@Frogger - Your attitude is why Pokemon is where it's at. It's the same attitude that GameFreak has; were ok with Pokemon just being "ok". Not terrible but not amazing or even great. Just passable. Then there are other developers working their asses off to make sure their franchises remain relevant and up to date with all the new tech/design philosophies with a fraction of the budget and marketing that Pokemon would get. Nobody cares that it's an improvement over the previous outing. There is absolutely no excuse why Pokemon "feels" like it has the budget of a Ys or a Compile Heart game...... that's not fair. Their games look better than anything Pokemon has done in the last 8 years or so.

The thread isn't titled "Pokemon Legends: Z-A and Champions are just passable looking games." I think they actually look good. I actively like how ZA looks. I like its graphics AND art style. I don't know what Pokemon game you think feels like it has that kind of budget. Ys and Compile Heart don't look better than ZA. And it's fine for Pokemon to not overindulge on spending for a spin off. People do care that it's an improvement.

Ahhh wait I get it. You want Pokemon to be a AAA franchise when it works well being a AA franchise. I want a game that looks better than ZA, but I absolutely never need that better to be an expensively made AAA game.

Give me this with better looking buildings you can actually enter, some differences in elevation, and better lighting and I'm pretty much good, but you seem to need much more merely because the franchise earns more. The characters look perfect, the Pokemon look great, the moves look great, the battle animations look great, the colors look great, and the scale is huge.

My attitude made Pokemon successful. It's the same attitude that made the original games the best selling games in the franchise. They could have made a proper explorable rpg on the n64, gamecube and wii, but instead they made the 5 best games in the series that were cheaper to make yet stands toe to toe with some of the best games ever made. It's silly to claim that pokemon's flaw is that they don't spend enough. XY are so bad, and it has nothing to do with how much money was spent on them. Pokemon was losing its soul. SV is a clear indication that they're getting some of it back, even if there were growing pains. ZA looks like the growing pains are clearly over. It's a silly and completely ahistorical idea that Pokemon needs to be some AAA technical marvel to be quality or respectable. It just has to be good.

Idk if ZA will be good, but it's off to an amazing start. Pokemon sucking for two console gens have completely rottened people's minds on this topic.

I would not be using games like Digimon or Yokai watch to show Pokemon's outdatedness if I wanted Pokemon to an AAA game. Matter of fact, no one in this thread has used any AAA games at all. They're all AA games! So, even comparison to AA games Pokemon is behind. What we want is Pokemon to live up to expectations set my other developers with similar or less status to Pokemon. If its going to do an open city game the do a great one, not passable one. That's it. Smaller developers are doing it This not about graphics necessarily(Just the first and easiest indicator) , its about a billion dollar franchise that takes multiple steps backwards every release. It's about a developer that seems to not be able to keep up with it's competitors or even outdo itself. It feels like Pokemon is gated but purposely.

I'm still determining if this thread is suppose to be satire. 

it's a billion dollar franchise exactly because they didn't do a ubisoft and being like 20000 to work on it. Plus, how do you expect pokemon games to look on par with other games when they release games so often with so few people ?

For example, zelda. Botw released in 2017, the zelda team is a core team from nintendo so they know the hardware far better than anyone else. It took them 6 years to jump from skyward sword to botw and another 7 years for same graphics totk.

When zelda team began working on botw, gamefreak was doing games on a N64 portable system, the ds, with black and white. And they've been working on a gamecube like portable system for the next years between that and the release of botw as they release ultra sun and moon in 2017 (November instead of March for botw). And during that time, you can acknowledge that pokemon games have far more improved technically than zelda games, going from black and white to SV is a far bigger leap than say twilight princess/skyward sword to botw.

Then they changed their engine for let's go, then again for swsh, then they even lend the remakes to ILCA while focusing on arceus and SV and just used the same engine for ZA.

You can't expect much from a team doing portable games less than a decade ago then changing the look of their games three times in 5 years while releasing games so often. Of course the pokemon games won't look great as they don't even have time to work on them to begin with. They fear that they would cease to sell games if they stopped, which is silly.

But yes, pokemon fans know that the games are not good looking, we have eyes. Yet, it's getting in the right direction, just slowly.

I have a ps5 and when i played demon souls remake, i could easily see that pokemon swsh were not even close to ps3 version.

Thanks for this post :)

Like how you can look at this and go "Pokemon looks fine" ?
Gamefreak are lazy sloppy developers, that live off of how successful the cartoon was, and their card game became.
These games sell to fans, that only play the games, for the pokemon (its like people collecting bottle caps), reguardless of how bad the actual games are.

BOTW was developed for the Wii U's inferior hardware and ported to the Switch late in its development with only a higher rendering resolution and slightly better performance differentiating the 2 versions. What was impressive about it on the Switch wasn't how well they knew the hardware but that they got it to run as well as it did on new hardware it and its engine were not developed for.

What Gamefreak needs is help. Monolithsoft has helped with the development of every console Zelda-game since and including Skyward Sword. Retro helped with the development of Mario Kart 8. It should be as easy as 1+1 to get a team from Monoliftsoft to Gamefreak's office to help them with the graphics and performance side of things so Pokemon can look and run amazing. But for whatever reason Pokemon is a gated community that doesn't allow outsiders, even close relatives, to come in and do anything. With every other franchise there's oversight, suggestions, and help from other places in Nintendo. It's only Pokemon where the status quo is so sacred that no one else in all of Nintendo can touch it with a 10-foot pole. Until this changes and they allow outside help, I don't think Pokemon will ever look like it's in the same generation as the rest of Nintendo's IPs.

Except if gamefreak does what they should have done years ago, which is :

"Hey, nintendo, do you mind us having botw engine plus one or 2 tech guys, just for once?"

"Of course, here they are"

Alternate universe ending : Pokemon since swsh has botw's graphical level.  Yeah, over simplifying but... Since Iwata helped on pokemon games back in gen 1 and 2, they could have asked once again.

Could Game Freak move over into Unreal Engine?

While Pokemon games graphics aren't exactly the best, that isn't the main problem with the games. Yes with the budget Game Freak has they absolutely should be taking the time to make better graphics and hiring better graphics people, as to me it seems likely the main reason Switch Pokemon games just had decent graphics is because they have just been making portable games and suddenly they are working on a powerful system that can produce great graphics so maybe their graphics people just don't have those skills. Regardless, graphics absolutely should be better.

But the main problem is the gameplay, not the graphics. I have Sword, and while the game was okay, it wasn't very challenging. The gyms were super easy and without challenge you just don't get much out of the game. And there just wasn't anything that was very exciting in the game. Not a bad game, but the only reason it sold 25m+ instead of a couple million is the Pokemon name.

I have Arceus as well, though I've only played a few hours of it, and while I like it more than Sword for sure, it still, from the little I've played, just seemed like a decent pokemon game and a step in the right direction, but nothing crazy good. The only other Pokemon game I've ever played is the original (Red) and I remember LOVING that game. Just feels like Game Freak phones it in a bit these days.

S/V looked cool being all open world, and from what I heard it was good, but of course the bug fiasco at launch, and which they apparently never fully fixed, was just absurd. And I watched the trailer for A-Z and it doesn't look interesting to me.

Since it seems likely the next mainline game what come out until holiday 2026 and will get an extra year in development compared to most of the mainline pokemon games, and being the first game on the next gen Switch, I feel like it's kind of a make or break moment for the series. This is their opportunity to hire more and better graphics people, take more time to make a polished bug-free game, and bring back the challenge and fun and excitement that the series used to have a long time ago, which is what made it a mega franchise in the first place. The series is running on pure fanbase momentum from the past, and they need to give it a shot in the arm by making the first Switch 2 Pokemon game actually great. Graphics are part of that but just a minor part.

This problem is so frustrating to me because it seems like it would be so easy to just add difficulty options and make an absolutely massive difference to people who have been playing the games for 20+ years...