People nowadays like to defend the crude battle sprites in gen 1, I often see "SOUL" get thrown around a lot. When I first started using the internet, which was around when FRLG came out, everyone on the gaming forums I frequented pretty much agreed that the battle sprites in gen 1 looked retarded. No one looked at it and thought shit like "comfy", "SOUL", or whatever epic meme word is popular now, it just looked like shit. But now people defend it.

The fact that the art is so shitty in gen 1 is inexcusable. Yes, I know, it's a Game Boy game. But the Game Boy was already SEVEN (7) years old by the time Pokemon came out. Pretty much everything that could be done on it had already been done. Even consumer-level computers of the time were capable of running tools that resemble the ones ROM hackers today use. You know how they probably made these sprites? They drew it in MS Paint and ran it through a program to turn it into Game Boy graphics data. With that in mind, why do the sprites look like they were made by a retarded 11-year-old who just joined DeviantArt? It would have been so easy to make good sprites. Gold/Silver proved that Game Boy graphics can look good, and there are countless Game Boy games released before 1996 that look a million times better than Pokemon. There is no defense for them looking like this other than Game Freak's pure incompetence.