>>58014987I can only imagine it's some twisted sense of pride coupled with paranoia that admitting they're humans trying their best will tarnish the brand.
Like no shit anything they design is gonna resemble a fan creation somewhere. Literal decades of pokemon being popular has lead to millions of kids (and adults) learning to draw and taking up character design because it inspired them and many put a lot of effort into mimicking the style/design language of the official art. No idea is so wholly unique that millions of people coming up with stuff to fit the same general prompt (a flying type eeveelution, an animal/object, or an unused type combo) won't have already stumbled upon it at least once by time the handful of pokemon designers do. Due diligence is good, obviously you don't want your creative team stealing/copying 1:1 from smaller creators like with Marathon, but trying to make everything 100% dissimilar to anything else is a futile endeavor. The whole valuing the "surprise" of something new over any sense of consistency thing is part of this too, they refuse to do something predictable even when it's legitimately good just because they don't want it to be expected or for people to say someone else thought of it first.
That extreme doesn't even keep the brand image cleaner. People still cry foul about stupid shit all the time, and by nature of being a big company they occasionally do put out something wrong that gets a lot of attention. Their unwillingness to admit they're just people only holds them back. If they just said "yeah, pokemon has grown into a logistical nightmare and we're struggling with development in 3d" people would've been more understanding about swsh and sv having performance and graphical issues. Better yet, ask colleagues from other studios for help/notes on stuff they already solved! That's part of growing as professionals! It's not a sign of weakness, nor does it mean giving access to your codebase or stealing their code.
