>>34976354A polygon is a shape with 3 or more sides used in creating 3D models. Simply put, the more you use the more detailed the 3D model. However, more polygons on screen at once makes it harder for the console to display them all since it has to run more calculations to determine where exactly each polygon is meant to show up, so if a model is too detailed it’ll cause the game to lag or even crash if it becomes too much. Part of the reason the 3DS Pokémon games lag so much in battles is because the Pokémon models are actually very high poly count, which was done so that they could be reused for years and years and still look good.
Even Pokémon that are simple shapes have high poly counts, IIRC Azumarill has over 8000 polygons comprising it’s model and it’s literally just fucking ovals and spheres. Xerneas on the other hand is supposed to have over 18000 polygons, more than half being in it’s antlers. So it’s obvious why the 3DS hardware shits itself trying to display multiple Pokémon on screen at a time. The Switch is much more powerful than the 3DS and displays in resolution higher than 240p (240 pixels from the top of the screen to the bottom) so the models will look far better despite being identical, since you can make out more detail on them.
The 3DS Pokémon models are actually quite detailed even by home console game standards, though they shouldn’t have much trouble rendering them unless there’s like 20 of them on screen at once.
