no matter how many places i've seen talk about the gen 5 designs, everyone comes to the general conclusion that they were terrible. personally i just loved how experimental and different most of these guys were. they felt really unfiltered, and i loved that. i was a little thrown off by useless designs like maractus and stunfisk but i actually really appreciated the ice cream and chandelier Pokémon because they were just so wildly creative and out there. i honestly want more designs like that. (not off of objects, but more of that creativity) i think what really got me was the colors and sprite work. for a game titled black and white, these have to be some of the most colorful and beautifully done sprite works ive seen since gen 2. while i know a lot dismiss gen 5 as the "holy crap we're running out of ideas" era, i saw it as "holy crap look at all of these new ideas". thoughts? EDIT: wow this thread went a year! thanks everyone for your feedback <3
i thought they were so well done... but i didnt like the camera zooming in on them and absolutely slaughtering the quality haha
I actually liked gen 5, because it introduced one of my favorite Pokémon, Sawsbuck. There were a lot of other Pokémon that I liked, such as Bouffalant and Haxorus. Though, there are some Pokémon designs that I can see getting a lot of hate. Trubbish and Stunfisk need more love...
Any generation has its ups and downs in terms of Pokémon designs. To me the worst designs are bland and forgettable, because at least "ugly" Pokémon get talked about. Personally, I loved Gen V! I absolutely adore Litwick and Chandelure, and I even the ones more commonly accepted as trash, like Trubbish (yes that was a pun) aren't that bad. I mean, it was meant to look like a pile of garbage, and I think that's as good as living garbage can get
I love Gen V. I can't think of any Pokémon from that era that I actually hate or even just dislike, and it had a lot of awesome new additions like Braviary, Hydeigon and Golurk.
I didn't mind gen 5 too much. I can't complain about Pokémon modelled over ice cream or garbage, as gen 1 had a Pokémon that was based off a magnet. I admit that I found most of their designs pretty weird when I first saw them (e.g. Seismitoad and Throh), but they've grown on me over time and I can't say that there are any designs from this generation that I really dislike. Except Throh and Sawk. But asides from those two, I really enjoy gen 5's unique designs.
Gen 5's one of my favorite gens. I do like their Pokémon but the one thing I didn't were just the way their moves were animated. Sometimes they make the Pokémon themselves look rather awkward. But in general, I thought the Pokémon had pretty cool designs (a few of my favorites include Galvantula, Braviary, and Snivy's evolution line).
yeah! these are my favorites from this gen for sure. Braviary especially reminded me of gen 1s simpler Pokémon designs so I was all over that I think I definitely had to grow onto them too. at first I was super confused but now it's kind of unhealthy the time I spent on these gens yeah I think the whole move-the-whole-Sprite move animation was strange but at the same time I don't know what else they could have done considering that's what they've been doing. They could added attacker and attackee animations but this was only a ds here so rip hefty memory
The Gen 5 story is so interest to me that it becomes an inspiration for my first fiction story reboot(or change of the story format-It's reboot again after watching some fan-made Pokémon figure story on Youtube.) and the design for Keldeo's Resolute form, Reshiram and White Kkyurem does amaze me as well. I am proud to state Gen 5 as my favourite generation(1st Place)
I don't mind the gen 5 Pokémon themselves, but I didn't really like the gen 5 art. The sprites were okay and it was cool that they moved, but I think they over did it by making them move constantly. While each of the other games had improved the quality of their sprites with each generations, the movements they added to the gen 5 games just brought too much attention to how pixelated they were, especially from the player's perspective of their own Pokémon, which was horribly zoomed in. If they were going to do something like that and spend time making sprites from the back perspective, they should have made it in a resolution to match. There were probably too many limitations on the DS though. One of the things I said after X and Y came out was that the gen 6 games made the gen 5 Pokémon look great. In fact, a lot of the times I think the gen 5 Pokémon are from gen 6 just because they looked so much better with the 3D models. The new art style did take some getting used to at first when the gen 5 Pokémon first started being revealed, but the gen 5 Pokémon are still pretty great.
i felt that way about the sprites too the whole camera idea really ruined em haha. i agree with you on the resolution matching idea, but that wouldve taken so long too.
I think the 5th gen games came out shortly before the 3DS was released, so that might have played into why they didn't do more with the sprites. If they had waited any longer, there wouldn't have been much of a reason for them to release another game for the DS. I think they could have done more if they had just waited and made it a 3DS game though. The 3DS didn't do that well when it was first released and I think having a new Pokémon game right from the start could have helped it along.
Possibly yeah. I thought black and whites camera style was kind of hot garbage but if you look at from a stylistic point of you it grows into you.
I think that the designers for Gen V took a lot more creative liberties with Unova. Lore has it that Unova is far away from the previous four regions, which makes sense since it's based off NYC compared to Japan for the first ones. That means that Pokémon there are going to be vastly different. I found a lot of them had much more of an American feel to it, which is understandable. The Sawsbuck family, Vanilluxe family, Braviary family, Whimsicott family, Bouffalant. Even those like the Beheeyem family (because apparently America is the only place where aliens crash land their spaceships), the Klingklang family (representing the American Industrial Revolution of sorts), the Garbodor family (Seriously...the average 'Murican throws out like 5 pounds of garbage a day ) So yeah, there's some interesting designs out there, but all and all, there's not one certain one I despise. (I'm looking at you Stunfisk) Ones like Reuniclus, Chandelure, Cofagrigus, Golurk, Bisharp, Gigalith are all unique designs that really make me believe that Unova's Pokémon are the most creative of any Generation.
I feel like Gen 5 gets a lot of undue flak partly because of the timing of its release, but also partly because, as Braviary said, it took a lot more creative liberties with all of the Pokémon designs. I mentioned this somewhere else (in another thread in here or maybe it was my Q&A thread? I forget), but the thing about Gen 5 is that it was specifically designed to be an overhaul of the series' presentation, from the aesthetics to the Pokémon designs to everything else. In a lot of ways, you could kind of compare it to Gen 3 - the jump from the Game Boy Color to the Advance was enormous, and Hoenn's tropical theme helped it stand out a lot compared to the more mundane Kanto (and arguably more mundane Johto). Even if its map layout left something to be desired, it was a big change. That's also why there were so many new Pokémon and the older Pokémon were fewer and far...-er, between. It wasn't quite as focused as Gen 5 was on making it a brand-new experience, but the seed of the idea was still there. That's part of the reason why I feel like I like and respect Gen 5 so much, because compared to the games that came before and after it, it really went out of its way to feel like its own thing and properly surprise players new and old with new experiences. Whenever I hear someone gripe about, like, Garbodor or Vanilluxe, I don't point to Muk and Magnemite (though that's a very valid argument), I think about how much more interesting it was to discover and battle against those completely new Pokémon instead of seeing another trainer or another patch of grass with the same Pokémon I'd always seen. Plus, I honestly don't have any problem with weird or "ugly" Pokémon like those two, or Stunfisk or others that usually show up on generic "hahah what were they thinking" lists, because not every Pokémon needs to be cute/cool. There always needs to be some weird stuff in there to balance it out. (I also feel like the "why wasn't B/W on the 3DS" thing is a little silly, if mainly because Gen 4 is really more like Gen 3.5, while Gen 5 is obviously when the developers had really gotten used to working with 3D models and the DS hardware - it's a lot like how Sun and Moon blow XY's graphics and presentation out of the water, too)
To me, gen 5 was like any other generation. There were plenty of great designs, plenty of good designs, a few okay designs and a few bad ones. Seriously, the way everyone treats gen 5 like the pinnacle of garbage really gets to me.
i forgot about reuniclus. definitely one of my favorites. but yeah i noticed unova felt more like america and now that you bring up the comparisons i think that makes the gen far more interesting. but you could do that with any generation really. i only didnt like stunfisk and maractus bc they were literally made for numbers. no evolutions, no cool techniques or context, just there to be there. but yeah gen 5 is my favorite because it was the best in terms of providing a new experience from past games and planting a seed for future ones. i cant say it gets to me and makes me all frustrated but it does make me want to ask if they would like it better if every batch of new Pokémon were to be be the exact same.
Some Pokémon are better then others, while I enjoyed many of the more elegant designs, there were just so many I didn't like, such as Gothitelle, stunfisk, the pan monkeys, cryagonal and more.