After more than a decade of speculation, Pokémon fans now know for a fact Jynx was at one point planned to have a Mega form in the video game series’ sixth generation. The latest Mega Jynx details were derived from a massive data breach of Game Freak’s servers the company recently confirmed occurred in August, the fruits of which began to appear online earlier this month. The search for details about Mega Jynx shows how the developer has tried, and largely failed, to rewrite the Pokémon’s controversial image.
Information from the breach began hitting the internet in mid-October. Since then, details concerning the ins and outs of past Pokémon game development, ongoing projects, canceled spin-offs, and even an as-of-yet unrealized sequel to the surprisingly decent live action Detective Pikachu movie have been proliferating across social media and Discord servers, providing a wellspring of information on the creative process behind the series.
Mega Jynx first entered the Poké-zeitgeist when Nintendo renewed the trademarks on a seemingly random group of Pokémon in May 2012. Little attention was paid to this legal maneuvering until Pokémon X and Y arrived a year later and introduced the Mega Evolution mechanic, which allowed some Pokémon to take on new, more powerful forms during battle for a limited time. It was soon discovered that every Pokémon included in the trademark apart from Jynx, Latias, and Latios received Mega forms. As such, it came as no surprise when the so-called eon duo of Latias and Latios gained the ability to Mega Evolve in 2014’s Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire.
But that still left Jynx. Solid evidence suggested Mega Jynx existed—or at least had in some form while Game Freak was working on the series’ sixth-generation games—but without anything tangible, the mysterious Pokémon became something of an urban legend in the community. People made Mega Jynx fan art, and some folks even tried to pass off unofficial mockups as legitimate leaks. Every few years, speculation would begin anew thanks to someone remembering the trademark situation or stumbling upon it for the first time on Reddit or YouTube. What type of Pokémon was Mega Jynx meant to be? What moves would it use? And most importantly, what would it look like?
As a longtime Pokémon fan, the hunt for Mega Jynx over the last two weeks was a fun diversion, but I think Game Freak made the right decision in shelving the Pokémon all those years ago.
The next big Mega Jynx clue came in 2020 via a Pokémon game that’s not really a game at all. While fiddling around with Pokémon HOME, a cloud service for storing and transferring Pokémon between generations six through nine, a modder known as Matt altered a Jynx’s code to mimic Pokémon with alternate forms and hacked it into the application. Surprisingly, his experiment bore fruit: The modified Jynx returned a cry that sounded like a normal Jynx accompanied by the strange, echoing sound effects common in Mega Pokémon. After some digging through the Pokémon HOME assets, it was also discovered the name of the supposed Mega Jynx sound file matched the naming scheme of other Mega cries.
Not only was the Mega Jynx evidence mounting, but these new clues indicated it was more than just a line of text in a planning document. Actual work had gone into making the Pokémon a reality, even if it was only how it would sound.
Which brings us to this month’s still-ongoing Game Freak leaks and the first indisputable proof of Mega Jynx’s existence. Among the hundreds of gigabytes of data pilfered from the developer’s servers and discussed in places like the TCRF Discord and 4chan's /vp/ board, a placeholder Mega Jynx with improved stats and a different ability (Magic Guard, for you Pokémaniacs out there) was uncovered in an early build of Pokémon X and Y using an old sprite of regular Jynx from Pokémon Black and White where one would expect to find new assets. A separate progress document listed a February 27, 2012 (Pokémon Day, funnily enough) completion date for top, side, and front view drawings of Mega Jynx. Further scouring indicated Mega Jynx was included in Pokémon X and Y prototypes until at least August 31, 2012, or less than a year before the game’s worldwide launch, but the February artwork was nowhere to be found.
Late last night, there was a breakthrough. In the upload of another massive repository of Pokémon X and Y data, fans discovered a rough drawing that depicts a Pokémon that looks much like the original Jynx, only with longer hair, a blue dress, and eyes consumed by hypnotic concentric circles. While obviously not a finalized design, Mega Jynx is quite tame compared to other Mega Pokémon, and a good deal less controversial than many anticipated.
If you’re familiar at all with Pokémon, you can probably make a reasonable guess as to what drove these expectations and why, perhaps, Mega Jynx has yet to see the light of day. Jynx is one of the original 151 pocket monsters, first appearing in 1996’s Pokémon Red and Green in Japan before the series made the jump to the United States with 1998’s Pokémon Red and Blue. Just eight days following the game’s arrival in the west, Jynx debuted in the Pokémon anime during the October 5 episode “Holiday Hi-Jynx.” When the episode aired in the United States the following month, it didn’t take long for similarities to be drawn between Jynx’s distinctive appearance and racist caricatures of Black people.
I’ll let author Carole Boston Weatherford’s oft-published critique “Politically Incorrect Pokémon” from January 2000 explain why this sucked:
The character Jynx, Pokémon No. 124, has decidedly human features: jet-black skin, huge pink lips, gaping eyes, a straight blonde mane and a full figure, complete with cleavage and wiggly hips. Put another way, Jynx resembles an overweight drag queen incarnation of Little Black Sambo, a racist stereotype from a children's book long ago purged from libraries.
While my 10- and 12-year-olds do not find Jynx offensive, their parents and grandparents do. And we have seen enough racist stereotypes to know one when we see it. There was room to debate whether Jar Jar Binks of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was West Indian, but there is no question about this Pokémon character. Jynx clearly denigrates African Americans, particularly black women. At the close of the 20th century, how could Japanese computer animators unleash such a culturally insensitive menace on the global marketplace?
Game Freak changed Jynx’s skin from black to purple starting with the next two games in the series, Pokémon Gold and Silver, and in future appearances in the anime, as well as removed the offending episode from syndication. But Jynx has yet to shake its status as the “racist Pokémon” among folks who take such conversations seriously almost 25 years later. Even fans who feel the controversy is overblown couldn't help but wonder just how offensive Mega Jynx might be in the days leading up to its unearthing. As last night's events unfolded, however, the communities where these leaks were most prominent returned to regurgitating the same old talking points, including claims of Jynx’s supposed mimicking of Japan's ganguro subculture (an aesthetic which itself has courted controversy) and how Americans were imposing their values on other countries, to discount the very real concerns about the Pokémon's original design.
Does Mega Jynx also perpetuate racial stereotypes? The unused design discovered last night certainly doesn’t do much to avoid succumbing to the same pitfalls as the original, purple skin notwithstanding. It’s possible Game Freak recognized this issue during the development of Pokémon X and Y and concluded it wasn’t worth drawing even more negative attention to the contentious Pokémon. As a longtime Pokémon fan, the hunt for Mega Jynx over the last two weeks was a fun diversion, but I think Game Freak made the right decision in shelving the Pokémon all those years ago, especially if it wasn’t going to go out of its way to fix what made Jynx so problematic in the first place.
And hey, with Mega forms making a return in next year’s Pokémon Legends: Z-A spin-off, the developers have the perfect opportunity to take another (and hopefully more successful) crack at the whole Mega Jynx thing.
