19h ago

Pokemon Legends Z-A's visuals aren't "great" say former Nintendo marketing leads, but hope Switch 2 could allow Game Freak to "go back to the drawing board"

www.gamesradar.com Pokemon Legends Z-A's visuals aren't "great" say former Nintendo marketing leads, but hope Switch 2 could allow Game Freak to "go back to the drawing board" and add more detail to future RPGs

With Legends: Z-A, Kit Ellis thinks "what we're seeing is mostly what we're going to get"

Pokemon Legends Z-A's visuals aren't "great" say former Nintendo marketing leads, but hope Switch 2 could allow Game Freak to "go back to the drawing board" and add more detail to future RPGs

28 comments

I will never understand Nintendo.
They make a console that is underpowered but is still marketable because of its uniqueness, then they make first party games that require better performance than the console can deliver.
- Pokémon is not a first party game, it's developed by Game Freaks. And the Switch isn't underpowered for this kind of games, there are lots of better looking games on it, such as Breath of the Wild, which is a launch title. Game Freaks is a terrible studio who can't make a game run smoothly even with GameCube graphics.

I know multiple people who complain about every release and then buy it, preferably both versions. A few even complaint there's no third edition to buy anymore.
If anything, GF could reduce their quality even more.
- Been clean since Sun/Moon.
  I was disappointed with X/Y and gave them one last chance to change course.
  The disappointing dungeons of X/Y had been replaced by nothing by straight lines with occasional fancy camera angles. The utter disgrace that was Z Cave as a super (only) dungeon was more than anything Sun/Moon offered.
  For a game series meant to be about exploring and discovering monsters to collect, they've really let the exploration/discovery side down. Holding my console upside down is cool and all that, but gimmicks to sell strategy guides are no subsidy for actual explorable environments to lead to dynamic, emergent gameplay experiences.
  Really want to make my take on a monster capture world explorer. I think there's a lot of space for a spiritual successor to Pokémon.
- Then there's me: not buying the console or the game, playing it emulated at better fps and higher resolution for like 20 minutes just to say "I knew it" and never touching the game again.

Maybe Game Freak shouldn't be the guys making Pokémon anymore
- Have they discovered terrain yet, or is the landscape still a flat plane?

The Switch 2 will finally allow GameFreak to leave behind their terrible N64 visuals and adopt moderate to okay N64 visuals.
Very exciting time.
- Dammit, I was going to make a joke about how Mario64 is blocky but was revolutionary at the time. Whereas gamefreak games are an inspiration, that ANYONE can make video games. Even if you're 30 years behind the times.
- I read that last line as Ryan George.
  Oh wow wow wow......wow

How can Breath of the Wild which was originally a Wii U release looks so much more refined and artistically appealing while running better than anything Gamefreak has made in the last 8 years?
- Why would Game Freak improve their games if they keep selling like hot cakes?
  It's that simple.
  
  Zelda also sells like hotcakes, and yet they still put effort into that one.
  
  also mr masuda said he was tired of pokemon in general, and will make this slop, this was all the way back sword and shield, when he shocked everyone about the half the dex being left out.
- Game freak still has no clue about doing 3D.
  Besides BotW, compare the xenoblade games to 3d pokemon. Game freak just cannot make optimal use of the hardware that's there.
  
  IIRC BOTW was built on MonolithSoft's engine (the devs behind Xenoblade) so in fairness, those games are more-so the same exception rather than the rule. That said, even without the comparison, GameFreak clearly did not properly optimize the Pokemon games on switch, with stuff like loading the whole map's ocean at any given time.
  
  In comparison to XC2 or 3, the recent pokemon games look like an insult, and a bad joke. I’m still mindblown by that Nintendo greenlit those releases, given how specific they are with other first-party game designs

Damn, the buildings in that screenshot do look like the terrible assets you got in simulator games ten years ago...

since swsh i havnt even played the console games, i solely play the online card game, even that is getting some fuckery.

the games and cards are fuelled by nostalgia and gambling addictions.
there is no quality to their game play and pokemon go was a massive invasion of privacy through tracking data.
fuck pokemon.
MTG IS THE GOAT.
- I'll respect the pokémon card game for demolishing reprint equity and making sure the meta cards are easily and cheaply available to players.
  The card game gameplay, and high level competitive battling, while not M:tG good, are still both solid though. Closer to Magic than they are Yu-Gi-Oh.
- the games and cards are fuelled by nostalgia and gambling addictions.
  MTG IS THE GOAT.
  You flip-flopped real fast on your principles there I see.
- Your view on this franchise is very surface level

Because graphics are the most important part of a game?
If the games are fun to play who cares if the graphics are bad? Scarlet and Violet were the best pokemon games since P:LA and that was the best since Gen 5.
Based on the limited information we've gotten about ZA there's no reason as of yet to doubt that it won't be comparable to P:LA and S&V in terms of enjoyability.
Complaining about the graphics of pokemon games or the bugginess of pokemon games is like complaining about CoD being an FPS or Assassin's Creed having traversable terrain or Souls-likes being hard. At this point it's a staple of the franchise with 40 games between the mainline games and major spinoffs establishing a trend of the games being thoroughly buggy messes and/or having shit graphics. There is absolutely no reason to expect any of that to change and constantly hearing complaints about it with every new game is getting fucking old.
- While graphics generally aren't important, they do become a glaring problem when the engine is poorly written. Pokémon Sword and Shield shed light on this problem because it was designed as an 3D open world game, meaning attention to detail was paramount. It needed to feel lived in, much like Breath of the Wild. Unfortunately, we got a barren and flat landscape that feels like it was ripped straight out of the DS.
  
  I don't disagree that the graphics could and probably should have been better. I do disagree with the idea that it's anything more than a minor annoyance with no meaningful impact on the game.
  However, regardless of what I think about it, my point was that at this point in the franchise, Gamefreak, the Pokemon Company, and Nintendo have demonstrated repeatedly since the very first game that optimization, stability, graphical fidelity, and any semblance of good development practices are not something they're willing to commit to. Expecting that to change at this point is unreasonable and continuing to complain about it is demonstrably unproductive and just introduces pointless negativity into the pokemon community.

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