>>49195132big cope, however, pre-3D pokemon worked because of their low resolution, not meaning low res graphics but having minimalist/symbolic kind of design that forced you to fill in the blanks.
When you arrived at a "city" that had six 4 room buildings at most in RBY, you could accept it as a city and imagine that there were other houses and businesses beyond that but you didn't needed to actually see them. The two or so important buildings and the three tiny NPC houses were all you needed for your trip and you could either ignore that because you were aware of the limitations of the game's design or because you were already filling in the blanks.
Now, when you arrive at a SweeSh >"""city""" and there's a single house you can't enter, a painted on city block you can't access, and the gym and years after games from developers with much smaller revenues like Saint's Row 2 could give you entire in-scale cities using roughly the same base design elements, then the illusion starts to fall apart.
In pre-3d games, you could have a forest be three rows of doubles of the same identical trees and some icon grass but when you start building a higher resolution game, where the game is trying to be a more faithful imitation of reality, you can't have the same exact tree model jutting out awkwardly from the ground without it looking bad and fake.
Theoretically, TPC could easily get the manpower and budget to create a triple A Pokemon game with a region the size of San Andreas, like the fucking 2000-something game you can run on phones, but they'll never do it because despite how shitty and fake the games look, "people" like (You) will keep buying them.
