When Pokemon Sword and Shield were revealed, some fans were disappointed as Pokemon battles still look the same way as titles released in the past.

Game Freak’s Shigeru Ohmori was asked why Pokemon battles still look the same, and he revealed that there were a few changes made here and there. He also mentioned that the studio “challenged themselves” to makes things slightly different.

Read his full explanation below:

VG247: We’ve talked a little about the cutscenes and the presentation of the game, but one thing that hasn’t changed as much is battles – they’re still very much the same format, where visually they’re quite static, with ‘canned’ animations for moves and stuff. Is there a temptation to try to make battles look more intricate, or do you think that’s something that just isn’t very possible with the number of moves and Pokemon in play?

Shigeru Ohmori: We do have some different battle features in terms of the presentation – one example is the dynamax battles where everything is a lot bigger, with a lot more pronounced animations and things like that… they’re basically just a lot more over-the-top battles compared to what we’ve had before.

Another aspect is the battle camera you have in the gym battles… now you’ve got these stadiums, you’ve got these fans that are cheering you on and shouting out at different points in the battle. So there are certain aspects where we challenged ourselves to make things a little bit different this time around. What we’d really like to do is look at how fans react to those kind of changes and think about how we might like to change things in the future.

What do you think of his words?