>>56610711Look at the Gen 2 beta sprites and you'll see the same stuff happening. A bunch of amateurish spritework and then there's a couple that had the same sprite in the final game as in 1997, which look great. Not even just Pokemon who had already been Sugimori'd to their final design, either.
Game Freak clearly had a couple of really good sprite artists and the rest were a bunch of hacks whose work was either jazzed up by the good staffers or saved by Sugi design notes.
The light colors do look off though, and the lack of outlining is present in final Gen 3 sprites. My speculation is that these sprites that date from 2001 were doing the thing all GBA games did that first couple of years and boost the contrast to work around the dark screen. RS was delayed too, meant to launch before the GBA turned one, but ultimately didn't come until the end of the year 2002. By the time the delay was inevitable, Game Freak must have known about the forthcoming GBASP and went back to more natural colors. Remember that they did the first 251 as a test to get familiar with the new hardware, and since most were to be unseen they weren't fixed and a lot of them have these messed up colors. The 212 Hoenn mons clearly had several passes to look more professional.
