Two things can be true at once. On the one hand, graphics don’t matter. On the other hand, Pokemon Legends: Z-A looks terrible.
I say that graphics don’t matter because games that look like anything can find an audience and become big hits. Cruelty Squad looks like the violent fever dream a ’90s desktop might have the moment after you unplugged it, and it found a huge player base on Steam where it has more than 18,000 reviews and sits at Overwhelmingly Positive. It’s far from the only game that managed to stand out because its developer picked a hyper-specific art style and went for it. With Legends: Z-A, Pokemon is still struggling because Game Freak doesn’t seem to be making a choice at all.
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Games Can Look Like Anything, As Long As They’re Interesting
The indie explosion of the late ’00s and 2010s taught players that a great game could come in any shape, size, and style. Games like Shovel Knight and Hyper Light Drifter harkened back to the retro aesthetic of the NES and SNES as a way of appealing to the cohort of players who grew up on pixel art and CRTs. But indie games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Dear Esther, The Stanley Parable, and Gone Home showed that three dimensions were also viable despite indie dev’s limited scope.
For my money, the best-looking games of the past 15 years aren’t the ones that can push a graphics card to its breaking point, they’re the ones like Cuphead and Harold Halibut, Darkest Dungeon and Mundaun — games that look like nothing else, and carve out a niche through artistic vision. Pokemon lives on the Switch, which is a technically limited console, but many indies with far less resources work around the system’s constraints.
But, graphically impressive games (obviously) look great, too. I love Uncharted as much as the next treasure hunter, and Naughty Dog is Naughty Dog because, in a medium that prioritizes photorealism, it’s better at it than anyone else. I’m not immune to marveling at a vista in Red Dead Redemption 2. I can’t help but gawk at a flashy Final Fantasy boss fight. I stop and stare at the detail of the jungle in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Pokemon couldn’t achieve this level of graphical performance on the Switch, but many other triple-A games, like Metroid Prime Remastered and Super Mario Odyssey look leagues better.
I’ve learned to appreciate both the artful indie and the luxurious triple-A in the same way that a foodie can love a $1,000 meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant and a $10 burger at a hole-in-the-wall diner. They’re different experiences, and they’re aiming for different targets.
Pokemon Looks Embarrassing
Which brings me back to Pokemon, a series that seemingly has no target in mind beyond the baseline of being able to run on the Switch. While watching this week’s trailer for Legends: Z-A I was struck by just how bad this series still looks despite being eight years into the Switch’s life cycle.
At first, I was willing to extend a little leeway. Game Freak had been developing handheld games for a long time, and adjusting to the mainline Pokemon games suddenly being made for home consoles could reasonably take an entry or two to figure out. But Let’s Go, Pikachu and Eevee came out in 2018, and Legends Z-A is the sixth Pokemon game the studio has made for this system, and the ninth overall. Few developers put out games at the rate Game Freak does and you would think that, if anyone would have figured this out, it would be Game Freak.
But I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that Legends Z-A looks like a GameCube game. Sure, there are more polygons. But, look at the grass at 0:17-18. It’s flat, untextured, and not much different from this grass from Pokemon Channel, a game that’s nearly 22-years-old. The NPC designs are more detailed than they were back then, but look at the robotic way the player character approaches the Wild Zone gate, beginning at 1:23. That isn’t a requirement of putting a game on Switch. Link doesn’t move like that. Mario doesn’t move like that either.
The world of Pokemon is filled with vibrant, colorful, larger-than-life characters. But by sticking to this art style, the series is failing to bring them to life. Other Pokemon media has found a look. The anime, the live-action Detective Pikachu, and Pokemon Concierge have all represented the world in aesthetically interesting ways. And the older handheld Pokemon games and spin-offs pulled off more evocative stuff with more constraints. I can only conclude that by putting out games this often, Game Freak only has time to shoot for the bare minimum. I can only hope that after Z-A the studio gets some time to aim a little higher.
