I'm arguing that Gen 8 battles looked awesome. A lot of attack animations were very dynamic, and the camera pans to the pokemon, trainers, crowds, the field, etc. all felt grandiose. Gen 9 sucks tho. We didn't even have a dynamic camera on release.
I would also agree that Gen 8 definitely felt more immersive than Gen 9 from a battle aspect. An attack animation that comes to mind that was well done in my opinion is Cinderace's Pyro Shot. If the battle animations just had a bit more going for it then I think it would remain on top compared to the other pkmn Switch titles indefinitely. It was a great surprise to see you here PK, always a pleasure my goat! 🙌
Maybe if one day Gamefreak hands the reigns in regards to animation back to Genius Sonority rather than having them work on tiny spin-offs, that will happen. But until then, I have my doubts.
It’s great to have you back. Honestly, the fact that battle revolution is a decade old and has better animation than the Pokémon games we see today is crazy. This game needs more attention hopefully Pokémon can have battle animation like that again because imagine what it could look like in Legends Zygarde.
Thing is they didn't make those games. It was Genius Sonority who made them and that's why they are so different from the usual Pokemon games. Its interesting and you should look this up. They had no idea what Pokemon was when they made those games
You know I agree with you on this. I have a lot I love about Scarlet/Violet, but I genuinely struggle to battle in that game. Terastalizing is one of the best gimmicks we've gotten, and yet I feel like I'm being tested to prove how far I'll go to enjoy it by slogging through battles that include pokemon clipping through the ground. I think something else worth pointing out is how insanely high quality almost everything out of the pokemon franchise is *except* the mainline games (and TCG Live, but not the point). All of the promotional material, animated shorts, music videos, etc for Scarlet/Violet has been soooo polished and clearly reflects how TPC envisions Paldea. Why the games are seemingly never on the same page when they're published by *Nintendo*, the big publisher with most consistent polish, is baffling. I would hope they would be embarrassed by association and insist improvements be made, but the money might just talk a bit louder.
I surely hope they opened their eyes after the glitch fest SV came to be. The necessary stepping stone to future improvements? I really hope so. But yeah overall consistency just sucks.
An argument I'm willing to give for the mainline games is that, unlike the battle simulators, they have to focus on a lot more than just battles, like exploration and story. With Colosseum and Gale of Darkness basically having every single bit of the Stadium games re-used when it comes to models and animations, not a single bit of extra polish. They only had to focus on the humans and the Gen 3 Pokémon (plus Shadow Lugia), instead of having to do over 600 Pokémon for a strict release and still have to focus on making it a casual JRPG, like with X and Y. Am I saying the animations of the new games are better? Hell nahw, Battle Revolution clears and by a wide margin. But rather that the mainline games don't have their emphasis only and exclusively on battles, and their focus has to go into other aspects. And I'm not even taking into account things like how underemployed GameFreak is for the kinds of games they have to work on or the crunch they have to be put through.
While true the Pokémon games have other aspects to focus on, it doesn’t excuse the development process of not polishing and providing Platinum, HGSS, BW2 quality games with at minimum of XD or Colosseum look to the battles. While time crunched, they have resources that aren’t utilized as they themselves are not experts in certain criteria’s for games as seen for SV. It’s a matter of how and when will they get things together tbh.
@@BigNation1 I see your point, and I agree on what you say. But thing is, they've always been working on handheld entries. The battle simulators such as Colosseum or XD were developed by companies that were not GameFreak, as they have no correlation other than transferring Pokémon from the title of that generation. So, what makes handheld titles a different case? The consoles they're at are lower power, and the release schedules are more apt for these consoles. Those games are more "polished" because the DS is very weak, and making an RPG in there is a piece of cake. But then, Nintendo makes a hybrid home console, not a weaker power handheld, and GameFreak is shoehorned into adapting to it. And they have to deal with the things I mentioned earlier, and something I skipped, the fact they're still using the 3DS engine to develop games, not even something such as Unity. So, at the end of the day, all GF needs is time. Time to adapt to this new environment, time to polish their entries, and time to hire new staff to make development easier.
I will say that it’s unfair to compare modern games to the games of back then specifically in the Pokémon community. Colloseum, XD, and PBR are battle only simulators and not made by gamefreak as you showed. That being said not all Pokémon in Colloseum or XD are catchable. They are animated yes but because they’re not catchable it actually reduces the work load on the dev teams. SV may have attempted the same thing and SWSH but there’s still hundreds more Pokémon in those games than the 3 mentioned have. I’m not defending gamefreak I’m just saying that we can’t compare all of these games to one another because 3 of them literally take shortcuts to look the way they do that SV simply cannot take and same with SWSH. They should look better tho imo, the way they look is unacceptable but it’s at least still fun
I mean, while legenda arceus wasnt like battle revolution, it at least was a step up from previous games. But then the next gen they have gone back to these weird animations where pokemon dont need to approach for physical moves. Hell, even sword and shield had some better animations for some moves than scarlet and violet, example being hyper beam
This is correct. Both games were developed experimenting different elements to see what would appeal to us as the audience. For example, the sound effect for when a shiny Pokemon appears in the overworld. But I agree that Hyper Beam looks insane in Gen 8.
Some extra perspective i want to give on gamefreaks end: the entire foundation for the 3d battle system we're still seeing today, as well as the majority of pokemon animations we still see today, was made alongside an equally rushed series of games for an entirely new system that was weaker than the consoles of colosseum and battle revolution. You can see how they were rectifying that crunch too in the very next generation. New pokemon are much more expressive, the overworld puts more of a focus on cinematic angles and large visable areas, the battle hud got a visual overhaul, etc. Pretty much everything was improved visually in sun and moon...except for the visuals of the core battle system. And then sword and shield threw many of those improvements in the garbage anyway. The problem isn't the 3d, it's that the visuals have barely evolved from the 3ds and will continue to be that way until gamefreak takes the oppurtunity to give a proper overhaul.
Awesome video. You make a lot of good points and it is really enjoyable. Makes me think of my hopes for this dream pitch - New Pokemon Stadium - Every Pokemon - Every gimmick - Every battle style - single, double, triple, inverse, battle royal, etc. (Even include contests!) - Tournaments can be run with limitations and restrictions, or none if wanted. - Central hub for competitive - Can build teams or use Pokemon you have in HOME - Made by Bandai Namco (although Genius Sonority would be an interesting alternative) - Can have a story mode of beating a Battle Frontier style facility. - Has a Metronome Mode
If you look for it, there's information out there somewhere about how 3d games on home console like revolution have been off the table since the generation 6. Their argument is that with the debut of 3d handheld games, home console no longer offers something new or different. That continues to today and now switch is both home and handheld and they are still leading from the handheld precedent, and not looking back to their last attempts at 3d for inspiration
The way I see it, the main problem is the graphics. This is a very good example of sacrificing gameplay for better looking graphics. Sure they look better but if the console tries to animate them (aka load multiple sprites in a split second) it’ll explode. And the switch was never a powerful console by todays standards either. As for future games, I wouldnt hold my breath. Pokemon SWSH and SV are the 2nd and 3rd most selling pokemon games respectively and BDSP is the most selling remake. They arent gonna fix what isnt broken. Great video dude!
I remember the story about how Iwata helped script in Kanto in gold and silver, and how the gen 1 games were really glitchy, Gamefreak hasn't always been the best of scripter from what i heard but idk if any of the original teams even work on the modern game. I'm guessing they manage the teams but the higher at both Gf and Tpci have terrible management zkills.
With the games such as pokemon stadium, colosseum, xd, and battle revolution, those game which stadium was develop Nintendo EAD and hal while the other were Genius Sonority, I'm guessing they were more expernced delevopers at both companies which was why the quality was much better in those game. I heard that Genius Sonority they were able to take the model and animations and were able to reuse them for pokemon colosseum which is something I vvish gamefreak was given time and able to do for the modern game with older generation of pokemons.
I honestly blame most of this on Nintendo and the Pokémon company for this. Literally the Pokémon home console games on the n64, GameCube and Wii were always made by another company. Not only that projects were constantly pushed for Pokémon from 2016 3Ds era of sun and moon- 2023’s indigo disk. Excluding third versions or enhanced versions, six games have been released within the span of 6 years. Not only that the companies didn’t think ever about delaying a game even after problems of the pandemic. Each game had a different kinds of steps but somehow one game couldn’t do all those steps simultaneously. I’m glad they are fixing models ever since PLA(cyndaquill and other scarlet and violet models) and so are they with the animations but it’s still bad. I hope this years gap year actually means they will take breaks frequently and produce less games instead of pushing 7 games in 6 years.
It’s the timeline they are forced to follow. It doesn’t offer enough of a margin to polish out what they need to do. Over 800+ people worked on SV and look at the end result.
SV animations overall were SO bad 😭 felt like I was playing a mobile game 😂 I don’t think Pokémon will ever be able to relive their previous great animations, it’s all about making money now. Not putting love and soul into a game
First of all I feel you with your arguments, but once again I hear this argument from a lot of players or streamers online over and over again and all I can say is it's a very political argument to make about Gamefreak and their performance as developers for a Pokémon games. It seems to me that nobody has educational Understanding of what goes behind the scenes with the Pokémon games. Now to cover myself, consider this speculative. There are multiple leaderships Who owned this product. As a result the Pokémon franchise is highly regulated and there's lack of artistic freedom to add quality to these pokemon games. As much as the higher ups concern quantity over quality so they will set unrealistic deadlines for these products to be released and that goes on all fronts: merchandise, home appliances, accessories, filming etc. And about that lie that Gamefreak stated about Sword and Shield Cutting back on content for improvement with graphics, companies on the whole always lie to make their higher ups look good On social media. Therefore there should come to no surprise for anybody.
Throwing shade in calling me uneducated alongside others about the situation with Game Freak and not providing any accurate information only to back up your claims on just a “speculative” perspective is just baffling to me.
@BigNation1 Shade? I was generalizing and what do you expect when the majority doesn't include or talk about the business structure of the problem vs. always casting blame on one side of the spectrum? Do you really think it's only a Gamefreak problem? Beside there are videos on RU-vid (may have gotten Demonitized) that showed overall reviews from employees of Gamefreak Pokémon and Nintendo Companies that help with my speculative point.
It's ridiculous just how bad the battles in SV look. Even though the pokemon animations from gens 6-8 weren't amazing, the moves at least looked really good in my opinion. But gen 9 has awful move animations as well (seriously look at all the legendaries signature moves in this game compared to the previous 3D games). I honestly enjoyed the visuals of Legends Arceus so if they can at least give us battles that look like that and were that fast paced again, I won't complain too much
People always compare to the gen 3 and 4 games but forget that a lot of the 3D models and animations in those games are RE USED from Pokémon stadium in the n64
Yet they are still better than the Gen 6 models that are currently still being reused up till Gen 9 with only slight modifications that still don’t show much expression as the older models do? It’s gotten worse as time progressed.
This is Chris Coy I am not the fans of Pokémon and I have earned the title of World Champion because I destroyed every Generation Pokémon League with Shiny Zeraora and I don't care about this garbage
Anytime someone brings up Colosseum, XD, and/or Battle Revolution in the argument of battle animations, I know they have no clue what they are talking about. Battle Revolution is just a battle sim. So, they are going to focus on the battle being the best animations it can be ... because that's the selling point of the game. Colosseum is mainly a battle sim that has a story mode in the game. Both, XD and Colosseum removed any real sense of exploration from the game. You travel between points via cut scenes, not traveling on your own like on the Switch games. Essentially why those older games have better animations is because they cut 50% or more of what makes a pokemon game a pokemon game. So, they had tons of space and time to make the animations better. (Also, it isn't like every animation in those games is stellar an amazing.) This argument is just so bad, I wish the community just moves on. It makes us all look like idiots.
