Foreword:
Please do NOT get me wrong on this topic. I do not buy into the "gAmE fReAk LiEd" garbage. Up front I'll say I'm expressing my disappointment in the Pokemon Switch games, and how Shin Megami Tensei V really puts them to shame, for reasons I'm going to outline. I know the discourse on Pokemon, especially Sword and Shield, gets tiring. I'm going to attempt to give a level-headed take on all this, as I think it's absolutely something that should be discussed.
For what it's worth, I actually bought and enjoyed Pokemon Sword, but still couldn't help but be disappointed with many aspects of it.
And now for the actual discussion:
At E3, we got the major gameplay reveal and information blowout on Shin Megami Tensei V, and still continue to now. There's daily videos uploaded that are less than a minute long on a demon, showing off some gameplay involving that demon and some explanation in Japanese about it. There was also a new trailer just released the other day, and we'll be getting info monthly in Game Informer, as well as places like Famitsu. We have seen a ton of gameplay and the game looks impressive as all hell.
Why am I comparing SMTV and Pokemon? Probably the biggest reason is that both games involve recruiting/capturing monsters that have been in the series over the course of many games, with new ones added in the latest game. Before you go thinking this is purely about "Dexit", please hear me out. While it was disappointing to hear that Sword and Shield would not have all the Pokemon return, it did make sense for it to become unsustainable at some point given the sheer number of creatures in the series. My hope when they announced that was that if they were going to only have a subset of all the Pokemon, to make the remaining ones look really good. To my disappointment, they did not do that. Most of the Pokemon only have a few animations, and while they have some for things like walking around in the Pokecamp, or following you in the DLC packs, in battle it still looks disappointing as you just have a lot of the model sliding all over the place. Some Pokemon have a unique move that they have a unique animation for, such as Cinderrace's Pyro Ball. It's a cool looking animation, as well as many of the other unique moves.
Sword and Shield's environments, while having neat ideas, do look kind of plain and don't run particularly well, even when not playing online in the Wild Area. The concept of the Wild Area is great, it just often doesn't look too good. I'm not going to spend a bunch of time harping on *that* tree, but there's plenty of things like that that one would think could just look a bit better. There are some nice looking areas in the game, one popular example being Ballonlea, having a strong art direction and good use of color. It just feels like not as much budget was put into the game in a multimillion dollar franchise.
Shin Megami Tensei V has been in development at least since 2017, when it was announced in the Nintendo Switch conference in January of that year. It was only announced just as a "Brand new Shin Megami Tensei project", and then later that year it would be announced as "Shin Megami Tensei V". The game was the first in the series using an established third party game engine, Unreal Engine 4, and the developers have spoken about how they were able to get things running much more quickly without having to create the engine themselves. There was no information on the game after that 2017 trailer until July 2020, when at a Nintendo Partner Showcase Direct out of nowhere, a trailer for the game was shown with a 2021 release date, and a simultaneous worldwide release. While there was no gameplay shown, we still got to see more footage of the game and see what it was about. At E3 2021, the game was shown again with gameplay and a release date, and there's just been more and more footage since then. The game was in development for at least four years. From my understanding, it had barely started when it was announced at the Switch conference in January 2021. That's at least four years.
From what I have been able to find, Sword and Shield took about three years, starting in 2016 after the release of Sun and Moon. The game would release in 2019. In 2018, Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee was released, but the development was seemingly separate from Sword and Shield. Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee only had Generation 1, plus the Malmetal Pokemon, but also Gen 1 was the focus of Let's Go, which kind of makes sense. I did feel that while despite the art style, visually this game looked better than Sword and Shield for the most part.
Shin Megami Tensei is a franchise that predates Pokemon, with the first game releasing in 1992. The Megami Tensei games released before that, but as far as SMT goes, it started in 1992. Kazuma Kaneko, the artist well known for the series' beautiful artwork, joined Atlus for Megami Tensei II in 1990, and then truly hit his stride starting with Shin Megami Tensei. Since then, he's been the predominant demon designer in the series, and while he has taken a backseat now, letting younger faces do the artwork, his designs still persist in SMT and Persona games today. The demons are used in SMT games, but also in Persona games, and many of the SMT spinoff series such as Devil Survivor and Devil Summoner. Kaneko has created hundreds of demons, in some cases more than one design of a single demon. For instance, there's two designs of Nue: One used in Devil Summoner 1 (the Saturn game that was ported to PSP, both never releasing in the west), and then there was a different one used for Soul Hackers and had been used ever since, still being used today. However none of the games include every single demon in the series. SMTIV and IV Apocalypse boasted a huge roster of 400+ demons, but that's still not all of them. Those games were in 2D. There's been confirmed 214 demons in Shin Megami Tensei V, which is more than Nocturne, and they are in 3D.
Pokemon Sword and Shield (with both DLCs) has a total of 667 Pokemon available. There's a total of 898 over the course of the franchise, and after both DLCs, 231 still missing. They have still managed to include a sizable chunk of the roster. I still find the biggest disappointment about it though is how the Pokemon look, both model-wise and animation-wise. I mentioned before that if they were going to cut Pokemon, I had hoped the remaining ones would end up looking a lot better as a result, and this did not happen. There's no sidestepping the fact that Pokemon is a much bigger (and more lucrative) franchise than Shin Megami Tensei. It makes tons of money, and yet the way a lot of these Pokemon look just feels cheap, for lack of a better word. That's not to say there's some impressive looking animations among them though:
Compare this to Shin Megami Tensei V, where it doesn't have all the demons from the entire franchise, the ones here look damn good.
Both franchises have different art styles. Pokemon is intended to look more cartoonish and simple, while SMT looks more detailed and grim. Even though Pokemon's art is going for a more simple look, a lot of the textures look incredibly low res, and seeing so many shifting and sliding animations in combat looks disappointing. In SMT, demons even have animations for missed or dodging attacks. In Pokemon it just shows nothing happening. Given how large of a franchise Pokemon is, I honestly expected better, and I feel like it's just getting put to shame as more and more footage of Shin Megami Tensei V comes out. While it's not fair to completely judge or write off Brilliant Diamond and Shiny Pearl, I haven't been too impressed with how those look either, but those are still works in progress and that remains to be seen when they actually release (even though I probably won't be playing them myself for a while because SMTV is out that same week lol).
I know the discourse over Pokemon Sword and Shield has been long and tiresome, and this is just more of it. I want to reiterate that I don't think the main issue with the Pokemon in that game is that a lot of them were cut from the roster, it's that how they look isn't really improved at all. Shin Megami Tensei V comes out with footage and just has things like demons doing completely unique animations for things, AND the models look a step up from their previous appearances. There was that gif I posted of the Moh Shuvuu sitting on the car swinging her legs. There's a point where they went into a cave and there's the bat-like Daimon just hanging upside down...like bats. In the latest trailer there's a part where you walk in on some kind of worshipping ceremony with a bunch of demons on their knees worshipping an Apsaras, including Pretas, Sandman, and Kodama. That's not to say there's plenty of points we have seen demons in their standard pose they have had in their artwork in previous games, but they also have a lot of animations. In the Nintendo Treehouse demo, we see Mandrakes chase Nahobino like Leevers from the Zelda series, and it looks really cool! There's a point where there's a giant Ubellurius looming in the distance, and a demon tells them "Hey you probably shouldn't go take that guy on or he'll whoop your ass.", and then they go over there and get destroyed by it.
I'm not going to pretend SMTV's framerate is good, and is probably about on the level of Pokemon SwSh in the wild area. However the big difference there is that Pokemon has so many low res textures and low detail, and still runs like that, while SMTV has a lot of higher detail, and runs like that.
I'm not here to say anything like "How can we let Game Freak get away with this?!", I'm just here to point out that Pokemon lately looks very disappointing when a franchise a lot smaller than it comes a long and just looks better. I hope other people don't read this as just being one of those "Dexit" or "gAmE fReAk LiEd" people, just throwing out a legitimate criticism of Pokemon that another game just really brings to light even further. I'm personally very much looking forward to SMTV, it's one of my two most anticipated games this year (the other being NEO: The World Ends With You). I'm still excited for Pokemon Legends Arceus, but that also exhibits a lot of the problems Sword and Shield does based on the footage we have seen so far, however like BDSP, it's not fair to judge that one until release, so I will not. I do think it's fair to say I am surprised they would show it in that state where there were things like Pokemon having very low framerate animations. I hope I've managed to get my point across here, and I'm curious to hear all of your thoughts on this.
