cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/28095114
Vapor World: Over The Mind is a Soulslike Metroidvania with an evocative, painterly art style reminiscent of Lies of P and the narrative platformers of Playdead. According to Korean studio Alive Inc, the game had 100,000 wishlists just before its early access launch on August 19, mostly on the strength of a demo available since January 2025.
But what should have been a triumphant early access launch went pear shaped very quickly. At launch, few talked about the quite distinctive worldbuilding or the parry-heavy combat. Instead, all focus was trained entirely on something absent from the popular demo: very obvious AI use.
“Sentinels of the Multiverse” is a fairly popular board game (within those circles) and it looks pretty rough. Pokemon S/V got rightfully dunked on for looking like shit but it still made a bunch of money. “The Case of the Golden Idol” is highly regarded. Runescape.
No one really gave pokémon any s*** for the art. They gave s*** for the performance such as like the pop-in and reused assets.
But the actual art is fine. No one really had issue with that. It’s pokémon for heaven’s sakes. Not crisis.
That’s why people got mad. It’s basic 3D models in really simple backgrounds and it ran like s***. There’s no reason for something that looks like pokémon to run poorly.
I think pokemon was so heavily criticized partly because it’s developed by a veteran studio that really should be able to do better. And the way it looked bad wasn’t so much the art style, but how it was loaded into the game.
You had a lot of pop-ins, things not being animated in the distance, and every npc using the exact same animation at the exact same time, as well as some truly uninspired textures out in the wild.
Gamefreak is clearly capable of better when you look at Beast of Reincarnation or Little Town Hero, they just don’t seem to care about pokemon anymore.
Effort, talent, technology, taste, there’s lots of reasons for something to look bad.