>>48858544I disagree, Pokemon looked like early SNES games on GBA, barely better than Final Fantasy IV and Dragon Quest V, though FRLG looked better. Some GBA games looked almost as good as 32-bit 2D games.
Pokemon was all extremely simplistic tiles, everything is square, look on the right how the environments have more natural shapes and there are layers and details on everything. Even Minish Cap which intentionally went for a tile based look to evoke the classic Zeldas puts a lot more detail in to make them look more lively and realistic.
Of course, this doesn't prove "GF were always bad with graphics", just that the gulf between simplistic graphics and complex graphics has grown more obvious over the years. Ruby and Sapphire were a lot of peoples' first GBA games, with Sword and Shield everyone has already seen Mario and Zelda.
