Venusaur was one of 151 different designs conceived by Game Freak's character development team and finalized by Ken Sugimori for the first generation of the "Pokémon" games "Red" and "Green", which were localized outside Japan as "Pokémon Red" and "Blue". Despite its English name and resemblance to the extinct Pareiasaur, its design was confirmed by Ken Sugimori to be based on a frog. Venusaur was originally named "Fushigibana" in Japanese, which is a combination of the words "fushigi" and "hana", which mean mystery and flower, respectively. Unlike its pre-evolutions, there is a difference between male and female Venusaur. The female has a seed in the center of its flower, while the male lacks it. Nintendo decided to give the various Pokémon species "clever and descriptive names" related to their appearance or features when translating the game for western audiences as a means to make the characters more relatable to American children. As a result, it was renamed Venusaur, which the gaming website "IGN" wrote was a combination of "venus" from the plant venus flytrap and "saur" from dinosaur.