mother 3's character designs are interesting to work with as a fanartist, cuz there's no truly official / "canon" designs for most of these characters beyond their sprites. no official clay models were ever made. smash bros sort of counts if you want it to. (i consider it just a 3D modeling team's best effort to faithfully translate the sprites into models. itoi's art team probably did not oversee the effort in any way, therefore these models don't convey much besides another team's interpretation of those same sprites.) for the most part, we're all just interpreting these little handfuls of pixels in our own ways.
there's somethin really special about fanart for games like this imo. the way community trends fill in the gaps, how different artists can put totally different spins on things, how we kinda get to collaboratively (with the original sprite artists and sometimes each other) design the characters ourselves. how every fan design you see is just as valid & plausible as the last, even though they may be wildly different from each other. it's nice and i like it.
A very specific pet peeve of mine is when people say Homura is 26. Like no??? She’s 14?? “B-but the time loop—” Nuh uh. The 12 fandom calculated years she spent in there cannot account for maturity. Like yes she’s been conscious for 26 years, but out of those 26, 12 were spent repeating the same month and a half over and over. To mature as a person your mind AND body have to mature—those kinda go hand in hand (like you gotta age, time’s gotta pass). And in the timeloop neither happens because 1) she’s in a timeloop so her body can’t age and 2) she’s repeating the same experiences so she’s not going through something new, thus not gaining any new experience, and therefore not mentally aging.
(tldr: Homura CAN’T be 26 years old because she gained 12 years worth of trauma NOT maturity)
Doylist explanation: They keep making new electric mouse pokemon because they're frantically trying to recreate the success of Pikachu. Or at least because it's tradition at this point.
Watsonian explanation: A major predator of rodents is birds of prey. A mouse that can deliver electric shocks to flying-types has a much higher chance of living to produce more offspring. Thus, convergent evolution fills this niche in every region. "Pikachu" is just the pokemon universe equivalent of "crab".
Both Story of Eastern Wonderland and Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream have the same image with Reimu in the staff roll, although a bit edited (with small variations).