>>31477462In the paper, to keep games cheap and affordable to stingy parents.
They're portable games, so not much money is put into them and games are cheaper to produce than console games. Sm4sh Bros sold better on 3DS than on Wii U, so in a business standpoint, people don't care too much about crispy graphics as they do about the price of their games.
This, and 3DS shitty resolution limits a lot of what can be done about graphics. Citra emulation showed that, at least, Pokemon is already halfway to look nicely in 1080p and 4k. Textures, though, are the issue, as they use just 256x256. In this case, cartridge capacity is to blame.
Consider there are 802 Pokemon in total. Adding Alternate forms and Alolan forms we get about 900. Add shinies. 900 x 2 = 1800. Each Pokemon has 3 or 4 sets of textures. 1800 x 3.5 = 6300. All these textures would add up to 1.2 GB if uncompressed, which would ramp up to about 80 GB if we use 2048x2048 resolution textures. Compression magic would make wonders and reduce the size to about 1/10. But still, we get almost 8 GB. Only on textures. Consider now meshes, animations, NPCs, landscapes, maps, etc.
Zelda, Mario and Monster Hunter series can do that because you have a limited set of foes and NPCs compared to Pokemon.
The 3D transition of mainline games was a huge undertaking if you think about it. And yet you have custom animations for each fucking Pokemon in battles and in Amie, conveying each one's personality. Obviously they would focus more on the most popular ones like Lucario and Gardevoir, but still, you can see they tried to do that on the animations.
>inb4 Gamefreak shill 
