Pokémon Legends: Arceus looks like a GameCube game and that’s not acceptable – Reader’s Feature

metro.co.uk:

A reader enjoys the latest Pokémon game but is upset that the graphics are still some of the worst on the Nintendo Switch.

I’d already written this Reader’s Feature and was ready to send it in when I saw the news story that Pokémon Legends: Arceus has outpaced sales of Sword/Shield and is already one of the most successful entries in the series. I suspected something like that would happen and it only makes me more resigned to the fact that they’ll never fix its biggest problem: the terrible graphics.

First off, I want to make it clear that I do like the game. The open world is much better than in Sword/Shield and the turn-based combat works surprisingly well, with a lot of quality of life improvements – like changing the moves whenever you want. Arceus is a good game and a welcome step forward in dragging Pokémon into the 21st century, but for it to fully get there they have got to do something about the graphics.

This has been a problem ever since Game Freak started making games on the Switch but the thing about Pokémon Legends is that it is a step forward and yet it’s still completely pathetic. Obviously, the Switch is not the most powerful console around, but Pokémon Legends has an awful lot in common with Zelda: Breath Of The Wild, to the point where you’d say it was a rip-off if it wasn’t the same company.

And yet somehow Pokémon Legends still manages to look and run worse in every way. The open world areas aren’t as big, the level of detail is nowhere near the same, and there’s no real physics system or other attempts at simulation. Remember, Breath Of The Wild is a Wii U game, so the fact that Pokémon Legends, one of Nintendo’s biggest games in years, is not even able to match that is ridiculous.

The use of textures