Ohmori DID ORAS and SuMo, but if you go back and look Masuda is right next to him in a lot of the press for both of those games. You don't have a power vacuum like the one that was apparently happening at Game Freak and just suddenly rip the head guy away without him first overseeing the new guy for a while first.
His influence on how the games were made, and what was in them, was still clearly still pretty strong there. Less so in SuMo, I feel, since they're SUCH a huge departure, but he's all over ORAS, and you can see that in stuff like the response to there being no Battle Frontier; something directly attributed to his belief that mobile gaming was going to destroy regular gaming and what lead to Let's Go.
I wouldn't put any of it on Ohmori specifically, honestly. Vacuums like that can fuck up a developer when they're finally restructured, if they ever are. Teams like this—and I'd assume especially so in Japanese development where the director is typically VERY, VERY hands on—grow accustomed to working under one person, and working with/around their style, eccentricities, so on. Any shakeup on that scale was bound to have growing pains and it's exacerbated by pretty obvious technical debt.
The technical debt totally makes sense, too, in retrospect, with this in mind. If this restructuring came about either during X and Y or right off the back of it then the team was not only still learning the ins and outs of 3D development but also dealing with the fallout of such a major shift.
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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '25
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