Oh boy!
I think everybody is freaking out over the leak thing. Honestly, we won't know until it's officially confirmed, so we should just wait until we get more information.
I don't mind the final evolutions like some do( they already grow on me). But I have a couple of reasons to be very skeptical:
I understand that sometimes leaks happen and that it was the same with Black and White and Smash 4, but even then,
some of the information either changed or was officially debunked
We got the Delta Species(everyone's going to call them that so I will too) but even then the predictions weren't fully right. Remember how we were supposed to get Mega Flygon? Or when we were supposed to get Mega Milotic during ORAS in a supposed "leak"?
Didn't happen(albeit for the stupidest of reasons but that's another story)The same can be applied to here.
The leak said Ninetails would be fire fairy. It was only partially right though. I checked the leak again and some other things also don't make sense. For another example. The no gyms thing is confirmed, yes, but then it said you would be establishing a league. This is obviously not confirmed yet and we all have the right to speculate, but I feel the information is way to muddled to take everything verbatim. Why?
Because a lot changed during the development of these games. This game has been in development for what---let's be generous and say 4 years( approximately). A lot has probably changed in development for these game. Is it possible that the leaks are true? Hell yeah, but keep in mind, it'll probably be by only a small margin.
Now onto the kicker, the one everyone's talking about. The starters. They look...okay. Rowlet's is pretty sick, Popplio's is majestic and Litten( ah....poor Litten). Do I think they are real? Yes, but to an extent. I get it, Mallow is in the picture, but that's what get's me. It seems waaaaayyyy too convient to be the case. And also, I'll bring it up now and it's weird, but the art is kind of messy. In a major cooperation (specifically Pokemon in this case), you can't just shit out any Pokemon for the hell of it. In a case like Pokemon, I presume the art has something called
approval stages. In these stages you can spend a plethora of time and effort into a drawing, but if it's not approved by those higher up, it doesn't fly. This might be the case of that.
I feel these aren't the absolute final evolutions for the starters simply because they look incomplete to me . The art is pretty messy, there are sketches everywhere and people who do not appear the games are in the art( granted they could be used as a reference but it's unlikely). Compare that to this concept art of Greninja
https://https://www.pokewiki.de/images/e/e3/Quajutsu_Konzeptzeichnung.png
It's clean and not as untidy as the other sketches. Isn't that kind of odd? Even looking at older concept art it's still pretty neat. Do I think that is a hundred percent valid reason on why the concept art is fake? No. But it's questionable. Really, we won't know our answer until we see for ourselves.
But for now, I'm iffy on it.