It’s been a while since I looked at a main series Pokémon game and thought, “That looks nice.” This includes last week’s full reveal of Pokémon Legends Z-A, which going from the first bit of footage seems to feature a lot of hazy-edged grey rooftops, futurist UI, and eerily smooth NPCs, and not a lot of consistent, nice-to-look-at art direction to tie it together. This is also a shame. First, because - and I don’t think it’s too controversial to say this - it’s good, generally speaking, when things look nice. Glad we’ve got that established.
Second, and still pretty obvious but at least a bit more interesting: while they’ve never been graphical powerhouses, there have absolutely been times when Pokémon games have looked quite wonderful. And there is undoubtedly room for Pokémon games to look even more wonderful. But the series’ recent, and quite aggressive moves away from that is both a bummer, and, considering Pokémon’s history with artistry - across its spinoff video games, its animations, its strikingly impactful trading card art - a waste.
Saying this out loud among Pokémon fans, however, often leads to some interesting reactions. While even casual observers and non-Pokénerds probably got whiff of controversies like “Dexit”, the nickname for the first time it was revealed less than the entirety of the Pokédex would be catchable in a single game, back at the launch of Pokémon Sword and Shield, fewer will be familiar with “tree-gate” of the same era.
This one looked great!
It’s also ok to wish that they run at a consistently smooth framerate. It’s one thing to look like crap and it’s another to both look like crap and run like it too. I’ve been playing Palworld on medium for the past couple of weeks and it was pretty jarring going from that to seeing the Legends Z-A footage.
Meanwhile the game will break records and sell switch systems cause people are fucking morons.
I’ve said similar things about many switch games. Even Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom might be fun games, but they are legitimately crappie than they should be. The world’s are very empty and often times look like PS2 quality textures and shapes. The frame rates are also appalling at times. Like no consideration for performance and art direction with so much Nintendo trash, and people still eat it up.
I agree, the last genuinely pretty game was Emerald, imo. Diamond and beyond is where 3D assets started weakening the art direction, imo. Either keep the beautiful pixel art, or do proper cel shaded graphics, like windwaker. Personally, I’d stick with pixel art for the strongest possible art direction.
Random, but you should check out Emerald Seaglass! Beautiful art style combination!
I agree. Pokemon once was my favorite video game series, but it has been technically and to some extent creatively stagnant for quite some years now. And whenever people point that out online, there is always a vocal horde of fans coming to Gamefreak’s defense, saying things like “Pokemon never looked good”. Which wouldn’t be a good argument, but it’s not even true. Pokemon games were never technically advanced, but they had a simple, clean look in the 2D/2.5D era. S/V has some really appallingly low-res textures in places that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the N64. It just looks muddy and inconsistent to a point where it’s distracting from the game itself. At the same time it runs at sub-30 FPS quite often.
Probably the only good looking Pokemon games we got this generation were the “Let’s Go” ones. Those had simple but consistently good-looking graphics just like the older titles.
To be fair, it’s almost infinitely cheaper to hire a bunch of people to post in threads muddying the waters of any discussion than it is to fix any given issue. If any public criticism devolves into bickering, it’s hard for outside observers to make enough sense of it to heavily impact sales.
Look how well it worked for the election. With a proof of concept that dramatic lying around, what money-grubbing executive wouldn’t want to follow the example?
Yeah, Pokemon had some nice 2D sprites. I yearn for a pokemon game that doesn’t hold your hand and is challenging with nice sprite work. It’ll never happen unless Game Freak lets the fans do something like Sonic Mania.
I’ve not played many since they went 3D, do all the NPCs still look like they were designed with the Mii Maker?
And they attack Palworld for being derivative
If they spent on bettering themselves, even half of what they employed to attack others…
But that actually requires effort and money
I love how they say
there are moments when Arceus is genuinely pretty
and then show a screenshot of a game that looks objectively worse than a low-budget movie tie-in from 2007. I mean look at the 1 tile, non-randomized, no noise, no depth, repeating light effect on the water with 0 effort put in to even make it look slightly good. The depth of field and fog looks like it is from pokemon pearl with a gaussian blur put on top of it.
Super mario sunshine from 2002 looks almost as good at the water looks 10x better lol
Gamefreak puts literally 1% effort into any of their games…
Dudes be like “devs too focused on making a game pretty instead of fun” then be like “this game is too ugly and it’s making me upset”
Games don’t need to be graphically ground breaking to be fun but the art should at least not be repulsive and/or incoherent as fuck like modern Pokemon games.
“devs too focused on making a game pretty instead of fun” is talking about making the art photorealistic with fancy hair engines and such, when doing so doesn’t add meaningfully to the experience and only serves to needlessly complicate development and inflate the cost.
We can tell that making all these 3D models and animations is a problem for the devs because they’ve said so repeatedly. They’ve even said they can’t have every Pokemon in the same game as a result. Instead of the lovely pixel art of FRLG we have a mish-mash of dead-eyed, poorly-animated cartoons with PSP-quality “realistic” terrain that grate against each other. And for what? Why do 3D when you can only do 3D so poorly?
When people say that I think they mean they want games to look like this:
Or like this.
So, still atmospheric and beautiful, but low poly enough that artists don’t have to spend so much time creating detail. Sort of like an impressionistic painting.
To be honest though for most AAA games I think its animations and highly choreographed gameplay sequences that are bottlenecking development more than the art is. Look at games like cyberpunk and fallout 76: they largely didn’t have unfinished art assets (in fact the art assets in both those games, particularly the environments, look quite good). Instead they had broken animations and gameplay systems. I guess art style does play a roll in that though, as a more realistic model kinda demands more realistic animations to avoid looking weird.
That would be more valid here if Pokémon were focused on being fun. As a lifelong fan, modern Pokémon games are typically both ugly and not terribly fun. They make decent “turn off your brain” games, but the quality of game did not go up with the decrease in graphics.
While it wasn’t necessarily pretty and had its share of glitches, I quite enjoyed Arceus. It was a nice break from the standard patterns it’s fallen into.
Course I say that as someone who also enjoyed Sword and Shield after a skipping a few prior.
Graphics definitely aren’t everything, but they could stop it With the half finished games with glitches.
Arceus was a fun break from the norm, and was even more fun once I played it on redacted to remove some of the performance issues my Switch had with it. I’m looking forward to Z-A exclusively because the impression Arceus made (well, and spoiler)
I’ve been playing a randomized (and slightly higher level enemy Pokémon) run of Shield after beating it once originally and being quite disappointed, and I’ve enjoyed that pretty thoroughly as well. The return of follower Pokémon in the DLC is something I’ve been asking for since HG/SS.
Yeah that’s fair. I haven’t cared about Pokemon since the remakes of Sapphire and Ruby during which I didn’t lose a single battle. It was a cool nostalgia trip but since there was absolutely no strategy necessary I never ever wanted to go back since there’s not enough reward for the time sink; it’s just not fun imo.
New pokemon games are neither so that doesn’t really work
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The only one I have found ugly has been Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl, I feel like I am playing in a fisher price universe.
