This game was disappointing, to say the least. I was really excited for Gen 9 especially since it had a Spanish influence. The nonlinear open-world aspects were a nice change of pace and all the new Pokémon were cool. Despite those better aspects, this game is disappointing because of this many flaws: there were tons of bugs at launch, the story wasn't very interesting, and most importantly it didn't advance the franchise in any meaningful way, instead it felt like a soulless cash-grab entry. I'm a huge Pokémon fan but I think this game has killed some of my enjoyment: I didn't catch all the Pokémon and haven't played the DLC. If Gen 10 is anything like this game I might be done with the series.
Video games are supposed to be fun. And despite its best efforts, Pokémon Scarlet is a lot of fun. It's Pokémon at its absolute best, and despite the pitiful performance and graphic job by Game Freak, the core series has never been better.
I won't beleaguer the point too much as everyone has already made it. But the performance is dreadfully bad. Thankfully, my entire (~100 hour) run with the game I never experienced any severe errors like crashes or resets or lost/corrupted data. But many did. And that's an unforgivable scenario for a company the size of Game Freak and a media titan that's as powerful as Pokémon. The relative scale of the media laid against the variety of crucial errors for a game as graphically unimpressive as Pokémon Scarlet/Violet make this a considerably larger debacle than Cyberpunk.
Frame rates are terrible at their best case and drop into the single digits at times. Pop in and draw distance is shockingly bad and some textures in the game are genuinely PS2 quality. The poor technical performance is jarring given I played this immediately after finishing God of War Ragnarök and when compared to other Switch stalwarts like Breath of the Wild and Xenoblade Chronicles. The technical load and ambition of Pokémon Scarlet/Violet is just so minimal and unimpressive even if fully-realized that the shockingly bad performance is not just unacceptable but embarrassing.
Putting the scathing remarks to bed, it's all the more frustrating that Pokémon Scarlet is damn fun anyway. The Pokémon designs this generation are some of the best the series has ever had with true, universally praised, standouts like Dachsbun, Smoliv, Charcadet, Bossmastiff and Pawmot. There are some duds of course like Revavroom, the starters, Cyclizar and the box legendaries, Dudunsparce. But overall the design quality, a core component of a successful Pokémon entry, is about as high as its ever been and represents a return to form after a poorer quality generation in Sword and Shield.
The open world design is a triumph for the series. Its implementation is still fairly threadbare and basic when lain across the gaming landscape, but as a first in the mainline franchise the open world is very fun. You can traverse end to end without a loading screen, encountering scores of Pokémon along the way and ultimately given you a Breath of the Wild-esque sense of wonder and exploration by giving you a world with very few hard limits. Unlike Breath of the Wild, there's not always a lot to discover along the journey but that doesn't discount just how fun that journey is to take. And with so many different wild Pokémon in the overworld you feel like you're swimming in content and opportunities as you trawl these routes. Sure there aren't as many Korok style secrets to overturn but the mysterious stakes, hidden items and the Pokémon themselves offer plenty to do at every turn.
The lack of storyline scaling does severely undermine this open world, however. The execution is half-baked at best leaving the experience more Fidough than Dachsbun. I started the game by following Nemona's advice and traveling west to Cortondo Gym to start the gym challenge journey. After beating the gym I could double back and head eastward to do the Titan challenge as Arven had suggested, or I could continue westward to the nearest next gym. I chose to do that. Along the way the level curve felt noticeable but not difficult. I battled some trainers and wild Pokémon as I continued westward and encountered my first Team Star base. I defeated the base without too much trouble and continued on to Cascarrafa Gym. The gym and its associated challenge gave me a bit of struggle by outside of using a potion or two in battle I was able to move through it quite easy.
It's at that point I realized what felt like a comfortable but engaging level curve was not at all the intent of Game Freak. I had taken on what should've been the fourth gym as my second. I had defeated what was to be the third Team Star base as my first. And I eventually defeated what was to be the fourth Titan as my first. I destroyed the level curve without any intent to do so. I broke the game for myself. From this innocent beginning I found myself wildly overleveled for much of the rest of the content without even attempting to do so, and even with shuffling teams I'd far outpaced the intended progression.
It certainly was no attempt of my own but this sort of thing is almost encouraged by the game. Allowing such freedom of exploration and rewarding it with XP encourages the player to take on the challenge of progressing through an area only to find out it was never meant to be challenging and now other areas will be a breeze. This sort of encounter is impossible in a semi-open world like God of War Ragnarök where areas that are meant to be accessed later are simply closed off. Ultimately, the experience of finding your own path and staking out your own adventure falls to pieces when you realize through just playing the game as you like you destroy the entire challenge of a turn-based tactical JRPG.
And that's something I think gets lost with Pokémon. We treat it with kid's gloves because it's a game for kids. But other JRPGs don't do this, even those aimed for younger audiences like Kingdom Hearts. A turn-based strategy game which should objectively have slow and in-depth combat choices is made trivially simply not only from early design but from how the game encourages and enables you to blast past the expected leveling progression. With almost no intentional grinding you can make the entirety of the game's combat system irrelevant throughout the rest of your experience. And that's a shame.
But, it is still fun. The new designs are fun, it's fun to evolve and collect them. Being able to access your Box in the field, a QoL change from SwSh, is significant in keeping the game quick paced. While many have complained about the lack of interior buildings and the new 'music-festival-merch-tent' style Pokémon Center and PokéMart, I quite enjoyed how the game kept you focused on the adventure. There was never much delight for me in talking to every single poorly written one sentence of nonsense NPC in every PokéTown. In Scarlet you're always kept right in the action in the center of everything. In a world that doesn't have may NPCs but is teeming with Pokémon.
The updated breeding system is incredibly welcomed. You can make very many eggs at once, across breeding pairs, without needing to double and triple back on trips or stash your Pokémon in the Day Care. Eggs hatch exceedingly fast making it supremely user-friendly to shiny hunt, or build your Living Dex, or hatch out some OT versions of Pokémon you've traded for. Fishing for hidden abilities or getting egg moves have never been easier in the franchise and it's just another example of Game Freak ridding Pokémon of its more tedious parts over the last three generations. Being able to forget and re-learn learnset moves on the fly is also an incredibly welcomed change. Being able to build TMs at any Pokémon Center in the game, on-demand, is also a fantastic innovation, especially when the means to do so is directly linked back to the game's battle mechanics. In many ways Pokémon Scarlet feels more interconnected and cohesive than any Pokémon game has in quite a long time.
Some battles, like Arven's final battle near Poco Path Lighthouse, are quite challenging and engaging, standing among the franchise's best. The two battles against AI Sada were delightfully challenging. Some other battles are quite sad in their lack of challenge, like every battle against Nemona, the battle against Penny or the battle against Geeta (who has to be the weakest E4 champion in the history of Pokémon). The difficulty is wildly imbalanced though leans heavily on being a total cakewalk for 95% of instances, regardless of your type imbalance.
The story is maybe the best we've seen in the franchise, but it's still not very good. The bar for a passable storyline in a mainline Pokémon game is so low it might as well be a jump rope. Still, there's at least an attempt at writing here which puts Pokémon Scarlet/Violet alongside Pokémon Black & White as the best written generation in the series. Arven's story is genuinely quite good and heartfelt, the story beats work great at the macro-level even if the moment to moment dialogue is pretty terrible. Nemona is an enjoyable rival even though her story is plenty shallow and her writing, also god awful. Team Star is thoroughly unlikable despite the attempt to write them as something heartfelt and their story is far too contrived, even for a JRPG, to feel relatable. The bullying victim storyline should be an easily realistic storyline to deliver in a game for kids and there could've been much more to drive home how touching the story wanted to be, but truly it's all such a mess. It especially doesn't help that the Team Star bases are maybe the worst idea any Pokémon has ever had for required content. They're boring, tedious and easy.
But the game is somehow better than the sum of its parts. The online components are as easy and user friendly as they've ever been, though I wish we could get a return of the GTS from Gen V. The raids are the same as they were from SwSh but that's okay because they work better and are more fun now. Trading is simple and available early, co-op play is barebones but it works, PvP is as easy as ever. Designs are great, the game doesn't move anywhere near as slow as the last several generations did. Cutscenes are still poor and annoying but they're not half as obtrusive as they were in SwSh.
Despite all of its flaws, Pokémon Scarlet is a very fun experience. Pokémon is a winning formula. It's the pizza of video games. Even bad Pokémon is still good, and this just isn't a bad Pokémon game. It's a poorly performing one. But it's a damn fun one. The open world and fresh new UI, new map and new Pokémon put the franchise on its best footing in years. And while the graphical performance is quite terrible, at least the game is more fun than its predecessor, Sword and Shield, which also suffered from poor graphics and terrible technical performance.
After having been on the fence about even bothering to pickup Pokémon Scarlet, after how poor I felt Pokémon Sword and Shield were, I am very grateful that I did. It's been plenty of fun, and I look forward to what other content Game Freak is looking into pushing for the franchise. A thought that was quite far from my mind after their Switch debut a few years ago.
I won't beleaguer the point too much as everyone has already made it. But the performance is dreadfully bad. Thankfully, my entire (~100 hour) run with the game I never experienced any severe errors like crashes or resets or lost/corrupted data. But many did. And that's an unforgivable scenario for a company the size of Game Freak and a media titan that's as powerful as Pokémon. The relative scale of the media laid against the variety of crucial errors for a game as graphically unimpressive as Pokémon Scarlet/Violet make this a considerably larger debacle than Cyberpunk.
Frame rates are terrible at their best case and drop into the single digits at times. Pop in and draw distance is shockingly bad and some textures in the game are genuinely PS2 quality. The poor technical performance is jarring given I played this immediately after finishing God of War Ragnarök and when compared to other Switch stalwarts like Breath of the Wild and Xenoblade Chronicles. The technical load and ambition of Pokémon Scarlet/Violet is just so minimal and unimpressive even if fully-realized that the shockingly bad performance is not just unacceptable but embarrassing.
Putting the scathing remarks to bed, it's all the more frustrating that Pokémon Scarlet is damn fun anyway. The Pokémon designs this generation are some of the best the series has ever had with true, universally praised, standouts like Dachsbun, Smoliv, Charcadet, Bossmastiff and Pawmot. There are some duds of course like Revavroom, the starters, Cyclizar and the box legendaries, Dudunsparce. But overall the design quality, a core component of a successful Pokémon entry, is about as high as its ever been and represents a return to form after a poorer quality generation in Sword and Shield.
The open world design is a triumph for the series. Its implementation is still fairly threadbare and basic when lain across the gaming landscape, but as a first in the mainline franchise the open world is very fun. You can traverse end to end without a loading screen, encountering scores of Pokémon along the way and ultimately given you a Breath of the Wild-esque sense of wonder and exploration by giving you a world with very few hard limits. Unlike Breath of the Wild, there's not always a lot to discover along the journey but that doesn't discount just how fun that journey is to take. And with so many different wild Pokémon in the overworld you feel like you're swimming in content and opportunities as you trawl these routes. Sure there aren't as many Korok style secrets to overturn but the mysterious stakes, hidden items and the Pokémon themselves offer plenty to do at every turn.
The lack of storyline scaling does severely undermine this open world, however. The execution is half-baked at best leaving the experience more Fidough than Dachsbun. I started the game by following Nemona's advice and traveling west to Cortondo Gym to start the gym challenge journey. After beating the gym I could double back and head eastward to do the Titan challenge as Arven had suggested, or I could continue westward to the nearest next gym. I chose to do that. Along the way the level curve felt noticeable but not difficult. I battled some trainers and wild Pokémon as I continued westward and encountered my first Team Star base. I defeated the base without too much trouble and continued on to Cascarrafa Gym. The gym and its associated challenge gave me a bit of struggle by outside of using a potion or two in battle I was able to move through it quite easy.
It's at that point I realized what felt like a comfortable but engaging level curve was not at all the intent of Game Freak. I had taken on what should've been the fourth gym as my second. I had defeated what was to be the third Team Star base as my first. And I eventually defeated what was to be the fourth Titan as my first. I destroyed the level curve without any intent to do so. I broke the game for myself. From this innocent beginning I found myself wildly overleveled for much of the rest of the content without even attempting to do so, and even with shuffling teams I'd far outpaced the intended progression.
It certainly was no attempt of my own but this sort of thing is almost encouraged by the game. Allowing such freedom of exploration and rewarding it with XP encourages the player to take on the challenge of progressing through an area only to find out it was never meant to be challenging and now other areas will be a breeze. This sort of encounter is impossible in a semi-open world like God of War Ragnarök where areas that are meant to be accessed later are simply closed off. Ultimately, the experience of finding your own path and staking out your own adventure falls to pieces when you realize through just playing the game as you like you destroy the entire challenge of a turn-based tactical JRPG.
And that's something I think gets lost with Pokémon. We treat it with kid's gloves because it's a game for kids. But other JRPGs don't do this, even those aimed for younger audiences like Kingdom Hearts. A turn-based strategy game which should objectively have slow and in-depth combat choices is made trivially simply not only from early design but from how the game encourages and enables you to blast past the expected leveling progression. With almost no intentional grinding you can make the entirety of the game's combat system irrelevant throughout the rest of your experience. And that's a shame.
But, it is still fun. The new designs are fun, it's fun to evolve and collect them. Being able to access your Box in the field, a QoL change from SwSh, is significant in keeping the game quick paced. While many have complained about the lack of interior buildings and the new 'music-festival-merch-tent' style Pokémon Center and PokéMart, I quite enjoyed how the game kept you focused on the adventure. There was never much delight for me in talking to every single poorly written one sentence of nonsense NPC in every PokéTown. In Scarlet you're always kept right in the action in the center of everything. In a world that doesn't have may NPCs but is teeming with Pokémon.
The updated breeding system is incredibly welcomed. You can make very many eggs at once, across breeding pairs, without needing to double and triple back on trips or stash your Pokémon in the Day Care. Eggs hatch exceedingly fast making it supremely user-friendly to shiny hunt, or build your Living Dex, or hatch out some OT versions of Pokémon you've traded for. Fishing for hidden abilities or getting egg moves have never been easier in the franchise and it's just another example of Game Freak ridding Pokémon of its more tedious parts over the last three generations. Being able to forget and re-learn learnset moves on the fly is also an incredibly welcomed change. Being able to build TMs at any Pokémon Center in the game, on-demand, is also a fantastic innovation, especially when the means to do so is directly linked back to the game's battle mechanics. In many ways Pokémon Scarlet feels more interconnected and cohesive than any Pokémon game has in quite a long time.
Some battles, like Arven's final battle near Poco Path Lighthouse, are quite challenging and engaging, standing among the franchise's best. The two battles against AI Sada were delightfully challenging. Some other battles are quite sad in their lack of challenge, like every battle against Nemona, the battle against Penny or the battle against Geeta (who has to be the weakest E4 champion in the history of Pokémon). The difficulty is wildly imbalanced though leans heavily on being a total cakewalk for 95% of instances, regardless of your type imbalance.
The story is maybe the best we've seen in the franchise, but it's still not very good. The bar for a passable storyline in a mainline Pokémon game is so low it might as well be a jump rope. Still, there's at least an attempt at writing here which puts Pokémon Scarlet/Violet alongside Pokémon Black & White as the best written generation in the series. Arven's story is genuinely quite good and heartfelt, the story beats work great at the macro-level even if the moment to moment dialogue is pretty terrible. Nemona is an enjoyable rival even though her story is plenty shallow and her writing, also god awful. Team Star is thoroughly unlikable despite the attempt to write them as something heartfelt and their story is far too contrived, even for a JRPG, to feel relatable. The bullying victim storyline should be an easily realistic storyline to deliver in a game for kids and there could've been much more to drive home how touching the story wanted to be, but truly it's all such a mess. It especially doesn't help that the Team Star bases are maybe the worst idea any Pokémon has ever had for required content. They're boring, tedious and easy.
But the game is somehow better than the sum of its parts. The online components are as easy and user friendly as they've ever been, though I wish we could get a return of the GTS from Gen V. The raids are the same as they were from SwSh but that's okay because they work better and are more fun now. Trading is simple and available early, co-op play is barebones but it works, PvP is as easy as ever. Designs are great, the game doesn't move anywhere near as slow as the last several generations did. Cutscenes are still poor and annoying but they're not half as obtrusive as they were in SwSh.
Despite all of its flaws, Pokémon Scarlet is a very fun experience. Pokémon is a winning formula. It's the pizza of video games. Even bad Pokémon is still good, and this just isn't a bad Pokémon game. It's a poorly performing one. But it's a damn fun one. The open world and fresh new UI, new map and new Pokémon put the franchise on its best footing in years. And while the graphical performance is quite terrible, at least the game is more fun than its predecessor, Sword and Shield, which also suffered from poor graphics and terrible technical performance.
After having been on the fence about even bothering to pickup Pokémon Scarlet, after how poor I felt Pokémon Sword and Shield were, I am very grateful that I did. It's been plenty of fun, and I look forward to what other content Game Freak is looking into pushing for the franchise. A thought that was quite far from my mind after their Switch debut a few years ago.