Pokémon Director, Junichi Masuda, sat down in a recent interview and explained why their latest installment was not going to be on the Nintendo 3DS. It would have seemed to have been the obvious choice to put it on the Nintendo 3DS to give it’s video game at-launch line-up that much stronger. He has pretty solid reasoning for restricting it to only the Nintendo DS.
“The main idea behind the Pokémon series, what’s most important for it, is to have as many people be able to play it as possible,” he explained (through translator David Numrich). “It has to be on hardware that has lots of units and people worldwide can play it together with each other.”
Masuda also went on to state why they preferred to stay with their 2D sprites in battles, even though most of the environment is in 3D.
“One of the reasons for sticking with the 2D Pokémon images is, with the 2D, it really depends on who draws it. There’s a lot of personality that’s drawn from the 2D images, whereas with 3D, it’s the same model used for everything, so the personality doesn’t really come out. One of the reasons we’ve stuck with 2D is to get a more individual feel with it.”
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I can understand where Masuda is coming from. While Pokémon is a franchise with a very strong foundation that is instantly recognizable, they would reap more benefits by staying on the DS, for the moment. Since a large number of people already own DS’s, then they an sell to a larger market. I bet once the 3DS picks up steam, we’ll see a 3D Pokémon.
