>>55440651Well, it should be noted that Gen 2's colors are almost certainly a choice from limitation first and foremost, given the few colors the GBC could display. It doesn't necessarily mean that they wanted it to look exactly like that if they had the choice otherwise.
That being said, I think the slightly more muted schemes fit Pokemon's aesthetic better personally. Gen 5 in particular, I love it's color palettes. Sugimori's works tend to use a wide variety of colors, but they tend to be relatively unsaturated. Picrel is just a random example, you can see his earlier works were even less saturated with pretty dull colors when you look at them individually. His art got a liiiittle more saturated when he shifted to a more digital focus, but it still remained largely the same. In that sense, I think the shift fit better.
I think these tend to work best when there's more texture to them, like we can see with Gen 5's walkways and grass.
