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News Detective Pikachu Returns coming to Nintendo Switch on October 6th (UPDATE: reviews are out, see threadmarks)

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ziggyrivers said:
Has the Pokemon brand been 100% mismanaged?
No.

Have Pokemon games 100% developed by GameFreak been mismanaged?
Yes.

Whatever quality process the Pokemon video games have, is very questionable.
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Game Freak isn’t involved with this game. It’s developed only by Creatures.
 
I enjoyed the first game. And yeah, this sequel does have graphical problems.

I'm still curious if the Uchikoshi rumours/predictions are true. If Uchikoshi is writting for this game it will be good regardless.
 
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ziggyrivers said:
Thanks for the clarification.

GameFreak, Creatures, whenever it’s in-house, the quality is questionable.
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I think it largely comes down to time and budget. Main series Pokémon games just don’t get as much development time as they really should have, which used to be fine on handheld systems but with HD development those short development times just aren’t sufficient anymore, yet The Pokémon Company doesn’t seem to want to budge on that unfortunately.

Conversely, I think the opposite is likely at play here with Detective Pikachu Returns; this game certainly got enough development time for what it is, but it probably was made with a much smaller budget and a much smaller team, being a lower priority project all around. Doesn’t matter how long the game is in development if hardly any progress is being made in all that time, after all. As always, I blame The Pokémon Company; their differences in philosophy and general operations compared to Nintendo are very apparent.

To the game’s credit, though, the animations do look really good and you can tell that a lot of work was put into that aspect of the game. And I recall the 3DS game looking a lot better in motion on the 3DS itself than it looked in screenshots and video, so maybe the same will be true of this game and it’ll look better on the Switch itself. Still, though, I would have expected a better showing than this for sure…
 
I was excited when this was rumored to be in development but the visuals look awful enough for me to completely pass on it.
 
Man, this game doesn't look great. It looks like it was a 3DS game at first that moved to the Switch... yeah not feeling it.
 
I am very confused by the entire Detective Pikachu saga as a sub-franchise.

1. TPC wants to make a live action Pokemon movie, but doesn't think the traditional Pokemon structure or world would work well for it so they make this Detective Pikachu spinoff series for the films to adapt.

2. The movie does... OK, but not great.

3. They announce the game sequel to Detective Pikachu years and years in advance and give no updates until four months from release.

4. Game sequel is extremely low budget and looks to have been done by a skeleton staff.

5. But they're still doing a Detective Pikachu movie sequel as well even though the Mario movie did so much better than Detective Pikachu.

If you want to make these movies big (and they probably won't be that big because it doesn't go that well with Pokemon in general), you should probably at least make the games big budget... But they instead went the exact opposite direction.

I don't know what the plan is. They're clearly throwing away a ton of money by not doing a traditional Pokemon movie, but they're also doing a really bad job of growing the Detective Pikachu brand so...
 
ItWasMeantToBe19 said:
I am very confused by the entire Detective Pikachu saga as a sub-franchise.

1. TPC wants to make a live action Pokemon movie, but doesn't think the traditional Pokemon structure or world would work well for it so they make this Detective Pikachu spinoff series for the films to adapt.

2. The movie does... OK, but not great.

3. They announce the game sequel to Detective Pikachu years and years in advance and give no updates until four months from release.

4. Game sequel is extremely low budget and looks to have been done by a skeleton staff.

5. But they're still doing a Detective Pikachu movie sequel as well even though the Mario movie did so much better than Detective Pikachu.

If you want to make these movies big (and they probably won't be that big because it doesn't go that well with Pokemon in general), you should probably at least make the games big budget... But they instead went the exact opposite direction.

I don't know what the plan is. They're clearly throwing away a ton of money by not doing a traditional Pokemon movie, but they're also doing a really bad job of growing the Detective Pikachu brand so...
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I love the movie tbh, but the games just don’t interest me. I still have a sealed copy of the first game on 3ds on my shelf
 
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Adulfzen said:
confused by how barebones this looks visually and why it took so long then since it was announced.
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I'm guessing they kept expecting resources to become available for some reason that kept being taken up by other games, and then just decided near the end of development (maybe like 2021) to release something super super cheap instead of outsourcing to an external company and starting over.

It seems like a really bad mistake to make the game that needs to help your movie franchise so low budget.
 
ItWasMeantToBe19 said:
I'm guessing they kept expecting resources to become available for some reason that kept being taken up by other games, and then just decided near the end of development (maybe like 2021) to release something super super cheap instead of outsourcing to an external company and starting over.

It seems like a really bad mistake to make the game that needs to help your movie franchise so low budget.
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feels like the equivalent would be if Nintendo after the Mario movie essentially released a game that exactly looked like NSMBU DX as opposed to Wonder. Feels like squandered potential.
 
I really just wish it... looked better. It feels Pokémon games rarely looks 'impressive' at all, the closest being Pokken, I think.
While I am not gonna say 'graphics are everything', the Pokémon games just looks so... drab, most of the time.
The models here are so stiff and uninteresting to me.
I will get the game, first one was simple fun. But such a simple Puzzle and Mystery game feels like the perfect opportunity to make nice lively graphics. I'd love a more realistic look, like the movie, for this. But it just looks really flat and lifeless.

I do, however, wanna solve the mystery of who murdered Pidove...
 
the game looks like it was designed for much better lighting models. don't want to scream "ray tracing!" but even better raster lighting would do this some good
 
The poor fidelity+no VA from NPCs but exaggerated mouth movement+really bad lighting+mix of humans and Pokemon unfortunately brings up Sonic 06 hub world vibes.
 
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So strange, this feels like its being pushed out to fulfill an investor/fan promise rather than because they really had their heart in it.

I will say, the graphics looks better at least in gameplay context. It really ought to have LM3 fidelity (or even a step towards that)
 
This game with Luigi's Mansion 3 fidelity and model quality would be so nice.
I understand wanting to reuse models, I really do, but I wish more spinoffs made their own models for their games. It gets boring seeing the same very awkward and stiff-looking Mewtwo Model in every single game, and such.
Now, I understand of course if they'd not have the budget or so, to make entirely new and way more detailed models for the Pokemon.
But it would help the game a lot
 
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First time seeing this new trailer and... oh god how I wish it looked better.
I'm not really a graphics person, but it screams "unfinished" for some reason. And the game actually looks like it could be fun, just can't help but wonder how it would look if it had a budget bigger than the Game Boy version of Tetris.
Since it took a while between announcement and release I'm not sure if time was a constraint, so maybe if they partnered with Bamco or some other for this, anything to accomplish this vision in a better way.
 
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how did this happen
image.png
 
Jesus Christ the shading of the characters and the textures look just so bland it hurts. And the game has "no lighting". Everything is illuminated equally and shadows, when present, are just circles or super bright that you can barely notice.

The human models and style is great imo, if only it had a good lighting... I'm not talking about any TotK/Pikmin 4/MPR/LM3 fidelity. The lighting being close to Arceus would make the game look good already.

The Pikachu model being the normal Pikachu instead of them trying to make the furry Pikachu of the movie(which come on would be pretty possible, we had Pokémon looking almost as good in Pokken and Smash) would already give the game some identity.

I say that with pain tho because the gameplay and story looks real interesting.
 
Was it here that a rumor about Kotaro Uchikoshi (Somnium Files,etc) being involved was posted? Or maybe that was twitter.
 
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It feels like a much better move here (if TPC didn't want to spend money on a Detective Pikachu game sequel) was to just cancel the sequels to the game and movie and make a more traditional Pokemon movie.

This is just a huge merchandising blunder.
 
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I never played the 3ds game (tho I loved the movie) is this a sequel to the 3ds game or a remake?
 
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visually it looks bad but I really enjoyed the first game so I'm looking forward to it. Although, it almost looks like a reboot? Thought it was supposed to be a sequel.
 
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Scarlet and Violet are the ugliest video games I’ve ever seen, but Detective Pikachu is trying its best to be even uglier.
 
Adulfzen said:
317604-detective-pikachu-screenshot.jpg


916573-detective-pikachu-2.jpg


if it weren't for the increased resolution you could barely tell the difference, this is the first legitimate "3DS but upresed" game I've seen.
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Yeah, I had to go back and watch the trailers for the 3DS game just to double-check that I wasn't going insane. It really does just feel like an upressed 3DS title, which is just nuts to see when the Switch has been around for seven years. This had to have been a low priority project or something.
 
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mazi said:
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Isn't this like, the plot of the movie? Was that the plot of the first game too?

Anyway, it doesn't look good but it isn't ugly either. I think it has a cohesive look overall, only thing that's bothering me is that Pikachu's animations look off, and given how much the game seems to be carried by your interactions with him, that's a bit disappointing.

I will wait for reviews to decide on getting this or not. Gameplay loop will make it or break it and so far, it looks like they made an entire game out of the undercooked side mechanics and poorly made minigames they like to put in the mainline pokémon games.
 
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Supreme Bum 01 said:
so is this just a remake or what? isn't this the same premise as the original 3DS game?
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Leo said:
Isn't this like, the plot of the movie? Was that the plot of the first game too?
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In the typical TPC fashion, the 3DS game was incomplete. It never solved the disappearance of Harry Goodman. Back in 2019, TPC announced that the Switch version will be a complete version of sorts, resolving that mystery but with a different ending than the movie (so that people would still want to play the new game).

As many have commented above, the graphics look bad and it really dampens my anticipation. What I don’t get is why they didn’t go with 2D graphics if the budget or resource was low? It could’ve worked so much better for a whodunit game to use a painterly style as in their promo card...

img_01.png

... or even the film noir style to lean into the inherent incongruence of a hardboiled Pikachu (which the movie halfheartedly attempted to do, before giving up and devolving into yet another family-oriented action flick):

ss_184d1e276f33e053315622b86696ef6f921f51bd.1920x1080.jpg
 
I'm not trying to be funny when I say that the flat lighting makes this look like a Wii game on Dolphin. Or at least my memory of it.
 
Red Monster said:
Scarlet and Violet are the ugliest video games I’ve ever seen, but Detective Pikachu is trying its best to be even uglier.
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You would think a brand like pokemon would be deserving of a bigger budget and more time. Oh well, at least we have the movie and the upcoming sequel for our fur rendered pikachu needs (no not like that)
 
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As you mentioned, there was quite a bit of a wait. The overall development and production was about five years for this game.
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One of the main reasons behind this is mostly the change in hardware, and that with the more specs available hardware-wise there are just a lot more things that were possible to do. It was hard to narrow down and figure out exactly what sort of things the developers wanted to do with this game.
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More info on the link. But tl;dr, they had to switch (heh) hardware and that gave them more ideas to do stuff.
 
ILikeFeet said:
lol, so this really was a 3DS game? they could have added some lights if the engine allowed for it. maybe it doesn't
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Its hilarious that they were thinking on releasing a 3ds game after the switch (granted US/UM did). But its weird that it took 5 years and the lighting is very flat. I guess we will know in a couple of weeks what engine they used
 
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Remember that Gamefreak wasn't originally sold on the Switch concept and wanted to stay with 3ds and mobile gaming. So this isn't too surprising
 
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