That doesn't look right.

[yvannairie]

I'm not sure if I've already posted about this but

I've been binge watching competitive Pokémon videos and it's astonishing how expressive, energetic, personable and full of appeal the animations in Pokémon Stadium, Stadium 2 and Colosseum (not to mention the general scale and polish of them) compared to the current post-XY 3D games is :/

It seems like there's quite a lot of animations shared between the libraries used for XY, SuMo (and apparently the Let's Go games, but I haven't really watched any footage of them, and those games also have a ton of out-of-battle animations that need to be taken into account compared to the other games) and.. while I prefer the cel-shaded, outlined look of the newer games compared to the toyline "shininess" of the Stadium-Colosseum games, they Pokémon in those games actually do motions relevant to their attacks, have a lot more energetic idles and flinches, and also have more grave-looking and dramatic fainting animations, whereas the newer games kinda just have them... standing. Maybe waving their appendages a little? And mostly bobbing up and down when not doing their One Attack Motion.

I get that "sprite doesn't move, the attack animation plays instead" is a stylistic choice picked straight from the 2D games where even in the last generation before full 3D they'd just started using sprite puppetry, but put side to side, you can feel the downgrade in visual spectacle. I hope this is something that they do differently in S&S, since the art style is changing again, and even more drastically this time.

Comments

[dragonfly_izzy]

I have to agree. I played a lot of Colosseum on the Wii and the battles on there just felt a lot more intense than in recent handheld games. Aside from the fact that SuMo has been designed to be, frankly, easier than previous generations even the few battles that could be considered challenging haven’t been massively engaging or interesting for the most part. SuMo is the first generation I haven’t at least completed the story for. The only experience I have of Let’s Go is from watching other people play it, but even then it looks like little more than a glorified version of the mobile game with the simplistic animations, motions and a relative disconnect from attack actions (on the rare occasion they happen).

[yvannairie]

I recently restarted SuMo, and I agree it's definitely easier with lower level areas and trainers having smaller teams at the beginning -- but I also beat the SuMo main plot 5-7 levels underleveled, and couldn't get anywhere in the post-game due to the steep difficulty curve towards the end.

And I don't mind this, usually the Pokémon games start boring me towards the end b/c the difficulty plateaus so hard. I guess people don't feel as served by the difficulty as I do, in that regard.