Sorry if this comes across as aggressive or overzealous via text, I mean it all rather casually. I disagree with you but I'm not trying to fight over it, I'm just interested in a conversation about it.
Oh, I'm quite fine with that. I enjoy a good round of debate too.
Fans are obviously willing to accept anything so that's not a high bar to clear.
By "a level of quality fans want" I mean "a level of quality that'd mollify and/or silence most complaints like these".
No one who uses that as a defense understands just how big the gulf between Pokemon and other Pokemon-esque series is. Its profitability dwarfs even Digimon and Yokai Watch by far, quite arguably the next biggest Pokemon clones (unless something is bigger in the mobile market, or is Japan-only).
Even if you include the entirety of Dragon Quest despite only a small fraction of their games emulating Pokemon, it's not even close. You'd have to stretch the notion of "monster collecting" pretty far to get anything even remotely close, like Yugioh, which is...a stretch.
They could very easily open an entirely separate team dedicated solely to monster modeling, or even just outsource the work, and it wouldn't make a dent in their profitability. They're just getting away with what they know they can, because it's common for people to defend their bad business tactics.
Let me give an example of what I mean, using some of the games you've mentioned. I'll come back to the scale problem later after the next quote.
This is Komasan and Komajiro, from Yo-kai watch. They're treated as two different numbers of Yo-kai watch's dex, despite being essentially recolours... and the entire medallium is riddled with things like this.
We're not going to mention Jibanyan.
Conversely, here's Sandshrew and it's regional variant.
They have a model difference, though it doesn't significantly affect their skeletons in the Sandshrew stage at least. What is also notable is that they have entirely different animations - for example, when running, Sandshrew will run on all fours, while A.Sandshrew will mimic a curling stone and spin across the ground (somehow this gets reversed when they evolve - Sandslash curls into a ball and rolls, and A.Sandslash runs).
This makes the gulf in numbers between Pokemon and other games even bigger than it already looks. There's not many Agi/Agilao/Agidyne or equivalent exchanges, either, every Pokemon Move is it's own deal, and doesn't generally just have "itself but bigger".
Persona 5 Royal has somewhere in the range of 220-250 unique moves, not counting passives, and a not-insignificant amount of those are very explicitly just multi-target or higher power versions of others. Pokemon sword and shield, after the move cuts, has about 660-670.
In general, Pokemon has made the worst choices when it comes to making an optimised model set that is easy to iterate on - basically nothing can be easily transferred between multiple instances. Whatever they're doing on their monster design front, at least at the conceptual levels, has clearly paid off, but it makes making some large scale revamp hell.
Anyone being compared to as a comparison point bot only has less strict quantity, but is making careful choices wherever they can to take shortcuts as subtly as possible, cuts whole swaths of the cast at will during graphical upgrades, or does other things to inflate the number without completely inflating the work. This is not a bad thing, in many cases it's by far the smarter and more sustainable option, but it means that the gulf is bigger than it looks.
TL;DR, my counterpoint to the claims of effectively "if someone else was making as much money as Pokemon, they could and would do this" is to say that no one even dares to come close.
Nothing indicates throwing money at the problem wouldn't solve it.
That's why to don't just pick a random team. You get one who can do the job right. You realize collaborations are fairly common between different teams, right? Not just in games but anime as well.
To be clear, the biggest bottleneck I'm talking about is in whoever would look at the 1000+ revamped Pokemon models and go "yeah, that looks okay, no, this looks bad, change this". You could give one thousand modelers each one Pokemon to revamp, but unless you have one person or small group who's going to give the final say on the models, it's going to have huge issues in consistency of style and quality. And even assuming this goes hyper-smoothly, it'd very easily take a couple of years just to get all new models improved and approved... without touching a single human character or non-pokemon anything.
Nintendo seems to have a close working relationship with Bandai Namco (and worked on Pokemon spinoffs), have them help. Oh but that would cost money, and would take work to coordinate, so let's just make a subpar game and make just as much money anyway.
What's this aversion to hard work? Super Smash Bros Ultimate was hard to make and multiple teams worked on it. Guess what, turned out fine.
People were saying that Smash Ult looked too similar to Smash 4, and were calling it a port at the time of release. This is partially because Smash largely iterates on designs, and smash ult in particular was focused on bringing back everything the series had to offer.
With that said, not counting echo fighters there's about 90 smash characters, all of whom have their own movesets, and you could make a case that there's a comparable scale their between the increased animations per model, decreased models, hitbox/frame data and all the npc-like assists and pokemon. But at the same time, Smash Ultimate is very explicitly something that they're not planning to do again, and the equivalent approval bottleneck (Sakurai) is pretty much literally falling apart at this point. They also got rid of any models that are not used in the pvp and pve aspect - no trophies, no smash tour or subspace mode with different enemy characters, just static images often lifted wholesale from source art.
Not to mention that Amiibo are another source of monetisation for the smash bros franchise in particular. Actually, now that I think about it, Pokemon as a game series rarely touches amiibo, which is... surprising. They had their own thing for a while, that didn't go anywhere. Not really related, just a thought.
Unlike Pokemon, Smash can't coast off mediocrity and rake in infinite money regardless. Pokemon makes most of its money from merchandising, the core games are just the source material. Shit those out and if they're adequate that's good enough to continue the series.
Putting aside the first comment because I don't even know how to begin approaching that bold fucking statement - like a smash ultimate port with the most minor of improvements and a few new characters wouldn't sell like mad on the next console - while they can theoretically siphon their money from other parts of the franchise to the games, that could likely mean the games becoming a loss leader, and when the company who actually makes the games are separate from the other branches, it's understandable why people would want to avoid that. Even if they take that money, see my bottleneck comments above.
See? Low standards. We already know what to expect and it won't hurt sales a bit.
I'm not blind to the issues, I just don't think the alternatives people speak about are based in reality, they're just theories about the possibilities in the land of the funny money, that you can just scale up infinitely and there's going to be no significant issues. making a set of models in the background while chugging along with the current quality in the foreground is pretty much the only way i see as practical once you reach these sorts of scales.
