This game will sell doorbusters because it's called Pokémon. But they've also tried to show off how different the game is. Does it truly modernize the franchise, though, or is it simply more of the same?

And of course, I know some of you literally cannot look at me, so here's the full written version: https://zyro-eg.com/2022/02/10/pokemon-legends-arceus-review/

This game looks absolutely horrid. Don’t try to defend it, you’ll only look blind. From textures that could, and I shit you not, easily come from the N64 era which includes grass sprites that turn to face your camera like said era, to terrible draw distances and pop-in that are massively exacerbated by fast traversal methods, to horribly low-resolution shadows, to framerate dips and stutters despite being 30fps, the game does not pass the naked eye test unless you quite literally play with your eyes closed.

I had to laugh a bit at this part.  As a modern N64 gamer, this game looks nothing like an N64 game.  It's a cell-shaded game, I mean so the textures aren't suppopsed to be ultra hi-res.  That said, it looks a lot closer to BotW in my opinion than anything from the N64 and looks like a significant graphical jump from previous games (especially the Pokemon games we got on the 3DS just a few short years ago, which were still mainly top-down).  That  said, I do not own a Switch and I do not know what constitutes good graphics on the console.  Maybe the standard set by BotW isn't what it was at the end of the Wii U era (a console I owned) but I would say that this game looks really good with solid graphics by that standard.

Anyways, my opinion has always been that Pokemon's gangbuster success is a double-edged sword and is a big part of why we won't see major innovation from the franchise.  You don't get games like BotW on the tails of massive prosperity.  You get it when you're desperate like Nintendo was at the end of the Wii U era.  If Pokemon sales ever started to dramatically dip, I think at that point we would get the Pokemon game that everybody has been dreaming of for the past 25 years: a full proper console Pokemon RPG with a modern and innovative battle system.

People are so absurd. Clearly some have forgotten what the N64 looked like back in the day.

I like the artstyle, so the game looks decent enough for me, not that it really matters that much.

I made some calls about how horrible the game looks, and yeah it looks fugly, but N64 ugly!? This is too much.
It looks ahead of Gamecube and PS2, More in line with PS360 game for sure, i'd say this game is oudated by 15 years... anyway, you made some valid points, 7.5 is also how i would grade this game.

Your reply is worth a chuckle, too.  Who said it looks like an N64 game?  I didn't.  Don't be that person that makes up narratives by clinging to select words.  I clearly said it has textures that look like they come from an N64 game (and also the sprites that spin to face your camera, which you didn't mention because you know that's exactly how those sprites worked on the N64).  You haven't seen the game yourself on your own TV, and you're also talking to someone who spent most of my overall gaming time in my life on the N64.  So I'll humor your hyperbole despite knowing you'll see this on a tiny mobile screen or even a PC monitor, and not a big screen TV like I had to since I have to capture via HDMI for my recordings (ergo, imagine seeing this on a big screen TV):

There's a reason virtually no one shares those types of screenshots: they KNOW how bad the textures are.

I haven't.  That's why I didn't say it looks like an N64 game.

I see we're all running with a made-up narrative to find something to attack because, ya know, it's the internet

Everybody talking about how the graphics suck, but nobody talking about how the music slaps.

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.

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. 

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.