anto is too busy to write this reply herself rn, but there's a couple reasons why she doesn't think that's a good idea:
- The official art would have to be shrunk too much. With avatars this works out okay since those only have a mon's head, but it's really easy to underestimate just how _tiny_ official art has to become for it to fit in such a format. Since the whole point of the art is to give the reader the design that's being judged as a reference, making that design hard to look at is not conducive to that. Especially apparent with designs that have a lot of detail.
For reference, this is what a "click Pokemon" format would look like:
which is... just bad, the images are just too small, especially that Mudsdale / Salandit would tire my eyes out if I had to scroll back to them repeatedly to compare them with the reviews, as per the intended purpose of the art. There is _some_ leeway because the images can be enlarged a bit further, but the point where the images start looking good enough lies beyond the point where the combined images would be too big / start drowning out the page. Especially if there's a lot of mons to analyse (like the 11 we had a couple times before), which is the case that's most relevant here because that's when we're unable to include the official art.
- Not something that would come into play often, but this setup requires that official art of the Pokemon be available. We had to improvise before when we reviewed Magearna, and Rockruff and Komala didn't have official art yet either when their WIP thread was first posted.
- It's bound to make for a messier design. The main problem receptionwise with a mon-by-mon format is that the last writer to review a mon is likely to get skipped over because people get bored / start to skim (especially a problem with how many writers we have now). The obvious solution is to randomise the order of writers for each mon, but that becomes inconsistent and therefore messy, which is exacerbated pretty hard by the fact that each writer has a different colour (all of which also would end up in different orders all the time) and that not every writer chooses to cover every mon (and they shouldn't have to anyway).
- It's limiting for the writers too. Some people have grouped mons together before in their reviews (a bunch of peeps did Sandyghast + Palossand as one, same with Fomantis + Lurantis, I recall Gato discussing all of Alolan Sandshrew / Sandslash / Vulpix / Ninetales as one), which they wouldn't be able to do with this format. Obviously we can just tell them not to do that, but if they really had sufficiently different thoughts on those designs, they wouldn't have discussed them as one in the first place. So that would lead to them either writing the same thing twice, which is... dumb, or putting the "Sandyghast + Palossand" review under Palossand alone, which leads to readers only interested in Sandyghast missing out on that review.
-personally I prefer reading an author's review as a whole and don't care as much about specific mons, and I know I'm not the only one here
[10:14 PM] anto: at the end add
[10:14 PM] anto: if i'm able to find a better solution i promise i will do it
As of now she hasn't though :(
okay that should be it, don't shoot the messenger pls
