New Pokémon mods show just how poorly the games represent size and scale in battles

In another incident where fans prove they are more competent than large game devs themselves, game modder Yisuno showed on June 29 what Pokémon would actually look like if they were actually represented in proper scale.

As far as any dedicated fan of the franchise can remember, Pokémon has always had an issue with getting their ‘mons to look right in the game. They always ended up looking uncanny, and this was due to the fact that large Pokémon would turn out looking just as big or even smaller than the trainers, and tiny ‘mons turned out much bigger than they needed to look, more often than not.

In other words, Pokémon were simply not represented to actual scale with regards to their environment, human characters, and other ‘mons around them, and this scaling issue is most prevalent during battle sequences. 

So what did modder and Pokémon fangame dev Yisuno do? Why, simply take it into their own hands to fix the issue, of course. 

That being said, it isn’t as simple as making the Pokémon bigger and accurate to scale, you would also need to adjust camera angles and take into account if the existing battle angles and frames could fit in the now bigger Pokémon—Yisuno took care of that too.

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What you’re left with are more proactive camera movements that now fit in the true-to-scale Pokémon, giving an overall (albeit modded) feel of realism and dynamism in games like BDSP that horribly botched the scaling of Pokémon, especially in battles.

The community was quite expectedly flabbergasted to see these true-to-size changes, with one fan pointing out how the enlarged, true-to-scale modded Eternatus began to even obstruct the environment around him due to being “fucking massive.”

Another fan happened to point out that these large monstrosities of Pokémon are hard to imagine in smaller, closed battle arenas such as any area that is indoors, and wondered how these mods would work in those environments. Yisuno replied that these battle arenas would simply be “reworked.”

Yisuno also happened to notice that when these larger Pokémon are represented to their actual sizes, their animations begin to feel a little too static. When Yisuno brought the most notoriously gigantic Pokémon to its actual size—Wailord—in BDSP, he realized that the game’s regular battle animations just wouldn’t cut it as they had a “static” quality to them.

The solution was to simply “adapt Wailord’s animations from Pokémon Colosseum” to work with the modern 3D model, then having to make it work in its actual behemoth size.