| Chrizum said: Your fake accent is almost as hard to listen to as it is hard to look at this cheap cash-in. I'd rate both below par at the least. |
Ironically, the former is on purpose, while the latter is willful negligence of investment lol
| mZuzek said: I've only played a little bit of this game so far but my first impressions are that everyone's standards for Pokémon are alarmingly low. I don't know if the textures are N64 level but most GameCube games I've played look and run better than this, and as for the game itself, it's stiff and clunky - that is, when it even allows me to play, because 95% of my playtime so far has been filled with needless tutorials for the most basic of things, and the most uninspired writing I've ever seen. I know Pokémon games don't usually have the best stories in the world, but when it won't allow you to play the game, it better be good. And this is horrible. Like, I have zero confidence in my writing skills but I am convinced I could do better. I hope it gets better once the game actually allows me to play it, but this is nowhere near as good as anyone's been making it out to be no matter what happens. Last time I went into a Pokémon game I was predisposed to dislike it, but it's not the case this time. The positive reception to Legends really gave me hope and I wanted to give it a fair chance, but it's just not good. |
It really is shocking that one of THE biggest franchises is struggling so hard to modernize. The good news is that, as mentioned, the actual part of catching and battling Pokémon is finally more engaging and modern, ergo genuinely fun. It's just a bit of a system shock otherwise for a 2022 game coming out as a headliner and top franchise game.
| Doctor_MG said: Okay, this narrative that the game looks like an N64 era game is just absolutely ridiculous. Despite some textures being questionable in quality, this game does not look like a game from the N64. I'm honestly tired of this kind of exaggeration from the gaming community. It's like when people were trying to say Metroid Dread looked like a 3DS game, or when Mario Golf: Super Rush didn't look better than Toadstool Tour on the Gamecube. You DON'T have to rely on hyperbole to get people to understand the graphics stink. This game has a lot of graphical offenses, from inconsistent textures (look at the professors buttons), poor texture filtering, incredible amounts of pop in, awful nearest neighbor resolution scaling, poor lighting implementation, low resolution shadows, and 2D billboard textures EVERYWHERE...but looking like an N64 game isn't one of these sins.
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I completely agree, I hate it when people use that hyperbole and have no clue what they're talking about. Clearly, it's why no one in this entire thread has said it looks like an N64 game. I agree, it doesn't look like one at all.
| Kyuu said: If you're not super duper careful, clear, and ridiculously specific with your wording throughout, any take that is remotely close to controversial or different could have you crucified on the internet (hyperbole intended!). |
I think it's primarily exacerbated by select/choice narratives. Someone could say, "geez, some of these textures look like they come from an N64 game", and the response will be, "the game looks NOTHING like an N64 game, you need your eyes checked, the game uses beautiful art styles"... lmfao 
Illusion said:
OK, first off, I wrote that post earlier when I was rushing out the door to do something and so I didn't notice that you were the one who actually wrote/recorded the review. I assumed that you had just linked to somebody else's review. I should have read your post more carefully before replying and so I apologize. I would have been more sensitive and precise in my delivery of criticism if I had known. I think what you have there is overall a good review and is worth watching. Thank you for your contribution. That said, please keep in mind that if you zoom close enough into any texture it will eventually start to look like N64 res. I do not agree that these are N64 textures. What matters is what the game and the textures look like during normal gameplay at distances that players spend most of their time seeing. Take a screenshot of Kokariko village:
Now compare that to the picture I quoted from your post above. As much as I love OoT, looking at the cliff on the right frankly you can barely even tell that it is even a rock face. Honestly, you could probably even mistake that for perhaps being dense forest with green foliage on the top and this is because the texture resolution is so incredibly low. Now in your pic, if you look at the mountain in the background it is clearly a rockface which is made evident by the advanced textural bump mapping on it. Now I agree that the rockface doesn't appear to have much texturing apart from bump mapping but as I will discuss more later, that's a part of the stylistic decision that goes into cell-shaded games. It's the same with the characters. If we were to zoom out in your above pic, I am sure that the texture detail on the character shown would look much better than the two Kakariko villagers shown on the left of my pic. For example, the use of bump mapping on the character's hat and jacket collar would create a much more realistic look than when zoomed way in. It's when you zoom in close that the artistic feel of the game starts to fail, but no game is designed to hold graphical fidelity when camera's go really close to objects. Keep in mind that bump mapping is something that didn't even start appearing on video game textures until the original XBox. I don't think that even the Gamecube had the shader support to draw bump mapping (if it did, it was never used in any of the AAA Ninty GCN games that I own). Also, as I said in my original post, this is a cell-shaded game and so the art style does not require extremely hi-res textures to convey a sense of polish and feel. So even if these texture fidelity is say at a PS3 or maybe even Gamecube level, the stylistic choices of the game need to be factored in to the overall look and feel of the textures. Cell shaded games always focus more lighting and shadows the way that cell animation does and lets the player's imagination fill in the missing textural detail. This was done in BotW as well. It just didn't seem fair to me to make the textural resolution one the biggest points of graphical criticism for a cell-shaded game like this. With regards to the grass sprites that always face the camera regardless of viewing angle, I get how this graphical technique was used on the N64 (as well as 100% of the time on the SNES and NES). That said, on the N64, that technique was used to render entire trees (Mario 64) or at best the grassy shrubs that link cut for rupees in certain places in OoT, not individual blades of grass in a large open field. Take a look at the grass in the above screenshot from Kakariko, that was about as advanced as grass effects got on the N64 (a flat green plane). Even the gamecube generally had completely flat grass textures with the odd use of grass sprites near cliff edges, etc (take a look at Tallon overworld from Metroid Prime). I didn't start to see entire fields of grass rendered vertically (using sprites or otherwise) until at least Mario Golf on the Gamecube and that was a game that used preset camera angles (plus it looked horrible, they should have just stuck with 2D textures, it looked way worse than in this pokemon game). This type of grass rendering didn't really become successful on Nintendo consoles, in my opinion, until Xenoblade Chronicles which was one of the most graphically advanced games on the Wii. Anyways, again I apologize for my delivery and lack of precision in my original post. There are many points in your review that I agree with such as the outdated battle system and lack of voice-overs. Overall, I found your review insightful and helpful and frankly it is better than some of the stuff that comes from IGN. I just respectfully disagree with your position on the N64 comparison. |
Before I get into replying, it's alright: I responded just as hastily as you and it sounded more harsh than it needed to be. I was mostly clarifying and providing further proof, but I'm a pretty blunt person. I'm probably one of the only people left in gaming that DOESN'T use hyperbole or bias to dramaticize a point. Which leads me to the part where you're likely not going to win this one without seeing this game for yourself. You may disagree, but I have the actual proof to back my side up:
- "please keep in mind that if you zoom close enough into any texture it will eventually start to look like N64 res."
I know that sounds cool in theory, but it's not really true within reasonable expectations. If you have not been gaming on the other current gen consoles or PC, you might not realize just how far textures have come. Let me tell you, it takes a very unreasonable and foolish amount of zoom to accomplish this on other high budget titles on more powerful platforms in which the zoom has to be so extreme that you lose sense of the overall picture. That is not the case, here.
- I'm not sure why you used a non-native screenshot of OoT for your N64 comparison, but I raise you this:
That floor texture is just about as N64 as it gets, but thanks to modern, higher resolutions and better anisotropic filtering, we can discern it's supposed to be wood flooring (and a large part of that is the color). Respectfully, you are not seeing this on your TV, you are seeing this on a small phone or monitor. See this on your TV natively, and you'll be hard pressed to argue that it's not an N64-era level texture.
But then you start addressing graphics on the whole again, and once again I remind you, the narrative is incorrect: I never said this looks like an N64 game. I said there are textures that look like they come from an N64 game, and with that a graphical technique that has NOT been needed thanks to modern hardware in spinning sprites to face the camera to reduce sprite complexity needed to make it viewable from any angle in 3D. You then get into the use of cel-shaded artstyle where graphical technology is not needed, and while I could throw Genshin Impact, Kena, and even R&C Rift Apart at you as examples where art style and graphics tech meld properly, I'll instead show you just how N64 this game can be with these:
Now, I mentioned I have no narrative and do not use hyperbole. You can see I'm not 400% zooming in, nor am I even going out of my way for these. EVERY screenshot I've uploaded is from a COMMON area you visit regularly in the game, and I can even name these areas if you had the game so you could check it out yourself.
In fact, let me share a funny tidbit with you, worth bolding because the story is true and funnier when seen from an external perspective: the textures were so bad that I thought something was wrong with my Switch, and I rebooted my Switch TWICE! I even removed the cart for the second reboot, thinking my textures were simply not loading properly!
It looks bad, man. I never said it looked like an N64 game, but are there textures that are so unacceptably bad that they could come from an N64 game? Yes, and I can prove that part all damned day lol 
Your only real argument here is that not ALL textures look that bad, and that's true. But again, 2022, and it's Pokémon, coming out on hardware that's been around for 5 years,... This is pretty unacceptable to have commonly traversed areas look this bad, and that is why there are already graphics mods floating around. For the record, my friend LOVES Pokémon, so she was in disbelief of the bad graphics. So I showed her using screenshare, and she ended up looking into it herself only to realize just how bad it really is. I think some people really don't want to acknowledge it, but once you see it on a TV right in front of you, it's hard to praise the graphics/artstyle without sounding like a Nintendo fanboy haha!
| SegaHeart said: In older generation noone could outdo pokemon . Gameboy Soundchip was nostalgia at 1:14 mark and rest of the fight. |
The funny part is that the older entries were actually right in line with what was technologically possible at the time. That's what made them so much better, it's just crazy that with the amount of money flowing, they haven't been able to keep up OR even exceed most of what's possible today. When a spinoff like Monster Hunter Stories 2 is doing better combat and better cinematics, it's a bit of a shocker knowing it has a fraction of the available/potential budget... In fact, if MHS2 had actually had modernizations in its world design and gameplay, it really would have been the better "Pokémon" game.
