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 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 meme to play its part. Like a broken clock, in this rare instance the jerks are kind of right, just in a very wrong way.