But it's only slightly better, to be frank this is not a good look for a new Pokemon game on Switch. As a 3D Artist myself, I could easily put together some better geometry than what's been leaked in the Lapras image, and I am aware of the standards in rock formation for current gen games. And it's not difficult to do, at all. I would hope Gamefreak is at least better than me, lol. The geometry is flat, no personality, and dated. The games I linked were more about dynamic lighting/physical based rendering (PBR) or even shadows on the models, which the Snack World does implement, but the pokemon leak doesn't. It looks like baked, pre rendered lighting which is a dated technique, well I take that back, not so much dated but not practiced as much today.

The bottom line is, we've seen graphics like this for 4 Pokemon games, it be extremely underwhelming to get another one.

Woah there, 4chan getting something correct one time doesn't mean we should start putting stock into every rumor on there.

lol, I know. Just reaching for some better info at this point. I'm definitely a bit more open though as the information does seem to be leaking left and right. Still labeling it as a rumor though. We'll see soon enough though!

The Pokemon screen is an off screen low quality shot so tbh you're jumping the gun somewhat because you can't exactly see everything in play to be making assumptions on lighting and such. I'm sure GF is better than any of us but you're not taking into account series approach and art direction to me the screen looks something similar to the approach taken with WW where it's not aiming for any of what you're looking for AAA games are not just about lighting and geometry.

Pokemon games were never really about graphics so if that's what you were looking forward to I doubt you were going to be satisfied as even on previous platforms they've always gone for modest graphics and focused more on the content.

I'm not saying that we need a pokemon game that costs that much, but why not give it the same time and effort as a Zelda game?

From a financial point of view, it is viable it's completely viable, and it even has more potential then simply using the normal formula. 

The 4chan leak so far looks promising, though i still think that Nintendo needs to change the formula. 

And lastly, would it kill them to have a difficulty option? 

Sounds casual. And why Eevee?

In Pokemon Yellow the player had a Pikachu while the rival had an Evee.

I'm not sure you understand where I'm coming from. Off screen footage doesn't even matter when analyzing what techniques are being used in the rendering engine. From what I can see, this is just a 3DS game. I've seen other off screen footage of games like Zelda Breath of the Wild, and could tell they were using a PBR engine. My eye is trained to analyze these kinds of things because I've been studying them for years. I'm making assumptions but they're damn good assumptions seeing that there are aspects of a PBR engine that are unmistakable even from far away. You have your dynamic lighting of course which take my word for it, this screen does NOT have, and then you have your meat and potatoes of PBR, which is Albedo (or Color), Metalness, Roughness, Normals, etc. That's why a game like Mario Odyssey looks the way it does. Of course it's their amazing and skilled art department, and then it's the standards of HD game development that also help make modern day games look the way they do.

I would hope Gamefreak's modeling art department is better than me, but base off of this image, I would say at least in the modeling department...they aren't. This does not show off how you do or create HD games on a device like Switch. Those rocks are at best, a hexagonal or octogonal primitive that's been cut in half, unwrapped and textured, nothing more and would take me at most 30 minutes to replicate. This is not the quality I would expect from them, especially with tools like Unreal Engine 4 are their fingertips.

But yes, I agree that the series has an art style to maintain. But you're mixing art style with modern standards. I don't care about the art style, that's great. But Wind Waker HD on Wii U at least looked like this:

vs

That's what I mean by more dynamic lighting or even just bloom, you can see the difference between the two almost instantly, the same can't be said about this Switch "leak". And I never said AAA games are all about lighting and modeling, but it's a decent chunk of it. Art and modeling along with animation are essentially 3 of the 5 pillars (coding and audio being the other 2) so they're important. 

But look, I was satisfied with how Pokemon looked on Gameboy, Gameboy Advance, DS, and 3DS because they took advantage of what the hardware had to offer. They looked like games on their respective devices. However, this leaked image, does NOT look representative of what Switch is capable of and it's quite underwhelming. I'm not a graphics whore, my favorite games are games that do stylistic approaches, but I'm going to call out incompetency when I see it. The tools, training, and engines that are available today are more than enough to develop something that doesn't look like a 3DS game on the most powerful mobile chipset on the market. That's the issue I have with this screenshot. That being said, I still retain the idea that this was just a tech demo for Pokemon Stars just to get a feel for the hardware. 

Pokemon is not an AAA franchise. 

These terms "AAA" or "B" are film terms that transferred over to games industry. They have nothing to do with the popularity of the game but the standard budget allocated to that series. All Pokemon games have less than a 20mill budget. I hope that image is not true as well, but everything we know so far makes it seem so. A Pokemon aimed at Pokemon GO players. 

This is what happens when a franchise goes unchallenged for too long.

Just to through this out:

There is a new Digimon Story game in development being built from the group up for PS4.