Earlier this year, a new Pokemon game released. Pokemon Legends: Arceus. It's a very interesting title in the series. It's the first main title to actually diverge from the dreadful 26 year long formula, and has a pretty great gameplay system. However, since the game was first shown, there's been a glaring issue with it: the graphics. To put it very shortly, the game looks like dogshit. It looks like a bargain bin Playstation 3 game at best, and an average Playstation 2 game at worst. Lazily mapped repeated textures are glaringly apparent in the terrain, for one. The textures and polygons of many things is really bad, especially when there are higher quality models and objects placed right next to them. As an example, somewhere there's a valley of mountains of extremely low quality with a high-resolution reflective pool of water right inside of it. To top it all off, the lighting is completely ambient, and there’s no real actual lighting dynamics on anything at all. It's atrocious.
The reason I bring this up is the discussions and responses I've been seeing online. People rightfully were concerned and upset at how laughably terrible this game looked, but there were many defenders of this. The main argument being "games don't need to look like 4k photorealistic Red Dead Redemption 2 in order to look good, this is fine." I've gotten really really mad at seeing these conversations online. Both sides of this discussion have grossly conflated Quality for Fidelity.
This new Pokemon game doesn't look like hotdog water because it isn't realistic. It looks awful because it looks bad. That might seem like an incredibly redundant and circular statement, but let's just think about it. In the year 2002 (almost 20 years ago) Nintendo released their game "The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker." This game was on the Gamecube, which is much much more limited than the current Switch console today. In comparison to Arceus, this game is a lot more rudimentary in its graphics, but... It actually looks better. And that's because of >>ARTISTIC VALUE<< !!! The developers understood the limitations of their platform, and leaned into them. Rather than fighting the console and trying to make the most realistic graphics they can, the embraced their limitations instead, and channeled it into an art style that actually WORKED with their limitations. The simplistic cartoon-like style of the characters shading and rendering was achievable in 2002, and still looks good to this day. The cartoon art style will always look good for the same reason pixel art style games still look appealing today. If they had tried to go all-out on making the graphics real-looking, the game would just look uncanny and off, aging poorly over the years. Almost every poorly aged piece of media is something that attempted to push the limitations beyond what was actually achievable. Wind Waker, a game from 20 years ago, looks better than Legends Arceus because it embraced its limitations rather than fighting them. But it's 2022. What in the world was Game Freak's limitations?
Game Freak has the largest media franchise on the planet. They have a ton of money. They can easily afford the money to make their games look good. Their problem is time. Game Freak operates on an annual release schedule. They've tuned their franchise to release at the pace they roll out all their other merchandise and media to. If they took more time to refine the quality of their game, it gets delayed. And when the game gets delayed, so does everything else. When the game takes longer to make, all the toys, trading cards, plushes, TV series manga keychains spinoff games collectibles mobile game updates and everything else has to wait too. That's money Game Freak does not want to miss. They're willing to rush out their titles if it means that extra revenue, and they don't care. They don't care about the quality of their games because it sells anyway. They've built a supermassive sphere of influence and generational brand loyalty, so they'll just produce whatever. As long as the game kind of passes, they'll push it out. Their limitations are imposed upon themselves through their profit-optimized release schedule and god I hate it.
I don't wanna end this blog on a negative note, so I'm gonna talk about something nicer instead.
From Software is an amazing developer, especially in their artistic presentation. They've always been a bit behind the industry in terms of their graphical fidelity, but the sheer quality and intelligence of their art direction pulls so much weight, and makes their games from 2015 look significantly better than many games releasing today. Graphical fidelity is not their priority, and they focus their energy on presentation and design, which works wonders for them. Dark Souls and Bloodborne would surely objectively look better with improved graphical fidelity, but they still look fantastic as they are. The environments are thoughtfully composed, including the ambient lighting's color and intensity, along with the arrangement and structure of the terrain/architecture. Elden Ring is releasing in a few days, and it's their best looking yet. I say that not just because it's their most graphically advanced, but because they've really put a lot of and design into everything. It feels so dense with art. Photorealism can work, but only when it is achievable and necessary. I hope developers stop trying to make the most realistic thing possible and focus more on the artistic presentation, or balance it like From Software does.
I have these kinds of rants in my head for a very long time. It gives me some good closure to enscribe them here. Thanks for reading!