>>39421464>>39421584As that anon put it, really good 2D art is harder than 3D. And 3D is already pretty hard itself.
Also, people really seem to underestimate how long good 3D work actually takes. They keep seeing people "making a pokemon in a day" and saying it's about the same quality, but it really isn't. They take a lot into account when designing Pokemon so that process takes a lot longer than most people give it. Pokemon models are actually really nice: high poly, really good rigs with proper weighting, super efficient UV'ing without obvious seams, diverse 2D work done for their face textures, etc. Then you have all the animations to make for the Pokemon, around 18-21 depending on what kind of special animations they have in Refresh (not all pokemon do the sleep thing nor the high-five). All of those animations require motion designing before they can even be made as well, eating up more production.
On top of ALL of that, you need to account for the worst enemy in a short dev time like this: corporate bureaucracy. All that stuff has stop-gaps between each part where the employees have to wait for their supervisors to sign off on the assets or, more usually, get back to them and tell them to edit something about them or even redo a whole part. So that's a whole extra chunk of time taken.
There's a lot of work that goes into making Pokemon, particularly the new pokemon each generation.
In XY, they did 720 of them at once, but they also hired more people than usual then to make that happen. Since then they've done around 70-80 new ones + forms each game, and if you look at the polycount and animations of those new ones compared to the XY ones, they're even higher poly and have more unique animations. They haven't been doing so few each gen cause they were lazy, they were doing so few because they were making those ones better than the last gen while working with fewer team members.
