Pokémon games have become consistently ugly, and it’s alright to wish they weren’t
Pokémon games have become consistently ugly, and it’s alright to wish they weren’t
by razorbeamz
49 Comments
razorbeamz
> Point being: the Pokémon community, as much as there is ever a single, monolithic “community” in games as vastly popular as these, has been heavily polarised by the modern games’ shift away from wistful pixel art and cheeky sprites to 3D environments that somehow feel both flatter and less expressive than their lo-fi origins. That excessive polarisation is a big part of why it’s so hard to talk about these things – and, I suspect, part of why quite reasonable fan feedback can often struggle to reach developers among the noise. It’s hard to say something pretty normal – “I wish this looked better” – when insincere, cynically reactionary people are also saying it. Typically, that is a sign you shouldn’t be agreeing with them at all, frankly, but this case feels like a good time for the old Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point meme to play its part. Like a broken clock, in this rare instance the jerks are kind of right, just in a very wrong way.
This is my favorite takeaway from this.
The games look bad. Like, ***really*** bad. But if you point that out, you get lumped in with the people who wanted to burn down Game Freak HQ because there was an ugly tree once.
Takadoxus
That’s why I’m voting with my wallet, and haven’t gotten the gen 9 games.
supervegeta101
And the notion sickness. Am I the only one getting motion sickness from these games?
FromDwight
New Pokemon Snap set the bar for what the games should look like.
But honestly, if they had just stuck with the Let’s Go art style the newer games would have looked so much better. They keep going backwards.
AllSeeingGoggles
> If anything, the uglier the main series Pokémon games get, the more they sell
That feels like a misinterpretation of the data. Pretty sure the Switch Pokemon games sold more because the Switch itself sold so many units, rather than the ugliness causing sales numbers.
StrictlyFT
Game Freak can make decent looking 3D games, the reason they haven’t been is because they’re doing too much.
Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee are the best looking games in terms of consistency.
SW/SH looks good when you’re not in the Wild Area.
Arceus is decent for what it is and has charming art design.
It’s Scarlet and Violet that’s the problem, even if the performance doesn’t bother you, the art design is abysmal. And it’s mostly because Game Freak make its two largest games simultaneously for some silly reason.
The problem is all those games (DLC included) came out one year after each other. Game Freak has been doing too much in the Switch Era
Surfugo
I don’t mind them, but one thing I really wish they’d do is make a HD-2D game. Octopath Traveller looks gorgeous. I think if we had a Pokemon game in the same style, it’d be absolutely amazing.
Microif
Scarlet and Violet are the only ones I consider genuinely ugly tbh. Sword and Shield are honestly really pretty outside of the wild area, Lets Go was really good looking, ZA is looking pretty good, and PLA has some charm to its visuals
DevLink89
I made this comment on a pokemon post in some other nintendo group and got lynched for it. I don’t think anyone can argue it looks bad for being a late- generation switch title when BotW looks and plays better as a Switch launch title. I didn’t even mention the performance which is also very choppy for pokemon games. Can’t have a scrap of critique these days.
Big-Criticism-8137
It’s not alright what they are doing, and I don’t understand why people keep saying otherwise.
Yes, the games are fun, and Pokémon holds a special place in probably all of our hearts. But at the price they’re asking? This is not okay (for a $10 game? Maybe). I expect the developers to deliver something worth the money. I want my money and my lifelong loyalty to be seen as a valuable bonus – not as something they can take for granted while putting out sloppy work.
At the very least, I want transparency. The developers should explain what’s going on and how this keeps happening and why investing in those games should still be worth it.
kuribosshoe0
Arceus looked pretty good. Not cutting edge, but passable.
Then they regressed with SV.
James-Avatar
Game Freak has sold almost 100 million units on the Switch, I don’t know where that money is going but it doesn’t seem like any of it goes into the next game. Ironically, Pokémon games are slower to evolve than any other franchise making those numbers.
superyoshiom
What’s it gonna take, man, for us to have a decent looking Pokemon game? The games are fun enough—didn’t play SV put I did play Arceus and the gameplay loop was great—but they look so embarrassingly ugly.
I think the last time GF put out something decent looking was Sun and Moon. I remember for the hardware, those games actually looked quite nice, even if the frame rate got to be quite bad at times. But I do wonder how things will be with the switch 2.
PaperClipSlip
Pokémon games have many issues. In recent times and with knowledge of the Terraleak it’s become more and more apparent the dev team is under huge pressure. And instead of scaling down to a more manageable size for a game, they keep trying to get their BotW.
There’s also the fact that games are often in development alongside each other. So there’s no natrual feedback loop. Which is why S/V have a half-backed sneaking mechanic and not Arcues’ mechanic.
Grazuzer
I so wish they’d get back to a level of quality close to Colosseum or XD: a real mature story, stylish characters, unique animations, real animations and unique behaviors for KOs and damage suffered, fuck, it was a proper game!
And that was 22 years ago! how can games be worse than they were 22 years ago?
MillionDollarMistake
It’s a shame because the games don’t have bad art styles, they’re just poorly implemented. PLA had a really nice painted look that really gave the Pokemon a fun and unique flair, but then the environments look like they were made by amateur Gmod map makers. Or the NPC’s moved around like robots.
I’m not confident that Pokemon Champions is going to look very good. It’s another battle simulator like Stadium and Revolution before it except this one is fully made by Gamefreak, right? With those 2 (technically 3) games the main appeal was seeing your dinky sprites brought to life with amazing graphics and animations. Stadium looks dated (though it looked great for it’s time) but Revolution still holds up really well. But “gamefreak” and “amazing 3D graphics” are not two things that go together very well, which at that point what is even the point of Champions? Just a way to let mobile users a way to battle online?
blukirbi
At least there’s one thing for sure, Pokemon TCG art goes hard.
D14form
Game freak is not a good game developer company. They struck gold with their IP, and thats it.
Most of the main line games are shells of what they could be.
PredictiveTextNames
The best thing Pokemon could do, IMO, is go the “HD 2D” route a la Triangle Strategy ect.
Pokemon worked best with sprites, and has only been increasingly disappointing since the move to 3d with X/Y.
IndustryPast3336
If this is what ugly qualifies as I want to know what games they aren’t playing.
Pliskkenn_D
If they were games produced for another IP we’d rightly give them flak and laugh at them.
Appropriate-Let-283
Pokemon made me start appreciating graphics in video games. It made me realise that my experince would be cooler if it looked better. Especially after playing games like Rdr2 and God of War Ragnarok.
Soft_Revenue2411
Dude, if they made DS level 2D games/sprites again I’d dump the 3D stuff in the garbage bin so fast. It’s never felt the same, I’ve always enjoyed the gameplay and art style of playing enjoyable 2d games that are linear and just fun and simple, that’s why I’ve been a Nintendo guy, I’ve never cared about fancy 3D graphics even without glitches. What a shame, I can’t play any of the new stuff, I didn’t even like playing coliseum back in the day because 3D doesn’t even have 1% of the feeling that all the classic Gen 1-5 games have.
not_superbeak
As an old person, I’d be fine going back to Gameboy-GBA era graphics for Pokémon.
Kamarai
They want to be on the open world hype train. But they refuse to compromise their release schedule for it.
This is the result.
-BluBone-
For Nintendo’s leading series I don’t understand why they won’t invest more into GameFreak and find the talent that they need to make these games function correctly. Zelda and Xeno games look incredible and run well on the Switch. The technology exists.
bongorituals
I agree with the writer here, but the irony of an article about these games looking ugly being hosted on a hideously ugly website overloaded with slow-loading, full-page video ads is… intense.
It was quite an experience scrolling up, and then down, and then up again, and then looking for a tiny little “X” to tap and then scrolling back down, all in an epic battle to simply *keep the screen on a single paragraph while I read it.*
Atrocious.
Mac_N_Cheeks_69
Its bad when x and y look better than scarlet violet
robotshavenohearts2
The sad reality is that they are making these games for children, so they can push merch. They can get away with the bare minimum.
itdogottobelikethat
The Switch games are the best selling Pokemon games of all time. Which shows there’s no need to change anything. So, everyone will either have to accept it or stop buying it in protest of their abysmal quality.
They need to really take a step forward with the graphical art style and animations and take their time to make a good game. Whether it’s open world or not.
just_a_hole_sir_
what made me laugh when was Nemona takes you up to the lighthouse tower and shows you the ‘beautiful, breathtaking” sites of paldea, and it’s 2D, jagged, 240p repeated textures EVERYWHERE.
IndustryThat
A true connoisseur of beauty, thank you for stepping in.
We have 2025 and this is the biggest mascot company in the ENTIRE WORLD, come on people, effort are necessary here!
billtopia
I don’t even need a Pokemon game to look that much better. I just need it to not look like a last gen game. Scarlet/violet are really fun with their open world, until you realize how generic everything looks and that there are hardly any interior spaces. A lot of the game looked like I was playing GameCube game.
DrewbieDoobert
Saying this on any other platform gets you a lot of flack. Pokemon fans are very accepting of mediocre graphics and don’t really care if the game runs poorly.
The game could run off of two pixels and look like it belongs on the DS, and all they will get upset over is that one of the starters is Chikorita 😆
Captain_Pumpkinhead
Fucking Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks on the old DS look better than modern Pokémon games.
pocket_arsenal
I expect to get downvoted for this since it’s like the most entitled take one could have, but I probably would put up with ugly looking games, dull stories, and samey gameplay if they just never removed the national dex. Having pokemon from as far back as my middle school days really kept me invested in this franchise. Even when I was starting to feel like the gameplay was dull, I still wanted to keep going since I had a history with the monsters in my PC storage. Now I’d have to pay a fee just to keep the ones I can’t use anymore ( And I have a living dex up to gen 6, plus pokemon I’ve spent hours breeding to perfection )
If Pokemon Champions is really the Pokemon Stadium-like game people think it is with a full national dex, and it actually has decent single player content, and isn’t just a vehicle for battling strangers online, I might actually get back into the series and even pick up the games I missed out on.
Adept-Armadillo2731
bring back the Top down pokémon games !
yellow_slash_red
I think Arceus looked really great, even though the textures and general overworld did look like a Gamecube/Wii era title at points lol
bumgrub
Some of those textures look like they’re literally developing these games for ps2
GingerGuy97
ITS. ALL. ART. STYLE!!!!!! I’m so tired of being told that graphics don’t matter. It’s NOT about the graphics (even though we could go on and on about how the actual graphics are bad and edges look terrible) it’s about the art style. Games like Hades, Stardew Valley, and Astro Bot are not 4K highest-settings-you-can-get kind of games. They don’t need that. What they have instead is art style that’s consistent and beautiful.
It’s insulting that each game looks more and more like an engine test with generic assets dropped in when Pokémon is inherently one of the most stylistic IPs in the world. Just make the games fucking pretty already.
stickyquestions
If 3D Pokemon is so unsustainable, halve the number of games that come out. Make a 2D game in the off-years to introduce new Pokemon and make more traditional adventures. That will give the 3D ones longer in the oven.
Pokemon should look like Octopath Traveler and it looks like a first-timer’s indie project. And when you say something about it, people just tell you you’re “nostalgic.”
Disastrous-Pick-3357
I posted about this in the pokemon community, and the first they did was just say to go f yourself for expecting better games, and said that I wasn’t a pokemon fan just cause I don’t like the modern games
Tumblechunk
I want sprite games back, I want spinoffs that cater to pokeboomers
bubby56789
Honestly the people who scream at others for disliking the lack of polish in the newer titles are equally as obnoxious as the ones who say you’re just an NPC if you buy them or enjoy them despite their many flaws. The games can be fun but you’re not EVER going to catch me telling someone I prefer the five minutes of development time over ACTUAL time.
ActivateGuacamole
I don’t think PLZA looks bad. the pokemon themselves look great. They have a nice lighting system.
The environments aren’t as good but they are not nearly as bad as everybody here is acting. And the performance in the trailer was good.
PoshDiggory
Pokemon peaked at Gen 3.
GalactusAteMyPlanet
Dunno about everyone else but I honestly wish the Pokemon games were still in 2D.
49 Comments
> Point being: the Pokémon community, as much as there is ever a single, monolithic “community” in games as vastly popular as these, has been heavily polarised by the modern games’ shift away from wistful pixel art and cheeky sprites to 3D environments that somehow feel both flatter and less expressive than their lo-fi origins. That excessive polarisation is a big part of why it’s so hard to talk about these things – and, I suspect, part of why quite reasonable fan feedback can often struggle to reach developers among the noise. It’s hard to say something pretty normal – “I wish this looked better” – when insincere, cynically reactionary people are also saying it. Typically, that is a sign you shouldn’t be agreeing with them at all, frankly, but this case feels like a good time for the old Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point meme to play its part. Like a broken clock, in this rare instance the jerks are kind of right, just in a very wrong way.
This is my favorite takeaway from this.
The games look bad. Like, ***really*** bad. But if you point that out, you get lumped in with the people who wanted to burn down Game Freak HQ because there was an ugly tree once.
That’s why I’m voting with my wallet, and haven’t gotten the gen 9 games.
And the notion sickness. Am I the only one getting motion sickness from these games?
New Pokemon Snap set the bar for what the games should look like.
But honestly, if they had just stuck with the Let’s Go art style the newer games would have looked so much better. They keep going backwards.
> If anything, the uglier the main series Pokémon games get, the more they sell
That feels like a misinterpretation of the data. Pretty sure the Switch Pokemon games sold more because the Switch itself sold so many units, rather than the ugliness causing sales numbers.
Game Freak can make decent looking 3D games, the reason they haven’t been is because they’re doing too much.
Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee are the best looking games in terms of consistency.
SW/SH looks good when you’re not in the Wild Area.
Arceus is decent for what it is and has charming art design.
It’s Scarlet and Violet that’s the problem, even if the performance doesn’t bother you, the art design is abysmal. And it’s mostly because Game Freak make its two largest games simultaneously for some silly reason.
The problem is all those games (DLC included) came out one year after each other. Game Freak has been doing too much in the Switch Era
I don’t mind them, but one thing I really wish they’d do is make a HD-2D game. Octopath Traveller looks gorgeous. I think if we had a Pokemon game in the same style, it’d be absolutely amazing.
Scarlet and Violet are the only ones I consider genuinely ugly tbh. Sword and Shield are honestly really pretty outside of the wild area, Lets Go was really good looking, ZA is looking pretty good, and PLA has some charm to its visuals
I made this comment on a pokemon post in some other nintendo group and got lynched for it. I don’t think anyone can argue it looks bad for being a late- generation switch title when BotW looks and plays better as a Switch launch title. I didn’t even mention the performance which is also very choppy for pokemon games. Can’t have a scrap of critique these days.
It’s not alright what they are doing, and I don’t understand why people keep saying otherwise.
Yes, the games are fun, and Pokémon holds a special place in probably all of our hearts. But at the price they’re asking? This is not okay (for a $10 game? Maybe). I expect the developers to deliver something worth the money. I want my money and my lifelong loyalty to be seen as a valuable bonus – not as something they can take for granted while putting out sloppy work.
At the very least, I want transparency. The developers should explain what’s going on and how this keeps happening and why investing in those games should still be worth it.
Arceus looked pretty good. Not cutting edge, but passable.
Then they regressed with SV.
Game Freak has sold almost 100 million units on the Switch, I don’t know where that money is going but it doesn’t seem like any of it goes into the next game. Ironically, Pokémon games are slower to evolve than any other franchise making those numbers.
What’s it gonna take, man, for us to have a decent looking Pokemon game? The games are fun enough—didn’t play SV put I did play Arceus and the gameplay loop was great—but they look so embarrassingly ugly.
I think the last time GF put out something decent looking was Sun and Moon. I remember for the hardware, those games actually looked quite nice, even if the frame rate got to be quite bad at times. But I do wonder how things will be with the switch 2.
Pokémon games have many issues. In recent times and with knowledge of the Terraleak it’s become more and more apparent the dev team is under huge pressure. And instead of scaling down to a more manageable size for a game, they keep trying to get their BotW.
There’s also the fact that games are often in development alongside each other. So there’s no natrual feedback loop. Which is why S/V have a half-backed sneaking mechanic and not Arcues’ mechanic.
I so wish they’d get back to a level of quality close to Colosseum or XD: a real mature story, stylish characters, unique animations, real animations and unique behaviors for KOs and damage suffered, fuck, it was a proper game!
And that was 22 years ago! how can games be worse than they were 22 years ago?
It’s a shame because the games don’t have bad art styles, they’re just poorly implemented. PLA had a really nice painted look that really gave the Pokemon a fun and unique flair, but then the environments look like they were made by amateur Gmod map makers. Or the NPC’s moved around like robots.
I’m not confident that Pokemon Champions is going to look very good. It’s another battle simulator like Stadium and Revolution before it except this one is fully made by Gamefreak, right? With those 2 (technically 3) games the main appeal was seeing your dinky sprites brought to life with amazing graphics and animations. Stadium looks dated (though it looked great for it’s time) but Revolution still holds up really well. But “gamefreak” and “amazing 3D graphics” are not two things that go together very well, which at that point what is even the point of Champions? Just a way to let mobile users a way to battle online?
At least there’s one thing for sure, Pokemon TCG art goes hard.
Game freak is not a good game developer company. They struck gold with their IP, and thats it.
Most of the main line games are shells of what they could be.
The best thing Pokemon could do, IMO, is go the “HD 2D” route a la Triangle Strategy ect.
Pokemon worked best with sprites, and has only been increasingly disappointing since the move to 3d with X/Y.
If this is what ugly qualifies as I want to know what games they aren’t playing.
If they were games produced for another IP we’d rightly give them flak and laugh at them.
Pokemon made me start appreciating graphics in video games. It made me realise that my experince would be cooler if it looked better. Especially after playing games like Rdr2 and God of War Ragnarok.
Dude, if they made DS level 2D games/sprites again I’d dump the 3D stuff in the garbage bin so fast. It’s never felt the same, I’ve always enjoyed the gameplay and art style of playing enjoyable 2d games that are linear and just fun and simple, that’s why I’ve been a Nintendo guy, I’ve never cared about fancy 3D graphics even without glitches. What a shame, I can’t play any of the new stuff, I didn’t even like playing coliseum back in the day because 3D doesn’t even have 1% of the feeling that all the classic Gen 1-5 games have.
As an old person, I’d be fine going back to Gameboy-GBA era graphics for Pokémon.
They want to be on the open world hype train. But they refuse to compromise their release schedule for it.
This is the result.
For Nintendo’s leading series I don’t understand why they won’t invest more into GameFreak and find the talent that they need to make these games function correctly. Zelda and Xeno games look incredible and run well on the Switch. The technology exists.
I agree with the writer here, but the irony of an article about these games looking ugly being hosted on a hideously ugly website overloaded with slow-loading, full-page video ads is… intense.
It was quite an experience scrolling up, and then down, and then up again, and then looking for a tiny little “X” to tap and then scrolling back down, all in an epic battle to simply *keep the screen on a single paragraph while I read it.*
Atrocious.
Its bad when x and y look better than scarlet violet
The sad reality is that they are making these games for children, so they can push merch. They can get away with the bare minimum.
The Switch games are the best selling Pokemon games of all time. Which shows there’s no need to change anything. So, everyone will either have to accept it or stop buying it in protest of their abysmal quality.
**Can we get a Pokémon colosseum remake?**
https://preview.redd.it/g2f4ngsq7xme1.png?width=1352&format=png&auto=webp&s=9381958f0f297b2c0a63e08b8a2b7d400518e739
They need to really take a step forward with the graphical art style and animations and take their time to make a good game. Whether it’s open world or not.
what made me laugh when was Nemona takes you up to the lighthouse tower and shows you the ‘beautiful, breathtaking” sites of paldea, and it’s 2D, jagged, 240p repeated textures EVERYWHERE.
A true connoisseur of beauty, thank you for stepping in.
We have 2025 and this is the biggest mascot company in the ENTIRE WORLD, come on people, effort are necessary here!
I don’t even need a Pokemon game to look that much better. I just need it to not look like a last gen game. Scarlet/violet are really fun with their open world, until you realize how generic everything looks and that there are hardly any interior spaces. A lot of the game looked like I was playing GameCube game.
Saying this on any other platform gets you a lot of flack. Pokemon fans are very accepting of mediocre graphics and don’t really care if the game runs poorly.
The game could run off of two pixels and look like it belongs on the DS, and all they will get upset over is that one of the starters is Chikorita 😆
Fucking Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks on the old DS look better than modern Pokémon games.
I expect to get downvoted for this since it’s like the most entitled take one could have, but I probably would put up with ugly looking games, dull stories, and samey gameplay if they just never removed the national dex. Having pokemon from as far back as my middle school days really kept me invested in this franchise. Even when I was starting to feel like the gameplay was dull, I still wanted to keep going since I had a history with the monsters in my PC storage. Now I’d have to pay a fee just to keep the ones I can’t use anymore ( And I have a living dex up to gen 6, plus pokemon I’ve spent hours breeding to perfection )
If Pokemon Champions is really the Pokemon Stadium-like game people think it is with a full national dex, and it actually has decent single player content, and isn’t just a vehicle for battling strangers online, I might actually get back into the series and even pick up the games I missed out on.
bring back the Top down pokémon games !
I think Arceus looked really great, even though the textures and general overworld did look like a Gamecube/Wii era title at points lol
Some of those textures look like they’re literally developing these games for ps2
ITS. ALL. ART. STYLE!!!!!! I’m so tired of being told that graphics don’t matter. It’s NOT about the graphics (even though we could go on and on about how the actual graphics are bad and edges look terrible) it’s about the art style. Games like Hades, Stardew Valley, and Astro Bot are not 4K highest-settings-you-can-get kind of games. They don’t need that. What they have instead is art style that’s consistent and beautiful.
It’s insulting that each game looks more and more like an engine test with generic assets dropped in when Pokémon is inherently one of the most stylistic IPs in the world. Just make the games fucking pretty already.
If 3D Pokemon is so unsustainable, halve the number of games that come out. Make a 2D game in the off-years to introduce new Pokemon and make more traditional adventures. That will give the 3D ones longer in the oven.
Pokemon should look like Octopath Traveler and it looks like a first-timer’s indie project. And when you say something about it, people just tell you you’re “nostalgic.”
I posted about this in the pokemon community, and the first they did was just say to go f yourself for expecting better games, and said that I wasn’t a pokemon fan just cause I don’t like the modern games
I want sprite games back, I want spinoffs that cater to pokeboomers
Honestly the people who scream at others for disliking the lack of polish in the newer titles are equally as obnoxious as the ones who say you’re just an NPC if you buy them or enjoy them despite their many flaws. The games can be fun but you’re not EVER going to catch me telling someone I prefer the five minutes of development time over ACTUAL time.
I don’t think PLZA looks bad. the pokemon themselves look great. They have a nice lighting system.
The environments aren’t as good but they are not nearly as bad as everybody here is acting. And the performance in the trailer was good.
Pokemon peaked at Gen 3.
Dunno about everyone else but I honestly wish the Pokemon games were still in 2D.