@xianc78 @hj @Alex
I don't really know. Breath of the Wild, which is comparable to the last Pokémon game was also made by Japanese. I don't think there's much correlation between nationality and coding skill.

@matrix @hj @Alex Nintendo developers seem to be competent at least (not just talking about Iwata). I always found it impressive what they were able to achieve on N64 cartridges for example (Star Fox 64 should not be able to have that many voice clips). You also had Masahiro Sakurai, who while is more known as a designer than a programmer, wrote the enemy patterns in Kirby's Dream Land entirely in hexadecimal, and he was just 19 years old.

Wind Waker uses two lighting techniques on a system that doesn't support programmable shaders. Super Smash Bros. Brawl was able to do the same thing.

Even outside of Nintendo, Namco was able to include an intro with lyrics for an SNES RPG. Capcom was able to port some of their 32-bit games on the SNES while still looking impressive. Star Ocean 1 had a fully voice intro cutscene.

Modern game devs in general are pretty incompetent though. I can agree with that.

@xianc78 @matrix @Alex >wrote the enemy patterns in Kirby's Dream Land entirely in hexadecimal

I hate how people seem to be impressed by this while it's not really a good approach nor skillful nor it's good programming either. It's similar to ROTT's GADs placements or typing in code from 64'er magazine. It's autistic as fuck yeah but really more tedious than complex.

@matrix @hj @Alex Breath of the Wild is still impressive in that a lot of it's effects are in real time (most Wii-U games would have them prerendered). A lot of those effects are on par with Unreal Engine 4.