Professor Diggsy's Anomalous Sanctuary

Reading the dev notes for Mina the Hollower has been a pretty stark reminder to consider the practical reasons for creative decisions. I was all "okay, but what are we really saying by making the protagonist a mouse", and then the devs are like "yeah, the main reason she's a mouse is because GBC-style sprites are tiny and her bigass ears make it easy for the player to tell which direction she's facing".

(To be 100% clear, I'm not saying that there's no symbolism in play there. The initial episode in which Mina breaks Thorne's siege on Lionel's manor is blatantly playing with both Androcles and the Lion and The Lion and the Mouse, which are often conflated in popular culture into a composite tale in which a mouse pulls a thorn from a lion's paw – the characters' names alone make that much obvious! It's just very funny that the decision to make her a mouse came first for completely unrelated reasons.)