Well now you got me red lining
(as a note, cause I know how the fanbase tends to be, this is for educational purposes, im not interested in a Pokemon bashing/defending debate. I'm interested in art and design, and how this doesn't work in my opinion.)
TLDR:
The composition is messy, the eye doesn't know where to focus, the lighting is too dark with not enough contrast.
So here's what i think the brief was;
Needs to emphasize the main draw of the game; real time battles in a bustling city with a day and night system (night having a particular battle mode).
Needs to show many characters, returning Mega Pokemon, all of the starters, cram pikachu in somewhere
Have them facing away from the viewer, like the Arceus Legends key art
At least 3 different ratios; key art for promo banners, boxart for switch, boxart for switch 2
So one of the main challenges the artist/s faced was that they clearly wanted key art to also work as box art. As someone who is very familiar with those types of restrictions (working on app store promo material, easily over 10 ratios of images), that is a really tricky needle to thread.
(if you compare to the final boxart, the characters have been moved around or out of frame as needed).
This makes it a lot more difficult to compose a cool illustration, basically they've had to make the background and character art separately, so they can move the characters as needed for each ratio. This is difficult enough to do, without all of those restrictions in the brief. This is all to say, I get how this happened.
(the Switch 2 and Switch boxes a slightly different, with Switch 2 having a huge text box at the bottom and logo banner at the top taking up significant space).
With that out of the way, here are the main issues as a result of these restrictions;
The composition is messy, the eye doesn't know where to focus, the lighting is too dark/gray with not enough contrast.
In a good composition, the eye should naturally know where to look as guided by the artist, with the use of light, lines, shapes, even character gazes or pointing.
The fact that we can see most of the characters because they are facing away is a problem, much harder to relate to. This would be fine if they were looking at something that was the focal point, but in practise, Mega Lucario is shrouded by de-saturated colour and effects to the point that it comes off as blurry.
This is further muddied by all of the city detail throwing off our eye, it overall just becomes confusing, the eye bounces right off. Which is not what you want for box art that needs to stand out on a store shelf or page.
Can you tell where the focal point is supposed to be? Is it easy for your eyes to travel around this image?
The other biggest issue is that everything is so de-saturated and gray, they could have used stronger contrast to make the focal points stand out much clearer. (Even the Pokemon logo is de-saturated!)
Night scenes don't have to look so gray (a frustrating art direction that's very popular).
I personally don't know what changes could be made with the existing assets, i think they just don't work as a compelling illustration.
However if you wanted some examples of similar kinds of key art that work much better, Pokemon Go splash screens do all of the above;
Each are at night, depicting battle, with a portrait ratio. Each will have had the restriction around different phone ratios (much more than 2 let me tell you).
The focus point in each one is much clearer, and the eye can travel around these images much more easily. The third example is especially notable for being a city scene with composited character art and models.
And notice how saturated only the focal points are! And the SFX are bright and eye catching! (The fact that these characters have different rendering styles is irrelevant, these techniques are easily translatable in cel shading).
I had a little go at seeing if i could improve the image based on the above pointers;
Its a bit clearer to see the characters, but this just made me realise that Mega Lucario should have been much larger in this shot, you can barely see him, and the megas are the coolest part about it!
It should have focused on Mega Lucario, not on the back of the kids' heads.
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