I love pixel art, but I feel the 3rd, 4th, and 5th gens of Pokemon games used them as a cop-out of laziness. The GBA and DS had PLENTY of polygon power to render the Pokemon battles in full 3D like the 3DS did. I'll give the GBA a pass, but I've seen it's polygon pushing capabilities, and it's an impressive and capable little machine. But as for the DS, it was engineered with 3D games in mind, and only used that 3D space in the overworld. The battles were still like Mode-7 style, and the only excuse for that is laziness. 3D models don't take up hardly any space as they're essentially text files with plot data in them for x, y, and z. The textures could have been simple and taken advantage of gouraud shading like the PS1 and N64 did, to save resources. But no... They gave is shitty sprite work instead. At least Gen 5 animated the sprites I guess, but it was still lame overall.
