I hated on Pokemon before it was cool, but I think we've lost the plot, guys. I feel like this deserved its own thread.

I remember thinking XY were kind of ugly looking Pokémon games. I also didn't really like how BW/B2W2 looked tbh, though I didn't think they were ugly. I thought ORAS was a huge improvement, and SM were too, with a bit of jank. I thought SwSh looked too shiny, and had a lot of the jank of SM, so I wasn't a fan, but this is when people started really saying that Pokemon games looked ugly more generally.

I kind of agreed here, and for other reasons completely skipped SwSh. I remember the Let's Go games came out and I skipped those too. I really hated the way they looked. But they were good looking games lol the dust has settled. We can admit that, right? The Let's Go games were sort of a wind waker situation where they looked a way that went backwards in terms of the direction we thought the series were going, but removed from that expectation, the games look wayyy better than SwSh for example. Not just better, but good.

Then Legends Arceus came out. Same jank of SM and SwSh, but definitely an improvement over those. I liked how that game looked more when it came out than I do now, but I still think it looks good. Btw, when I say "jank," I mean the character models have weird proportions. This has been an issue ever since XY honestly, but that was only in the cutscenes so it just felt like something they'd fix later, but it's felt like they just use the same base every game and it always looked off and amateur.

BDSP also released and just look bad, but the trainer models look really good, funnily enough. No more jank. So far, we have generally a mixed bag of how the games looked ever since XY, but a lot of the games still look good. ORAS, SM, Let's Go, and Legends Arceus look good. Even still, I've been avoiding part the criticism, which is technical.

SwSh were critiqued for looking technically bad too, not just aesthetically. I don't agree. I think they look mediocre, but that's it. Let's Go was fine. BDSP look fine graphically. Legends Arceus had some issues. But they don't look bad graphically. They just don't look impressive. I'll get back to that.

I played SV blind. I had no idea what the discourse was for these games until after I finished. I loved it. I had issues, but I had a great time. Relevant to this thread, is I actually thought they looked better than any Pokemon game since HGSS. I thought they were beautiful. I log online and see the games being bashed for how they look.

First, I didn't run into literally any of the glitches I've seen online. 2, I did run into all of the framerate issues. They were bad, so I loved SV in spite of it. I, like many of you, gasped at that intro cutscene in the class where the students behind me moved at like 3 frames per second. But I thought the game itself looked really good. I'd be fine with the game looking as it does now, but at a better framerate, forever.

But of course, I don't think it's a graphically impressive game. I've been a Pokemon fan since the beginning. Almost none of them have been. Maybe Battle Revolution was impressive for the Wii. Idk. But my expectation for Pokemon has never been the specs. HGSS and Platinum are the best looking DS games to me, and they aren't the most graphical games to me, and Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee are the best looking Pokemon games this console gen (so far) even though they aren't graphically the most impressive. I don't know where this spec critique of Pokemon became the norm.

Pokemon is an unrealistic franchise, so I genuinely don't understand what people are looking for if they not only don't like how ZA and Champions look, which I understand I guess, but that they think it should look graphically better. How????

Not how as in I can't understand how it could look more impressive, but I can't understand how much more impressive a graphical increase would look. Pokemon games are meant to look like cartoons. There's only so far increased fidelity will bring before you can't notice a different, and my biggest point to that is that they don't look bad graphically anymore! They look fine! Good even! Maybe the colors are a bit flat? But I think that's a stylistic choice, and I kind of think it looks good here. But people are saying it looks like a PS1 or 2 game or something. Statements like that make my head spin. It looks like a really good looking Wii U game, aka a switch game.

The attack animations in ZA look amazing. All of them. Amazing. Go and rewatch. Outrage looks killer. Flamethrower looks great. The pokemon finally look right again. This semi cel-shaded look for them looks great. I was always on the side of preferring the pastel colors and outlines of XY since I love sugimori's art, but this sold me on a different style.

The insides of the buildings look so good and detailed. The character models look good and not jank. Lumiose looks really good. Yes, the buildings look a bit flat (literally), but why care? They don't look bad like that. They look fine. The textures look better than they have before. Not amazing, but pretty good.

I feel like I'm in some alternate reality seeing people call ZA in particular ugly when to me, it shows Gamefreak actually listening to criticism. What's craziest of all to me is that the game looks this good on the Switch, when the Switch 2 is coming and this will likely be a launch title for that system too. It will look and perform better than this, and it already looks and performs this good now!

Pokemon Legends: Z-A and Champions are good looking games - You guys are just mean. I think we're all just traumatized by post-DS Pokemon, but it's okay. Things are going back to normal. Legends was good with some issues. SV were good, with some issues. Champions and ZA look better. I'm sure they'll have issues too. Never forget the Dexit, but we need to move forward.

I think it sends a really confusing message to GF when they do something so unambiguously good, and are criticized as much as they seem to be with this announcement. The message being to stop listening to fans because they don't know wtf they're talking about anymore. If ZA is being compared to a ps2 game when it looks this good, they're just hating to hate. I don't want them to think that.

You're welcome I've just fixed pokemon discourse worldwide

Maybe they arent tho. At least what theyve released so far gives me a better impression than Violet/Scarlet, tho maybe its just me. 

Too long OP; and after skimming it may satire but; I think for as huge as Pokemon is and the amount money it brings in these past Pokemon look sub par. We have developers like Gust, Compile Heart, Sting + indies; MUCH smaller developers producing more visually satisfying games.

I can't see any reason why Pokemon can't reach this visual quality other than just not wanting to. My biggest problem are features that go missing every game. Why did difficulty levels, something that every RPG series is doing, disappear after 1 game? 

Ni No Kuni on the PS3 is gorgeous.

Pokémon as a series that sells an ungodly amount of copies should be putting more polish and production value into their titles. Pokémon games just look cheap and low effort graphically and it's nothing to do with specs.

Pokemon games are not the best looking games and nevdr will be for 3 reasons :

1) They are like 200 to make the games
2) They released 10 main games on the switch, compared to 7 on gb, 5 on gba 9 on ds, 8 on 3ds
3) They were a portable console developper only until 2017.

You have to actually read the post, or it's not worth replying to substantively 🙃

Okay, great example I can use. We both agree that Ni No Kuni on PS3 looks great. But obviously Z-A looks more graphically impressive, right? Like it's not even close. If you like the style more, I think that's fair. I may even agree with you.

But NNK isn't even, for example, more graphically impressive for PS3 than Z-A is for Switch. The character models in ZA don't have a low poly count. The textures aren't low res anymore (compared to other open world Switch games). Like I said, the lighting is a bit flat, but I don't see why that can't be seen as an artistic choice. The world looks very toy like, and not every game needs to have lighting like Link's Awakening. Even then, the lighting looks better than SV.

I just don't understand what people are expecting a "more graphical" Switch open world Pokemon game to look like, outside of nicer lighting. Like genuinely, take something Like Xenoblade Chronicles 3, for example. A lot of people think that a peak game in terms of Switch graphics. I genuinely want to know what looks graphically better in your minds than what we're seeing in Z-A that is possible to replicate while keeping Pokémon's art style. XC3 definitely doesn't have better animations than what we've seen so far. It doesn't look like there are more polygons on the models of the humanoid characters, and it wouldn't make sense to put more polygons on the Pokemon themselves than some of the more detailed monsters and enemies in those games.

We can look at TotK. When I see the floor textures, they just straight up don't look more detailed than what's in ZA. With Arceus, there was a clear difference in fidelity. I don't see that in ZA so far. TotK seems like it has better aliasing? Is that that big of a deal, or even what people are talking about? Foliage looks about on par-just in different styles. We don't have any good evidence for the draw distance in ZA compared to TotK, but we do have comparisons at least compared to some things in LA and SV, and ZA looks better than both of those. The clouds definitely look better in TotK, but again who is complaining about the clouds, and how are we to tell if that's a graphic issue or a style issue? The buildings in TotK look better, but the buildings in ZA don't look cheap. And again, I'm only talking graphically here.

And again, I don't even see why Pokemon needs to be compared to games like this at all if the final product looks good, which I think it does. I don't see why the amount of money Pokemon makes should matter on a game looking graphically impressive when it looks aesthetically good already. Platinum and HGSS looked amazing compared to other DS game because of the style alone, and not because of how they graphically stacked.

I think ZA can look graphically more impressive for sure. I just don't think most of those improvements would be that noticeable in a game with Pokemon's art style. I don't think people would notice more polygonal buildings in a game like this very much. The Switch Zeldas look way better than ZA, but it's mostly due to artistic choices from what I can see.

Graphics is not the thing I prioritize the most about Pokemon, but if I see GameFreak cutting corners everywhere else (less features, less postgame, less battle modes, LESS POKEMON...), if I don't see an improvement in something, anything, to compensate, I will call them out. I was understanding with the jump between BW and XY, because the 3D jump was a big leap, so it was understandable at the time. Now, with the trend continuing for multiple generations and absolute no sign of improving (in fact, it's becoming worse), I am much less charitable.

They have no excuse: they have enough resources to make it work, they win enough money to justify hiring more staff if they need help (plus they could ask other Nintendo studios). The Switch is powerful enough to show absolutely gorgeous stylized graphics, so it's not a hardware constraint. Hell, I am one of the few people who would rather go back to 2D if we get enough worthwile content. GameFreak has been going on a downwards spiral ever since The Pokemon Co. hit gold with Pokemon Go, which has dwarfed their own profits for the company, and they are cutting corners to try to catch up to an impossible standard.

Plus, who thought having the entire game in Luminose City was a good idea?? Seriously, why?? At least Arceus had you explore a world, this is just putting mons randomly between buildings, I cannot believe how transparently lazy this choice is.

ZA looks good enough, but nowhere near great. Watching the trailer by itself in 720p it actually looks a lot better than it did during the Pokemon Presents. Either they were showing an earlier build in the Presents or the streaming feed caused it to look way more low-res and flat than it is.

That said, Xenoblade 3's characters and models are way, way higher poly than ZA's are. It's like comparing Mario 64 to Sunshine. And Ni No Kuni looks way, way better than ZA. Being a playable Studio Ghibli movie will do that even if the tech is better in ZA, which I see no evidence of it being.

What I have wanted from Pokemon on Switch is to have that feeling I get from Xenoblade games when I go into open areas and see all of that exotic and wonderous wildlife, including gigantic creatures, roaming and moving about. The only game that really gives that sense of wonder is New Pokemon Snap, though Arceus does do a lot in that regard even if the terrible visuals hold it back. If ZA is limited to 1 city as it looks right now it won't be able to do that no matter how good the graphics are. If on Switch 2 with its better than PS4-level hardware they make a Pokemon game that is as open as Arceus and S/V and looks as good as the original Wii U version of XCX at 720p or a high-level 360 open-world game at 720p, I'll be happy.

Nah Legends Z-A looks really bad; the characters are fine but the rest is atrocious; flat lighting, muddy textures, rough image quality. This would have been subpar on the Xbox 360 in 2007 much less on Switch in 2025.

I'm sure those who only care about gameplay will still be able to enjoy it, but there's just no excuse for one of the biggest IPs in the world to be so technically poor.

Oh, I totally agree on everything else. I'm just talking about graphics here. I just don't think ZA look like a cheaply made game at all. At least not for what it is, which is a Pokemon spin off. It doesn't look like a cheap Pokemon spin off, and it doesn't look like they were cutting corners graphically. I just don't see what People are talking about there at all.

I think the entire game being set in Lumiose is a great idea. The world in LA wasn't that big, and I don't see why anyone is seeing exploring one dense city as a downgrade to a small open world. It feels like criticizing GTA or Cyberpunk for not being the size of a country. Especially for a spin off series that hadn't built it's identity yet, I think it's fine that they're doing this. This will be by far the biggest and most complex city ever made in a Pokemon game, and quite possibly the biggest and most complex one they'll ever do. I just don't think that isn't ambitious, again, especially considering that this is a spin off.

SV totally eclipsed LA in scale, and SV will likely be way bigger than this game too. I just don't think a spin off being smaller than a main series game is lazy.

I think it looked great even in the presents. I think people were just looking for things to hate on.

I have to address the character model thing.

Ignore the art style for a moment. You cannot tell me with a straight face that XC3 looks like it has way more polygons than ZA. Especially not to the extent that it's a generational difference. We can not be looking at the same games.

The Ni No Kuni thing is an art style question, which I'm not here to discuss, but you mentioned that you see no evidence of ZA being technically more impressive than that game, which is absolutely insane to me. I don't even have a fair way to compare the games because NNK isn't open world. ZA looks at least as good as NNK2 graphically while having a wayyy larger area. Of course it's more graphically impressive.

Remember the system we're talking about here. The Switch is more powerful than a PS3, but nowhere near a PS4. This game doesn't have a generational leap of hardware to work with, and NNK 1+2 had the luxury of being able to have small areas to prioritize graphics. If NNK took place in one open world city, they'd have looked much, much worse than ZA.

To the last point, I'll just repeat the point I made to Darwinianevolution: the Legends games are spin offs. What's more, they're spin offs that didn't even have an identity yet. It seems obvious now that the Legends games are pseudo remakes that allow them to test out new mechanics and ambitions for the next generation. That seems to clearly be the relationship between LA and SV, considering how massively SV eclipsed LA in scale and borrowed some pokeball throwing stuff.

Being disappointed in the direction those games went is totally valid, but wanting ZA to be a different game is different from the game cutting corners. Legends never promised to be a series where you explore open areas. You did that for one game, and we've known for a year that this one wasn't going to do that.

If ZA is any indication, Gen 10 on Switch 2 will look incredible, but it won't be some graphically impressive PS4-level powerhouse. The world design of SV was incredible already. I think it's very likely you'll get your wish granted by then, as long as you're okay with the game not looking like TLOU2.