>>58412393
Yeah nowadays that the franchise is stabilized. Even then it still uses Sugimori's final designs for the first ~500 Pokemon. Masuda already stepped down from composing everything by Gen II, Go Ichinose is responsible for like half the the franchise's beloved tracks while Sugimori was the unifying artistic lens the series saw up to Gen V, coincidentally the start of when the leaks would say he started getting fed up with Masuda's bullshit
Visual art is much more important to the general masses than the audio is. The audio is important, but for Pokemon the average joe is going to point to the monster design Sugimori was responsible for before Masuda's compositions as the main reason for this franchise's success. You genuinely can't fucking argue otherwise. The real significance for Masuda's influence is the fact he was clearly the only one that really continued to push for Pokemon to even exist, his music is pretty much an afterthought in this conversation
