The first mainline Pokémon game in years is on the way with Pokémon Winds and Waves, and while things look very promising so far from just the announcement trailer, I’m understandably antsy. The 3D era of Pokémon has been – very successful, certainly – but in terms of quality it’s been a very mixed bag. For this upcoming game, I don’t mind if there are too many areas of empty space. I’m not interested in whether the tree trunks look bad. All I really care about is the Pokémon themselves.
While 3D Pokémon have certainly improved – with Legends ZA in particular including some of the most naturalistic movement and battle animations yet – there’ve been some truly dire stops along the way.
Right now, it feels like the best place to see Pokémon represented in their true glory is the trading card game. Here, we get to see Pokémon in their natural environment, interacting with their trainers, battling, or just hanging out together. Pokémon TCG artists can play with scale, color, and deploy different art styles in ways that weren’t possible in the pixel era, let alone in the 3D games, and the results speak for themselves. Pokémon Pocket has only increased the amount of commissioned artwork, and the number of full arts just keeps on increasing. It’s a glorious golden age for 2D Pokémon art!
Comparably, 3D Pokémon have often suffered from stilted, static poses, washed out colors and half-assed animations. The difficulties in stepping up from the art style of Black and White (a culmination of years of mastering the pixel art style) really made themselves known in those first few games, and it kind of feels like we never escaped an awkward middle evolution for the franchise. Even at their very best, there’s still an awkward tendency for 3D Pokémon to resemble plastic toys more than dynamic, living creatures.
Tragically, the change even seems to have filtered down to some of the official 2D artwork for each Pokémon. It’s not present in every piece, but it’s notable that some of the artwork seems carefully drawn to resemble the 3D in-game models, with the same lifeless poses. The ultimate example I always point to is Baxcalibur, who genuinely looks like it’s T-posing. You can see from its cards that it doesn’t take much to make it look more dynamic.
Obviously, it takes a lot less work to draw a Pokémon in an interesting way for a single, still piece of artwork than to animate it in 3D, but my hope for Winds and Waves is that the designers take some pointers from how good Pokémon look on Pokémon cards nowadays.
As I say, initial signs are promising. There are Krabby going ‘snip snip’ with their claws, Dusclops doing a little spooky ghost move. If that’s not just been carefully presented for the trailer and also translates from the overworld into the battles themselves, we might finally be seeing that third evolution of the Pokémon video games.
Source: Wargamer
