Game Freak, developers of the popular Pokemon series is one of the most famous and talented developers in the industry. They're also one of the most frustrating developers in the industry. Not because they're greedy or evil, but because they seem hell bent on living in the past. For a while, Game Freak was one of the very few developers that hadn't yet fully moved on to modern resolutions, as most of their titles this generation were predomedently on the 3DS, including its flagship. Even there, they struggled. When they moved to full 3D with the Pokemon series, the 3DS entries were plagued with performance issues, including massive frame-rate drops even when there isn't a lot happening. Considering how many other 3DS games with more going on didn't suffer those issues, that says more about Game Freak than the system. I won't get into the heavy handed tutorialization of those games since I always viewed Pokemon as primarily a multiplayer series, but I can understand the complaints if you were looking for a single player experience.
Now we get to the Nintendo Switch. Game Freak is now, whether they like it or not, forced to adopt modern resolutions, including 1080p support thanks to the Switch being both a handheld AND a home console. Their first strike was Pokemon Let's Go! Pikachu and Evee. A solid new side series in the main pantheon, but with a development team of 100 people, 2 year development time, with graphics that aren't much better than the 3DS games that's STILL plagued with performance drops. You get the sense that something is wrong with the Pokemon team there. I get moving to HD resolutions is hard at first, and 100 man teams wouldn't be unusually for a graphically intense AAA project, but for a Pokemon game with graphics that look THAT simple, that's a massive red flag in my eyes. And then there's Sword and Shield, which is already plagued with controversies. First off, only Pokemon that appear in Sword and Shield can be transfered from previous games, meaning that hundreds of Pokemon from previous entries can't be transferred. Game Freak's reasoning was due to hardware limitations and time constraints. I don't know how true that is, but nevertheless, it shows just how inefficient Game Freak is as a developer. 100+ people, toiling away at a game that still looks like an upresed 3DS title (Seriously, I've seen low budget indie games look better than this). There's something wrong here.
What's strange is that, None of these problems plague Game Freak's non-Pokemon titles. Those games have solid performance, good visuals, and are made with smaller teams, even on systems with HD resolutions. So either the Pokemon team is that incompetent, or Game Freak doesn't care. Game Freak is very talented studio, and even at their worst, they still make decent games. But the Pokemon team really needs to get its shit together if it wants to survive in the Switch era. That starts with retiring the aging 3DS engine. No wonder these games are taking this long to make, they're still using an engine designed for a platform rendering things at 240p, no shit it's going to be harder. Either make a new engine designed with the Switch in mind, or just license Unreal or Unity. Seriously, it'd save you a lot of time and money in the future.
