Main series Pokémon games continue to suffer from low fidelity, poor performance, or just a sheer lack of art direction. It's okay to expect more.

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.

  • drosophilaEnglish
    3·
    3 hours ago

    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.