>>40214821Mainline Pokemon games already looked bad compared to other games on the same platform.
This fact is much more noticeable on the Switch; instead of just "Pokemon doesn't really have as much detail as other 3DS RPGs", Sword and Shield looks like it's several generations behind graphically.
On top of this, the main excuse behind Pokemon's graphics lacking detail is "They have to animate every single pokemon!". Now that this detail is gone, everyone is left to ask, "Why does the game still look like shit?".
And THEN, they decided to draw SPECIFIC attention to the graphics by using effort on quality animations, thus calling attention to the graphics as a whole, as the explanation for a controversial move.
Not to mention that you can literally see that animations have been re-used, not just in the pokemon but throughout the game such as Hau's generic talking/arm-waving animation.
tl;dr It's understandable that they wanted to give SOME excuse for the cut beyond "we have a deadline and we're too lazy to try and meet it without cutting corners", but they decided to use the game's single weakest and most visibly apparent aspect, the graphical quality, as an excuse. Nevermind what you think about the culling, that's just bad business sense. You could've at least said you were working hard on gameplay content, because even if you weren't actually adding any more gameplay than usual (because it's not like Game Freak hasn't said that exact lie before), people won't know that you're lying until the game has come out.
