This thread is silly. I fucking love sprites, I eat sprites for breakfast, Disgaea is my #1 favorite series because it still uses sprites even when it hit the PS4, but unless someone takes a massive amount of time to work on said sprites, models are a much better solution for any game dev.
As
>>32739962 said, models allow for more applications, as opposed to sprites. Pokemon Amie probably wouldn't be possible with sprites, or if it were attempted with sprites, it would be severely gimped, the same applies to Pokemon following you. In HG/SS, a Pokemon's entire overworld spritesheet had 6 frames, basically you would have a basic walking sprite that bounces up and down and faced different directions, and while I love the look of it, the fact is that every single Pokemon having a unique walking AND running animation, including alt forms+Mega Evos, is simply a better option and would really only be possible with models. If you have any repsect for spritework, you would know how much effort goes into making them look good. Sprites simply require too much fine tuning to be practical for a dev studio who has a yearly quota, especially in a series with 800+ monsters and growing.
tl;dr: Sprites are great and Pokemon's sprites are outstanding, but they just do not work with the direction the series is headed.
>>32742243Vectored sprites look ugly as shit desu.
