5th Gen Pokemon B/W Have Bad Graphics

Started by Kitsune-bi June 15th, 2011 9:17 PM
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Male
Seen October 7th, 2011
Posted September 22nd, 2011
22 posts
11.9 Years
The graphic of the generation V games were good overall.However, I would have expected better from a game that is supposed to surpass is predissesors(spelling?). The pokemon featured in the box or in the summary look pretty good, that all changes when you go into a pokemon battle. Pokemon participating in a battle have a pixelated qualtiy to them,even from afar. Some features of your pokemon are blurred to the point that they don't look like a seperate appendage at all, I couldn't tell whether or not my Typhlosion had ears or not at first glance. I'm wasn't expecting much in the graphic department but why are Black and White's graphics so bad compared to Diamond,Pearl, and Platinum. Anyone else see what I'm talking about?

Sydian

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Posted November 29th, 2021
33,354 posts
15.2 Years
Okayyy, dunno how you completely missed the Black and White forum, but moving there. I completely disagree btw. DPPt is just disgusting to look at imo. The grass. That's...all I even need to say. I can deal with pixely backsprites. But...DPPt grass.
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Kenshin5

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14.9 Years
The back sprites were so pixelated because it was a close up shot compared to previous generations. And I am sure the constant animation didn't help. I'm not really seeing anything wrong with them. Overland stuff looks great as well, very detailed, and shows things from a distance like Castelia City from Sky Arrow Bridge looked amazing. Or the Subway passing under Tubeline Bridge. I think they did a great job, and graphically surpassed it's predecessors. I had the same issue you did when they were doing Black and White coverage before the release and thought dang that back sprite looks like crap I hope this is a beta version they are showing us.

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Enigma

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Age 26
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Posted July 12th, 2016
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I think the graphics are a pretty good improvement over the last generation. I do have to admit that the B/W back sprites do tend to bug me at times, though. :/ However, I don't find it to be too big of a deal. All of the graphics in the games are pretty amazing, including the bridges and the appearance of Reshiram/Zekrom.

It tosses its enemies around with agility. It uses all its limbs to fight in its own unique style.
Night Sky's Edge
Seen May 15th, 2021
Posted December 7th, 2015
461 posts
12.5 Years
You're saying BW's graphics are worse than those of DPPt, but the only thing you seem to be complaining about are the backsprites. That doesn't make the graphics as a whole bad, just the backsprites. The rest of the game's graphics are clearly an improvement on previous generations. Besides, it's easy to get used to the pixilated back sprites, especially if you grew up playing Gen 1 games (in which the backsprites were VERY pixilated).

Ho-Oh

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I'd say the graphics of B/W do have issues tbh. :x Idk it's like graphically they could be better (especially for zoomed out Castelia, etc so pixelated), buuuttt at least we aren't back in the R/S days where the graphics were ugh. On the plus side, they're likely to improve in the third game, so really I'm just gunna wait til then and if the graphics aren't better, then I'll complain.

Actually on the note of backsprites, I honestly don't even notice them anymore, yay. Sooo if anything, battle graphics are awesome.

Legendary Silke

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Seen December 23rd, 2021
Posted April 22nd, 2020
5,925 posts
12.5 Years
Well, aside from the back sprites, it looks exceptional. I have a feeling that the back sprites are made with the normal Pokédex screens and status screens in mind. Besides, having 1:1 back sprites means 4 times the video RAM usage when compared to the current size (halved resolution), and it won't be pretty when you run out of RAM of any kind. It's a compromise so that it runs properly... hopefully. And they are well-animated. The spriters are doing their job well.

All the locations look great that it blows DP out of the water by a huge margin. Pt and HGSS fared better, but not by much. BW still has the best graphics, I think.

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cheeky

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DP had a lot of graphics experimenting going on, and while they developed it to the better in Pt, it still had its flaws. That's why they could keep experimenting with graphics on the DS console.

BW, still running on the same handheld as DPPt, has really enhanced and developed graphics, and I'm in love with them, albeit I found them questionable at first when I saw pre-release screens :P

Like Twiggy here says, the backsprites were made pixelated to make them fit better with summary screens and such, as well to apply less weight on the game itself.
Personally I'm completely used to the backsprites, and I think they look really good. It gives it a sort of a cool, good balanced theme. And this way the zoomed out backsprites and the front sprites are the same size, which makes many things, like zooming in battle cutscenes, and sprite comparison way easier and better looking.

So tl;dr:
BW has some really good and efficient graphics. And I can't wait to see what they'll manage to make of the 3DS's graphic capacity :P

The 100 Mega Shock

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Seen March 10th, 2013
Posted March 23rd, 2012
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12.7 Years
The graphics in BW are a shining example of why people don't often use 2D graphics in RPGs anymore - the work involved to make it look anywhere near as good as a large-scale 3D game is just too much and too restrictive.

Pokémon animations are bits and pieces moved around by the hardware which results in the distorted and pixellated look of the game's battle scenes. This is because drawing proper animated sprites for over 600 Pokémon front and back is both too much work for any artists to handle - unless there's far more artists working on graphics than usually in handheld development teams, and because it would soon eat into storage space and graphics memory to keep tons of seperate sprite frames in the data.

The blown-up backsprites are a result of them being re-used in the Musical sequences (again something which suffers because of 2D graphics) and probably also due to memory constraints when working on double and triple battle sequences - or again, just because drawing 600 large, full sized sprites is too resource intensive.

Pokémon only have one animation loop which plays throughout when they're in battle - compare this to the Stadium series where Pokémon have idle animations, attack animations, recoiling animations and fainting animations among others. 2D graphics on a large scale like Pokémon makes it very hard to add these kind of animations, so we're stuck with a single animation in battles.

Finally, the sprites themselves aren't anything to crow home about. Pokémon sprites are a brilliant example of being forced to emphasise quantity over quality when producing a game, as a result the sprites have a very simple style and use of colour (again, limited to a restrictive 16 colours presumably due to graphics memory constraints) so they're not really that impressive as sprites go.


If you look at other RPGs on the DS, ones that use 3D graphics like Dragon Quest IX, Final Fantasy IV DS and Golden Sun: Dark Dawn you can see that they're able to pull off much better animations and graphics quality overall.
Age 31
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Seen October 30th, 2012
Posted November 30th, 2011
238 posts
12.8 Years
I like the BW sprites the best. The animations on the Pokemon make them feel like they are alive. The backsprites are pixely, sure, but it never bothered me too much. I think the game looks fine, and 10x better than DPPt.

EDIT: One thing I've always hated though, was the battle backgrounds...it's so ugly with the weird colours all the time. -_- I wish it was more realistic looking lol.

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drarixio

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12.2 Years
I like the BW sprites the best. The animations on the Pokemon make them feel like they are alive. The backsprites are pixely, sure, but it never bothered me too much. I think the game looks fine, and 10x better than DPPt.

EDIT: One thing I've always hated though, was the battle backgrounds...it's so ugly with the weird colours all the time. -_- I wish it was more realistic looking lol.
I guess you're right about the backgrounds, but at least they're better than the other games.

Meganium

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Seen February 1st, 2023
Posted February 1st, 2023
The graphics in the game aren't that bad, to be honest. I think they were a huge step above D/P/Pt and HG/SS. I do have a small problem with the back sprites, which they were pretty pixelated, but it doesn't bother me. They could have done a bit better on that.

Clefairies

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Age 33
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Seen August 12th, 2016
Posted August 6th, 2016
142 posts
13.1 Years
I personally feel B/W have better graphics then D/P/Pl.
Playing Platinum briefly to trade things over I was bit like "Ohwow, they did notch the graphics up a fair amount on Black."
The pixelated sprites of extreme close-ups on Pokemon can be forgiven imo, its a hand-held console after all & graphics have never really bothered me in games anyway, as long as gameplay is good, not really fussed ^__^
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Age 30
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Posted May 16th, 2016
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15.9 Years
I think some slack needs to be given for their inability to use 3D models in the DS games. All things considered, there are 649 Pokemon, 48 of which have gender differences--accounting for form changes (+27 Unown, +3 Castform, +3 Deoxys, +4 Burmy / Wormadam, +1 Cherrim, +3 Shellos / Gastrodon, +5 Rotom, +1 Giratina, +1 Shaymin, +1 Basculin, +1 Darmanitan, +6 Deerling / Sawsbuck, +1 Meloetta), there are technically 754 Pokemon. With Alternate Color Pokemon taken into account, that's 1508 different sprites--3016 including backsprites, and just under ~3700 including the Pokemon icons. If we discount the use of backsprites (because we're talking about 3D), then that's 1508 different models AND 1508 skins that have to be generated. I didn't include Arceus / Genesect forms because I wasn't sure if they were actual sprites or alpha recolored in-game. This also doesn't include all the NPC sprites, nor those of items, attacks, tiles, etc. Also--3D sprites look like crap up close.

The reason why other games can use such gratuitous amounts of 3D is because they lack such a heavy load of information. GS:DD has nowhere near the same amount of depth as P:B/W, nor a bestiary that can come close to matching.

That, plus the fact that these games are supposed to reflect the style of their predecessors.

When I started the game, I remember that as soon as you left your house, a flock of Koromori flew by your screen--and your first step into the grassy route was accompanied by a gust of leaves. I liked that. The little things.
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Seen April 13th, 2016
Posted April 12th, 2016
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14.2 Years
Well, like most people would tell you - Graphics don't make up a game.

Either way, I have to agree with most of the other people in this thread and say that I think the graphics in B/W were so much more better than the other 4th gen games. But I wouldn't go as far as saying you want them to look like PS3 and Xbox360 games, as the DS can't handle that. But the graphics were great in B/W considering they were on the DS, which i'm suprised even handled it.
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14.2 Years
I see what you mean.
It's not just battles though.

Diamond and Pearl were the same. The graphics were'nt top-notch. But then platinum came out and it was superb. My bets is if this rumoured 3rd edition is released they graphics will make you (bad word) bricks ._.
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The 100 Mega Shock

Male
Seen March 10th, 2013
Posted March 23rd, 2012
1,234 posts
12.7 Years
lots of numbers about Pokémon sprites
Well to start, shiny Pokémon are just loading different palette files or in the 3D case a recoloured texture file. Meanwhile the Pokémon icons in the 3D games are just pictures of their 3D renders - that's the beauty of working with 3D graphics.

Anyway, we're not starting from scratch here. Creatures Inc has a big team of 3D artists that have been responsible for rendering Pokémon into 3D graphics for the past 10 years with the Stadium/etc series, and recently did the work for Pokédex 3D.

This means we already have the first four generations of Pokémon modelled in 3D, we have people modelled in 3D, we have attack animations created and the game already uses 3D graphics for buildings - and it's not very hard to drop the polygon count and texture quality on the graphics that were made for the GC and Wii to fit them on the DS.

You make your claim about how bad "3D sprites" look up close, but neither do the current 2D graphics - backsprites in BW are blown up and pixelated, and animations are choppy and rough due to tech and resource limitations.

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Don't Ask, Just Tell

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Seen May 2nd, 2015
Posted December 22nd, 2012
792 posts
13.6 Years
I think that they rushed finishing the game inorder to get it done before the 3DS release because that would entail less pixelated graphics. If you look at the pokemon sprites through out the years, there is not much difference between the GBA and DS sprites, Some of the GBA sprites are in fact better than the DS!!!
THE first sprite is from gold, the second is from Ruby, the third is from BW. Over more than TEN YEARS this is what has been accomplished. The GBA and DS sprite are really not much different, one just has 10 more colors.






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