Shellos’s two location-based forms. It also shows us the proper kana for the prototype name:

In conclusion, we hope this little nugget hidden inside Battle Revolution inspires you to look under overlooked rocks sometimes, especially if those rocks are Pokemon-related.