Gaming Squad

This week, people desperate for Nintendo to finally pull back the curtain on the successor to the Switch instead got an announcement that the acclaimed role-playing game Xenoblade Chronicles X, previously only available on Wii U, will make its way to the handheld hybrid next year. Also, Guy “Dr Disrespect” Beahm was denied by YouTube in his efforts to have his channel’s monetization reinstated, and Sony shuttered Firewalk Studios, the team behind sci-fi shooter Concord. These stories and more await in the pages ahead.

We’re still getting new information from the massive Pokémon data breach that happened earlier this month, and while there have been some details about upcoming projects in the mix, it’s mostly consisted of design docs and other information about old games we’ve already played. We’ve seen starter Pokémon that never were, mega evolutions that weren’t included in Pokémon X and Y, and now we know another monster that never made its way out of the ideation phase: a flying Eevee evolution.

According to a design doc in the leaks, a flying-type Eevee evolution was planned for the series’ seventh-gen games, Pokémon Sun and Moon. A translated feedback sheet says that the design Game Freak had in the works too closely resembled fan mock-ups, which led to the team shelving the idea. Unfortunately, we don’t have any images of the flying fox at the moment.

That being said, the way fan artists were able to respond to the news by immediately whipping out their existing mock-ups of the hypothetical Eeveelution kind of suggests that Game Freak’s own ideas were likely being cannibalized by fan artists at the time, too. Eevee’s entire schtick is that it can evolve into one of several Pokémon, each with a different elemental affinity, so fans have been drawing mockups of possible Eevee evolutionary lines for decades, including flying-types.

Eevee is one of the most popular Pokémon in the franchise, having become a secondary mascot to the series alongside Pikachu. Eevee even got its own game in 2018’s Let’s Go, Eevee! on the Switch. It’s been a long time, however, since it got a new evolution, with the last being Sylveon, who debuted in 2013 as one of the introductions to the fairy typing that was added in Pokémon X and Y. Whether or not Eevee needs more evolutions remains a topic of much debate among fans, with some content with the eight it already has, while others would like to see Eevee get a form for all 18 elemental types in the series. It sounds like Game Freak isn’t opposed to the idea, as long as it can find one that feels wholly original, and given how long people have been making fan art of fake Pokémon, that sounds like a difficult proposition.