Pokémon games have become consistently ugly, and it's alright to wish they weren't
Pokémon games have become consistently ugly, and it's alright to wish they weren't
Imho the problem with the 3D-era pokemon games isn't that they look low-fi, it's that they look low-fi in a boring way. Like they were built from asset-store content from 15 years ago.
If ever there was a game that could've gotten away with some weird theme like voxel-art or heavy use of billboarded sprites, it's pokemon. Like, imagine a pokemon game with pixelated hand-animated textures like in Megaman Legends. That would work.
Cobblemon is a pokémon mod for minecraft, and definitely has a charm to it and fits weirdly well into the minecraft-pixel-art-with-shaders esthetic IMO. Plus the "gotta catch em all" basic gameplay loop meshes well with Minecraft's incentive to explore the world.
Of course it's a free mod so it's a bit rough around the edges and there doesn't seem to be much to do beyond collect pokémon and build minecraft houses, but in my online circles it certainly has captured a lot more attention than any pokémon game released in the last forever. I would like to think Nintendo is taking notes, but we all know they Don't Give A Fuck. They'll pump out any asset flip and people will buy it because they're nostalgic and Nintendo has a legally enforced monopoly on the franchise.
Is that mouth just a texture with the camera angle painted on it?
Honestly that's just great.
Yup. The game is pretty overrated, imho, but its aesthetic was amazing. No lighting system, everything was hand-shaded with textures that really got the Megaman look. One of a kind style.
Thanks for calling out Megaman Legends. It's one of my favorite series of all time and it's so wildly underrated.
I used to wish for a remaster, but now I don't want one because I know it'll be made to shit.
Not a very hot take, only corpo bootlickers pretend that Nintendo isn't squandering the franchise.
It's supremely frustrating that franchises like these get enshittified to hell and there's fuck-all anyone can do about it if they are not willing to work completely for free (i.e. fanfiction writers). Same with the Star Wars content mill which also went to shit while we're forced to sit and watch or give up on the franchise entirely. Or LoTR which in the past 20 years only gave us The Hobbit (🤮) and the Amazon show (🤮🤮).
Human stories were meant to be evolved and expanded on; that's how all of our ancestors built a rich tapestry of myths and folklore over generations, constantly retelling and updating stories. But we aren't allowed to.
I'm Belgian. My grandparents, my parents, my cousins and my cousin's children all grew up reading Belgian comics such as Tintin, Spirou&Fantasio, Lucky Luke, the Smurfs, etc, which were written in the mid-20th century. Yet if any of them publishes anything set in those universes they'll get sued into the ground, so instead these important cultural works are left to rot and wither and be slowly forgotten by each subsequent generation while the Estate shits out a soulless (if not outright racist and sexist which shits on everything that Franquin ever stood for) reboot that no-one cares about every 15 years or so. Such a sad end for such important cultural landmarks that used to be the pride of our country.
Copyright should last 25 years, just like patents. That's more than enough time to recoup your initial investment and doesn't prevent you from making money after then, you'll just have to compete for it on the marketplace of ideas. Isn't that what capitalists should want?
Holy shit, that "monkey" screenshot isn't something being "faithfully represented from the original"? The original thing didn't have that, but the new 2023 reboot did?
Broadly correct. Franquin was a grassroots leftist by his peak in the '70s and even now a lot of his comics would generate a lot of "Gaston goes woke???" youtube thumbnails. His comics included a lot of overt anticapitalist & ecologist messaging in particular.
Idées Noires (apparently reedited as "Die Laughing" in English) has his most politically charged stuff and is what happened when Franquin didn't try to draw for mass appeal:
I did however find some racist colonial stuff from his very early works (1950). I won't like, it's quite bad. However the 1950 stuff is ignorant & insensitive racist colonial fuckery from a then 26 year old author who later denounced it and tried to make up for it, while the 2023 stuff is very intentional dogwhistling to modern day racists from boomers who should really know better. It's unfathomable that Dupuis would have greenlighted such backwards stuff in the modern age.
They somehow made it MORE racist
Something selling in the tens of thousands of millions at every release has zero reason to do better.
If any, it has all the reasons to find the lowest point in which they keep selling that much so they can cut effort as much as possible while maintaining the income.
Pokémon has always been weirdly behind the curve in terms of presentation. People were frustrated by how late they went full 3D and how long they were reusing sprites and sounds, and rightfully so.
I think some of why the GBA games are more fondly remembered is because the one time their visual ambitions and their underlying hardware lined up at all, short of the original games.
I've never heard a reasonable explanation for this, honestly. I'm hesitant to say it's just greed or laziness. I bet the answers are way more interesting.
They are probably highly understaffed. Also underfunded, and working on yearly releases.
There is reason for this: either greed or incompetence. Or both. There is no reason for game freak to keep their studio so small if not to save money or because they can't manage more people. They have the most profitable IP in the world, it can't be a lack of funds.
The best explanation I've heard is that Game Freak just flat out refuses to ever hire new people.
I wish they never had gone to 3D. Black and White still look gorgeous to this day. Leave 3D to Stadium/Revolution style battle arena games and keep letting your incredibly skilled traditional pixel artists doing what they do best.
It is worth pointing out that the first few generations were legitimately groundbreaking for mechanics as well.
Part of the problem is a lot of pokemon weren't designed to live in a world, just be a sprite on a battle screen. It also got more egregious in later titles, but there's always been some problematic pokemon. So not only do you have to make a ton of models, you have to fudge the scales a lot to make Pidgey vs Onix look remotely good. There's really no way to make a decent looking game without drastically reducing the scope like pokemon snap did.
Pokemon fans are some of the dumbest people in fandom. They will take bottom tier slop with a smile and get upset when you suggest that maybe the highest grossing franchise in human history should maybe do a little bit better. The reborn lineage of games is the only thing keeping me from abandoning the franchise entirely.
It's okay. Palworld exists and it looks pretty good.
At those times you kind of get why Ninhelldo is suing Palworld. It is not about direct competition (Palworld plays a lot more like Ark than Pokemon); it's because Palworld makes Pokémon look boring, uninspired, stale.
This video goes into details about why the lawsuit happened, but its more of Sony trying to make Palworld a huge IP that made Nintendo go "now hold on you can't be throwing monsters out of balls that's our thing!"
thats the only pokemon game i play
they could be prettier tho but the whole thing has jank half ass charme
If they really wanted to kill Palworld, they'd just make a Pokemon game that is similar to it. Both in presentation and mechanically.
But I mean... It's an over 100-year old Japanese company. Changing how they do shit is unlikely.
Maybe I’m nostalgic, but I think Pokémon graphics peaked with the Gold and Silver generation. They really nailed the color palette in that one.
100%. The graphics may be dated but gen 2 is peak Pokemon aesthetic. Peak sprites and soundtrack.
It's such a shame. Pokemon has so much potential, but Gamefreak/TPC are... a bit shitty.
They could take a leaf from Morrowind. Open world, but use terrain and fog to hide the limitation and funnel the players along the points of interest.
Then late game let them go nuts, flying everywhere seeing the less than pretty areas.
Like Breath of the Wild had some empty ugly areas, but the worse areas were off the beaten path.
Also the bland areas were also usually hiding a shrine or something.
The only time graphics bothered me is with Violet where everything would slow to a crawl and windmills got super choppy. Otherwise I don't necessarily care that much.
I wish more time was spent getting rid of cutscenes and story. Pikemon is never going to have anything interesting to say because it needs to appeal to everyone on earth. But they keep shoving more cutscenes that say nothing into the game. Just let me wander and catch pokemon dammit.
Watching my wife play, I was appalled at the numerous framerate and graphical issues. Once I finally got around to playing it myself, the issues didn't impact me that much. There's still no excuse for a game made that far into the system's life to play like that, from the companies in charge of the largest multimedia franchise currently in the world.
I think, part of the frustration is that many people have been wishing for realistic Pokemon games for a long time, to experience their favorite anime as if it was real. Pokemon Colosseum gave people a lot of hope when it came out a million years ago and then it's just been disappointment after disappointment. Even the recent games hardly look better.
Haven’t bought a Pokémon game since Shield, and it was absolutely shit. I refuse to touch the series until they can genuinely try something different. Pseudo open-world is not different
While think graphics in pokemon games could be better , also think reactions to them waaaaay overblown
Also :
I didn't mind the graphics in Arceus, but the game was just boring. And hours of cutscenes which were only walls of text didn't help.
I played my first real Pokémon game a short while back and was so surprised at just how shit it was. Before that I only played like fan games of Pokémon like pokerogue, showdown, and the Minecraft ones.
I can’t wrap my head around why you can’t change the animation speed in the real games. I only got a few hours in before I got tired of watching Pokémon terastalize into some crystal abomination with a stupid hat.
I didn't mind the graphics of the Pokemon games. Aside from the occasional framerate drops, my only gripes with the graphics has been the animations (moreso in Sw/Sh) and the slow speed of the battles.
I get why people want the games to look better, but as someone who still plays the originals on occasion, it's probably not even in my top 10 wants for the series.
And it's so annoying to hear the excuse "BEcaUsE tHe sWITCh iS aN UNDErpOWeRed SYsTEm" when the Switch's launch title was Breath of the Wild.
Not only. BotW was a wiiu title too, so it had to be made considering the limits of wiiu!
In some ways the WiiU was more powerful. For instance the Korok Forest area isn’t nearly as laggy on the WiiU. Also the WiiU was powering 2 screens at once.
The Switch is barely 5 years newer than the WiiU and uses a mobile chipset like a phone (an Nvidia Tegra specifically) where the WiiU used the same desktop class chipset that was in the Xbox 360 and PS3.
I really hate the “it’s for kids” argument. Let alone the fact that adults play the games too. It’s for everyone.
If anything, media made for a malleable audience with low critical-thinking skills should be held to a higher standard, not lower. I still remember how much I loved The Hobbit as a child. Even at the age kids don't remember stuff, you still set the groundwork for the rest of their lives. The argument insults kids and betrays the speaker's low opinion of them.
It's a shame discourse is still stuck where it was when SWSH came out. I hope the fandom can move forward some day and accept that a billion-dollar franchise isn't immune from critique.
In a lot of ways the older Pokemon games are harder, more complex, and less hand-holds. Were those not made for kids?