- Joined
- Apr 11, 2018
Celebrate Nite already put a link here.
I might build another one soon.
Pokémon (Not-So) Griefing Thread - Scarlet and Violet Released with 10 Million Copies in First 3 Days in Buggy States
- Thread starter Bugaboo
- Start date
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🏰 Registrations are open.
🖼️ Please be sure to archive things to the site. I've noticed most people are too lazy to even screenshot tweets now.
I might build another one soon.
- Joined
- Jun 21, 2025
I missed that.
Thank you. Good luck on removing the tranny flags. May I suggest a german flag replaces them?
- Joined
- Apr 11, 2018
The problem is no the replacement, but rather the location of the data where the queer flags are located in the actual ROM file. I need to get back to scrolling throug HexManiacAdvance and hoping that I can find the flags there.
Two Dollars
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2022
Given that you still haven’t been able to find them, I wonder if it’s something intentionally obscure like it’s not a sprite, but instead a command to draw lines directly with specific colors? I wouldn’t put it past a tranny dev to do that if he’s that paranoid about people modding out the flag.
- Joined
- Apr 11, 2018
I am just busy lately. I might go back this week.
chimpSculpture
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Oct 1, 2019
bruh, read the description...'Pokémon Mania' is coming true in a way.
This game is called 'Pokémon FIX'.
Yes; the name is that blatant.
I hope tha trannies will not ge their way here.
All game screens are not real. * Product details and specifications are based on the video game ©Octopath Traveler, Octopath Traveler 2, LIVE A LIVE & Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake.
The-Mad-Asshatter
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2020
The only way I can see this happening is if they diversify rather then just keeping the same formula year in and year out or being content to look just like every other monster catcher game.
I'm a big Gen 1 Gen 2 fan and the reason I am just interested in this generation is because they did something different from later gens, plus tried to remain based in the 'real world.' (Plus Gen 1 and 2's creator is the original creator, while Gen 3 and on is a different guy.) They implied that the Pokemon were not from Earth and had been on Earth for probably less then a century, which is why everyone and their uncle is crazy excited to build a life around catching them and to learn about them. The other stuff is that Earth's native animals started going extinct, but people were too crazy about Pokemon to care or seemingly notice. This era of Pokemon is when you see the normal animals in the anime and Misty holding a cross in her attempt to frighten off a Ghastly. There was even mention of real world places. That's really interesting to me, because it implies that the Pokemon are some type of alien creature that could (possibly) drain life energy, or out compete Earth animals, and there lies ethical and a moral conundrum there, along with being powerful creatures that can outclass humans.
Reason why I say this is that when Pokemon (for me anyway) had these elements, it was kind of different. Even if one doesn't care for the stuff I liked, nowadays it's just like every other monster catching game, with monster gods, made up places, and escalating power creep. You have dimensions, gimmicks and stones to add spice, but nothing that ultimately adds longevity. There needs to be something more that can translate into other things. More things of substance.
Pokemon needs a story that can last. You can only add so many monsters, gimmicks or keep playing as a 10 year old child before it starts to feel repetitious and stale. Pokemon needs stories and something that doesn't look like every other monster game out there. And right now, it looks like every other monster game out there.
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chimpSculpture
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Oct 1, 2019
That's all massive head canon stemmed from a time when the cartoon production was scrappier. You never see stuff like real animals or a Christian cross anymore because everyone on staff now understands what "the world of Pokémon" is. Most people working on the cartoon today were probably children that watched the original series.
I would be curious to see what the sales demographics for these games are. If it's mostly children then the series doesn't need to progress.
If your first Pokémon game was Sword or Shield and you're nine years old, you don't understand or even care how much of a let down those games were to everyone else. The novelty of capturing a wild beast and then raising it until it transforms into a giant powerful version is such a great premise on it's own, that most new comers will enjoy it just as much as children did with generation 1 in the nineties.
Yeah, after 10, 20 or 30 years it all becomes stale, but when your target audience is naturally cycled every 3-5 years or so. It's not as big a priority as fucking up that core premise.
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- Joined
- Apr 17, 2018
One more day!
Honestly I am more excited than ever not for the game announcement but when the game finally comes out, the leak threads on /vp/ are some of the most fun I've had with pokemon in years.
Nothing pokemon related will ever be as funny as getting Centro to post that roaring moon picture.
Honestly I am more excited than ever not for the game announcement but when the game finally comes out, the leak threads on /vp/ are some of the most fun I've had with pokemon in years.
Nothing pokemon related will ever be as funny as getting Centro to post that roaring moon picture.
starborn427614
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 27, 2020
It's always interesting to experience the reveal of a new generation. Starters, what the region is like. Gym leaders and so forth. And yes, the shitposting.
- Joined
- May 29, 2024
Honestly, I don't want Game Freak to chase graphics.
I wish that Pokémon's visual design focused more on art style than graphical fidelity.
I've been meaning for a while to make an in-depth comparison between Gen 8 and Gen 9 graphics styles, to showcase the difference between these two focuses, and the importance of one choice over the other.
So I guess I'll do it now to try to make my point.
Basically, SwSh uses strongly-defined zones for coloring and shading within models, using fewer colors within a model at any given time, creating higher contrast. SwSh also uses strong outlines on almost all of its models (aside from the scenery) to define shapes.
Both of these art style choices make the characters, Pokémon, and environment in SwSh look so much more like all of the hand-drawn art that has defined the franchise.
And the use of outlines and fewer, more-strongly-defined colors also keeps things looking like the sprite models from all of the 2D games. They all had strong outlines. They were all inherently limited in how many colors they could use, so they all stuck with the anime's style of strong, simple shading. Even Gens 6 and 7 used outlines and limited colors, probably for this same reason of maintaining the art style.
But in SV, the outlines are gone, the coloration for anything new is all just smooth gradients (only not doing this with already-defined items / Pokémon that already have a sharp cut-off, as set forth in their official art), and the shading is as naturalistic and generic as a poorly-optimized game struggling to run on the Switch 1 can manage.
Instead of maintaining a visual link with all of the previous games, all of the previous art, and all of the current art and the anime and everything else, it now looks like almost any other game made in Unity or Unreal.
When everybody says that Gen 9 looks "generic" now, I think that this is why.
I wrote a more in-depth explanation with examples.
It also got retardedly long.
I'm mostly going to compare SV to SwSh because the two are the most similar in game design, and they're running on the same hardware.
It's going to seem like I'm praising SwSh a lot, but I know that the game isn't perfect. I just think that it does some things really well, which went underappreciated, and that SV could've learned from what SwSh did right.
---
This is a basic example of what I'm referring to with the outline vs. no outline character art styles:
In SwSh, the models are simpler geometrically, trading less detail within the lines for more detail in the overall shapes of the body and the character's silhouette. They also rely on lines drawn along some features (mouths, noses, wrinkles, etc.) in order to make them appear, just like hand-drawn line art would.
In SV, the models are more detailed—perhaps because they rely almost entirely on the lighting engine to create shadows on the model in order to bring out features on the face or other body parts. Because there are almost no lines drawn on the models, this can lead to features no longer being visible, depending on lighting conditions or the angle of the model relative to its light sources.
SwSh's art style emulates the style of Pokémon's official art, the anime, all of the past games, and even most fan art (beneath whatever effects or embellishments they might add).
Almost every time when you see Pokémon art, whenever you have a human character, a Pokémon, an item, or really anything that's not just part of the background, there's:
- an outline
- a main color (for any given skin color / piece of clothing / body feature)
- a darker version of that main color, for shading
- a bright hue that's used very sparingly (unless it's a really smooth / reflective surface) to highlight the raised features or the edges closest to the light source
And that's pretty much it.
To be fair, the art style in SwSh isn't the exact same as the style that I'm describing from the rest of the series.
The biggest difference is that boundary between the main color and the darker "shadow" color on some shapes is much softer, with a slight gradient between the two colors (I think that this mostly occurs on curved objects). Also, the brighter hue is used a bit more liberally than elsewhere in the franchise on shiny surfaces like hair, plastic, or certain fabrics. But even with these slight deviations from the overall pattern, the key part is that each model's shapes are still made up of those two main colors, within an outline that differentiates the model from the world and different parts of the model from the rest of it. SwSh's art style feels consistent with the rest of the series as a result.
Obviously, Pokémon's art style comes from anime / manga. It is simple and low in detail in order to be quick and easy to draw, so that you can churn out hundreds of manga pages or thousands of anime frames.
Because the point of the style is simplicity, companies that use this style seem to get embarrassed of it the larger and more successful that they get. They imagine that they should be more "respectable," and simple, cheap-looking anime art doesn't fit that mold. Whenever they improve the graphics in their games or increase the fidelity of their art style, it's always to move away from the simplicity of this style.
But in doing so, they overlook all of the benefits of the style, and often end up losing something important—beyond the simple recognizability of their established art style.
For context: I hate anime. I do not watch it. I dislike the art specifically. Yet even I understand the usefulness of the art style. It is incredibly good at clarity—which is very useful when you have small figures on a screen with overlapping features. A strong art style also helps hide the limitations of the hardware, and the limitations of the dev team. There are 20- and 30-year-old games that still look good because of this.
When games like SV throw out parts of their old, "less-advanced" art style without understanding why they were useful in the first place, the game suffers for it.
I remember hearing people say that they thought that SV looked "off" because the style and shape of characters' eyes didn't match past games. I think that SV misses the mark for a much more fundamental reason.
My thesis is that, because SV doesn't use this pattern of outlines + limited colors, it doesn't look like anything else in Pokémon that we're used to. Furthermore, it loses the benefits of the series's established style.
This causes many players to dislike and reject it the game's visuals—even if they haven't been able to put their finger on exactly why it seems so different and "off."
---
Outlines and Shading
In SwSh, the outline separates a character's model from the background, but it also separates similarly-colored or similarly-shaded body parts from one another.
In SV, without an outline, overlapping features of the model are harder to differentiate (unless the model is posed such that the shading helps make it clearer), and parts of the model can easily be lost against the game's vast, bland backgrounds when they feature similar colors (like the character's arm in the image below).
In the SwSh image below, the player character's outline makes every part of his body clearly and readily understandable, even when parts overlap. The left side of his face (from our view) is in just as much shadow as his neck, but the outline around his head preserves the shape of his jawline and chin. The outline around his left forearm (from our view) differentiates his upper and lower arm at the inner bend of his elbow, and the outline around his fingers and hands differentiates his fingers from the inside of his right hand (from our view).
In the first of the SV images below, the player character's right forearm (from our view) basically disappears into his thigh. In the second, the player character's left hand is just undifferentiated mush, all the same color, where you can barely even tell how the hand is rotated and which direction the top side of the hand is pointing unless you look at it for a second. In the third, because we only have (poorly-implemented) lightness and shadows to try to differentiate the shapes by, it looks at first as if the character's hands are backwards, with the lighter portions pointed toward the viewer seeming like the slightly-raised shape of his thumbs. (I tried to find better visual examples for the last two, but hands are usually either too small or just out of the frame.)
Another thing that outlines do is hide, disrupt, or distract from jagged, pixelated edges that desperately need antialiasing.
All of the models below have these edges. But they look way worse on the SV models.
In SwSh, the light and dark portions of a character are always well defined. Even when some part of their body is mostly in shadow, like the player character's head in the below picture, you can still see the brighter part along the top-right. You can track exactly where the light source is.
In SV, when much of the character's face is in shadow, it's just a mess of slight color gradients. SV wants to rely on shadows to show you characters' facial features—but once you're in too much shadow, those details disappear. And where's the light source supposed to be? Somewhere vaguely above him?
Along the undersides of the characters' arms and hands, and beneath their chins in the SwSh image below, there are strong, clearly-differentiated shadows. The shadows immediately convey how each part of the body is oriented, letting you make sense of what's going on more quickly.
When we look at the same places on the character model in the SV image, we don't have the same clear shadows, so we don't get the same effect. In exchange, there are a few more vague shadows on the face. Incredibly soft, incredibly rounded, features damn near disappear. Everywhere else in the franchise, you'd at least have a line for the nose and another for the mouth. The lighting engine can't make the neck beneath the his head or the interior of either palm convincingly dark (not even under the tera orb in his hand). Certainly not as dark as the shadows within his ears would tell us that these other shadows should be (but I'll get to that later).
In SwSh, the Pokémon are given the same outlines and the same two-color shading as the characters, matching the style with which they're drawn in the rest of the franchise, and affording them the all the same benefits of visual clarity.
... but, bizarrely, their outline temporarily disappears when they evolve. So what would've been some of your most kino screenshots aren't going to look like they normally do. No idea why.
So if we take a Pokémon and look at all of its other appearances across the franchise...
... which game's art style presents a better-realized version of that Pokémon?
Which one looks "right?"
For me, it's SwSh.
Also, even though SwSh uses that two-tone style for coloration, it's not too strict about it. Not if it would be to its own detriment.
If you compare Leafeon's head in both of the above pictures as clouds pass over and the light changes slightly how the fuck has my life gotten to the point where I'm writing this sentence, part of the lighter tone of tan on the upper part of his head brightens slightly, conveying both depth and roundness without breaking the high-contrast two-tone visual style. There seems to be a range for each tone, within which that tone's lightness can vary depending on the surrounding lighting.
To be fair, SV's shadows aren't always all bad. Sometimes they convey the point of the visuals more clearly. It's just that they're really inconsistent at best. And even when they're working "well," the shadows are still quite low-contrast.
You could argue that "low contrast" is fine. It's just a stylistic choice, right?
But given the low resolution that we're working with, and the low detail of the models, and how small each model usually is in any given frame (zoomed out while exploring to show you the open world, zoomed out during a battle to show you all of the Pokémon with their trainers behind them and the scenery behind them, etc.), I think that we need more contrast—like what SwSh gives us.
It seems as if the devs took the level of detail that the textures and models had in SwSh as a starting point, and then tried to increase the fidelity in small ways just so they could point to the difference and go, "look, SV is better because bigger number of pixels / polygons / shadows"—without taking into account how that would change the overall picture.
Like, yes, the faces are more detailed in SV—but they're not detailed enough to clearly convey its features most of the time.
So SV is left in this bad middle ground. Trying to escape the simplicity of Pokémon's anime / manga art style, but instead just losing its clarity. Trying to reach the level of immersion that a more realistic art style could bring, but instead just making everything vague and disjointed.
I bet that the art team got rid of the outline because they said to themselves, "we don't need this anymore. We're past this. Our models' visuals are now clear enough on their own." I'm sure that you can tell by now: I disagree.
---
Pre-Rendered Shadows
In SwSh, some parts of a character's body will have what appear to be pre-rendered shadows—between the chin and collarbone, under the armpits, inside the ears, behind the head, between the legs, and a few more places, depending on the model. These shadows are placed in recessed areas that are expected to always be in shadow—and since the character models never lie flat on their backs or turn upside-down, these shadows will fit with pretty much every light source that you're going to encounter in-game.
Using these pre-rendered shadows probably saves resources from the engine, and it also creates shadows that look sharper and better defined, without that soft gradient between one color and the other—more like the stark color differentiation found in the art across the rest of the Pokémon franchise.
The rest of the shadows on a character's body in SwSh are generated by the lighting engine. It results in some softer shadows in some cases, but in others—like along the underside of the player's arm, no matter which way that arm is bent or pointing—the shadows are quite sharp.
In SV, Game Freak seems to have hardly used this technique at all. They're still relying on the lighting engine to do nearly all of the work. If a particular part of a character model should usually be dark, then the engine will just make it dark when it needs to... right? But this doesn't always pan out.
It looks like there might be a tiny pre-rendered shadow at the very top of characters' necks, where it meets their head... but it's really not selling the illusion of actual light and shadows like the SwSh textures did. There's another pre-rendered shadow just inside the ears. I don't see much else.
But since SV's cast of boarding school characters show a lot less skin, that makes it harder to tell the extent to which they're actually using the technique or not. Especially since they barely seem to use pre-rendered shadows on clothes at all (I think just a tiny bit under the armpits), perhaps because of how clothes are treated separately from the base model.
Of course, sometimes both games get something wrong. They both have you break your own shoulder to throw a pokéball.
This is also one of the only instances where the pre-baked shadows in SwSh end up looking bad, because part of the character model got twisted into an unusual position.
---
Scarlet & Violet's Lighting Engine
Despite SV relying on their lighting engine for so much of their shading and details, the engine doesn't seem "reliable." It messes up a lot of things.
And since this system is the "alternative" or the "replacement" to SwSh's shadows and coloration, I want to examine all of the lighting engine's other shortcomings.
In dark or shadowed areas, it struggles to make character models dark enough to match the environment. And it doesn't even try to render extra shadows under characters, Pokémon, or scenery objects in darker environments. If the game thinks that you're already in a dark / shadowed area, even if it's not that dark, then, too bad, you're not getting any more darkness—not even a shadow directly under Gastrodon's big, fat body (like in picture 2 above).
But when the models are still bright and the environment is supposed to be dark but there aren't any shadows, the scene just looks fake. And when you're not getting shadows from your character or a Pokémon or most of the environment, but you are getting them from other random things in the scene like a single cliff or the fucking clouds, then the scene is just an absolute mess (like in picture 5 above).
Of course, maybe the "brighter model lighting" thing was done deliberately, as an accessibility thing, to make models stand out in the dark so that you don't miss them or lose sight them. It would help with spotting wild Pokémon in the open world, and maybe if Pokémon get one lighting system, then all characters have to use that system. But the brightness goes way further than simple accessibility would require. Plus, if models had outlines, they would stand out better against their environment, and Game Freak might not need to make them quite as bright.
But if we were to indulge the idea that this brightness is just an accessibility thing... look at the characters' eyes in the SV screenshots above. Even when the rest of your face is completely in shadow, your eyes cannot get anywhere near dark enough. The whites of your eyes stay bright white.
But in SwSh, which you might think would do poorly in this regard for over-relying on premade shadows, they don't have any problem with this stuff. Models—the entire model—are made just as dark as they need to be, fitting with their surrounding lighting.
SV's lighting problems get especially bad in caves. Models are lit as if they're outside. Interior surfaces are all the same brightness (which looks even worse with the endlessly-repeating textures). Environmental shadows are completely absent.
I'm not asking for something like a pitch-black Skyrim DLC dungeon where you're forced to use torches or magelight spells. I don't need survival horror game darkness, or extraction shooter darkness.
How about just a shadow where the cave floor meets the wall. How about a shadow around a rock, or in a corner. How about doing the basic game dev work of setting a geometric volume within caves wherein the engine uses its nighttime shading settings on the models, at least.
And the dumb thing is, it's apparent when you go to exit a cave that SV is trying to do something like that to help sell the effect of being in a cave. There's some kind of inside / outside lighting difference going on.
It doesn't look good, though. I'm not sure that it's even working right.
SwSh's caves (and similar dark locations) don't get that dark, but at least they look like actual places with convincing lighting, models, and textures.
... for the most part. The ones in The Isle of Armor are actually pretty bad, suffering from a lot of the same lighting problems as the caves in SV. At least they have more than a single texture.
Around dawn or dusk in SV, the lighting engine just breaks. Scenes will get way darker or washed-out randomly.
And even when it looks like the lighting is working like it's supposed to, and the scene might even look nice... your character's eyes are still messed up. Way too bright.
Let's look at how light interacts with the trees in the world. A lot of games use some kind of extra processing whenever sunlight hits trees or bushes in order to sell the effect of light on leaves—since they're smooth and reflective, while also being translucent at the same time, so they need extra attention to make them look good. And since foliage is such a prominent part of any (normal) outdoor landscape, it's important to make them look right.
In SV, they're clearly trying to employ these techniques... but they look flat at best, or completely broken at worst. The third picture below isn't selling "sunlight coming through the leaves" at all. It's showing me that these leaves are made out of crystal or something, and also catching fire. The fifth picture is close to getting it right—but when you're shooting for realism, getting close but missing the mark doesn't look great.
For comparison, here are a few screenshots from The Witcher 3 (a game which I think handles environmental lighting very well) running on a base-model PS4, showing how that game renders sunlight coming through foliage.
TW3 is a good-looking game, but not some incredible standout. It's also seven-and-a-half years older than SV. The PS4 running it in these screenshots is three-and-a-half years older than the Switch, and the shots were taken with the PS4's basic inbuilt capture system (which is pretty underpowered) instead of a capture card. Of course, the PS4 itself is slightly more powerful, with an 8-core 1.6GHz CPU and 8GB DDR5 RAM, compared to the Switch's 4-core 1.02GHz CPU and 4GB DDR4 RAM. So what accounts for the difference here?
I won't accept "art style," since SV is clearly going for the same "realistic lighting" effect.
It could be the budget—$81 million for TW3, only $20-22 million for SV. But even then, Game Freak still knew what their budget was while they were making the game. They got to pick what they tried to pull off.
So is SV just let down by the Switch's anemic hardware? Or did Game Freak bite off way more than they could chew?
To be fair to the game, there are some times when SV's lighting engine makes the game look good, beautiful, comfy, aesthetic, etc.
I just think that either the engine, or the hardware, or both, are just being asked to do way too much.
If the devs had devoted a little attention to manually painting shadows onto the textures of models and around the environment like SwSh did, instead of just relying on the lighting engine to handle everything procedurally, that would have gone a long way. Even if they'd used a different technique, like having supplemental shadows follow a model or certain parts of a model around instead of drawing them on as pre-rendered textures, that still would have helped.
But looking at stuff that made it into the game (like the awful, repeated textures in SV's open world), I suspect that "better shadows" were quite a way down the list of priorities, behind a number of other things that Game Freak also didn't get to in time. I think that they might've left everything to the lighting engine as a last-ditch move to ensure that they had something shippable in time for their deadline. Or, maybe they were just over-optimistic retards who earnestly thought that their mediocre lighting engine (or the mediocre hardware that it was running on) really could handle all of this. Who knows.
It's going to seem like I'm praising SwSh a lot, but I know that the game isn't perfect. I just think that it does some things really well, which went underappreciated, and that SV could've learned from what SwSh did right.
---
This is a basic example of what I'm referring to with the outline vs. no outline character art styles:
In SwSh, the models are simpler geometrically, trading less detail within the lines for more detail in the overall shapes of the body and the character's silhouette. They also rely on lines drawn along some features (mouths, noses, wrinkles, etc.) in order to make them appear, just like hand-drawn line art would.
In SV, the models are more detailed—perhaps because they rely almost entirely on the lighting engine to create shadows on the model in order to bring out features on the face or other body parts. Because there are almost no lines drawn on the models, this can lead to features no longer being visible, depending on lighting conditions or the angle of the model relative to its light sources.
SwSh's art style emulates the style of Pokémon's official art, the anime, all of the past games, and even most fan art (beneath whatever effects or embellishments they might add).
Almost every time when you see Pokémon art, whenever you have a human character, a Pokémon, an item, or really anything that's not just part of the background, there's:
- an outline
- a main color (for any given skin color / piece of clothing / body feature)
- a darker version of that main color, for shading
- a bright hue that's used very sparingly (unless it's a really smooth / reflective surface) to highlight the raised features or the edges closest to the light source
And that's pretty much it.
To be fair, the art style in SwSh isn't the exact same as the style that I'm describing from the rest of the series.
The biggest difference is that boundary between the main color and the darker "shadow" color on some shapes is much softer, with a slight gradient between the two colors (I think that this mostly occurs on curved objects). Also, the brighter hue is used a bit more liberally than elsewhere in the franchise on shiny surfaces like hair, plastic, or certain fabrics. But even with these slight deviations from the overall pattern, the key part is that each model's shapes are still made up of those two main colors, within an outline that differentiates the model from the world and different parts of the model from the rest of it. SwSh's art style feels consistent with the rest of the series as a result.
Obviously, Pokémon's art style comes from anime / manga. It is simple and low in detail in order to be quick and easy to draw, so that you can churn out hundreds of manga pages or thousands of anime frames.
Because the point of the style is simplicity, companies that use this style seem to get embarrassed of it the larger and more successful that they get. They imagine that they should be more "respectable," and simple, cheap-looking anime art doesn't fit that mold. Whenever they improve the graphics in their games or increase the fidelity of their art style, it's always to move away from the simplicity of this style.
But in doing so, they overlook all of the benefits of the style, and often end up losing something important—beyond the simple recognizability of their established art style.
For context: I hate anime. I do not watch it. I dislike the art specifically. Yet even I understand the usefulness of the art style. It is incredibly good at clarity—which is very useful when you have small figures on a screen with overlapping features. A strong art style also helps hide the limitations of the hardware, and the limitations of the dev team. There are 20- and 30-year-old games that still look good because of this.
When games like SV throw out parts of their old, "less-advanced" art style without understanding why they were useful in the first place, the game suffers for it.
I remember hearing people say that they thought that SV looked "off" because the style and shape of characters' eyes didn't match past games. I think that SV misses the mark for a much more fundamental reason.
My thesis is that, because SV doesn't use this pattern of outlines + limited colors, it doesn't look like anything else in Pokémon that we're used to. Furthermore, it loses the benefits of the series's established style.
This causes many players to dislike and reject it the game's visuals—even if they haven't been able to put their finger on exactly why it seems so different and "off."
---
Outlines and Shading
In SwSh, the outline separates a character's model from the background, but it also separates similarly-colored or similarly-shaded body parts from one another.
In SV, without an outline, overlapping features of the model are harder to differentiate (unless the model is posed such that the shading helps make it clearer), and parts of the model can easily be lost against the game's vast, bland backgrounds when they feature similar colors (like the character's arm in the image below).
In the SwSh image below, the player character's outline makes every part of his body clearly and readily understandable, even when parts overlap. The left side of his face (from our view) is in just as much shadow as his neck, but the outline around his head preserves the shape of his jawline and chin. The outline around his left forearm (from our view) differentiates his upper and lower arm at the inner bend of his elbow, and the outline around his fingers and hands differentiates his fingers from the inside of his right hand (from our view).
In the first of the SV images below, the player character's right forearm (from our view) basically disappears into his thigh. In the second, the player character's left hand is just undifferentiated mush, all the same color, where you can barely even tell how the hand is rotated and which direction the top side of the hand is pointing unless you look at it for a second. In the third, because we only have (poorly-implemented) lightness and shadows to try to differentiate the shapes by, it looks at first as if the character's hands are backwards, with the lighter portions pointed toward the viewer seeming like the slightly-raised shape of his thumbs. (I tried to find better visual examples for the last two, but hands are usually either too small or just out of the frame.)
Another thing that outlines do is hide, disrupt, or distract from jagged, pixelated edges that desperately need antialiasing.
All of the models below have these edges. But they look way worse on the SV models.
In SwSh, the light and dark portions of a character are always well defined. Even when some part of their body is mostly in shadow, like the player character's head in the below picture, you can still see the brighter part along the top-right. You can track exactly where the light source is.
In SV, when much of the character's face is in shadow, it's just a mess of slight color gradients. SV wants to rely on shadows to show you characters' facial features—but once you're in too much shadow, those details disappear. And where's the light source supposed to be? Somewhere vaguely above him?
Along the undersides of the characters' arms and hands, and beneath their chins in the SwSh image below, there are strong, clearly-differentiated shadows. The shadows immediately convey how each part of the body is oriented, letting you make sense of what's going on more quickly.
When we look at the same places on the character model in the SV image, we don't have the same clear shadows, so we don't get the same effect. In exchange, there are a few more vague shadows on the face. Incredibly soft, incredibly rounded, features damn near disappear. Everywhere else in the franchise, you'd at least have a line for the nose and another for the mouth. The lighting engine can't make the neck beneath the his head or the interior of either palm convincingly dark (not even under the tera orb in his hand). Certainly not as dark as the shadows within his ears would tell us that these other shadows should be (but I'll get to that later).
In SwSh, the Pokémon are given the same outlines and the same two-color shading as the characters, matching the style with which they're drawn in the rest of the franchise, and affording them the all the same benefits of visual clarity.
... but, bizarrely, their outline temporarily disappears when they evolve. So what would've been some of your most kino screenshots aren't going to look like they normally do. No idea why.
So if we take a Pokémon and look at all of its other appearances across the franchise...
... which game's art style presents a better-realized version of that Pokémon?
Which one looks "right?"
For me, it's SwSh.
Also, even though SwSh uses that two-tone style for coloration, it's not too strict about it. Not if it would be to its own detriment.
If you compare Leafeon's head in both of the above pictures as clouds pass over and the light changes slightly how the fuck has my life gotten to the point where I'm writing this sentence, part of the lighter tone of tan on the upper part of his head brightens slightly, conveying both depth and roundness without breaking the high-contrast two-tone visual style. There seems to be a range for each tone, within which that tone's lightness can vary depending on the surrounding lighting.
To be fair, SV's shadows aren't always all bad. Sometimes they convey the point of the visuals more clearly. It's just that they're really inconsistent at best. And even when they're working "well," the shadows are still quite low-contrast.
You could argue that "low contrast" is fine. It's just a stylistic choice, right?
But given the low resolution that we're working with, and the low detail of the models, and how small each model usually is in any given frame (zoomed out while exploring to show you the open world, zoomed out during a battle to show you all of the Pokémon with their trainers behind them and the scenery behind them, etc.), I think that we need more contrast—like what SwSh gives us.
It seems as if the devs took the level of detail that the textures and models had in SwSh as a starting point, and then tried to increase the fidelity in small ways just so they could point to the difference and go, "look, SV is better because bigger number of pixels / polygons / shadows"—without taking into account how that would change the overall picture.
Like, yes, the faces are more detailed in SV—but they're not detailed enough to clearly convey its features most of the time.
So SV is left in this bad middle ground. Trying to escape the simplicity of Pokémon's anime / manga art style, but instead just losing its clarity. Trying to reach the level of immersion that a more realistic art style could bring, but instead just making everything vague and disjointed.
I bet that the art team got rid of the outline because they said to themselves, "we don't need this anymore. We're past this. Our models' visuals are now clear enough on their own." I'm sure that you can tell by now: I disagree.
---
Pre-Rendered Shadows
In SwSh, some parts of a character's body will have what appear to be pre-rendered shadows—between the chin and collarbone, under the armpits, inside the ears, behind the head, between the legs, and a few more places, depending on the model. These shadows are placed in recessed areas that are expected to always be in shadow—and since the character models never lie flat on their backs or turn upside-down, these shadows will fit with pretty much every light source that you're going to encounter in-game.
Using these pre-rendered shadows probably saves resources from the engine, and it also creates shadows that look sharper and better defined, without that soft gradient between one color and the other—more like the stark color differentiation found in the art across the rest of the Pokémon franchise.
The rest of the shadows on a character's body in SwSh are generated by the lighting engine. It results in some softer shadows in some cases, but in others—like along the underside of the player's arm, no matter which way that arm is bent or pointing—the shadows are quite sharp.
In SV, Game Freak seems to have hardly used this technique at all. They're still relying on the lighting engine to do nearly all of the work. If a particular part of a character model should usually be dark, then the engine will just make it dark when it needs to... right? But this doesn't always pan out.
It looks like there might be a tiny pre-rendered shadow at the very top of characters' necks, where it meets their head... but it's really not selling the illusion of actual light and shadows like the SwSh textures did. There's another pre-rendered shadow just inside the ears. I don't see much else.
But since SV's cast of boarding school characters show a lot less skin, that makes it harder to tell the extent to which they're actually using the technique or not. Especially since they barely seem to use pre-rendered shadows on clothes at all (I think just a tiny bit under the armpits), perhaps because of how clothes are treated separately from the base model.
Of course, sometimes both games get something wrong. They both have you break your own shoulder to throw a pokéball.
This is also one of the only instances where the pre-baked shadows in SwSh end up looking bad, because part of the character model got twisted into an unusual position.
---
Scarlet & Violet's Lighting Engine
Despite SV relying on their lighting engine for so much of their shading and details, the engine doesn't seem "reliable." It messes up a lot of things.
And since this system is the "alternative" or the "replacement" to SwSh's shadows and coloration, I want to examine all of the lighting engine's other shortcomings.
In dark or shadowed areas, it struggles to make character models dark enough to match the environment. And it doesn't even try to render extra shadows under characters, Pokémon, or scenery objects in darker environments. If the game thinks that you're already in a dark / shadowed area, even if it's not that dark, then, too bad, you're not getting any more darkness—not even a shadow directly under Gastrodon's big, fat body (like in picture 2 above).
But when the models are still bright and the environment is supposed to be dark but there aren't any shadows, the scene just looks fake. And when you're not getting shadows from your character or a Pokémon or most of the environment, but you are getting them from other random things in the scene like a single cliff or the fucking clouds, then the scene is just an absolute mess (like in picture 5 above).
Of course, maybe the "brighter model lighting" thing was done deliberately, as an accessibility thing, to make models stand out in the dark so that you don't miss them or lose sight them. It would help with spotting wild Pokémon in the open world, and maybe if Pokémon get one lighting system, then all characters have to use that system. But the brightness goes way further than simple accessibility would require. Plus, if models had outlines, they would stand out better against their environment, and Game Freak might not need to make them quite as bright.
But if we were to indulge the idea that this brightness is just an accessibility thing... look at the characters' eyes in the SV screenshots above. Even when the rest of your face is completely in shadow, your eyes cannot get anywhere near dark enough. The whites of your eyes stay bright white.
But in SwSh, which you might think would do poorly in this regard for over-relying on premade shadows, they don't have any problem with this stuff. Models—the entire model—are made just as dark as they need to be, fitting with their surrounding lighting.
SV's lighting problems get especially bad in caves. Models are lit as if they're outside. Interior surfaces are all the same brightness (which looks even worse with the endlessly-repeating textures). Environmental shadows are completely absent.
I'm not asking for something like a pitch-black Skyrim DLC dungeon where you're forced to use torches or magelight spells. I don't need survival horror game darkness, or extraction shooter darkness.
How about just a shadow where the cave floor meets the wall. How about a shadow around a rock, or in a corner. How about doing the basic game dev work of setting a geometric volume within caves wherein the engine uses its nighttime shading settings on the models, at least.
And the dumb thing is, it's apparent when you go to exit a cave that SV is trying to do something like that to help sell the effect of being in a cave. There's some kind of inside / outside lighting difference going on.
It doesn't look good, though. I'm not sure that it's even working right.
SwSh's caves (and similar dark locations) don't get that dark, but at least they look like actual places with convincing lighting, models, and textures.
... for the most part. The ones in The Isle of Armor are actually pretty bad, suffering from a lot of the same lighting problems as the caves in SV. At least they have more than a single texture.
Around dawn or dusk in SV, the lighting engine just breaks. Scenes will get way darker or washed-out randomly.
And even when it looks like the lighting is working like it's supposed to, and the scene might even look nice... your character's eyes are still messed up. Way too bright.
Let's look at how light interacts with the trees in the world. A lot of games use some kind of extra processing whenever sunlight hits trees or bushes in order to sell the effect of light on leaves—since they're smooth and reflective, while also being translucent at the same time, so they need extra attention to make them look good. And since foliage is such a prominent part of any (normal) outdoor landscape, it's important to make them look right.
In SV, they're clearly trying to employ these techniques... but they look flat at best, or completely broken at worst. The third picture below isn't selling "sunlight coming through the leaves" at all. It's showing me that these leaves are made out of crystal or something, and also catching fire. The fifth picture is close to getting it right—but when you're shooting for realism, getting close but missing the mark doesn't look great.
For comparison, here are a few screenshots from The Witcher 3 (a game which I think handles environmental lighting very well) running on a base-model PS4, showing how that game renders sunlight coming through foliage.
TW3 is a good-looking game, but not some incredible standout. It's also seven-and-a-half years older than SV. The PS4 running it in these screenshots is three-and-a-half years older than the Switch, and the shots were taken with the PS4's basic inbuilt capture system (which is pretty underpowered) instead of a capture card. Of course, the PS4 itself is slightly more powerful, with an 8-core 1.6GHz CPU and 8GB DDR5 RAM, compared to the Switch's 4-core 1.02GHz CPU and 4GB DDR4 RAM. So what accounts for the difference here?
I won't accept "art style," since SV is clearly going for the same "realistic lighting" effect.
It could be the budget—$81 million for TW3, only $20-22 million for SV. But even then, Game Freak still knew what their budget was while they were making the game. They got to pick what they tried to pull off.
So is SV just let down by the Switch's anemic hardware? Or did Game Freak bite off way more than they could chew?
To be fair to the game, there are some times when SV's lighting engine makes the game look good, beautiful, comfy, aesthetic, etc.
I just think that either the engine, or the hardware, or both, are just being asked to do way too much.
If the devs had devoted a little attention to manually painting shadows onto the textures of models and around the environment like SwSh did, instead of just relying on the lighting engine to handle everything procedurally, that would have gone a long way. Even if they'd used a different technique, like having supplemental shadows follow a model or certain parts of a model around instead of drawing them on as pre-rendered textures, that still would have helped.
But looking at stuff that made it into the game (like the awful, repeated textures in SV's open world), I suspect that "better shadows" were quite a way down the list of priorities, behind a number of other things that Game Freak also didn't get to in time. I think that they might've left everything to the lighting engine as a last-ditch move to ensure that they had something shippable in time for their deadline. Or, maybe they were just over-optimistic retards who earnestly thought that their mediocre lighting engine (or the mediocre hardware that it was running on) really could handle all of this. Who knows.
I had more to say about other parts of SV's design, but apparently I hit the character limit.
My attachments from the 2nd post got into this one somehow. Sorry about that.
Should be cleaned up now.
Last edited:
Ghost88
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2019
Is there any special merchandise out for the 30th anniversary, anyone bought anything nice?
- Joined
- Nov 12, 2024
Nice one, but wrong thread mate.
- Joined
- May 29, 2024
Even though it has nothing to do with my original point about outlines and colors and shading, I want to criticize SV's presentation. The game's cinematography, its style, its designs, its details. Because I believe that there's a lot more in here that helps contribute to SV feeling... "off."
I don't have a strong thesis about the problems with its presentation, not like I did with the art style. Basically, I just want to show that SV didn't really try, and that SwSh, while not perfect, at least tried, at least had some real style to it. So I guess the magic solution that I'm proposing this time is that Game Freak just needs to fucking try again.
I won't spend too much time on the obvious.
We all know that SV's open world textures are an embarrassment.
I don't show the SwSh landscape screenshots here as if they're incredible. They're not—the models and textures are barely better than SV's. But what they do show is how much better the environment could look with just tiny bit of effort.
I get that SV needed to have big cliffs and mountains in order to divide zones and make travel barriers. But so something with them. Anything other than the same featureless, repeating textures.
Give us a little more variety in the shapes of the landscape. A few sub-features. Varying textures. Throw a few splotches of green on there. With just the barest effort, it could have looked so much better.
Using some actual natural-looking shapes in the landscape probably would have done the most for SV.
SwSh's pointy little hills look like the most basic schema of hills, almost a caricature—but at least they look like what they're supposed to look like. Just like I was saying about character models in the last post, having a clear style really helps disguise technical inadequacies. If you can't render something complex, then go with a style that draws it simpler.
The only time when the textures don't look completely blank is when the angle of the sun is just right, so that SV's lighting engine can cast some shadows across the uneven shapes, finally giving us a scintilla of variety. Is that really what Game Freak was relying upon to make their visuals look passable? They know that the sun moves in their game, right?
Even when in the most flattering light possible, the level of detail and variety that these shadows add is nowhere near good enough.
It wouldn't have taken much effort at all from the level designers to add some actual details to the landscape. All that it would have taken was a bit of creativity and care.
What else could the excuse be? That it would've been impossible to render anything more detailed than what they had? I refuse to believe that.
But I suppose that I can believe, after ZA's incredible failures with optimization were discovered (it loads the entire fucking city at once, not just the section where you are), that Game Freak didn't know how to make varied landscapes for SV that wouldn't crash the game if you got more than 100 feet away and had too much of it on your screen at once.
---
You all know about SV's flaws by now, but let's play the hits:
Locations feel empty and unnatural.
Open-world "locations" are even worse.
World assets are absurdly undetailed.
Models are arranged nonsensically, and their textures are (still) horrible.
Those textures might not even load.
Light shines through solid objects.
Building interiors are basically nonexistent.
Pokémon will spawn in dumb places where there should've been safeguards against it.
Sometimes, Pokémon will spawn in truly absurd places.
You can get stuck pretty easily, provided that you can find a part of the world where the geometry is even complex enough for that.
If the camera doesn't wedge itself in a hillside, you can also just do it yourself.
This is not an acceptable level of polish from a game made by the world's largest media franchise.
---
But maybe it's not fair to compare the environment in a much-smaller, much-more-linear game like SwSh to the open-world environment of SV.
Lots of the landscape in the SwSh images above is out-of-bounds, so it can be less-detailed, and it's easier for the engine to work with. That's not the same as SV's open world.
So how about another another open-world Switch game, Breath of the Wild?
I've never played it before, and looking at it for the first time now, I'm not terribly impressed... but it at least shows us that, yes, there is definitely more that can be squeezed out of the Switch's hardware.
And, of course, BotW came out five-and-a-half years before SV. Ooof.
It's not really worth comparing SV's open world to the open world in something like The Witcher 3. They're in completely different leagues.
This is completely unfair. Except that TW3 is also available on the Switch.
But the point of this is to show the difference between vision and execution.
Some game engines can pull off a fully-realized, immersive open world. Some hardware can bring a huge, detailed setting to life. And some just can't.
It's important to know your limits, and to work within them.
From what I've heard, it was actually Nintendo who mandated that everything be turned into a huge open-world game after BotW's smash success, technical limitations be damned.
But the Game Freak devs were still the ones with the best grasp of what they could and couldn't actually pull off. Even if Nintendo gave them unrealistic goals, it was still on Game Freak to twist and reinterpret those goals into something that they could actually do.
What about the much-derided Mass Effect: Andromeda, legendary for all of its sloppiness, bad design, broken elements, and cut corners?
This game came out around the same time as BotW, and is running on my even-older base-model PS4.
Does SV look better than ME:A?
No. Of course not. But this is the danger of Game Freak trying to go for "graphical fidelity" instead of its tried-and-true art style. Even dogshit will end up looking better than your game if that dogshit's models are more-detailed than yours are.
So let's really lower the bar.
How about Knights of the Old Republic? A game that came out nineteen-and-a-half years before SV. Who does deserts better?
And even if you do side with SV on this, should it even be fucking close?
KotOR ran on anything above a 1.0 GHz CPU (Pentium III/Athlon), 256MB RAM, and 32MB OpenGL 1.4-compatible graphics. This is an incredibly-low bar. Your phone can run this. A smart fridge could probably run it.
It's also available on the Switch. (With worse graphics, somehow, according to the screenshots on Nintendo's store page. I don't know what the fuck is going on over there at Nintendo.)
And, yes, beyond the playable area in KotOR, the horizon is low-resolution, pixelated sprites.
But you know what that looks like to me?
Making the most you can with what little you have.
Like older Pokémon games used to do.
This spot on Route 103 isn't actually drawing out as far as it's pretending to. Not even close. It's not high-fidelity. But it's charming.
Game Freak needs to get back to that.
We all know that SV's open world textures are an embarrassment.
I don't show the SwSh landscape screenshots here as if they're incredible. They're not—the models and textures are barely better than SV's. But what they do show is how much better the environment could look with just tiny bit of effort.
I get that SV needed to have big cliffs and mountains in order to divide zones and make travel barriers. But so something with them. Anything other than the same featureless, repeating textures.
Give us a little more variety in the shapes of the landscape. A few sub-features. Varying textures. Throw a few splotches of green on there. With just the barest effort, it could have looked so much better.
Using some actual natural-looking shapes in the landscape probably would have done the most for SV.
SwSh's pointy little hills look like the most basic schema of hills, almost a caricature—but at least they look like what they're supposed to look like. Just like I was saying about character models in the last post, having a clear style really helps disguise technical inadequacies. If you can't render something complex, then go with a style that draws it simpler.
The only time when the textures don't look completely blank is when the angle of the sun is just right, so that SV's lighting engine can cast some shadows across the uneven shapes, finally giving us a scintilla of variety. Is that really what Game Freak was relying upon to make their visuals look passable? They know that the sun moves in their game, right?
Even when in the most flattering light possible, the level of detail and variety that these shadows add is nowhere near good enough.
It wouldn't have taken much effort at all from the level designers to add some actual details to the landscape. All that it would have taken was a bit of creativity and care.
What else could the excuse be? That it would've been impossible to render anything more detailed than what they had? I refuse to believe that.
But I suppose that I can believe, after ZA's incredible failures with optimization were discovered (it loads the entire fucking city at once, not just the section where you are), that Game Freak didn't know how to make varied landscapes for SV that wouldn't crash the game if you got more than 100 feet away and had too much of it on your screen at once.
---
You all know about SV's flaws by now, but let's play the hits:
Locations feel empty and unnatural.
Open-world "locations" are even worse.
World assets are absurdly undetailed.
Models are arranged nonsensically, and their textures are (still) horrible.
Those textures might not even load.
Light shines through solid objects.
Building interiors are basically nonexistent.
Pokémon will spawn in dumb places where there should've been safeguards against it.
Sometimes, Pokémon will spawn in truly absurd places.
You can get stuck pretty easily, provided that you can find a part of the world where the geometry is even complex enough for that.
If the camera doesn't wedge itself in a hillside, you can also just do it yourself.
This is not an acceptable level of polish from a game made by the world's largest media franchise.
---
But maybe it's not fair to compare the environment in a much-smaller, much-more-linear game like SwSh to the open-world environment of SV.
Lots of the landscape in the SwSh images above is out-of-bounds, so it can be less-detailed, and it's easier for the engine to work with. That's not the same as SV's open world.
So how about another another open-world Switch game, Breath of the Wild?
I've never played it before, and looking at it for the first time now, I'm not terribly impressed... but it at least shows us that, yes, there is definitely more that can be squeezed out of the Switch's hardware.
And, of course, BotW came out five-and-a-half years before SV. Ooof.
It's not really worth comparing SV's open world to the open world in something like The Witcher 3. They're in completely different leagues.
This is completely unfair. Except that TW3 is also available on the Switch.
But the point of this is to show the difference between vision and execution.
Some game engines can pull off a fully-realized, immersive open world. Some hardware can bring a huge, detailed setting to life. And some just can't.
It's important to know your limits, and to work within them.
From what I've heard, it was actually Nintendo who mandated that everything be turned into a huge open-world game after BotW's smash success, technical limitations be damned.
But the Game Freak devs were still the ones with the best grasp of what they could and couldn't actually pull off. Even if Nintendo gave them unrealistic goals, it was still on Game Freak to twist and reinterpret those goals into something that they could actually do.
What about the much-derided Mass Effect: Andromeda, legendary for all of its sloppiness, bad design, broken elements, and cut corners?
This game came out around the same time as BotW, and is running on my even-older base-model PS4.
Does SV look better than ME:A?
No. Of course not. But this is the danger of Game Freak trying to go for "graphical fidelity" instead of its tried-and-true art style. Even dogshit will end up looking better than your game if that dogshit's models are more-detailed than yours are.
So let's really lower the bar.
How about Knights of the Old Republic? A game that came out nineteen-and-a-half years before SV. Who does deserts better?
And even if you do side with SV on this, should it even be fucking close?
KotOR ran on anything above a 1.0 GHz CPU (Pentium III/Athlon), 256MB RAM, and 32MB OpenGL 1.4-compatible graphics. This is an incredibly-low bar. Your phone can run this. A smart fridge could probably run it.
It's also available on the Switch. (With worse graphics, somehow, according to the screenshots on Nintendo's store page. I don't know what the fuck is going on over there at Nintendo.)
And, yes, beyond the playable area in KotOR, the horizon is low-resolution, pixelated sprites.
But you know what that looks like to me?
Making the most you can with what little you have.
Like older Pokémon games used to do.
This spot on Route 103 isn't actually drawing out as far as it's pretending to. Not even close. It's not high-fidelity. But it's charming.
Game Freak needs to get back to that.
I also think that SV feels like a worse Pokémon game because of its animations.
Game Freak animated lots of unique Pokémon behaviors that Pokémon use in the open world, or when they're running around at picnics, which is certainly nice... but this isn't Nintendogs.
A lot of the animations and effects that we're used to in battles—the main focus of the game—are either very lackluster or just completely missing.
I have gripes about a lot of the new move animations, but I really want to focus on the camera.
In SwSh, we used to get a ton of camera effects. They conveyed speed, force, they showed wind-ups, they had style god damn it.
We've had camera effects since RBY, with Thunderbolt flashing inverted colors, or Earthquake shaking the screen. These effects have been present in every other generation, conveying motion and speed and intensity and all kinds of things.
But now, in SV, these camera effects are usually missing. And in the few instances when they do show up, they're incredibly subdued.
If you're in a "major" battle in the story, like a gym battle, a postgame battle, or an online battle, the camera might actually flip around from the default rear view to an angled front view of your Pokémon to show the attack coming out, with animations and especially effects that are often a shadow of their former self. If you're idle for a moment, the game will start using a variety of orbiting camera angles, like battles did in past generations... but it's not as good as it was. And in SV, it only shows up in these kinds of battles.
But if you're in an open-world battle against trainers or wild Pokémon, the camera just sits wherever you've got it rotated. No special framing for a wind-up. No special angle of the water jet or fire blast or whatever as it shoots out. No camera effects like zooming or shaking or distortion to sell the impact. This is most of your fights for most players, and the camera effects are completely absent.
And if you're in a tera raid, the camera won't even show attacks from any other angle. You get to just sit there and churn out damage within the time limit. Raids in SwSh were like that, too, but with how prominent raids have become in SV, the empty, unengaging presentation is much more apparent.
---
I'd bet that the player-rotatable camera that you have during open-world battles is probably what explains why a lot of the move animations in SV are so lackluster.
When you're designing an effect with set camera angles in mind, you have to make it look good from each of those angles. And, those angles are almost always zoomed in more than the default battle view, so you have to ensure a decent level of detail, too.
But when you're counting on the player-controlled camera just being "wherever," then you can just churn out a mediocre animation and move on to the next one because no one's ever going to see it that closely, so it doesn't really matter that much.
For the vast majority of players, in the vast majority of their battles, Game Freak counts on the camera being zoomed out and just sitting wherever it's sitting. And for the smaller group of players who play enough online battles that those animations are the majority of what they see, if you're already that invested in the game, Game Freak figures that they've already got you hooked.
Aww, you didn't think that this Brick Break animation looked as good as it used to? So? Where else are you gonna go?
"A controllable camera during battles" seems like something that players have wanted for decades—and now that we have it, it's shit. Your player just gets glued in place somewhere in the empty world for a half-assed battle with no effects.
Suddenly, the little 3D vignettes where battles used to take place during Gens 6-8 look a lot better. Even the backdrops in the 3DS games look better than most places where you could have a battle in SV.
People used to complain about how it was like battles transported you into an alternate dimension, disconnected from the world—but now you can see the care that actually went into these little vignettes. Sure, you can move the camera around in SV, but there's nothing to see.
I'm sure that the fact that you can move your camera during battles was sold as "player freedom," just like the game being "open world" was.
There are these twin siren songs in gaming of "freedom" and "realism" that just show up and fuck up whatever you had before. Game devs are pathologically desperate to chase these qualities. Players think that they want them.
They just think that more player freedom must necessarily be better. Even if there was a purpose to the structure. Same for realism, and whatever deliberate style it's replacing. Like how Call of Duty added a ton of doors to buildings on their multiplayer maps a few years ago because "it's more realistic," just blindly thinking that "more realistic" must mean "better"—only to completely ruin the sightlines and map flow and have the whole community hate it.
And then everybody gets a clunky, ugly mess with no structure, no style, and no purpose.
"Just wander around and collect 100 whatevers."
"Complete this checklist to be given your ending screen."
"Put up with this 'more realistic' thing that does nothing but make the gameplay worse."
It sucks. I'm sick of it. And it's such an obvious trap that developers should really know about by now. But leave it to Game Freak to be miles behind the curve.
I think it's sad that you have a better chance of seeing proper camera effects in SV when a story opponent is talking to you than in an actual battle.
---
I could try to develop this idea better, or just write it better, but I'm running out of steam, and this topic is a really mixed bag.
There are still a few decent camera effects for some move impacts. There are still some move animations and effects that look good. So it's harder to pick out a consistent pattern to talk about.
Game Freak animated lots of unique Pokémon behaviors that Pokémon use in the open world, or when they're running around at picnics, which is certainly nice... but this isn't Nintendogs.
A lot of the animations and effects that we're used to in battles—the main focus of the game—are either very lackluster or just completely missing.
I have gripes about a lot of the new move animations, but I really want to focus on the camera.
In SwSh, we used to get a ton of camera effects. They conveyed speed, force, they showed wind-ups, they had style god damn it.
We've had camera effects since RBY, with Thunderbolt flashing inverted colors, or Earthquake shaking the screen. These effects have been present in every other generation, conveying motion and speed and intensity and all kinds of things.
But now, in SV, these camera effects are usually missing. And in the few instances when they do show up, they're incredibly subdued.
If you're in a "major" battle in the story, like a gym battle, a postgame battle, or an online battle, the camera might actually flip around from the default rear view to an angled front view of your Pokémon to show the attack coming out, with animations and especially effects that are often a shadow of their former self. If you're idle for a moment, the game will start using a variety of orbiting camera angles, like battles did in past generations... but it's not as good as it was. And in SV, it only shows up in these kinds of battles.
But if you're in an open-world battle against trainers or wild Pokémon, the camera just sits wherever you've got it rotated. No special framing for a wind-up. No special angle of the water jet or fire blast or whatever as it shoots out. No camera effects like zooming or shaking or distortion to sell the impact. This is most of your fights for most players, and the camera effects are completely absent.
And if you're in a tera raid, the camera won't even show attacks from any other angle. You get to just sit there and churn out damage within the time limit. Raids in SwSh were like that, too, but with how prominent raids have become in SV, the empty, unengaging presentation is much more apparent.
---
I'd bet that the player-rotatable camera that you have during open-world battles is probably what explains why a lot of the move animations in SV are so lackluster.
When you're designing an effect with set camera angles in mind, you have to make it look good from each of those angles. And, those angles are almost always zoomed in more than the default battle view, so you have to ensure a decent level of detail, too.
But when you're counting on the player-controlled camera just being "wherever," then you can just churn out a mediocre animation and move on to the next one because no one's ever going to see it that closely, so it doesn't really matter that much.
For the vast majority of players, in the vast majority of their battles, Game Freak counts on the camera being zoomed out and just sitting wherever it's sitting. And for the smaller group of players who play enough online battles that those animations are the majority of what they see, if you're already that invested in the game, Game Freak figures that they've already got you hooked.
Aww, you didn't think that this Brick Break animation looked as good as it used to? So? Where else are you gonna go?
"A controllable camera during battles" seems like something that players have wanted for decades—and now that we have it, it's shit. Your player just gets glued in place somewhere in the empty world for a half-assed battle with no effects.
Suddenly, the little 3D vignettes where battles used to take place during Gens 6-8 look a lot better. Even the backdrops in the 3DS games look better than most places where you could have a battle in SV.
People used to complain about how it was like battles transported you into an alternate dimension, disconnected from the world—but now you can see the care that actually went into these little vignettes. Sure, you can move the camera around in SV, but there's nothing to see.
I'm sure that the fact that you can move your camera during battles was sold as "player freedom," just like the game being "open world" was.
There are these twin siren songs in gaming of "freedom" and "realism" that just show up and fuck up whatever you had before. Game devs are pathologically desperate to chase these qualities. Players think that they want them.
They just think that more player freedom must necessarily be better. Even if there was a purpose to the structure. Same for realism, and whatever deliberate style it's replacing. Like how Call of Duty added a ton of doors to buildings on their multiplayer maps a few years ago because "it's more realistic," just blindly thinking that "more realistic" must mean "better"—only to completely ruin the sightlines and map flow and have the whole community hate it.
And then everybody gets a clunky, ugly mess with no structure, no style, and no purpose.
"Just wander around and collect 100 whatevers."
"Complete this checklist to be given your ending screen."
"Put up with this 'more realistic' thing that does nothing but make the gameplay worse."
It sucks. I'm sick of it. And it's such an obvious trap that developers should really know about by now. But leave it to Game Freak to be miles behind the curve.
I think it's sad that you have a better chance of seeing proper camera effects in SV when a story opponent is talking to you than in an actual battle.
---
I could try to develop this idea better, or just write it better, but I'm running out of steam, and this topic is a really mixed bag.
There are still a few decent camera effects for some move impacts. There are still some move animations and effects that look good. So it's harder to pick out a consistent pattern to talk about.
Everything in SV feels flat. Plain. Featureless. Short on details, shorter on theme and vibe and feeling.
The few things and places that actually do try to represent something else feel like a hollow imitation.
SV starts off with a bit of care in its presentation, showing you things that are specific and appealing to try to entice you to keep playing.
But then you wander just a bit further, and you see the blank landscape in the distance, and you think, "oh god, is this really it?"
And, yeah, it mostly is.
The models look like whatever they were shat out as. The weather and the environment is whatever it was like when you showed up. Your path to a place is wherever you went through this bland, featureless landscape. The music was one of four songs—who needs more?
Nothing is particular. Nothing is special. Every other part of SV is built on the assumption that you will find the open world to be so much more engaging than it actually is. As if they think that you'll go on these wild and memorable organic adventures wherever you go, no matter which path you take nor what you find along the way—so there's just no need to populate the world with curated experiences presented in a particular way.
Maybe it sounds unfair to ask for this, since past Pokémon games didn't have such sculpted encounters or cutscenes or things like that, and we still liked those games.
But if Pokémon wants to be an open-world game now, then I want an actual open world. One that doesn't feel like an empty spread of polygons. One that feels like a world.
An open world needs:
- other people and other things going on in it, aside from just you
- things that change
- things that you can interact with and affect
- things that are meaningful
Hell, any video game world—"open" or not—needs most or all of that if you want it to feel like an actual, immersive, living world.
And to convey them, you need particular scenarios. Maybe you convey them in cutscenes. Maybe in things that look like quests. Little scenarios that you can come across. Things going on in the world around you.
I don't really see that in SV.
And I don't think that the lack of "presentation" can even be blamed on the limitations of being an open-world game. Like thinking that they couldn't make scenarios because they couldn't account for which direction the player might come from. Of course you can. Game freak just didn't.
---
There are some things that are best suited that old, awful, "linear" game model that Game Freak and every other developer seems to want to get away from. There are still some forgotten advantages to linear games.
During the campaign, SwSh controls the time of day based on story progression, rather than letting it follow your system clock. At first, I wasn't wild about that idea. "What about the small handful of evolutions that rely on time of day?" I shrieked. But it does let the devs do some interesting things with the setting, especially the lighting. It can help set a particular mood that they might want for a particular story segment.
When you first arrive at Hulbury, it's a normal, partially-cloudy day. You've come to a normal-looking town, on the next, normal, expected step of your journey. It's early on, the gyms aren't too hard... like the weather, it's all pretty mundane.
At the lighthouse, the clouds stretch out to the horizon, highlighting the expanse of the sea... in the town where the water-type gym is.
You first meet that water-type gym leader looking out at the sea. A bit on-the-nose... but, hey, it's got a theme.
When you enter the gym to take on the gym leader, it's still daytime.
But when you begin the gym challenge, afternoon turns to evening. The sky above the arena grows a darker, deeper blue. The clouds take on a similar hue. The interior of the arena is cast in shadows that complement the blue architectural details and the water-themed decorations inside, bringing out their blue color even more.
And after you've beaten the gym leader and you step outside again, you see that the evening features a dramatic sunset, marking a number of changes—your victory and your growth in power; your coming transition from this place onto the next, unknown location; and the Chairman's newfound interest in you. It shows that your efforts have made a mark on the world by literally changing the state of the world.
Plus, evening is when dinnertime is. And the meeting with the Chairman is at a café. With a reminder of where you just were and what you just did right out the window.
Sure, it didn't have to take place at a café, but since it does... do you see how everything in this sequence goes together?
Yes, the story of SwSh was shit, but it wasn't all shit. Game Freak tried here. This is such a basic example of some of the things that can be done with a game's presentation if the devs just try.
---
SV doesn't really do anything like this.
The few times when something story-related happens, you get incredibly-basic framing. Usually just a few text boxes as the camera cuts back and forth between the speakers, like the framing in a sit-com. Sometimes, the camera tilts. Wooo.
The lighting is kept as daytime during the tutorial so that new players don't miss anything when they're supposed to be learning.
After that, it's just whatever it is, racing through a day / night cycle instead of mirroring your system clock like past generations. I guess that offers variety in the different stages of lighting that you'll experience during a playthrough, or even just a single sitting.
Encounters in the open world trigger the same basic camera movements every single time—moving, locking position, zooming in, and then resetting your camera.
... but this rigid pattern can easily fuck up by phasing through the scenery. There don't seem to be any safeguards to prevent this. I guess it just doesn't happen more often because the world is so devoid of details that could get in the way.
The grass is gracious enough to fade out when it's in the way. Alas, the hills are not so accommodating.
For the rest of SV's presentation, there's basically nothing.
You'll meet major characters who each have a bit of personality, sure—Larry is a mopey, disinterested douche in a restaurant; Katy is a nice, chubby ditz with a confectionary shop that you barely see; the Team Star theaterfags can't wait to waterboard you with their half-hearted indignation and their gay backstory—but none of it feels like it matters. Whoever it is, you run into them whenever you want, you take care of business on their little stage, you take in the scant theming that they have, and then you move on.
It's brief, it's interchangeable, it's forgettable, and nothing changes about the world once you've gone through it. It's just "and then this happened, and then this happened," over and over, with long stretches of absolutely nothing in between as you cross the map from one of these checkpoints to another. I guess because Game Freak was utterly terrified of constraining players' freedom in the open world in any way.
We can't give the world some changes that might matter as a result of their actions—what if they want to tackle the gyms and bosses and titans in the most retarded order possible? Anything meaningful that could constrain them in any way must be sacrificed at the altar of pathological freedom!
---
But let's go back and look at the gym battle in Hulbury. The setpiece. The big, climactic showdown. And let's compare it to what's supposed to be the literal best that SV has to offer in that regard.
In SwSh, Nessa's venue is a big sports arena. The building the same model as every other gym leader's arena, aside from the coloring, but it's still a decent model. It at least looks like what it's trying to be.
In SV, Geeta's venue is literally "some polygons." Just about the most incoherent architecture possible.
Big, featureless drum on the bottom, handle on top.
You first meet Nessa by the seaside, looking out at the ocean.
You first meet Geeta lurking in a random gym office like fucking slenderman.
The prelude to your battle with Nessa is a standard gym lobby, recolored in blue and with her wave pattern on the carpet—followed by a classic Pokémon gym puzzle with big, colorful pipes and gushing water.
The prelude to your battle with Geeta is a blank office—followed by a big, nearly-colorless room covered in a bunch of blank square panels.
Nessa's arena is decorated with wave patterns. Her water-droplet emblem is displayed prominently on the wall.
The floor, the wall panels, the architecture, and the little details in the arena are all some different shade of blue or indigo—somewhere around ten different shades, if not more. Because the battle takes place in the evening, Nessa's arena is lit slightly darker than the other gyms to compliment the blue colors throughout the interior. And when the camera pans up, the sky makes the whole scene even more blue. It might be heavy-handed, but it all does a strong job of reinforcing her theme.
Geeta's arena is blank white metal panels in incredibly-simple shapes. The overall structure of the suspended area where you're fighting is just a rhombus. The arena is a plain rectangle with no decoration, not even a recolor of the design that the gyms used. It all hangs above a cylinder with a... compass rose printed on top of it? And it's held up between two weird "modern architecture" suspension bridge thingies that double as elevator shafts.
There are no symbols, no patterns. No meaning in the backdrop. Nothing to convey a theme or any ideas at all.
The only color is found in the red, yellow, green, and blue lines around the arena, in each corner. These colors aren't connected to anything (unless you take those four basic colors to represent something "all-encompassing," signifying how Geeta is the champion over all of Paldea and all its various types, or something like that). They don't match the colors from existing types. They're incredibly over-saturated, looking like they were taken straight out of Microsoft Paint in the late '90s. They come across as a complete afterthought.
And this dreadful arena is presented... however it looks when you show up. For me, Geeta's arena was washed out by the sunlight, because fuck you, you get whatever time of day you get. Not like there's anything to see up there. But it still goes back to the idea that Game Freak just trusted all of their procedural systems to handle everything instead of giving anything, even something as important as this, any individualized effort.
Nessa is a slender swimmer in a visually-busy swimsuit that's similar to the other gym leaders' sponsor-covered league uniforms, wearing lots of jewelry and beachy adornments. Her hair is styled similarly, and is dyed a vivid aqua blue.
Geeta is a lanky goober in a plain suit with no decorations, a weird face, and a dumb gold bolo tie. Her hair is a giant tangle that regularly clips through her shoulders, and is dyed a completely-missable dark indigo, matching parts of her suit and the gloves that she wears like a fucking Alliance agent from Firefly.
During her battle, Nessa gets a lot of custom cinematography. Camera angles and effects and animations, all particular to her, just like many other characters in SwSh get. All to convey mood, style, personality.
Geeta's battle—against the champion—has a few brief moments of unique animation, in which she's doing... not much. Adjusting her glove. Standing stiff and straight. The rest of her animations are all incredibly stiff, perhaps even adapted or reused from other characters.
And as the battle reaches its end, Nessa sends out a big, glowing Dreadnaw the size of a house, with the camera pulling back and panning up to show the storm swirling above it...
... while Geeta's final Glimmora puts on a shiny hat and then sits there in its same old spot before getting one-shotted a second later.
I don't like Dynamaxxing. I always thought that it was dumb. I know that Terastallization is better balanced and much better for the game. But one of these actually looks like a climax. And it isn't the sensible, well-balanced one.
So given all of that, which of these two presentations actually conveys the feeling of "an intense battle against a compelling character?"
Does anyone think that the effort shown in SV is acceptable, let alone better?
---
But maybe it's not fair to compare the presentation for Nessa (a gym leader with a single type and thus a well-defined theme for her arena and her presentation) to a region's champion (who's kind of trying to encompass everything at once).
Let's try Iono.
V-tuber quirk chungus. It's so bad that you almost can't jerk off to her.
Her backdrop is the flattest, emptiest handful of buildings you've ever seen. There are some skyscrapers in her city, but they're actually behind you, out-of-frame. They actually could have made a visually-impressive backdrop for her, and the devs didn't do it. It's insane.
Surrounding her gym is just a ring of glass panels, and a few electronic billboards that you can barely see even when your Pokémon or your team's experience pop-up isn't in the way.
She has the exact same center-field design as every other gym in the game, just in electric colors this time! Like yellow, and electric blue, and... orange...
But... the backdrop is a city, and... she's the electric-type gym leader, and... cities use... electricity...
And those electronic billboards also use... uh...
This is shit.
- "What if you'd gone at night, and the buildings had all been lit up—?"
Yeah, well, they weren't.
Katy, the bug-type gym leader, at least has a web motif along the railing of her rooftop court. And on her apron, too! Hey, that's something!
How about Larry?
He's memorable! People like him... for some reason...
The setting for his gym was new and interesting. I liked it. (Maybe just because it was actually a building's interior.)
His demeanor was new and, I thought, repulsive. But I hear that the irony-poisoned among us found it to be "fun." So I guess I have to admit that he has something going for him.
And I get that he was supposed to be what carried the normal-type theme by being a "bland office worker," as opposed to it being the setting that really carried the theme.
I just really hate it when the whole point of a game is to be invested in what's going on in the game, to take it seriously, to care, and then the devs give you a character whose entire bit is that he actually doesn't care about any of it. He's aloof and cynical, you see. Isn't that clever? Don't you feel your expectations getting subverted? Yuck.
But whatever you thought of him... it just ends.
You show up, he mopes at you, you beat him, and you move on. You go somewhere else, off to the next interchangeable place. You forget about him.
And when you see him again, he's doing his exact same schtick, just this time in an empty room full of squares. This is not good presentation.
---
Maybe this is the tiniest, bitchiest stylistic complaint, but in SV, the little information panel that each Pokémon has during a battle sucks now.
The experience bar is gone. Can't check that! The frame and the font and the features are all so fucking metrosexual.
And even though the frame of the panel is a so minimalistic already, it completely disappears during open-world battles. What little presentation the game offers is lessened even further in most of your fights.
In every past game, that information panel had a style to it. It conveyed information, but it wasn't just a plain box. It fit with the menus and every other bit of visual style in the game.
When games got enhanced editions or sequels, the panel's style would change, and that difference—although it seems small and silly to try to talk about—sticks out in your mind. It meant something. I'm sure that people will see the Gen 4 screenshot below and wish that I was showing off Platinum's style instead.
But now the devs just see that panel as something to be gotten rid of. To be minimized, made translucent, rounded and muted and stripped of visual features. I hate it.
And even when it is still on the screen, SV can't wait to strip away as much information as they can the moment that they get a chance. A lot of times, I find myself trying to check on some detail that I'd missed earlier, and it'll just be gone.
In past games, the panels went away during attacking animations just to free up screen space, but they always came back in full as soon as the attack hit and there was damage to be dealt. The point of them was to convey information. And they did that as much as possible before SV.
---
Also, in SwSh, we used to get cuties. In SV, we get ogres.
Give the people what they want, Game Freak.
The few things and places that actually do try to represent something else feel like a hollow imitation.
SV starts off with a bit of care in its presentation, showing you things that are specific and appealing to try to entice you to keep playing.
But then you wander just a bit further, and you see the blank landscape in the distance, and you think, "oh god, is this really it?"
And, yeah, it mostly is.
The models look like whatever they were shat out as. The weather and the environment is whatever it was like when you showed up. Your path to a place is wherever you went through this bland, featureless landscape. The music was one of four songs—who needs more?
Nothing is particular. Nothing is special. Every other part of SV is built on the assumption that you will find the open world to be so much more engaging than it actually is. As if they think that you'll go on these wild and memorable organic adventures wherever you go, no matter which path you take nor what you find along the way—so there's just no need to populate the world with curated experiences presented in a particular way.
Maybe it sounds unfair to ask for this, since past Pokémon games didn't have such sculpted encounters or cutscenes or things like that, and we still liked those games.
But if Pokémon wants to be an open-world game now, then I want an actual open world. One that doesn't feel like an empty spread of polygons. One that feels like a world.
An open world needs:
- other people and other things going on in it, aside from just you
- things that change
- things that you can interact with and affect
- things that are meaningful
Hell, any video game world—"open" or not—needs most or all of that if you want it to feel like an actual, immersive, living world.
And to convey them, you need particular scenarios. Maybe you convey them in cutscenes. Maybe in things that look like quests. Little scenarios that you can come across. Things going on in the world around you.
I don't really see that in SV.
And I don't think that the lack of "presentation" can even be blamed on the limitations of being an open-world game. Like thinking that they couldn't make scenarios because they couldn't account for which direction the player might come from. Of course you can. Game freak just didn't.
---
There are some things that are best suited that old, awful, "linear" game model that Game Freak and every other developer seems to want to get away from. There are still some forgotten advantages to linear games.
During the campaign, SwSh controls the time of day based on story progression, rather than letting it follow your system clock. At first, I wasn't wild about that idea. "What about the small handful of evolutions that rely on time of day?" I shrieked. But it does let the devs do some interesting things with the setting, especially the lighting. It can help set a particular mood that they might want for a particular story segment.
When you first arrive at Hulbury, it's a normal, partially-cloudy day. You've come to a normal-looking town, on the next, normal, expected step of your journey. It's early on, the gyms aren't too hard... like the weather, it's all pretty mundane.
At the lighthouse, the clouds stretch out to the horizon, highlighting the expanse of the sea... in the town where the water-type gym is.
You first meet that water-type gym leader looking out at the sea. A bit on-the-nose... but, hey, it's got a theme.
When you enter the gym to take on the gym leader, it's still daytime.
But when you begin the gym challenge, afternoon turns to evening. The sky above the arena grows a darker, deeper blue. The clouds take on a similar hue. The interior of the arena is cast in shadows that complement the blue architectural details and the water-themed decorations inside, bringing out their blue color even more.
And after you've beaten the gym leader and you step outside again, you see that the evening features a dramatic sunset, marking a number of changes—your victory and your growth in power; your coming transition from this place onto the next, unknown location; and the Chairman's newfound interest in you. It shows that your efforts have made a mark on the world by literally changing the state of the world.
Plus, evening is when dinnertime is. And the meeting with the Chairman is at a café. With a reminder of where you just were and what you just did right out the window.
Sure, it didn't have to take place at a café, but since it does... do you see how everything in this sequence goes together?
Yes, the story of SwSh was shit, but it wasn't all shit. Game Freak tried here. This is such a basic example of some of the things that can be done with a game's presentation if the devs just try.
---
SV doesn't really do anything like this.
The few times when something story-related happens, you get incredibly-basic framing. Usually just a few text boxes as the camera cuts back and forth between the speakers, like the framing in a sit-com. Sometimes, the camera tilts. Wooo.
The lighting is kept as daytime during the tutorial so that new players don't miss anything when they're supposed to be learning.
After that, it's just whatever it is, racing through a day / night cycle instead of mirroring your system clock like past generations. I guess that offers variety in the different stages of lighting that you'll experience during a playthrough, or even just a single sitting.
Encounters in the open world trigger the same basic camera movements every single time—moving, locking position, zooming in, and then resetting your camera.
... but this rigid pattern can easily fuck up by phasing through the scenery. There don't seem to be any safeguards to prevent this. I guess it just doesn't happen more often because the world is so devoid of details that could get in the way.
The grass is gracious enough to fade out when it's in the way. Alas, the hills are not so accommodating.
For the rest of SV's presentation, there's basically nothing.
You'll meet major characters who each have a bit of personality, sure—Larry is a mopey, disinterested douche in a restaurant; Katy is a nice, chubby ditz with a confectionary shop that you barely see; the Team Star theaterfags can't wait to waterboard you with their half-hearted indignation and their gay backstory—but none of it feels like it matters. Whoever it is, you run into them whenever you want, you take care of business on their little stage, you take in the scant theming that they have, and then you move on.
It's brief, it's interchangeable, it's forgettable, and nothing changes about the world once you've gone through it. It's just "and then this happened, and then this happened," over and over, with long stretches of absolutely nothing in between as you cross the map from one of these checkpoints to another. I guess because Game Freak was utterly terrified of constraining players' freedom in the open world in any way.
We can't give the world some changes that might matter as a result of their actions—what if they want to tackle the gyms and bosses and titans in the most retarded order possible? Anything meaningful that could constrain them in any way must be sacrificed at the altar of pathological freedom!
---
But let's go back and look at the gym battle in Hulbury. The setpiece. The big, climactic showdown. And let's compare it to what's supposed to be the literal best that SV has to offer in that regard.
In SwSh, Nessa's venue is a big sports arena. The building the same model as every other gym leader's arena, aside from the coloring, but it's still a decent model. It at least looks like what it's trying to be.
In SV, Geeta's venue is literally "some polygons." Just about the most incoherent architecture possible.
Big, featureless drum on the bottom, handle on top.
You first meet Nessa by the seaside, looking out at the ocean.
You first meet Geeta lurking in a random gym office like fucking slenderman.
The prelude to your battle with Nessa is a standard gym lobby, recolored in blue and with her wave pattern on the carpet—followed by a classic Pokémon gym puzzle with big, colorful pipes and gushing water.
The prelude to your battle with Geeta is a blank office—followed by a big, nearly-colorless room covered in a bunch of blank square panels.
Nessa's arena is decorated with wave patterns. Her water-droplet emblem is displayed prominently on the wall.
The floor, the wall panels, the architecture, and the little details in the arena are all some different shade of blue or indigo—somewhere around ten different shades, if not more. Because the battle takes place in the evening, Nessa's arena is lit slightly darker than the other gyms to compliment the blue colors throughout the interior. And when the camera pans up, the sky makes the whole scene even more blue. It might be heavy-handed, but it all does a strong job of reinforcing her theme.
Geeta's arena is blank white metal panels in incredibly-simple shapes. The overall structure of the suspended area where you're fighting is just a rhombus. The arena is a plain rectangle with no decoration, not even a recolor of the design that the gyms used. It all hangs above a cylinder with a... compass rose printed on top of it? And it's held up between two weird "modern architecture" suspension bridge thingies that double as elevator shafts.
There are no symbols, no patterns. No meaning in the backdrop. Nothing to convey a theme or any ideas at all.
The only color is found in the red, yellow, green, and blue lines around the arena, in each corner. These colors aren't connected to anything (unless you take those four basic colors to represent something "all-encompassing," signifying how Geeta is the champion over all of Paldea and all its various types, or something like that). They don't match the colors from existing types. They're incredibly over-saturated, looking like they were taken straight out of Microsoft Paint in the late '90s. They come across as a complete afterthought.
And this dreadful arena is presented... however it looks when you show up. For me, Geeta's arena was washed out by the sunlight, because fuck you, you get whatever time of day you get. Not like there's anything to see up there. But it still goes back to the idea that Game Freak just trusted all of their procedural systems to handle everything instead of giving anything, even something as important as this, any individualized effort.
Nessa is a slender swimmer in a visually-busy swimsuit that's similar to the other gym leaders' sponsor-covered league uniforms, wearing lots of jewelry and beachy adornments. Her hair is styled similarly, and is dyed a vivid aqua blue.
Geeta is a lanky goober in a plain suit with no decorations, a weird face, and a dumb gold bolo tie. Her hair is a giant tangle that regularly clips through her shoulders, and is dyed a completely-missable dark indigo, matching parts of her suit and the gloves that she wears like a fucking Alliance agent from Firefly.
During her battle, Nessa gets a lot of custom cinematography. Camera angles and effects and animations, all particular to her, just like many other characters in SwSh get. All to convey mood, style, personality.
Geeta's battle—against the champion—has a few brief moments of unique animation, in which she's doing... not much. Adjusting her glove. Standing stiff and straight. The rest of her animations are all incredibly stiff, perhaps even adapted or reused from other characters.
And as the battle reaches its end, Nessa sends out a big, glowing Dreadnaw the size of a house, with the camera pulling back and panning up to show the storm swirling above it...
... while Geeta's final Glimmora puts on a shiny hat and then sits there in its same old spot before getting one-shotted a second later.
I don't like Dynamaxxing. I always thought that it was dumb. I know that Terastallization is better balanced and much better for the game. But one of these actually looks like a climax. And it isn't the sensible, well-balanced one.
So given all of that, which of these two presentations actually conveys the feeling of "an intense battle against a compelling character?"
Does anyone think that the effort shown in SV is acceptable, let alone better?
---
But maybe it's not fair to compare the presentation for Nessa (a gym leader with a single type and thus a well-defined theme for her arena and her presentation) to a region's champion (who's kind of trying to encompass everything at once).
Let's try Iono.
V-tuber quirk chungus. It's so bad that you almost can't jerk off to her.
Her backdrop is the flattest, emptiest handful of buildings you've ever seen. There are some skyscrapers in her city, but they're actually behind you, out-of-frame. They actually could have made a visually-impressive backdrop for her, and the devs didn't do it. It's insane.
Surrounding her gym is just a ring of glass panels, and a few electronic billboards that you can barely see even when your Pokémon or your team's experience pop-up isn't in the way.
She has the exact same center-field design as every other gym in the game, just in electric colors this time! Like yellow, and electric blue, and... orange...
But... the backdrop is a city, and... she's the electric-type gym leader, and... cities use... electricity...
And those electronic billboards also use... uh...
This is shit.
- "What if you'd gone at night, and the buildings had all been lit up—?"
Yeah, well, they weren't.
Katy, the bug-type gym leader, at least has a web motif along the railing of her rooftop court. And on her apron, too! Hey, that's something!
How about Larry?
He's memorable! People like him... for some reason...
The setting for his gym was new and interesting. I liked it. (Maybe just because it was actually a building's interior.)
His demeanor was new and, I thought, repulsive. But I hear that the irony-poisoned among us found it to be "fun." So I guess I have to admit that he has something going for him.
And I get that he was supposed to be what carried the normal-type theme by being a "bland office worker," as opposed to it being the setting that really carried the theme.
I just really hate it when the whole point of a game is to be invested in what's going on in the game, to take it seriously, to care, and then the devs give you a character whose entire bit is that he actually doesn't care about any of it. He's aloof and cynical, you see. Isn't that clever? Don't you feel your expectations getting subverted? Yuck.
But whatever you thought of him... it just ends.
You show up, he mopes at you, you beat him, and you move on. You go somewhere else, off to the next interchangeable place. You forget about him.
And when you see him again, he's doing his exact same schtick, just this time in an empty room full of squares. This is not good presentation.
---
Maybe this is the tiniest, bitchiest stylistic complaint, but in SV, the little information panel that each Pokémon has during a battle sucks now.
The experience bar is gone. Can't check that! The frame and the font and the features are all so fucking metrosexual.
And even though the frame of the panel is a so minimalistic already, it completely disappears during open-world battles. What little presentation the game offers is lessened even further in most of your fights.
In every past game, that information panel had a style to it. It conveyed information, but it wasn't just a plain box. It fit with the menus and every other bit of visual style in the game.
When games got enhanced editions or sequels, the panel's style would change, and that difference—although it seems small and silly to try to talk about—sticks out in your mind. It meant something. I'm sure that people will see the Gen 4 screenshot below and wish that I was showing off Platinum's style instead.
But now the devs just see that panel as something to be gotten rid of. To be minimized, made translucent, rounded and muted and stripped of visual features. I hate it.
And even when it is still on the screen, SV can't wait to strip away as much information as they can the moment that they get a chance. A lot of times, I find myself trying to check on some detail that I'd missed earlier, and it'll just be gone.
In past games, the panels went away during attacking animations just to free up screen space, but they always came back in full as soon as the attack hit and there was damage to be dealt. The point of them was to convey information. And they did that as much as possible before SV.
---
Also, in SwSh, we used to get cuties. In SV, we get ogres.
Give the people what they want, Game Freak.
SV has a few story-based cutscenes, but not many.
Even brief ones for little character moments or interactions are pretty rare. When they do happen, they're as stiff and bare as it gets.
View attachment 8620100View attachment 8617540
(please work, embedded video)
But all of the story cutscenes are clustered around the beginning and the end of the story. For the bulk of the game, there's nothing else going on. You just wander around on your own, read a few text boxes when you reach some milestone like a gym, and get nothing to give context or meaning or motivation to what you're doing.
It's as if nothing can be allowed to guide the player in a certain direction. Like Game Freak were terrified of setting up different parts of the world with any context other than either 1. "beat a gym leader / boss / titan, but only when you feel like it of course," or 2. "explore as freely as possible."
Why? Because it's an open-world game?
You can still have cutscenes in an open-world game that shape how some small part of how it goes without destroying player agency. You can have quests with flags that advance things or trigger events. You can set instances within the open world to vary what happens, and when. You can still have things happen without railroading your players.
And the open world doesn't suffer for it. It actually gives meaning to different parts of the world. Every other open-world game dev knows this.
I know that I'm super late to this observation, but this all just smacks of Game Freak being absurdly new to making open-world games. It's like they'd only ever heard of them when they made SV.
But when SV does try to present us with cutscenes or climactic setpieces, they're held back by all of the problems that I've been going over.
They undercut the seriousness and believability of the scene. And since SV is going for some level of realism in its world, that just sets the bar higher.
The lighting engine can't handle shadows and contrast well enough to create dark, dramatic, or even believable scenes.
The lighting engine can't keep up with the concept artists' ambition—or even basic scene composition.
Every single part of the screenshot below is lit differently. The light sources are incoherent.
The animation is always either stiff, or bland, or absurdly brief. Or many of these at once.
View attachment 8617657View attachment 8617661
(please actually show up this time, videos)
The sets are plain and poorly-detailed, with low-fidelity models and textures. They're usually uncreative, and always uninspired. With the exception of the Zero Lab. I did like that.
And the textures are still abominable. Absolute poison to the immersion.
This is not the part where I go "SwSh did everything better!"
Remember, they gave up and started showing us fucking PowerPoint slides toward the end.
But... when SwSh did have cutscenes, big or small, their shot composition was much better. And the animations and expressions. And the backdrops. Most things needed to convey a compelling and coherent scene, really.
I don't really have advice for Game Freak after this, aside from "try harder, all around."
They don't get to set lofty targets and then use "oh but we were trying to do stuff that was so hard, give us credit for that" as the defense when they fail to reach them.
Even brief ones for little character moments or interactions are pretty rare. When they do happen, they're as stiff and bare as it gets.
View attachment 8620100View attachment 8617540
But all of the story cutscenes are clustered around the beginning and the end of the story. For the bulk of the game, there's nothing else going on. You just wander around on your own, read a few text boxes when you reach some milestone like a gym, and get nothing to give context or meaning or motivation to what you're doing.
It's as if nothing can be allowed to guide the player in a certain direction. Like Game Freak were terrified of setting up different parts of the world with any context other than either 1. "beat a gym leader / boss / titan, but only when you feel like it of course," or 2. "explore as freely as possible."
Why? Because it's an open-world game?
You can still have cutscenes in an open-world game that shape how some small part of how it goes without destroying player agency. You can have quests with flags that advance things or trigger events. You can set instances within the open world to vary what happens, and when. You can still have things happen without railroading your players.
And the open world doesn't suffer for it. It actually gives meaning to different parts of the world. Every other open-world game dev knows this.
I know that I'm super late to this observation, but this all just smacks of Game Freak being absurdly new to making open-world games. It's like they'd only ever heard of them when they made SV.
But when SV does try to present us with cutscenes or climactic setpieces, they're held back by all of the problems that I've been going over.
They undercut the seriousness and believability of the scene. And since SV is going for some level of realism in its world, that just sets the bar higher.
The lighting engine can't handle shadows and contrast well enough to create dark, dramatic, or even believable scenes.
The lighting engine can't keep up with the concept artists' ambition—or even basic scene composition.
Every single part of the screenshot below is lit differently. The light sources are incoherent.
The animation is always either stiff, or bland, or absurdly brief. Or many of these at once.
View attachment 8617657View attachment 8617661
The sets are plain and poorly-detailed, with low-fidelity models and textures. They're usually uncreative, and always uninspired. With the exception of the Zero Lab. I did like that.
And the textures are still abominable. Absolute poison to the immersion.
This is not the part where I go "SwSh did everything better!"
Remember, they gave up and started showing us fucking PowerPoint slides toward the end.
But... when SwSh did have cutscenes, big or small, their shot composition was much better. And the animations and expressions. And the backdrops. Most things needed to convey a compelling and coherent scene, really.
I don't really have advice for Game Freak after this, aside from "try harder, all around."
They don't get to set lofty targets and then use "oh but we were trying to do stuff that was so hard, give us credit for that" as the defense when they fail to reach them.
I'm sure that a bunch of this stuff is well-worn territory for people who played the games at launch, but I'm late to the party.
And the more I thought about this stuff, the more I kept noticing, so I wanted to write it all down somewhere.
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- Joined
- Jul 1, 2015
@Grayback All of those details about how SV felt off and like GF wasn't trying compared even with SwSh is also scarily similar to how Dynasty Warriors 9 was a disaster compared to the previous DW games:
DW9 also went with the open world route and made it way too big with very little to do, and the textures and game performance was also pretty bad compared to other open world games. The presentation also took a nosedive with cutscenes being very stiff with people just standing in place talking in robotic-like fashion, in addition to the awful English voice acting because Koei Tecmo went with a different voice acting studio compared to previous games.
S/V somehow getting more of a pass with the fanbase, compared to how the DW fanbase absolutely trashed 9 for how many things it messed up (at least in the Western community, I don't know how the Japanese felt about the game) also shows how Pokémon's fanbase is also a travesty. And that giving mediocre games a pass deal will make GF just do even more of the bare minimum in future games.
DW9 also went with the open world route and made it way too big with very little to do, and the textures and game performance was also pretty bad compared to other open world games. The presentation also took a nosedive with cutscenes being very stiff with people just standing in place talking in robotic-like fashion, in addition to the awful English voice acting because Koei Tecmo went with a different voice acting studio compared to previous games.
S/V somehow getting more of a pass with the fanbase, compared to how the DW fanbase absolutely trashed 9 for how many things it messed up (at least in the Western community, I don't know how the Japanese felt about the game) also shows how Pokémon's fanbase is also a travesty. And that giving mediocre games a pass deal will make GF just do even more of the bare minimum in future games.
Rinyuu is my EX
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 12, 2025
I am looking forward if the new shit is Switch 2 exclusive or not
Because if it is, those big brains will finally have an incentive to start working on cracking the fucking thing / share something if they’ve done something already.
Otherwise we better pray for a new Mario or Zelda announcement soon or else we gonna wait for very long time.
- Joined
- May 29, 2024
I think that this is almost entirely the result of how invested existing fans already are, and the things that new games do keep them invested.
New games include most of the old Pokémon that you already like.
New games let you transfer most of your old Pokémon up to the current generation.
New games (because of Home) let you preserve all of your old Pokémon.
New Pokémon games aren't a new product that has to earn its own goodwill. They're a new collection of old products that already have your goodwill—with a small sprinkling of new content on top, just enough to help justify the new purchase.
It had better be, if Nintendo wants to sell Switch 2s. Because apparently units aren't moving like Nintendo needs them to.
I don't have any reason to buy a Switch 2 without a new Pokémon game making me do it. How many other people feel the same? Probably a lot.
The Cum Beast
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 11, 2022
All the way back in early 2019 I was thinking about buying a switch eventually if SwSh (which was just announced by then) were at least on par with something like the alola games. My main Nintendo franchise is pokemon after all......safe to say I just emulated the switch games.
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2022
Ask and you shall receive.
GEM Partners surveyed 180000 Japanese people to figure out their average age and gender ratios per the forms of entertainment they enjoy, including vidya. The results were released in July 2025 so they're still fresh (link in Japanese, translation (A) in some random forum).
| Title | Genre | Gender Ratio (Male:Female) | Average Age |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brawl Stars | MOBA | 90:10 | 18 |
| Project Sekai | Rhythm Game | 40:60 | 22 |
| eFootball | Sports | 99:1 | 22 |
| VALORANT | FPS | 85:15 | 23 |
| Honkai: Star Rail | RPG | 60:40 | 25 |
| Apex Legends | Battle Royale | 85:15 | 25 |
| Blue Archive | RPG | 90:10 | 25 |
| Fortnite | Battle Royale | 85:15 | 25 |
| Ensemble Stars | Idol | 5:95 | 25 |
| Pro Baseball Spirits | Sports | 95:5 | 25 |
| Zenless Zone Zero | Action RPG | 75:25 | 26 |
| Genshin Impact | Action RPG | 55:45 | 26 |
| Splatoon | TPS/Action | 65:35 | 27 |
| Twisted Wonderland | Adventure | 5:95 | 27 |
| Monster Strike | RPG | 90:10 | 28 |
| Minecraft | Sandbox | 70:30 | 28 |
| The Idolmaster Series | Idol | 65:35 | 28 |
| IDOLiSH7 | Idol | 5:95 | 30 |
| BanG Dream! | Rhythm Game | 75:25 | 30 |
| Kirby Series | Action etc. | 45:55 | 30 |
| Mario Series | Action etc. | 70:30 | 32 |
| Pokémon Series | RPG etc. | 60:40 | 32 |
| Fate Series | Adventure etc. | 60:40 | 33 |
| Love Live! | Idol | 80:20 | 33 |
| Uma Musume: Pretty Derby | Raising Simulation | 85:15 | 35 |
| The Legend of Zelda Series | Action Adventure | 60:40 | 35 |
| Animal Crossing Series | Simulation | 25:75 | 35 |
| Touken Ranbu | Raising Simulation | 2:98 | 35 |
| Monster Hunter Series | Action | 80:20 | 35 |
| Resident Evil Series | Horror | 80:20 | 38 |
| Yakuza (Like a Dragon) Series | Action Adventure | 60:40 | 38 |
| Disney Tsum Tsum | Puzzle | 35:65 | 42 |
| Final Fantasy Series | RPG | 70:30 | 42 |
| Dragon Quest Series | RPG | 75:25 | 42 |
What this shows is that the target audience isn't being cycled, at least not as fast as GF and Nintendo were hoping. Most of the people who bought SwSh and SV day 1 are the adults who grew up with the franchise, not their kids, despite GF's very aggressive attempts to cater to a younger audience.
Edit: The survey's age range was 15-69, so as I suspected, Pokemon's actual target audience was just not included at all. The average age might be closer to 25, which would make sense given that we're seeing a wave of nostalgia around the DS games, which were released when 25-year-olds were kids.
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