Why Pokémon Gen 5 Graphics & Animations Look So Terrible
Pokémon Black and White introduced moving sprites to the series, but Gen 5’s odd animation technique makes them more ugly than impressive.
You Are Reading :Why Pokémon Gen 5 Graphics & Animations Look So Terrible
Category : Pokemon
Pokémon Black and White broke ground for the series by being the first Pokémon games with fully animated sprites. Between attacks, their Pokémon idly rock back and forth, flap their wings, hop around, flash different colors, and even blink, giving them far more personality than the static images of previous generations. But in order to animate more than 600 Pokémon, corners apparently had to be cut. The Generation 5 games’ sprites have a signature messy, pixelated look to their movements that makes them ugly in some fans’ eyes, and emulating the games in HD reveals the cause.
Traditionally, pixel art is created in a grid. Every pixel is aligned perfectly with those adjacent to it. To animate the art, certain pixels are removed and replaced with similarly colored ones nearby, creating the illusion of movement when played in rapid succession. With the addition of some sprite scaling and warping, this is how Pokémon’s battle-starting movements were animated in games like Pokémon Emerald and Platinum.
Meticulously animating every Black and White and Black 2 and White 2 Pokémon this way would have taken a considerable amount of work. Instead, it appears Game Freak opted for an animation style akin to paper puppets, with pre-drawn segments of each Pokémon’s body pivoted and stretched individually. This causes some odd graphical issues when output through the Nintendo DS’s native resolution.
Pokémon Gen 5’s Inconsistent Pixel Art Makes Animations Messy
Playing Pokémon Black in HD via the DeSmuME Nintendo DS emulator shows the true structure of Gen 5’s Pokémon sprites. As seen above, Minccino’s body is separated into sections, such as its three tail floofs, its arms, and its ears. Unlike traditional, grid-based pixel art, the “pixels” throughout its sprite are at odd angles and weirdly overlap in some areas.
The animation style already looks messy in HD, but when output at chunky DS resolution, the overlaps and intersecting angles are made into ugly clusters of parallel pixels. This is because the DS’s individual pixels are smaller than the HD Pokémon sprites’ uniformly sized boxes – a fact that wouldn’t matter if the boxes stayed parallel to the resolution, but those tilted at odd angles are forced to be interpreted as many differently sized boxes of color. It all makes for sprites full of pixel art blunders, such as uneven, jagged lines (“jaggies”) and doubled-up outline pixels (“doubles”).
Other areas of the game, such as the overworld and battle arenas, look fine on the DS, since they’re 3D objects being filtered through a pixelated resolution. But the Pokémon themselves are essentially pixel art being filtered through more pixelation. The odd artifacting isn’t a product of emulating the DS’s standard resolution, either – it’s visible on native hardware and in this official Nintendo Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 trailer.
Pokémon Black and White were controversial at launch for their lack of non-Unova Pokémon before completing the main story, but they are largely remembered fondly today. Despite several duds, the Unova Pokédex introduced a number of beloved ‘mons, and the first two Gen 5 games have what’s widely considered the main series’ best story. The mere fact that Black and White’s Pokémon are animated is another high point untouched by the 2D games, but the execution is so distracting and unpleasant to look at that it’s actually a detriment to the games’ aesthetic. Perhaps animated Pokémon would have been best left for the 3D era.
See more : PokemonWe