Hope they get some publicity, the game is great and at a glance on the socials the devs seem at least anticapitalist (in case the game's evil zombie landlord faction and Marx being literally in the game as an NPC weren't good indicators)

Let's not forget Rock with Arms, and its evolutions, Rock with More Arms, and Lizard in a Rock.

seal named seel

There's an experimental quality to gen 1 that people miss I think. It's not about the designs being "better" it's more about them being weird little creatures, there was no "pokemon" archetype yet, they were designing creatures for their RPG game, not trying to design "pokemon" if that makes sense.

These days pokemon designs, especially starters, almost feel "focus tested" to be as appealing as possible, it always feels like "animal but with a gimmick" which gen 1 had plenty of, obviously, but they also had weird nonsense and there was an inconsistency in the designs. And even a lot of "animal with gimmick" designs weren't even that gimmicky, like Ekans is just snake.

I think people who complain endlessly (and make the 3 hour long video essays about why pokemon sucks now) dislike how empty and corporate it feels, pokemon is being treated as a product to sell merchandise, and pokemon designs stem from that philosophy.

A lot of gen 1 designs come from what a bunch of Japanese 20 and 30 somethings though a "monster" should look like, so you get a lot of creatures that feel like they're played by a guy in a big rubber suit, like they could be fighting ultraman or godzilla. There's a "clunkyness" to the designs that doesn't really exist anymore. Everything feels so streamlined and smoothed over now, even mons that have a gen 1 feel don't feel like they're trying to capture the idea of a monster from an old cheesy tv show, they feel like they're trying to emulate what a gen 1 pokemon looks like. Pokemon doesn't represent anything other than itself anymore, and is just purely self-referential with the designs, and I think people just kind of miss when pokemon designs felt inspired by something other than how many plushie/figurine sales the company expects to see from them. But they don't realise this or examine it, so they just come away with the idea that the new designs "look bad" without really understanding why they feel that way.

To sum up, the problem is capitalism, but a lot of pokemon "essayists" and whining redditors don't understand that, or refuse to understand it, and so lash out at the designs, without actually analysing "why" the designs feel different to them these days.

We'll see how it goes, whether they actually worked on improving the way the games run, or if they just made up a fake mock-up for the trailers to make it look better.

From what I understand the Pokemon Company wants synergy between the launch of the next gen mainline game and the next trading card game expansion. So when the latter is ready to go, Gamefreak drops the next gen game even if it’s in a beta state.

i hope the dog one just keeps getting fluffier and fluffier

I heard it's Southeast Asia. It makes sense cause the map has a lot of islands

Edit: This leak seems to be right