>>53941690I made a comparison image of Gyarados' sprites from gen 1 up until 5 to see if that helped
It's got similar poses throughout the generations, but as the gens go on the pose just looks more and more stilted as the spritework starts looking more professional and "clean"
it sort of worked when the sprites were already a bit wonky, there was kind of a charm to it, but by the fifth gen when everything was pretty uniform and flat it stuck out like a sore thumb
also worth mentioning: I think that, from Platinum onward, sprites started looking way more flat because Pokemon changed its shading method. You can see in a lot of the earlier-gen sprites (and even some DP ones) that there's a whole lot of dithering, and the colors were generally a bit more pastel-y. From Platinum onwards the sprites all started using flat cel shading, and the colors became a lot more bright- I theorize that's because by the time Platinum rolled around the DS lite had come out and had a much better backlight than any handheld before it.
