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.
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.
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
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”
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
mega evolutions
)
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
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.
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…
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.
The only one I have found ugly has been Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl, I feel like I am playing in a fisher price universe.
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game freak games look awful, HudSoft Pokemon games always lookes great
