Chinese Pokemon mobile game Let’s Go Pokemon Mobile uses stolen assets. More specifically, the mobile game features models and animations pulled straight from Pokken Tournament DX.
Twitter user Lewchube pointed out that the released footage of the game rips Pokemon models from the Nintendo Switch game. You can see Blastoise and Charizard perform the same animations that they do in Game Freak’s fighter release. These are incredibly specific animations, like any just other combat-focused game, which made the realization all the more obvious.
"Junichi Masuda reaffirms that the sheer volume of high quality animations and desire to balance further resulted in the decision to block transfer of some Pokémon"
This is some high quality animation alright pic.twitter.com/gwXJCrXLqD
— shofu (@shofu) June 12, 2019
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Fans have been using the Chinese mobile game to criticize Pokemon Sword and Shield. They think the mobile game shows how simple it is to include high-quality animations on a theoretically lower budget than the upcoming Switch release. They believe that Nintendo’s recent comments about not including all of the previous Pokemon to increase the fidelity of the game are a poor excuse. The mobile game helped confirm their criticisms, at least until it was revealed to be fake.
Many YouTube comments make a point about the mobile game having better animations than the regular Pokemon games. They suggest that Game Freak could easily do the same with a bigger budget. But it turns out that the mobile game didn’t do a lot of work to get such an impressive look. It’s both ironic and a good example of game development being more complicated than it might appear. Fancy models and animations take time and effort, after all.
It’s unclear if Let’s Go Pokemon Mobile will ever make it to a full release on iOS and Android. The YouTube video has a broken link to the Android APK, but no links to any other forms of the game. Nintendo is typically fast at removing copies of their games, so it probably won’t last long.
Despite this, the community isn’t done arguing about the new games. But the mobile game should help them sympathize better with Game Freak’s reasoning.
