Pokémon Music Poll!

Indeed there is a difference between style and quality. I do think both have declined drastically in the modern Pokémon series, but I do not think it needs to be pixel art to be good (though that is where I believe Gamefreak's talents lay), and I think realism would be a very bad direction for Pokémon. The Detective Pikachu movie looked very uncanny for that reason, though it did work better for some Pokémon like Mr. Mime and Mewtwo.

I have spoken before on the change to 3D being very detrimental to Pokémon models, especially in gen 6. We went from the most detailed and animated sprites in gen 5 to flat textured, lifeless 3D models in XY. Efforts have been made to improve them in subsequent games with mixed results.

Outside the wild area I think SwSh had great world and human character design, the problem was the limits of the engine letting it down, constraining you to a static camera with objects and characters popping in mere steps away from you.

The wild area not only exacerbated those problems, but was in itself a fairly dull and empty area, with very poor visual effects and textures. The comparisons to Ocarina's Hyrule Field and that tree were well founded.

Unfortunately moving forward it seemed that Gamefreak took the wild area as the model for their future games. PLA looked utterly awful, with low quality textures stretching across massive, empty expanses of grassland and rock. I dislike BotW, but that game's graphical achievements by comparison made PLA's attempts at mimicking the beauty shot in the trailer embarrassing. And it felt like the human characters, Pokémon and the world were all using different lighting engines, making each look like they belonged to different games.

PLA looks and plays like a promising early alpha build, not a finished product.

And we all know the problems with SV. But even if the game ran flawlessly with zero glitches, it is still a very ugly game. Outside of the main cast, the NPCs are the ugliest they have been outside of that one western TCG game. The world shares a lot of PLA's issues, and again it feels like we have been dropped into an unfinished preliminary build of the game with temporary textures and assets, not a final product.

Once more, this is not about the bugs, though those are unforgivable for The Highest Grossing Media Franchise in the World™. The game could run unwaiveringly at 120fps and would still look awful.

Winds and Waves looks somewhat promising, but I am reserving judgement until I see real gameplay running on a real Switch 2.