It’s been a while since I looked at a main series Pokémon game and thought, “That looks nice.” This includes last week’s full reveal of Pokémon Legends Z-A, which going from the first bit of footage seems to feature a lot of hazy-edged grey rooftops, futurist UI, and eerily smooth NPCs, and not a lot of consistent, nice-to-look-at art direction to tie it together. This is also a shame. First, because – and I don’t think it’s too controversial to say this – it’s good, generally speaking, when things look nice. Glad we’ve got that established.
Second, and still pretty obvious but at least a bit more interesting: while they’ve never been graphical powerhouses, there have absolutely been times when Pokémon games have looked quite wonderful. And there is undoubtedly room for Pokémon games to look even more wonderful. But the series’ recent, and quite aggressive moves away from that is both a bummer, and, considering Pokémon’s history with artistry – across its spinoff video games, its animations, its strikingly impactful trading card art – a waste.
Saying this out loud among Pokémon fans, however, often leads to some interesting reactions. While even casual observers and non-Pokénerds probably got whiff of controversies like “Dexit”, the nickname for the first time it was revealed less than the entirety of the Pokédex would be catchable in a single game, back at the launch of Pokémon Sword and Shield, fewer will be familiar with “tree-gate” of the same era.
To summarise, this is a controversy surrounding a tree which did not look particularly good in a screenshot of Sword and Shield’s Wild Area, neither in terms of graphical fidelity nor plain old attractiveness. Some people thought this tree looked very bad; other people thought complaining about the way a tree looks in a Pokémon game is silly. Many took the negative position to absurd extremes in poor faith, more or less permanently poisoning the well of conversation, as is the modern way. Many others were blessed with neither knowing nor caring about the conversation at all (to whom I now have to apologise for bringing it up – sorry.)
Point being: the Pokémon community, as much as there is ever a single, monolithic “community” in games as vastly popular as these, has been heavily polarised by the modern games’ shift away from wistful pixel art and cheeky sprites to 3D environments that somehow feel both flatter and less expressive than their lo-fi origins. That excessive polarisation is a big part of why it’s so hard to talk about these things – and, I suspect, part of why quite reasonable fan feedback can often struggle to reach developers among the noise. It’s hard to say something pretty normal – “I wish this looked better” – when insincere, cynically reactionary people are also saying it. Typically, that is a sign you shouldn’t be agreeing with them at all, frankly, but this case feels like a good time for the old Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point
The issues with modern Pokémon games have been plentiful. Pokémon Sword and Shield, while having moments of genuine prettiness – exclusively in handheld mode, in certain spots such as Ballonlea, and never anywhere in the Wild Area – also suffered in plenty more. The aforementioned Wild Area and its unfortunate trees took the brunt of it, but single-lane, pop-up Potemkin Villages such as Spikemuth, and post-game cutscenes playing out over static drawings were the fist signs of developer Game Freak’s real issues with simply getting everything done in time. Similar issues came up in their own way in Pokémon Legends: Arceus, a game with some nice thematic elements to menus and the like, and that hinted towards a Breath of the Wild-like painterly style, but never really got there – and with more murky, muddy open areas driving the artistic limitations home. Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, remakes outsourced to ICLA, could at least run well, but missed a Link’s Awakening-shaped open goal in their choice of eerily plastic art style. And it’s not at all exaggerating to say Scarlet and Violet were graphical and technical disasters.
As much as it might be tempting for some to really pelt these games with further technical criticism, it’s worth talking about why they are the way they are. Plenty of explanations have been offered over the years, from limitations with the hardware (undermined somewhat by the likes of Xenoblade and Zelda), to Pokémon’s nature as a game with thousands of models to animate (which is increasingly hard to justify to a layperson next to, say, the upcoming DokeV, an incredibly flashy-looking monster-training game from Korean developer Pearl Abyss). The main answer, however, is that it’s all the kids’ fault.
Sorry kids! The slightly more serious version is quite simply: not enough Pokémon fans care – which, yes, includes an awful lot of kids. If anything, the uglier the main series Pokémon games get, the more they sell, and as long as they sell there’s no real incentive to slow down, spend more money or make any concerted effort to improve. Pokémon Sword and Shield and Scarlet and Violet, the two most recent pairings, landed in second and third of the all-time sales charts, after only the Pokémania-fuelled original trilogy of Red, Blue, and Green. Pokémon Legends: Arceus sold 15m copies alone as of last November, more than any other one-off entry, and more than half of those first three combined.
As has been widely parrotted over the past few years, there’s a lot of evidence (cough-Roblox-cough) to suggest the youngest generation of players just don’t really care what a game looks like. They care about whether it’s fun. And in a lot of ways that’s quite admirable. In fact, in many senses I agree with them. The overall experience of a game is many times more important than solely its appearance or how it runs.
Fidelity, in particular, has become conflated with attractiveness here in video game land, which is really a slightly different thing – either is possible without the other. Likewise, attractiveness is often conflated with beauty, which, if we’re getting really serious about it, in its truest form really requires something a little more. Real beauty requires meaning, whether that’s a meaning you read onto it, or one you believe to be somehow intrinsic. It needs a bit of profundity in there, a bit of deeper magic on top of pure good looks, an emulsifier to the special sauce. The important point is: this kind of beauty is the experience. It’s inseparable from gameplay, in the best cases, because in those cases the looks, the sounds, the action and the expression are all mixed into one. Experiencing a game is experiencing all of this at once.
This is the real good stuff Pokémon is missing out on. This is why we still fawn over The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Shadow of the Colossus, or even a Return of the Obra Dinn or Geometry Wars, to pick a random few. It’s wistful transience, foggy mournfulness, pontillist dot-joining, mathematics in motion in turn. There’s something going on here beyond fun, and beyond merely looking nice as well.
With classic Pokémon games, it’s hard to pin down exactly what that extra layer was, but I’d argue to the ends of the earth that it was there. Part of it, I suspect, was simply cohesion, helped by the tighter restrictions of a purely handheld platform (modern Pokémon games do, to their credit, look notably better when the Switch is exclusively used that way, too). Part of it is the power of pixel art in particular as a style in itself – a style that’s come to actually represent nostalgia, as much as simply being nostalgic to those who were there at the time.
Beyond that, it’s a style that brings life along with it. For some mystic reason, the 8-bit waves of a Pokémon Red, Gold, or Ruby, for instance, ticking by in clockwork unison, conjure more expansive visions of rolling tides than the same oceans of identical tiles in a Scarlet or a Legends: Arceus today. As do simple, rhythmically swaying fields of flowers, or a sprite’s basic head-bob as they talk. In truth, I can’t really answer why pixel art and its equivalents continue to work so well now, but I suspect the solution’s somewhere in the mind. A single style, fully committed to, will always give more space for imagination, for your mind to fill the gaps, than a more expansive equivalent that attempts it on its own.
It’s this space between the lines, the blankness on the page, the room for you in all of this, that makes the visuals of those older games so special. Pokémon’s thing, much as many overlook it, has always been its appeal to personal memory and attachment, going as far back as Game Freak’s choice to let you nickname every Pokémon you catch in the first generation, at the expense of dozens of creatures cut from the game. This is why standing on the shores of Johto in 1999, overlooking the rudimentary dotted swirls of the flat blue ocean, conjures semi-serious comparisons with Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, while standing atop the real hills of Legends: Arceus – which uses that same painting’s iconography for its own box art – never really manages the same. This is why there is more to these older games than mere nostalgia – or maybe, why these games generate such nostalgia; because in granting your mind more freedom to wander, they then lodge themselves there more firmly, stamped more clearly, as distinct memories of your own.
I do agree with these hypothetical kids of today, mind. How a game plays is ultimately paramount. But I do also think they’ll be losing something or missing out in some way if the lesson we take is that a game’s appearance – its art direction, character, spirit, style – can be cast aside as a result. Video games’ magic is their reliance on a hundred disciplines, and the best give proper care to every one of them. As much as criticism of these games and their clunky looks has brought out the very worst in popular fandoms over the years, it would be just as bad to say that artistry doesn’t matter at all. Just as much as every other facet, all in equal measure, the artistry, too, is the point.