>>55543481Your argument makes sense if it's the only case considered but I do believe several Pokemon were ruined over sky battles. It can be reasonably assumed that all Flying Pokemon had to be made eligible for sky battles as part of it making cognitive sense (I'm going to treat Hawlucha as an outlier but it's also reasonable to say part of his appeal was the mucha lucha aspect and that would look too lost in constant flight). So they gave every Pokemon a flying animation, even if they didn't have one before e.g. Skarmory, Tropics, Honchkrow, etc. Some of these animations ended up worse than others and that's the main rub people including myself have with them, and if it weren't for sky battles there would be no reason for them to forcibly put every Pokemon in the air. Sure it's possible that they would have given everyone a shitty flying animation anyway, but sky battles existing forced their hand and we got some abhorrent animations out of it. The argument that a flying animation was a hard requirement is backed by Gengar by the way; he has Levitate, but he isn't allowed to participate in sky battles and he happens to be a grounded Pokemon.
And if I can appeal to common sense, do you really think they'd have elected to put Xatu in the air if they didn't feel they had to? The whole thing is fucking stupid anyway since even if you do somehow like Sky Battles they didn't acknowledge them in post-game via multiplayer or Battle Maizon, so Gamefreak failed even the people who liked this shit
