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The Chibi-style of the game. Like or Hate

Do you like the the fact that the characters are Chibi?

  • Yes

    Votes: 39 44.3%
  • No

    Votes: 49 55.7%

  • Total voters
    88
If you check out this edit the models with outlines look much better imo but that's more of a subjective thing.
pokemon-brilliant-diamond-and-shining-pearl-line-tracing-graphics.jpg

The outlines look fine on the battle models, but the chibis... it feels off.
I like the chibi style, but I definitely agree that better shading could improve the models (especially the battle models).
 
This thread (and the discourse around the new remakes and SwSh in general) made me buy Let's Go, Eevee

Honestly it's still somehow the best-looking Pokémon Switch game and feels less lazy than SwSh (still lazy though)

I just hope BDSP has some redeeming content to make it stand out from the originals other than "it's cheaper than getting a legit copy of the originals on eBay"
 
Honestly it's still somehow the best-looking Pokémon Switch game and feels less lazy than SwSh (still lazy though)
I honestly never understand when people call them lazy. They clearly work very hard on the games. Nothing about LGPE or SwSh scream to me “we just didn’t feel like making it better even though it would have been easy to do so”. Even with their flaws, you can tell that the games had a lot of effort put in.
 
The only game I’d call mildly lazy would be BDSP since the art style hasn’t evolved even a single bit since when DPPt released. The design language is the same, everything is the same with some feeble attempts to make it 3D. Other remakes appealed to nostalgia as well, but it didn’t halt stylistic evolution- just look at Let's Go.
 
The only game I’d call mildly lazy would be BDSP since the art style hasn’t evolved even a single bit since when DPPt released. The design language is the same, everything is the same with some feeble attempts to make it 3D. Other remakes appealed to nostalgia as well, but it didn’t halt stylistic evolution- just look at Let's Go.
I still wouldn’t call that lazy, though. It seems more like an intentional artistic decision rather than something done because they didn’t feel like putting in more effort.

To be honest, while there really is no way to know what the climate is exactly like at GF or ILCA, right now the game development profession is notoriously strict and work-heavy. Devs are known to work very late hours.
 
The game freak is lazy narrative really does need to end. They might not be the best with graphics or optimization but the games still come out pretty well and efficiently for a franchise that releases a game yearly. If gamefreak was lazy we wouldn't be getting a game yearly or the yearly game would be as glitchy as red and blue, if anything they are very well organized. Its the rush that causes them to cut corners since they seem to be trying to always get that holiday release date.
 
I still wouldn’t call that lazy, though. It seems more like an intentional artistic decision rather than something done because they didn’t feel like putting in more effort.

To be honest, while there really is no way to know what the climate is exactly like at GF or ILCA, right now the game development profession is notoriously strict and work-heavy. Devs are known to work very late hours.

I guess "stagnant" would be a better word than lazy. I can see how a game refusing to evolve in some of the main aspects (style, story) might attract the "lazy" misnomer but stagnant might be more appropriate.
 
I feel like there was potential with the art style, but... It's not executed very well. Like I get they were going for something cutesy and like a callback to the original with the chibis, but I think the styles could have gone even further apart. In-battle, they should have stuck with the artistic design we're used to, like with the lines. Especially on Barry. His black thin eyebrows look ridiculous with his soft blonde hair, but when there are lines, it's less jarring.

With the chibis part, they really should've gone for a completely different look form the battles. Could've even gone the route of Link's Awakening, almost like the chibi part is made of toys/dioramas, almost an imaginary toy box of sorts. What we got is... Not quite there. They literally just took the big model and tried to shrink it down to "cute" proportions, but I don't think it translates well. The same style scaled down just looks... Bland? Like, honestly, I hate to keep bringing up Link's Awakening, but they very prominently made the stylistic choice to keep the scale of the original, but also make it look... Amazing. And there's a clear difference between that style and the anime-esque opening cinematic, so it's very clear that this is a dream-like world as opposed to the bigger-proportioned people we're used to. Even the music partially reflects this, and it just works wonderfully as a whole. Even if the style isn't your preference, or you feel the gameplay wasn't improved in any way, the concept was at least very well-thought out, something I think the chibi portion of BDSP can't compare to.

Tldr: the differing art styles should have been more drastically different, chibi world had potential but wasn't done right.
 
I'd call Game Freak anything but lazy. They are just pressured by TPCi into a release schedule that prevents them from effectively executing their innovations as well in their games.

Game Freak own TPC
 
I still don’t see how that doesn’t make them immune to pressure from the non-game divisions of the company, specially since sales are driven by the merch.

Because Game Freak are the ones who ultimately decide what they want to do, and TPC follows suit. If GF wanted to pump the brakes on the games, they could. They'd just have to coordinate with TPC and figure out how they want to deal with the dead space. 2015 worked out fine. This franchise literally has all kinds of merchandise pouring from every orifice anyway. I'm not really sure what you mean by "since sales are driven by the merch." Do you just mean the fact that most of the franchise's money comes from merchandise, rather than the games? 'Cause that's true, but their sales numbers are consistently huge regardless of whether or not there's a new game coming out soon, so why would having to wait for a game be such a big issue for TPC that they need to try to put "pressure" on the company they're subordinate to? After all, it's Pokémon - a marketing team that can't figure out how to sell more of such a world-renowned apex of cute collectible creature mascots for kids should really just resign in embarrassment. Or do you mean that the game sales depend on the merchandise? Because I really don't think there's evidence of that; it's the games that help steer the focus of the merchandise.
 
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The word "lazy" needs to be tarred, feathered, hanged, drawn and quartered, and then needs to have its four remnants cast into active volcanoes on four separate planets, each in a different galaxy, so that nobody will ever reassemble it and deploy it in the service of video game criticism ever again.

In my opinion while Game Freak aren't lazy, they're just bad at some aspects, mainly optimization.

Asking constructively, then, what could they do to improve?

If anything, the laziest thing they have done is re-use and recycle animations for the Pokemon and Hop but that's really it.

I think typically, reusing assets is considered a good practice. For the Pokémon, it would simply be high lunacy to dispose of the thousands of smooth, fully-functional, personalized animations that took so much time and effort to create, and Hop reuses like one of Hau's animations like once, and otherwise has plenty of animations that are tailored to himself. So if that's the bar for Game Freak's laziness, they're really in pretty great shape.
 
Asking constructively, then, what could they do to improve?

I'd say maybe ask for help from another Switch exclusive [for a lack of a better term] company considering they can probably handle optimization the best. They really need help from other studios with a lot of aspects; maybe not necessarily Nintendo itself but maybe companies owned by/with IPs owned by Nintendo.
I'm not a game dev so I don't really know how to optimize games; but considering BOTW can run on the system just fine and from what I've seen and played Sw/Sh has frame rate issues they probably need some help with that.
 
I'd say maybe ask for help from another Switch exclusive [for a lack of a better term] company considering they can probably handle optimization the best. They really need help from other studios with a lot of aspects; maybe not necessarily Nintendo itself but maybe companies owned by/with IPs owned by Nintendo.
I'm not a game dev so I don't really know how to optimize games; but considering BOTW can run on the system just fine and from what I've seen and played Sw/Sh has frame rate issues they probably need some help with that.
Even botw had issues I was riding the master cycle zero in hyrule castle and as a guardian was aiming at me the game hiccupped and paused for a moment. Also there was some pop in issues (not nearly as bad as swsh but still, it was there)
 
Even botw had issues I was riding the master cycle zero in hyrule castle and as a guardian was aiming at me the game hiccupped and paused for a moment. Also there was some pop in issues (not nearly as bad as swsh but still, it was there)
Yeah but pop-in doesn't really equal framerate issues, which BOTW only ever had when too much was going on on screen.
New Pokemon Snap had barely any framerate issues but also very noticeable pop-in for example.
 
Personally, the only time I can say that I've had noticeable frame issues in SwSh is when playing in one of the Wild Areas with online enabled (which, yeah, torpedoes it pretty hard).
 
Please note: The thread is from 2 years ago.
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