Masanao Arimoto, who took over Takaya Imamura's role as the character and sprite artist for Star Fox 2 from the first game, seemed to have cycled through a wide variety of new character pilots designs to represent the two Light class Arwing models, before finally settling on Fay (a spaniel) and Miyu (a Lynx). These beta designs were discovered in the Nintendo Gigaleak of 2020.

Some of these include a sheep, a bear, a deer, a hippo, and even Fara Phoenix (dubbed internally as "lady") from the 1993 Star Fox Nintendo Power comics. The sheep design would actually appear in an issue of Super Game Power magazine that had a feature on Star Fox 2 (before it was cancelled) along with Miyu, making it clear that it was an early design for what would become Fay.

What's also notable and curious is that there seem to be unused female human pilots found within the Gigaleak. It is speculated that Arimoto drew these up as generic templates to base the new female characters' designs off of, rather than introduce human characters into the Star Fox series specifically like what has been theorized since the Gigaleak. The fact that there are multiple different variants of the same non-descript woman with none of them being a different gender compared to the vastly more distinctive anthro designs that Arimoto brainstormed adds credence to this theory.