>>31086075>Gen 1 by a longshot. Boils my blood when these people who joined later on in the franchise have the audacity to call some of the older designs boring, since they're accustomed to features extraneously tacked onto a design.>Obviously there are extremes like the simplicity of Grimer and Voltorb and the transition from Poliwhirl to Poliwrath, but that isn't to say there aren't extremes on the opposite end of the spectrum as well, especially among Legendaries.Got in on Gen 1, but gonna have to disagree on the word of the post, rather than the spirit.
Barring a few examples (Voltorb/Electrode), Pokemon has always been a series of easy identification. Regardless of what Pokemon it is, if I showed you its silhouette, you should be able to identify it easily. Because of this, Pokemon has very rarely had overly complex designs outside of Legendaries, but you could find said designs even going back to gen 1.
The big issue with more recent Pokemon designs is color palette and art style. Starting with gen 3, partially due to the more advanced 32-bit system of the GBA, they could have more fine details and color schemes. It's why everything looks more smooth. The same thing happened with the transition to gen 6, where everything got more easily translatable to 3D models.
If you're a spriter, a fun exercise that people can do is convert more recent generation Pokemon into Gen 2 sprites. You either lose a lot of the color palette, or the Pokemon looks shockingly good in that style without too much changes.
tl;dr aside from art shift of Sugimori over the years, technology allows new designs to be possible. His job as a designer is to make designs that can be easily translated.
Color palettes still often suck.
