Poll by Matt S.
Since it doesn’t seem possible for Game Freak and Nintendo to release a Pokémon game without it becoming painfully controversial, we thought we would focus the first poll of the year on the newly-released Pokémon Legends: Arceus (the review is coming, I promise!). This time around the controversy has been on the graphics, so that’s what we put to the community.
I was actually a little surprised by this result, as I expected (based on the noise) that a much larger percentage of people would be livid about how “ugly” they thought it was. As it turns out, only 15.7 per cent of people think Arceus looks ugly, which either means that when it comes to Pokémon, it’s not so much that the games are controversial than it is that there’s a particularly loud group of people that don’t enjoy a thing that a lot of people really enjoy… or that the DigitallyDownloaded.net audience is more inclined towards art direction over technical detail.
One-quarter of people (25.7 per cent) said that Pokémon Arceus is gorgeous. What is interesting about this is that there is a demographic gap. The DDNet poll combines results from both Twitter and YouTube, and on Twitter, the percentage of people that love the look of the game was vastly higher. On YouTube, more people replied that they thought the game was ugly. I do talk about aesthetics more on Twitter so it’s possible that I have a larger audience for that around me, but the gap between the two is very significant.
Across both Twitter and YouTube, however, the biggest category was the people that thought that Pokémon Arceus is adequate and “good enough.” (51.4 per cent). The level of technical detail is that underwhelming, but the quality of the art direction and general cheerful presentation makes this result in itself unsurprising. People are generally loving the game, based on reviews and social media chatter. It’s just that they’re tolerating the art.
It is a bit of a pity that the game would be mired in such a superficial discussion, because there is so much to admire and love about Pokémon Arceus. I doubt it’s going to put any kind of dampener on the runaway success of the series, though. Nintendo got early-mover advantage on 2022 and this is going to top the charts comfortably.
