>>54477749Really? You think that is the only criticism of recent Pokémon games is that people say they're bad? And every other indicator says they are as good if not better than earlier games?
For starters, "we managed to produce games on a modern HD console as good as things produced for handheld consoles from decades ago" is not really a win for Gamefreak. The expectation is really that they would build, iterate and improve upon it, not just make more of the same standard.
Then there are the issues of scale and abstraction. Cities only having half a dozen buildings in them with a couple of NPCs milling about was acceptable in the Game Boy days because it wasn't meant to be a 1:1 representation of a real space. The game could only represent a few buildings, so a handful of the most gameplay or plot significant placed being rendered was acceptable. You knew that the real Pallet Town or Celedon City would not be that small. But for the purposes of a Game Boy RPG it was sufficient and functional. You could look at the abstract, 2D space and your imagination or the manga or anime could fill in the details of how the real, 3D space might look.
In modern games however the trend continues, despite being 3D and running on exponentially more powerful hardware. We are supposed to be seeing the real 3D space, not an abstraction of it. But in SwSh you would still bump into towns with a handful of buildings. And I challenge anyone to call Windon or whatever not-London is called "bustling". It is the capital city, but the streets are so empty it looks like there has been some kind of mass depopulation event.
SV are arguably worse because you cannot even enter the buildings now. Gym receptions and the school are about the only interiors you are going to see.
The horrible optimisation and rendering only compound the problem, with the former likely being the reason the towns are so small and depopulated to begin with. Did you see the human slideshows stuttering around SV?
