​UK’s Thicc Leeks Were Inspiration For Pokémon Farfetch’d’s New Evolution

While we may all be mourning the loss of the more than 400 legacy Pokémon that won't be crossing over into Sword & Shield, we can still get excited for a whole new set of creatures - including an evolution for Farfetch'd.

This gallant brown duck has been in the series since the original Red & Blue versions, but in all that time it's not had an evolution. That is until game director Shigeru Ohmori got a load of the UK's thicc leek scene.

That's my duck

In an interview with Polygon, Ohmori was asked why, after all this time, Farfetch'd of all Pokémon was getting a new evolution. And apparently the inspiration came from a research trip to the UK.

"So the Galar region, the inspiration for it is actually the UK," Ohmori explains. "We spent a lot of time researching and kind of referring to different things in the UK, and I spent time there. One of the things I remember noticing was that the leeks that they sell in the UK are much bigger and thicker than the ones I see in Japan. So seeing that, I got the idea that the Farfetch'd that lives in the Galar region would maybe evolve in a different way than you see elsewhere."

As a keen leek fan, I'd never considered the rest of the world was saddled with slender green sticks instead of the chunky soup branches we can pick up in Tesco. I'm sorry for the rest of the world that they've had to get by with insubstantial roughage. The implication of this revelation, too, is that the Farfetch'd we've seen waddling about all these years are carrying child-size leeks, making it a much smaller Pokémon than I'd ever assumed. That small brown duck is even more impressive for fighting off those big mean Pokémon all these years.

My duck's all grown up

There are a lot of reasons to look forward to the new Pokémon games, but evolving a Farfetch'd into its larger and older sibling, Sirfetch'd, is high on my list.

The Polygon interview goes into details about why Game Freak had to cut down the Pokédex. "It's always been in the back of my mind that at some point we were going to have to not include all the Pokémon," producer Junichi Masuda says. The devs also discuss whether Pokémon would ever have released on a home console if it weren't for the Switch's portability.

Topics: Game Freak, Nintendo