>>41181328I'm not a spritefag. And abstraction is a real thing that anyone with half a brain instinctively understands even without knowing the term. It baffles me that you don't understand why sprites worked as abstractions and 3D didn't.
Stadium looked great because, while 3D made the abstraction impossible, it wasn't necessary since the animations were amazing. You didn't have to imagine shit because the game already did it for you.
The 3DS games kill abstraction by replacing everything with 3D models, but they don't make good use of the 3D. The pokemon just stand there lifeless and the animations are complete shit. They are begging you to use your imagination to make up for their shittiness, to treat the models and animations as abstractions... but it's just impossible to do it naturally. You have to force it.
Sprites aren't inherently better than 3D. But if you switch to 3D for the sake of it and don't use it to make the animations good and give life to the models, what's the fucking point? You still have to imagine the good shit yourself but now it's 80% more unnatural.
You are no longer looking at an abstract 2D representation of the battle and imagining it. Now you have to actively block the 3D models and animations from your mind in order to do so, because they are practically screaming "this is how the battle really looks!", due to the impossibility of 3D to work as an abstraction. It's just fucking awkward, having to completely ignore the game's in-your-face crappy interpretation of the battle, instead of imagining it from scratch by looking at abstract representations of the battle in sprite form.
If you are not going to create amazing 3D animations and lively models to make use of imagination unnecessary, why make it 3D at all? The animations are so shitty and the models so dead, you are forced to imagine cool shit yourself. But the 3D actively works against that.
