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Unpopular opinions

I have to say this, Pokemon NOT being like the typical RPG where team members are limited, and can be permanently dropped for something better due to move complexity and initially field moves is why we can't just mindlessly copy paste RPG standards

Gen 1 tried to be closer to DQ3, but the types being done last minute and enormous roster severely shifted dev. It's why we had a lot of redundancies for similarly typed mons that are awkwardly still hard to get, and map design that is honestly extremely boring visually, which FRLG and LGPE exposes. And no rose tinting of "but they were referencing Japan's urbanization" will fix that, it was beyond undercooked and lacked cohesion for some mons, and the 1996 Pokedex book by staff and Johto's version of Kanto confirms there's no ulterior theme

Gen 2 dev the SW97 map was scrapped largely cuz it fell into the same trap; they were treating it more like a generic RPG, which made game balance unfeasible for the planned new mons. Even final has major issues with it that led to overly specific teams in casual playthroughs, but SW97 was worse that front

3-4 still has traces of attrocious coverage for some early route mons (ft. Nuzleaf), but map design drastically improved cuz they stuck to way better mon leveraging

I can't in good faith say the hyper coverage late gens is entirely bad bar Grass Knott Infernape, especially when a lot of it is post game TM/TR. People were pissed at the Move Dexit largely cuz it removed so many options in pvp and some in game challenges. I enjoy watching WeedleTwineedle vids cuz of some niche as fuck strat for Doubles/VGC relying on uncommon moves like Round, or Stockpile, or Sparkling Aria. Moves that are mostly useless in Singles!
 
Not to beat on a dead horse here but man, I really dislike the SV models. And I don't mean in the "graphics bad" kinda way, I just feel like no thought was put in as to how to represent the Pokémon at all.

The problem really comes down to the designs having a strong cartoon appeal, but the art direction in SV doesn't seem to be concerned about keeping that appeal and only slapping a realistic material on top of them. Torkoal and Weezing have rigid clouds that look like they're made of play-doh, and Quaxly has a realistic sheen to its hair despite also having a stylized shine drawn in the design. Instead of making the Pokémon look like living, breathing creatures, it just ends up looking like one of those Minecraft HD texture mods.

Now compare this to Legends Arceus. Pokémon like Chimchar and Gastly have particle effects added to them, so they feel like they're being affected by the environment. And more importantly, that game actually has dynamic lighting, so the models feel like they belong in the environment, unlike SV and its tacky highlights . Even New Pokémon Snap was relatively subtle when adding details to the Pokémon textures, relying a lot more in, again, strong lighting to make the Pokémon look good.

This is probably the meanest post I ever made here but I've always loved the art in Pokémon games, but that's an aspect of SV that I feel was completely neglected, even before the performance issues. Ugh
 
pokemon snap does have the benefit of being a cutscene you can look around and interact very vaguely.

honestly im mixed on the sv textures, the metal ones are completely fine, even cartoons can have pretty metal rendering, but the fur and scale ones annoy me. pokemon have very cartoony fur spikes and shapes, putting realistic fur on top of that makes it look like a toy, as said above. I feel like pokemon would look much better with stylistic rendering, 2d shaders, etc
 
My personal opinion is I think SV does a good job with the Pokemon models themselves, I like some of the texturing, don't like some o the other texturing.

I hope the extra time for Gen 10 lets them cook an aesthetic more because it's also hard for me to judge the Pokemon because the game's visuals in general feel underbaked. Does Pawmot's texturing look weird, or is it that it's sitting in an underbaked weird environment, kinda deal.

I'm a weirdo who liked how SWSH looked. I thought its battles were very pretty with the HD models. It was the empty environments that made the game feel empty to me, which does effect how I see the aesthetic but in general I thought people saying the game looked bad was strange.
 
ant4456 said:
I'm a weirdo who liked how SWSH looked. I thought its battles were very pretty with the HD models.
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ME TOO yeah the trees were rough or whatever but 1. models are super cute, love the lineless look, 2. the background for battles looked really nice!!

swsh was gorgeous imo, the wild area was underbaked but places like ballonlea make me crazy. I almost wish they just left to figure out open world on sv itself so they had more time to make bigger cities and routes to explore tbh
 
Bakugames said:
ME TOO yeah the trees were rough or whatever but 1. models are super cute, love the lineless look, 2. the background for battles looked really nice!!

swsh was gorgeous imo, the wild area was underbaked but places like ballonlea make me crazy. I almost wish they just left to figure out open world on sv itself so they had more time to make bigger cities and routes to explore tbh
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To me SV and SWSH are two coins of unfinished:

SWSH was much more polished but the content wasn't there, while SV had content (one of the longest campaigns in a mainline game, if not the longest) but unpolished as hell.

It does also help that SWSH is just also an easier game to develop too, I imagine lol

I know a lot of people see SV and hope for a Return to Monke but honestly I love the new dev team's ambition. People used to say every Pokemon game is the same and that is 1000% not true anymore
 
Them enlisting Capcom for help to do "realistic"/deatailed designs wen?

Funny enough SV's lack of art focus can be seen on human models. Despite *trying* to do more standard lighting, human faces are forcibly flat for shading due to tweaking normals. This is a technique modern "anime" games do to have extremely basic shading that I despise cuz why are your faces so flat!?

Granted I hate how 99% of the time they make the face itself flat even in anime games, but for Pokemon it sticks out worse cuz...why are you even doing this? It looks like a weird gradient cuz of the lighting

I also think doing 2D tone shaders won't solve anything. LA tried...and it looks ugly still, despite better particles some mons

The other issue, a lot of times games with 2D shaders really limit dynamic lighting. I see this issue in Dragon Ball Sparking Zero, despite it being a 3D arena ish fighter. Auras don't actually light chars most of the time, nor do they like having shadows from the environment or other objects impact chars. It's very baked on samey lighting that for a sprawling world WILL feel generic once you notice

BotW meanwhile, despite over abuse of post processing like Bloom, tries to be dynamic. Though ToK does some weird things like some particles very much not looking two tone shaded (like the smoke in the Goron area), looks like clashing styles. Still, an actually dynamic cel shaded game that respects two toning is rare
 
Oh man don't get me STARTED on the human models. The way Geeta looks in game is an actual insult to take's art.

Tbh I wouldn't feel so strongly about this if were not by every nerd going like "oh Pokémon have scales now! They figured out materials lol" when the game came out
 
I don’t mind Baton Pass. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it should be unbanned or anything, I’m just saying I personally didn’t find it broken. I’d be down for an OU tour with it legal.
 
Ironmage said:
Could you explain the joke here to me? The Capcom series I interact the most with by far is consistently cartoony.
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Devil May Cry, Resident Evil, and Monster Hunter...

Like next to Square Enix, they have stylized, aesthetic, or even grotesque "realism" down pat. They've shattered the wrong notion that realism means not stylized or lacking expression

Like Peacock colored swamp monster toad platypuses? Heck yeah
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Regardless, Pokemon won't want to do this cuz it frankly isn't cute or marketable to casual audiences for the most part. Detective Pikachu was hit miss in attempting this, but people really want mons to look like toys. There are a lot of Pokemon fans that aren't aware Lugia is canonically feathered cuz the 2D drawings and current models are very flat even with SV detailing, so...

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All I want for GF to actually get consistently good for...any style really. SwSh is jank for most areas, SV is very grey and muddy and really bad for light exposure, and LA is Unity 2013 failed attempt of celshading

New Snap and Pokken look good, LGPE I'm not a fan of the style admittedly but it's competent and polished. They have examples of what they can do before diving into more experimental styles
 
i made this joke but i would genuinely love for pokemon to do something heavily stylized like okami did, or maybe something like rain world. massive copium, the latter is a completely different genre but can a woman not dream of impossible things
 
The problem Pokemon's graphics have:
1000 monsters
1000 moves with unique animations
20 human characters
All the mons have to have animations that fit each move as well as picnics etc
Player Customization
Large environments
A variety of biomes
Everything above has to be viewed from a variety of angles and zooms
Also it's multiplayer

Power is not the issue there. Yes the Switch is underpowered and Pokemon games are unoptimized, but that matters a lot less than the sheer amount of manhours it takes to build everything above, in a consistent style, and not looking like trash. And then bug test all of it.

I'm not saying I disagree with people saying they should go more stylized, or that the latest graphics have been poor, just that the sheer scale of the problem is extremely intimidating and I think a lot of companies would do even worse at this if they tried.
 
Hugin said:
The problem Pokemon's graphics have:
1000 monsters
1000 moves with unique animations
20 human characters
All the mons have to have animations that fit each move as well as picnics etc
Player Customization
Large environments
A variety of biomes
Everything above has to be viewed from a variety of angles and zooms
Also it's multiplayer

Power is not the issue there. Yes the Switch is underpowered and Pokemon games are unoptimized, but that matters a lot less than the sheer amount of manhours it takes to build everything above, in a consistent style, and not looking like trash. And then bug test all of it.

I'm not saying I disagree with people saying they should go more stylized, or that the latest graphics have been poor, just that the sheer scale of the problem is extremely intimidating and I think a lot of companies would do even worse at this if they tried.
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"Power is not the issue" is a lot more nuanced than I think a lot of people say I think
 
Hugin said:
The problem Pokemon's graphics have:
1000 monsters
1000 moves with unique animations
20 human characters
All the mons have to have animations that fit each move as well as picnics etc
Player Customization
Large environments
A variety of biomes
Everything above has to be viewed from a variety of angles and zooms
Also it's multiplayer

Power is not the issue there. Yes the Switch is underpowered and Pokemon games are unoptimized, but that matters a lot less than the sheer amount of manhours it takes to build everything above, in a consistent style, and not looking like trash. And then bug test all of it.

I'm not saying I disagree with people saying they should go more stylized, or that the latest graphics have been poor, just that the sheer scale of the problem is extremely intimidating and I think a lot of companies would do even worse at this if they tried.
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The solution to this that Game Freak probably can't ever do: Shrink The Dexes For God's Sake. Aim for 250-300 max, refine the animations, do balance changes and other stuff so every slot feels meaningful and carefully considered. Legends Arceus more or less did this imo, or at least was a good start. Even though it was using a pre-existing dex as a foundation very little felt like arbitrary filler.

Of course, there's a reason why this is probably not viable for new gens: In a post-Dexit world you really can't go below the 600ish final Pokemon count of SWSH & SV without pissing people off and causing certain Pokemon to be gone for way too long, and the squeeze will only get tighter as the years go by. One hell of a catch-22.
 
AztecCroc said:
Pretty sure that would've killed the franchise. Gen 3 was already a low point for the franchise saleswise.
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Huh. Gen 1, 3, and 5 all focused heavily on new mons. 2, 4, and 6 went all-in on reusing existing mons. And I think the fanbase tends to prefer the odd-numbered gens to the even-numbered ones, at least with the benefit of a decade+ of hindsight. But 3 and 5 are both known to be sales disappointments. Is it any surprise GF learned the wrong lessons from that?
 
Hugin said:
Huh. Gen 1, 3, and 5 all focused heavily on new mons. 2, 4, and 6 went all-in on reusing existing mons. And I think the fanbase tends to prefer the odd-numbered gens to the even-numbered ones, at least with the benefit of a decade+ of hindsight. But 3 and 5 are both known to be sales disappointments. Is it any surprise GF learned the wrong lessons from that?
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I think that a different wrong lesson was learned. Cutting existing mons will always go against the concept of lifelong partners that the franchise tries to sell itself as, Other factors being equal, it would make sense for games that are perceived as doing that sell lower than ones that don't. That the other factors aren't equal is why gen 3 and especially 5 are well-liked in spite of that. I see a lot of praise for BW's story, overworld presentation, and not being painfully slow to drain HP bars like gen 4, but little for its mon reset. If anything, a common talking point is how several gen 5 mons are worse-looking versions of the gen 1 mons their niche is fulfilling (Machamp/Conkeldurr, Magnemite/Klink, Garbodor/Weezing, etc.), indicating that the games would be thought of as even better had they not run completely new for the regional dex. But since the polish was initially overshadowed by the mon selection, they didn't sell well. As a result, GF no longer appears to care about adding polish to the new games.
 
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