Subjective, but honestly i'm gonna agree. As much as I love gen 5 I have to admit its stinkers hit way harder than anything from Tohjo does. I think it's a combination of the Pokemon Machine giving less time for finalization (reminder: the Kanto cast took 7+ years simply to develop professionally. I say 7+ because Sugimori could've been working on these designs in private prior to that. Every other gen has had 4 years maximum, usually 3.), alongside the art style shift both due to Sugimori going digital and focusing more on simplification (over the semi-realism of gens 1-3), and the fact that gens 7-9 were almost certainly designed to be 3D models first and 2D designs second.
Returning to the aforementioned spreadsheet because I feel it's relevant.
I was wholly on board with almost every single new dex until gen 8. I very much like gens 3-7, even if 4 kind of sucks ass and 7 is definitely not as good as the rest, but look at that fucking drop-off. The second Sinnoh hits the percentage of designs in Negative tiers skyrockets and never goes back down. Positive tiers can only keep up until gen 7, and the two generations proceeding it have extremely comparable positive/negative percentage ratios. There was an undeniable shift somewhere down the line that became more and more noticeable as time has gone on, and I know that this comparison is done to death but just look at Roselia's design vs Roserade's.
These guys came one generation after the other, and yet
- Roselia's arms are immediately more detailed, with actual emphasis on the petals as opposed to Roserade's strange three-pronged amorphous bush
- Every part of Roselia fits together very clearly, whereas Roserade's mask is detached from any immediate appendage or grounding and its face seems to float in front of its hair (which is also somewhat ambiguous and undetailed, not made to be either flower petals or actual tufts of hair).
- Roselia has far less saturated colors; Roserade's green is noticeably more neon than Roselia's faded petals- despite them obviously sharing the same family- as is its yellow compared to Roselia's. This is not Dream World fuckery btw, you can see it when comparing their official art too.
These points don't make Roserade's design objectively worse- far from it- they're just examples of a shift in art style that occurred rather rapidly and made the series a bit more disconnected from its past.
It's also worth noting that Kanto had
extremely strong visual motifs throughout its entire cast that made those designs very very cohesive (if a bit bland at points), as opposed to the more experimental approach taken with gens past it. (I'd give an archive link for that thread but it's very long and only a few tweets showed up when I tried to archive it so I won't clog the thread with the 7 separate links you'd need to read the whole thing.)
That's not to say other gens are completely incoherent, of course- I have so many fucking images demonstrating otherwise, if a bit simplistically- just that they're nowhere near as unified as gen 1 was and they don't fit too well together as a series.
I don't think any designs from gen 4 onward look especially "at home" when sat next to anything from the first few gens. Put a Carkol next to a Girafarig and tell me they came from the same series, and I'll believe you because I'm crazy obsessed with this stupid shit but no sane person would. My parents certainly didn't when I'd excitedly blab to them about an upcoming generation as a kid.
