Story time for the new kids on the #GameFreakLied issue. A few years ago (3ds era) Gamefreak essentially modeled out all of the pokemon. I don't remember which article it was from, tho the jist of it was: "We modeled them to prepare for future generations of pokemon games"

If you wondered why pokemon 3ds games ran like total ass when 3d mode was on: expensive models was it. Oh and lack of sophisticated shaders.

The artists literally modeled everything out. They didn't have alpha transparency, they didn't even use alphatest.

Again to iterate: they modeled EVERYTHING. In order to fake transparency artists used inverted faces (like on castform or ghastly) In the image below notice how the background elements are not visible thru castforms water membrane?

Simple trick of inverting the faces.

So you're seeing where I'm going with this... Round pokemon where highpoly. Like a TON of triangles for the 3ds hardware. Bigger pokemon were especially problematic because they required a lot more articulation.

For example all of the whiskers on Mega Rayquaza are fully modeled.

Pokemon like snorlax and chansey are very smooth and round, thus requiring a ton of triangles. This was made worse by their shader that reads the tangent info of all that smoothing group info

They use it to create: rimlights, fake lighting, and shadow banding for a stylized look

Again the whole idea was to make this stuff as highpoly as it could be to support future games. It makes sense. 800+ unique models is a ton of work.

When you toggled on 3d it was DOUBLING the triangle count of the whole scene, including the shading expense of the pokemon models.

This is why 3d had to force off in code when a swarm of pokemon showed up, or you had double/triple battles. The scene cost was too high.

p.s ghastly used fancy effects like vertex deformation to do the smoke modulation. They also used dither transparency to somewhat fake smoke.

So when gamefreak said a few months back that they had to remodel shit, first off I was like yeah right. You already did that.

Secondly, it would be easy prove if they had via all of the extracted pokemon from the 3ds roms. (which is now why this hashtag exists)

I get that it's a lot of work, but if any studio can pull it off and has the money to do it: it's gamefreak. They made a conscious decision to go with the way they modeled and rendered pokemon for this EXACT purpose.

There is no "remodel" phase. It's bullshit and #GameFreakLied

And now we're here. Gamefreak has found about every way to piss off the fanbase over stuff that's REALLY EASY to uncover.

All of the pokemon across all 6+ generations are fully modeled. rigged and animated. But they aren't shipping them all in sword/shield because ???

Also I should add: Why did they model everything out so intensely?

Welp, from a technical standpoint, it made more sense from a realtime cost standpoint to model the topology to be as smooth as possible.

Imagine having baked normal maps and alpha channels for over 800 pokemon

It's super expensive vram wise. The 3ds was not able to handle that much memory. There's also storage issues on the actual rom

I might be wrong about this, but I think there aren't many diffuse textures either, they use solid colors that are shader driven on specific sub-objects

LAST POST: Sum up from this is that gamefreak have skirted these issues for a while. Complacency and lack of challenge has put gamefreak in their current state. Throwing money at everything they did is half of why we're here. The criticism is long overdue.