5th Gen If SquereEnix was developing BW, they would have XY graphics

Pokedream.su said:

Now that the online is gone for the old DS games, the games feel like they have lost an essential limb.

Click to expand...

yamibakura95 said:

Its seems to me that after gen 3 GF focused a lot more on addons, connectivity and content over graphics. Pokemon up until gen 3, including games like Colo/XD, still had a rather traditional RPG structure to tem with dungeons, bosses, side quests. But in gen 4 they took a new turn with wifi, focusing more on trading, online battling and downloadable content.

But i feel like this was done at the expense of graphics. GF wanted to make games with multiplayer value it seems. I would personally prefered it if they concentrated more on graphics and ingame content over wifi. It would have made a different impact.

Click to expand...

The DS was underutilized by Game Freak. Seeing as how the DS can run games like KH recoded and 356/2 Days, i dont see any reason as to why it wouldnt be able to run a turn based RPG.

The DS is as powerful as PS1 even more so in some areas. I found BW lazy compared to the other DS games that were out by their time. They could keep the overworld as it was but the battles could certaintly be 3d.

And tbh, i felt the XY graphics werent impressive for 3ds either. When there are games like Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask and Kingom Hearts DDD with ps2 graphics on a handheld, pokemon XY doesnt seem that impressive by comparison.

Click to expand...

chief18 said:

If Game Freak cared about graphics then they would have never published Pokémon on Game Boy.
At the time of Pokémon publishing on Game Boy there was a console called Game Gear, which already had colours and was way more powerful than Game Boy. There were consoles like Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn, PlayStation 1.
So why did they decided to publish on Game Boy? Because they didn't give a L about graphics.
The same reason behind the choice about publishing Pokémon Gold and Silver on Game Boy Color, and the same behind that one about publishing Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire on Game Boy Advance instead of GameCube, PlayStation 2, Sega Dreamcast, or Xbox.
You see now with Pokémon Sword and Shield on Nintendo Switch, Game Freak and Pokémon are still a step back to Zelda Breath of the wild, or Mario Odyssey, because Game Freak cares about graphics, but not in the Square Enix and Final Fantasy XV manner, in another way.
So at last, about Pokémon Black and White, I can say which these are top 3 best Nintendo DS games, even not using a particular and intensive graphics, because in terms of gameplay they are a step beyond any other DS game.
And if you pick up a 3D graphics NDS game, it won't ever have the same level of refinement as Pokémon Black and White have.

Click to expand...

Radio said:

GameFreak has always prioritized the multiplayer content, though. Down to reason the main Pokémon games are handheld only.

Sugimori has stated in interviews that Pokemon was directly inspired by the Gameboy because it was a concept that allowed trading to be a thing. And considering the Gameboy was already declining when Pokemon dropped, I think it's fair to say this explanation wasn't corporate bull about vision or whatever when it was really all about money.

They wanted a portable handheld to have the interaction that Pokémon has (trades and battling), and to be fair, I do think that ended up being the right choice. Being able to battle or trade with your friends during recess or in the school bus or whatever most likely helped Pokémon's success.



True, but the main issue here, in my opinion, isn't the lack of ability, but rather the lack of man-hours.

Pokémon, historically is made by relatively short teams in relatively short cycles.

Also unlike OoT 3D and MM 3D which are remakes (and as such, don't really need to waste time dealing with plot or major design work, only making models and other assets of pre established designs), Pokemon XY had to waste a lot of design time with actually deciding how the trainers and region and Pokémon would look.

Maybe I'm wrong - I'm not really the biggest KH fan - but I'd guess that most of the Kingdom Hearts DDD maps and characters and whatever are returning characters or inspired by existing Disney works instead of having to be designed wholesale. So that also helps them to be able to focus on polishing those graphics even more relatively quickly.

Should Pokémon stop with the yearly (or near yearly) release cycles, we'd likely have more polished works (and not only graphically).

Now, to be honest I personally don't really care - Pokémon never was about the graphics to me, and I suspect to a large amount of people - and I don't particularly have faith in GameFreak to do better graphics right to begin with. But even if I did care, I don't think GameFreak is changing anytime soon.

Pokémon is the most popular media franchise in the planet, Sword and Shield were the best hits a Pokémon main game had since Gen II (and with a higher price and paid DLC to boot). As far as GameFreak is concerned they don't need to have state of the art graphics, what they're doing is working enough. Which is rather unfortunate in my opinion, but that's how corporate works, I guess.

(Personally, I do think that the chibi XY style was better instead of this "anime-realism" that they're going for with SM / SwSh. Stylization helps you build a brand, usually ages better, and, if you're willing to put in the work, allows you to do a few shortcuts to make animations and scenery more vibrant and smooth than you could with "anime-realism" or actual realism given the same processing power.

Alas, it seems they're going all-in on "anime realism" now. Let's see how this goes, I guess).

Click to expand...

_pheebs said:

is that a good thing though?

I personally loved the 3D enviroments, 2D overworlds style.

Gen 5 was the best looking graphic wise.
The Battle sprites were super amazing too!

Click to expand...

Sheep said:

Part of what made XY super fun was the addition of Wonder Trade, I swear I was addicted to using that even if I mostly got Fletchling and Magikarp lol. BW's graphics were lovely to me on the other hand, the battles moved fast/fluidly and they were such a joy to look at and replay. Not sure I'd have wanted those games to have 3D-style graphics. Maybe I would've back then though? Since the idea of main series games in 3D seemed awesome before we actually got it. But right now I'm especially attached/nostalgic for the pixel style.

Square did develop one of my favorite games of all time (FF14) and if we could get people from the same team to help with Pokémon... well, I'll be super happy!

Click to expand...

yamibakura95 said:

yeah but game freak was working with Nintendo not SEGA. Also, handhelds are a different market. Dont confuse it with tv consoles/pc.

Well, i aggree on the refinement part but XY didnt have refinement compared to their contemporary games so even GF accepted that they had to sacifice refinement for 3d graphics



Tbh i do too prefer XY graphics over the newer ones. They look better to me, the newer ones feel too flat.

Yeah pokemon release too frequently so there are certaitnyl time contraints regarding development. I feel like GF bets a lot on keeping the players sharp with new pokemon. Because if GF took more time developing pokemon games then the games would receive a different treatment. Longer development->higher expectations and i guess GF prefers making steady profits by frequent releases over investing in a more amitious title.

XY/ORAS, despite not having the best graphics, they were a huge improvment over BW and im glad GF decided to go that way. Even though i found their graphics meh, they still gave me a better impression than BW.



I liked the bulk of the battle sprites too. But point is, they could have done those for the orignal DP



I think the main difference between SE and GF is that SE takes their time to develop the games while GF prefers frequent releasing. I get a feeling that GF benefits from this because if they took their time then their games would be compared to final fantasy and i think they wanna avoid that because it wouldnt be a fair comparison since FF and pokemon are rpgs but they very different.

Click to expand...

yamibakura95 said:

I liked the bulk of the battle sprites too. But point is, they could have done those for the orignal DP

Click to expand...

_pheebs said:

Pretty sure BWB2W2 were DSI enchanced games too.
They had a lot more space, and the programmers were more knowledgable about how the DS works.

having it that fully animated on DP would have been an impossible task, and way ahead of it's time.

Click to expand...

Bellsprout said:

I wish they would just go back to sprites. I thought Pokemon being in 3D in XY was cool, but over time I feel its somehow taken away from any realism. Maybe it's just the quality of the 3D models they use, but a lot of Pokemon seem rounder and blob like. At the same time the sprites in BW always looked off to me. They seem too sharp on the edges and pixelated. Perhaps that's why I welcomed the 3D models initially.

Click to expand...

yamibakura95 said:

and what was ahead of its time with DP then? because as far as im concerned the animations werent that better than emerald's

Click to expand...

Megan said:

The difference between companies like Square and GF is that GF was and still is a very small team of developers. As a result they are always a lot more limited in what they can do. It shows especially looking at what they did whenever a change of hardware occured (most recent example being SwSh on the Switch which looks more like an enhanced 3DS port).

And then you look at the DS versions of Final Fantasy 3 and 4 which all look pretty impressive as 3D titles. Square does have a certain understanding of how to make the most out of the given hardware. However, I'm not sure if implementing all the 3D models for Pokemon even during gen 5 would have been possible. One thing Square liked to do was to reuse models but with different colors (which still goes back to the really old consoles and their space limitations, mind you). Pokemon doesn't allow that, however. They would have still needed to implement ~500 unique models and a DS cardrige was about 4 GB in space, I believe?

There's a reason why a lot of games still were 2D in the DS era is what I want to say.

Click to expand...