I went to look up more sprites to use as reference so I could practice drawing the generic female Resistance member design from MMZ1, and I made two discoveries in the process:
- Despite the in-game portrait having 2 braids, there are ladder-climbing sprites for her that show her as having only 1, which admittedly works in my favor since I actually kinda prefer that look.
- There's actually another generic female Resistance member design in MMZ1, I just didn't realize it because there's no dialogue sprite for her and it's a bit hard to make out the gender of most of the unnamed Resistance members anyway, especially if you're not paying attention to subtle details. This other design has medium-length black hair from what I can tell, and aside from the head seems to be identical to the redhead version (aside from not having a sprite where she's holding a buster shot).
There's a room in MMZ1 with 1 redheaded reploid gal (who you can speak with, and based on her dialogue I think this might actually be the specific one you can spawn in the base in MMZ3 using an e-Reader card) and 3 identical black-haired reploid gals milling about, which makes it much easier to tell they're all meant to be female reploids (since the idle pose for the redhead is taken from her walk cycle, which is identical to that of the other design, as mentioned earlier).
I took the liberty of basing the redheaded design's outfit moreso on her outfit as it appears in official artwork, where she doesn't have an exposed midriff, since I like the idea of them being a little more visually distinct from one another than their in-game sprites would suggest, especially since there's a lot more variety between the generic male Resistance members. (Not to mention that the generic male designs reappear in the other games, whereas these two are restricted to MMZ1, not counting the aformentioned e-Reader cameo in 3 since you can't even access that without importing the cards from Japan in the original GBA release.)
I didn't put 2 and 2 together at first because she's super butch in the official art, but by process of elimination, this is the only artwork that could possible correspond to this in-game character design. Every other illustration I've seen has an in-game sprite set in one or more of the games, and every other set of sprites has an illustration. And it's not like differences in character design between the sprite and illustration are unique to her, either! The dialogue portrait, in-world sprite, and official art for the redhead/brunette are all different, too:
All three designs seem to have her in a short skirt, but they differ aside from that:
- In-game she has an exposed midriff, a single braid, and red hair.
- In her dialogue sprite she has two braids and red hair.
- In the official illustration her vest covers her midriff, and she has a single braid and brown hair (this illustration is also used for her e-reader cameo's dialogue sprite in 3, as far as I can tell).
So why the changes, then? I suspect it was mostly a combination of 1.) making them legibly feminine on the tiny GBA screen and 2.) trying to save on effort by averaging the two designs and only differentiating the heads in-game, such that they could reuse the same body sprites for the walking and climbing animations of both designs. That doesn't explain why she has different bangs, but then again the other design's number of braids isn't consistent either, so it's probably just another minor character design change that got glossed over.
Addendum: I should maybe also note that the Official Complete Works specifically attributes that illustration to Mega Man Zero, which is the only game where that unnamed female Resistance member design appears, further cementing my belief that they're one and the same.