This is less of a problem nowadays, but when games were heavily restricted by the hardware they were running on, they were often restrained to pixel art artstyles. This is totally fine and many pixel art games still look great. However, I firmly believe that no attempt should be made to directly scale that artstyle up without making any adjustments. An artstyle borne from hardware restrictions is defined by that, and attempting to directly scale it up is just going to make it look… uncomfortable.
Of course, I’m talking about Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Pokémon Shining Pearl. The second I saw these games revealed, I had a visceral reaction to the artstyle. Maybe it’s because I know the original games so well – Pokémon Pearl was my first entry and I have countless hours in it – but the artstyle in the new games feels extremely 1-to-1 and just a scale up. This is 100% intentional, and I’m not calling the developers lazy. It’s a very intentional direction the whole game is going in, and I’m just not really a fan.
It doesn’t look bad, at least for most of it, but it just feels, er, uncomfortable, I guess?. I wish I had a better word for it.
Perhaps an analogy will do the trick. Everyone knows Minecraft‘s art style, right? Intentionally pixelated and blocky. What happens when you try to scale this up with no consideration?
Minecraft simply does not scale up well, and forcing it to be photorealistic only makes it look horrendously ugly.
Now, granted, this might be a poor example because applying a high-quality texture to a low-quality model is obviously going to be different than recreating a model and texture from the ground up based on a sprite, but I think I at least got the point across. Scaling up the artstyle like Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl is, in my opinion, uncanny and uncomfortable.
Something about this screenshot in particular just really grinds my gears. The character Dawn here just looks compressed, like she actually went through a hydraulic press with a chibi mold. All the overworld models in this game look like they are smiling through the pain of being forcefully miniature’d. I’m certain I could get used to it, but my initial reaction of visceral discomfort (in February 2021) is still present for this latest August 2021 trailer.
I don’t know why they went with a 1-to-1 direction with this whole game. It’s too faithful for a Pokémon remake. It’s just a different design decision, but I really don’t like it. Even with the new features, I’m not convinced that I should buy this new one instead of playing the DS game I already have. This problem is only accelerated by the artstyle. The genuine glow-ups of the player characters of Gen 3 remakes come to mind – they’re obviously the same character, but they reinterpreted them in such a way that modernizes them while still keeping them recognizable. It’s so odd to me they didn’t follow this pattern for the Diamond and Pearl remakes.
I think I’ve grown out of Pokémon, and the series has grown out of me. I knew while playing Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon that the way the series works doesn’t work for me anymore, and being thoroughly disappointed by Sword/Shield before it was even released really sealed the deal. I wanted to be excited about Diamond and Pearl remakes, because Pearl was a formative game for me – but I just can’t. Pokémon Legends Arceus looks interesting at least, but I don’t see myself dropping $60 for it on release day.
Oh well. Life goes on. There are plenty of different games for me to play. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯