[Around February I was working with the Pokémon RSE soundfont to try and write a Pokémon-style route theme. This is some stuff I wrote up for my old Patreon account whilst sharing abandoned drafts.]
One of my observations was that, at least with the Gen I-IV route themes, there's usually a lot going on. Masuda, with RBGY, took note from Bach, because he was writing three-part music, just as Bach was. (Though, for the sake of clarity, while clearly contrapuntal, it would not be totally honest to call RBGY's music polyphonic, because one melody clearly has greater weight than its counterpoint.) Masuda carried that philosophy into GSC, too, and Ichinose, who joined as composer, did too.
With RSE, Ichinose was joined by Morikazu Aoki, and Masuda, who directed RS, shifted to writing just battle themes (though he also contributed "Fallarbor Town"). Because of the hardware jump, more channels of sound are available - more channels can function in a strictly harmonic or rhythmic way, not just a melodic or contrapuntal way. (All these functions bleed into each other, obviously, but the point remains.) Nevertheless, that contrapuntal mindset carries over, and there's almost always more going on than is immediately obvious.
Just listening to Ichinose's and Aoki's pieces, even without a good ear for harmony, reveals some differences. Aoki's melodic sensibility is period-based. Antecedent, and consequent. Question? Answer. Ichinose's melodic sensibility is a little bit more sentence-based. Oh! You could identify antecedent-consequent type phrases, but the consequent is less an answer to a question so much as it spins off into its own melodic direction.
Let's compare the two earliest route themes in the game: Aoki's "Route 101" and Ichinose's "Route 104," to illustrate this more clearly.
"Route 101" starts off with a charming flute melody, which repeats at 0:08. At 0:16 it launches into a new melody, of which 0:25 is a variation (or a partial variation, depending on whether or not you count 0:29 as a separate melodic phrase). So, roughly, a structure of AABB'.
"Route 104" starts off with a a couple bars of percussion before launching into the first melody at 0:03. The horn then repeats this melody at 0:11, but there's some extra material here to lead us into 0:18. A variation begins at 0:22, with a different intervallic contour, which leads us, seamlessly, into fresh melodic material which does not repeat. So how to structure this? AA'B is clear enough, at least, but is the melodic statement from 0:22 B', even though it is much longer, even though most of it isn't the B-melody at all? Or do we call it C, even though it opens with a B-melody variant?
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Early in DPPt's development, Morikazu Aoki departed Game Freak and went to work at AlphaDream, where he acted as sound engineer, and may have written some of the music in the Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story remake. AlphaDream filed for bankruptcy in 2019, so it's anybody's guess what Aoki is doing now.
Ichinose was therefore joined by Hitomi Sato, who had arranged one of Aoki's tracks in Emerald. Sato's style is similar to Ichinose's - they both have somewhat adventurous senses of harmony, and both tend to work in more sentence-based structures. But Sato's melodies are distinctly motivic - she is not a natural melodist, which she has said in an interview. I'm not sure if there's an easy way to explain this, but if you were to listen to some of Sato's pieces and compare them to Ichinose's, I believe my meaning would be evident.
And, similarly, a hardware advance means more sound channels - which means more channels acting harmonically or rhythmically, instead of melodically or contrapuntally, and the music reflects this, though once again, there is often more going on than is immediately apparent. This is music that rewards attentive listening (just, indeed, as good melody-harmony-bass music rewards attentive listening).
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