>>49423852lol you made the other anon fucking mad
I'll try to give answer instead. In pretty every other game where you fight wild monsters, you kill them. Pokemon is pretty unique in that nothing is lethal. When they fade/explode, it represents that there is nothing remaining, they're dead, no more body.
So with pokemon, you want to avoid that, but you also aren't going to put the extra work into making an "escape" animation for every single pokemon. You want something that you can reuse for wild battle defeats and trainer KOs. So you make one animation that can be used for both: in the wild, the animation plays as it sinks into the ground to show that it still exists, but is leaving the scene, and in the battle, it plays as it gets returned into the pokeball in a beam of light. Having the wild pokemon suddenly drop through the floor like in the 2D games is just fucking awkward for a 3D setting, because it would have to be a very slow passing in order to showcase the full fainting animation. There would be a lot of obvious clipping. So you make it "disappear" from the scene without having to add extra animation, which leads to what we have.
