>>31121677It feels to me like since DPPt starters have adopted more "artificial" designs featuring things like armor/clothing-like growth, ornamental/geometric patterns or other "accessories" that just don't feel natural. It's indeed still a game about magical animals that don't play by our own rules, but I find that my favorites almost always are ones I can easily imagine encountering in the wild, rather than ones that seem to be obviously influenced by artificial/human ideas (you can only take the "pokemon invented that in this universe" angle so far) that just seem ridiculous. Besides that, there's also a proliferation of "bobblehead" designs especially in XY that just look plain silly and kind of contrast with the overall atmosphere of the Pokemon world which is otherwise generally pretty well-proportioned, you don't have to ridiculously exaggerate a design like that to still keep the animated charm that makes the series great after all.
I personally am relatively new to the series and have never played a pre-Gen 4 game for any appreciable amount of time, so I don't think my perspective is that nostalgia-tinted, but I still think it would be ridiculous to say that nostalgia isn't a non-existent factor overall in the complaints, design trends have obviously changed since the first generation and some people just aren't 100% fans of the newer direction, that's okay, because it's fully subjective.
>>31133058I like the Fennekin line but I still found the proportions a little silly looking and the design as a whole overly "angular", I have the same complaints with Popplio in SM. It's almost *too* simple, the things I liked about the earlier starters was that they seemed to strike a good balance between that charming animated look while also seeming plausible enough that they didn't interfere with my ability to self-insert into my adventure (which is a pretty big deal in a roleplaying game after all)