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Great poses, more detailed colorations, whites that echo Sugimori's water colors, and no fear in making Pokemon both large and small look much bigger to fill the small canvas. Farfecth'd is a great example and already posted, and GSC is the best Ho-oh ever look in 2D for sprites that put him into clear motions that make him look gigantic. You can't see it in my attachment but his Silver sprite basically fills the entire canvas. Platinum and HGSS, each for their part, understood this too, and DP's sprites were typically pretty good to begin with. Gen 5's animated sprites were neat but they oft asked Game Freak to use the stationary sprites so Pokemon with great dynamic but bad stationary sprites (Tyranitar) were short-changed.
Gen 3 feels like a victim of canvas size more than anything, even if it's only 16 some pixels smaller than Gen 4. A lot of Gen 3 sprites are bad, RSE's sprites of those of the 251 not in the Hoenn Pokedex clearly being rushed, but they had some serviceable and what would have been great ones had they been slightly larger - the Kanto Starters, Fearow, Nidoking, Arcanine, Camerupt, Sharpedo, etc.
