>>42948656>>42948431The franchise's art direction started leaning away from Sugimori, who heavily borrowed his style from Toriyama (Dragon Quest motifs in particular), which caused the art of Pokemon to smooth over rather than retain a sharper, blockier, and overall more polygonal style featured in its initial incarnations. As the series progressed, directors and staff felt creatively strained, often borrowing more and more heavily from common, real-life animals and generic legends. Many new creatures which perhaps didn't feel "unique" enough acquired aesthetic frills and adornments which complicated many designs in an attempt to forcibly differentiate them from past additions (i.e. imagine a Garchomp without any limb spikes and a complementary color scheme featuring only two hues). In addition to additional visual accouterments, more and more Pokemon designs began to borrow very strictly from objects rather than rely on artistic interpretations of creatures (not to say that Voltorb, Geodude, and Magnemite don't exist, but entries like Vanilluxe, Comfey or Klefki feature EXTREMELY reified designs, often getting in the way of imagination's ability to individually attach unique emotions and interpretations to these creatures; yes, Voltorb is literally just a pokeball with eyes, but at least it's a pokeball--a fictional device--and not fucking ice cream or a key ring). Ultimately, whether one sees it as a good, bad or neutral progression, the Pokemon franchise's creature-design themes went from 80s-90s Dragon Quest to a polished-sphere, post-2007moeblob "anime" style (much like the rest of Japanese media aimed at children and young adults). Rather than relying on overall shape as a distinction of uniqueness, the aesthetic of "standing out" in a lot of anime has shifted towards "frills on a familiar, re-used shape" over the past 15 or so years.
