game freak released a glitchy unpolished barely finished mess in 1996,,,,nobody bats an eye
game freak released a glitchy unpolished barely finished mess in 2022,,,,everybody loses their minds!!!!

Anyway if i had to guess im a bit under halfway through but this is easily the most fun ive had with a pokemon game in like a decade. The people putting that much ire on the visual glitches and how ugly n performance are right in that this is unacceptable from a company as big as game freak but this has done very little to actually take away from my experience. At its core its just a fun small lil open world game where you run around on a fun dinosaur and do goofy stupid shit for gyms and stuff and i like it.

Many point to the removal of random battles/trainers as the best change, but i think its easily the fact that they made the characters shut the fuck up after like an hour

Chegou a hora de falar de Pokémon Scarlet & Violet, esses jogos prometeram tanto...

Não é uma surpresa pra quem vê minhas reviews que sou fã da franquia Pokémon e que fiz a review de todos os jogos da série principal do Nintendo Switch então fazer uma review da Nona Geração seria inevitável, todos nós sabemos que Pokémon está super polêmico desde que entrou no Switch e Scarlet & Violet colocam mais lenha na fogueira mas apesar de tudo isso ainda são bons jogos não é ? Não é ?

Uma das partes mais polêmicas são os gráficos e realmente são estranhos, o que eu quero dizer com isso é que os cenários são realmente feios  principalmente as texturas que estão borradas, pelo menos os personagens são bons, principalmente o modelo dos Pokémon que dessa vez possuem texturas próprias como por exemplo o Magnemite que agora ele parece que é de metal mas ainda no geral tudo podia ser BEM mais bonito, pelo menos são mais bonitos que Sword & Shield o que não é difícil.

A principal novidade do jogo é o Mundo Aberto em Pokémon, diferente de Legends Arceus que apesar das áreas serem razoavelmente grandes não é considerado como um jogo de Mundo Aberto por causa que os lugares são separados e não conectados, Scarlet & Violet possui um único mapa conectado e realmente é incrível, explorar Paldea foi uma sensação bem diferente e divertida porque aonde eu andava sempre tinha alguma novidade e gostei bastante do tamanho do mapa, não é muito grande mas também não é muito pequeno.

Ao contrário dos jogos anteriores agora existem 3 Histórias principais:

1- Victory Road: a experiência clássica de Pokémon, derrotamos 8 ginásios e no fim enfrentamos a Elite Four e o campeão da região mas dessa vez podemos escolher a ordem dos ginásios e isso muda bastante porque agora temos várias possibilidades e isso é um bom fator replay !

2- Operation Starfall: claro que também a clássica equipe vilã está de volta e dessa vez é a Team Star, os membros da equipe são compostas pelos estudantes mais rebeldes da Academia de Naranja/Uva (a escola da região de Paldea que muda dependendo da versão que você escolhe), assim como na Victory Road você que decide a ordem de enfrentar cada membro da Team Star.

3- Path of Legends: você junto com um novo personagem chamado Arven precisam pegar a Erva Mística (Mornak foda se) porém os Pokémon Titãs são os guardiões dessas ervas e teremos que derrotar todos eles, também podemos escolher a ordem.

Eu adorei esse sistema de escolher a ordem das coisas, você pode fazer qualquer uma das histórias na sua ordem, o único problema é que o Level dos adversários é fixo, ou seja apesar de você ter a liberdade de escolher o seu caminho ainda o Level possui uma ordem mesmo não sendo obrigatório. Quando concluir as 3 Histórias uma nova e última história será liberada chamada Area Zero, no fim das contas Pokémon Scarlet & Violet são novos jogos do Sonic na Era Adventure, não vou falar nada por motivos de Spoilers mas é um final muito bom.

A história em si por incrível que pareça é muito boa, as histórias de Pokémon no geral são simples mas aqui em Paldea é boa e diferente por causa que são temas que você se identifica tipo Bullying, ausência dos pais e até mesmo amizade com seu cachorro ! E todos os jogos anteriores a história era mais surreal já que tínhamos equipes vilãs querendo dominar o mundo, criar uma galáxia nova, acabar com a água ou a terra, libertar os Pokémon e etc mas aqui em Scarlet & Violet as coisas são mais "realistas" mas claro que temos as partes mais insanas que é impossível acontecer na vida real, só que essa parte é apenas na reta final da Area Zero.

Outro ponto super importante são os lendários da região de Paldea ! Koraidon (Scarlet) e Miraidon (Violet) são os lendários dos jogos e eles são incríveis, porque eles são considerados como personagens de verdade e não apenas Pokémon que você encontra no final do jogo, eles estão presentes na aventura inteira e possuem uma grande importância principalmente na reta final, no começo eles são bem fracos mas cada vez que você avança eles ficam mais poderosoe, eles também servem como montaria, no Legends Arceus tinham várias montarias mas cada função era para uma montaria já em Scarlet & Violet o nosso lendário tem todas as funções do Legends Arceus e isso ficou bem mais dinâmico já que você não precisa mais ficar trocando o Pokémon, a história Path of Legends é bem importante porque cada vez que um Titã é derrotado o lendário ganha uma nova habilidade, resumindo nós criamos uma conexão com eles e possuem uma função na história que deixa eles únicos de qualquer outro Pokémon lendário.

Assim como em toda região nova de Pokémon  existem novos Pokémon ! E depois de tantos anos finalmente temos uma Pokédex com mais de 100 Pokémon novos e também é a região que finalmente temos o Pokémon de número 1000, eu gostei muito da Pokédex dessa região, de longe é a melhor Pokédex da Era 3D, interessante também é que existem duas novidades sobre os novos Pokémon:

1- Formas Convergentes: Pokémon que são parecidos com outros mas não são da mesma espécie, Diglett e Wiglett são parecidos mas são considerados como Pokémon separados.

2- Formas Paradoxo: uma das temáticas do jogo é o Passado e Futuro, esses Pokémon são versões do Passado e Futuro de espécies antigas, Great Tusk é a forma do passado de Dolphan e Iron Moth é a forma do futuro de Volcarona por exemplo.

Meu time foi um pouquinho diferente dessa vez porque eu sempre escolho o inicial de água mas dessa vez eu achei o Fuecoco (inicial de fogo) tão foda que escolhi ele, meu time ficou assim:

-Skeledirge
-Kilowattrel
-Palafin
-Cetitan
-Anihilape
-Farigiraf

A nova mecânica se chama Terastal, ela pode alterar o tipo do seu Pokémon, vou dar um exemplo: o Pikachu é do tipo Elétrico mas com Terastal podemos alterar ele pro tipo Água mas se usarmos um Terastal elétrico pro Pikachu ele aumenta o dano de golpes elétrico (ou seja é um STAB 2.0), eu gostei da mecânica mas ela é melhor aproveitada no online, no modo história não é tão necessário assim e muitas vezes os adversários não alteram o tipo dos Pokémon.

A trilha sonora é muito boa como sempre, aqui estão as minhas favoritas (vou tentar não spoilar muito aqui):

-Tera Raid Battle
-Final Boss
-Team Star Boss
-Champion Nemona
-Treasures of Ruin
-Gym Leader Battle
-South Province
-Area Zero

E assim termino mais uma Review, Pokémon Scarlet e Violet são jogos super injustiçados, só porque são feios não quer dizer que são bons, enfim a comunidade de Pokémon é uma merda mesmo... Espera aí, eu ainda não falei dos problemas do jogo...

A otimização desse jogo é um CU VIRADO DO AVESSO, é incrível que Pokémon Scarlet & Violet é todo fodido, vou ser sincero no começo da minha jornada eu não tinha nenhum problema de quedas de FPS mas depois de muitas horas esses problemas começaram a ficar mais evidentes, quando tinha muitos Pokémon no mapa o meu jogo simplesmente diminuía os FPS assim ficando mais devagar e na água esse problema era pior ainda, porque o FPS tava menor ainda.

Eu também tive muitos bugs como meu personagem ficar invisível na hora de capturar um Pokémon, meu Pokémon ficar escorregando, atravessei em uma cachoeira de sem querer e ficou todo bugado os gráficos, Pokémon aparecendo na parede assim não podendo capturar, a câmera nas batalhas eu conseguia ver dentro do chão e etc.

O online também é outra coisa no mínimo duvidosa, online da Nintendo no geral não é lá essas coisas mas jogo tem umas decisões muito estranhas de online, você pode explorar o mapa do jogo junto com outras pessoas no online porém é muito difícil fazer isso com pessoas que não são seus amigos, porque pra explorar no online você deve ter um código e com amigos é bem mais fácil do que com pessoas random, você não pode entrar em mundos de outras pessoas na hora que você quer, apenas se tiver um código e isso pra mim foi bem difícil porque eu não tenho  que tem Pokémon Scarlet & Violet e tive que usar essa feature para evoluir um Pokémon que só é possível evoluir por causa dessa porra de online.

Para evoluir meu Pokémon eu tive que entrar em vários servidores do Discord de Pokémon para encontrar uma alma viva pra eu poder evoluir e depois de um dia eu consegui encontrar um cara, muito obrigado P3DROS4 sem você eu nunca teria pego meu Palafin.

Outra coisa tenebrosa são as Tera Raids Battles,  uma mecânica que voltou do Sword & Shield, resumindo são batalhas que 4 pessoas enfrentam um Pokémon poderoso e no final se ganharmos conseguimos pegar ele, a Raid está melhor e pior, melhor porque as batalhas são muito mais dinâmicas já que agora não existe mais um turno pra cada jogador agora todos podem batalhar sem um interferir no outro porém estão piores por uma série de fatores, coisas básicas como a porra do gráfico da barra de vida do Pokémon inimigo não descer, isso mesmo o jogo quase nunca diminui o gráfico de HP do inimigo ou seja você não sabe se está conseguindo derrotar o Pokémon ou não, isso é muito ridículo, outro Bug é quando perdemos, tive uma partida que perdi e a tela ficou branca por um bom tempo e eu podia ouvir o Cry dos Pokémon repetidas vezes, enfim eu tive mais bugs mas esses são os principais.

Engraçado que a primeira vez que comentei desses bugs foi na minha lista dos 20 Jogos Favoritos de Switch e nesse tempo nada foi consertado kkkkkkk

Até o Pokémon Home sofreu com esses problemas porque eu lembro que eles adiaram a compatibilidade de transportar os Pokémon por causa dos bugs.

O jogo não ter dublagem no começo não me incomodava mas depois de ver os TRAILERS eu foi convencido que ter vozes para os personagens deixa uma experiência bem melhor.

Foi lançada recentemente a primeira parte da DLC chamada The Teal Mask, eu ainda não joguei então por isso que não vou falar nada dela, mas ouvi dizer que os problemas de otimização ainda estão presentes.

Pokémon Scarlet & Violet tinham muito potencial de serem os melhores jogos da franquia mas por conta dos bugs, otimização cagada e o prazo curto de desenvolvimento impediram desses jogos de serem incríveis, eu fico muito triste com isso porque eu adorei esse jogo, mesmo com os bugs foram um dos jogos que mais me diverti com Pokémon e desse vez eu não posso passar pano porque isso envolve dinheiro e gastar um jogo de 300 reais com inúmeros problemas de desempenho não dá.

Pokemon Scarlet/Violet are an event horizon for Pokemon games. It is actually unbelievable how unfinished these games are. It's when playing these games that you realise that every single Pokemon game since they went 3D about 10 years ago has been unfinished. Every single one has blacked out the screen in place of actual animations whenever a character does anything even remotely active, every single one up until now has re-used the same Pokemon models and attack animations, and every single one has had barebones world design, plot and characters that you're just railroaded along with no freedom because the devs likely didn't have time to design anything other than an incredibly linear experience.

When I tell you this game is unfinished, I mean that there are frame drops during the opening cutscene and the CREDITS. THE CREDITS. THERE ARE LITERALLY FRAME DROPS ON A BUNCH OF FUCKING NAMES SCROLLING DOWN A BLACK SCREEN. This game's technical performance is unbelievable in the absolute worst way, there is never a moment where its utter lack of polish is not a total distraction. Frame drops, hideous PS2-looking textures, egregious pop-in everywhere you go, NPCs fading out of existence because they can't make it up a flight of stairs, Pokemon turning invisible mid-battle. I could go on. I have never played a game in a state as rough as this.

And what pisses me off the most about that is that it puts a huge damper on what is otherwise a really fucking good Pokemon game, the best since Generation 5, in my opinion. Fundamentally, from a design perspective, I think this is just really good shit - it does a lot of things I've been pining for from the series for a long time. The open world isn't a lie, it truly is open! Shockingly so, in fact! Even with the supposedly open world being all over the marketing I really was expecting this game to do the classic Pokemon, "oh you can't go there yet there's been an outbreak of Sugma" or whatever and have some fuckin' dude blocking my way at 3/4 of the exits of every city, but nope! You really are just let loose in this world, allowed to beeline straight to areas with Level 50+ trainers and Pokemon and get your ass beat right away! It's super refreshing to not have my hand held every step of the way! Yet it does subtly tell you which parts of the map are intended to be taken on later through some nice and sensible design. There's a cave in the southwestern part of the map that leads to a city with a gym, but to get through the cave your "mount" (the game's "box legendary") needs to unlock a high jump that you get from progressing elsewhere in the game. HOWEVER that city is not blocked off from you entirely early on because there's a slightly harder-to-find hidden path that lets you get to the city without needing to unlock the upgrade! Wow! Thanks for telling me that the area is hard but not entirely blocking me off from going there anyway, Game Freak! Junichi Masuda leaves and suddenly you learn game design! What's up with that?

Scarlet and Violet despite having similarly condescending and 2-dimensional dialogue (even by kid's game standards) to previous Pokemon games, do also genuinely have a pretty good story! There's some interesting stuff going on here ESPECIALLY towards the game's climax! Narrative-wise, I think the last 4 hours or so of this game are some of the best stuff Pokemon has ever done!

A shame then, that all the cutscenes and moments around this part of this game and indeed all the way through are undercut by the devs only having time to put like 6, whack-ass MIDI sounding songs in it, and having to constantly watch hideous textures glitch out in the background whilst none of the characters emote or animate at all. At this game's emotional climax, it plays this incredibly cheap, wafer-thin "emotional music cue" song that you've heard numerous times throughout the game, and that on top of everything else just robs it of all its emotional weight. This game frequently deserves better. It has genuine freedom, a fair and reasonable sense of difficulty and challenge and a story with far more intrigue and nuance behind it than any other Pokemon game in the last decade. What a shame that it's buried under the weight of what has to have been a horrible amount of crunch.

For the first time in a long time I find myself feeling sympathy for Game Freak. No dev ever wants to release a rushed or unfinished game, and they will definitely have KNOWN what state it was in before it came out. There is no doubt in my mind that the state of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are far less to do with incompetence on Game Freak's part and far more to do with corporate interference and this increasingly ridiculous and unsustainable "new generation every 3 years" release pattern that well and truly killed them here.

How sad. If these games had been given another year or even 6 months in the oven they would have absolutely been the best Pokemon games ever in my mind. My dream scenario is that some kind of "Deluxe" version of these games comes out in a few years (and maybe for SwSh too, which were also clearly unfinished) for the next, more powerful Nintendo console that includes all the DLC from jump, HUGELY touches up the graphics and technical performance, adds in some new animations and general polish and maybe adds just a few little extra bits of content here and there. Realistically I think the best I can hope for is that they continue on with Scarlet/Violet's open world design philosophy in the next games, which I'd like to get excited for! But if they have to shit out another one in just another 3 years?

I don't know. Just give them more time next time. Jesus christ.

“Yesss! Let’s disable the four locks and get into that lab!
Sounds kinda video-gamey when you say it out loud, huh?”
-Nemona Pokemon.

I don’t fucking care about graphics nor glitches. It’s the type of thing that you see and forget about 5 minutes afterwards. I didn’t care about them in cyberpunk and I don’t care about them here. It’s true that demanding that the company with the biggest gaming franchise in the world do better it’s the right thing to do, but c’mon man, if that’s the only thing you have to say about this and other games then you don’t care much about the medium as you say.
That being said, this game sucks ass.

The last Pokemon game I played to completion was Moon, so I don’t know about Sword and the other games in between, but I’m gonna pretend they don’t exist for this review.
The main problem with this game is also the problem I had with other recent releases from other franchises (SMTV, Elden Ring…) but I think this one here is the worst of them all.
It’s the open world thing. It’s a very sad thing that this is the norm now.
My main gripe with this new approach is that it’s supposed to give you ‘freedom’, but in reality, while being true that you can go anywhere you want (not that much though), the game openly reveals the points of interests you need to know, and in a very open-worldy fashion, becomes rigidly structured. You can do A, B, C or B, C, A, but that’s it, it’ll never allow itself to divert from that. It becomes a checking boxes simulator with stealth and crafting. Just beat 8 leaders, 5 paradoxes and 5 star members, collect shit and get the ending. It’s just the open world way man, you’ll never understand…
All the tera stuff is pointless, in combat, in raids, in minibosses. The paradox bosses, gym tests and team star bases were boring as fuck, the last two are specially jarring because the pre-gym dungeon/team bases were the most fun part of the series for me, and they replaced it with mini-games.
Let’s not forget about the difficulty, since I feel that the series became a bit too easy the past few gens. I would say that it’s all over the place with spikes and all but you can also make your own path here, so maybe it’s my fault in some way. But it’s also true that the game makes no attempt to adjust itself to the path you choose, it doesn’t need automatic level scaling, that would suck, but for example: very early in the game you get to choose between two doors, east and west, but when you do so, instead of leveling up the path you did not take, they leave it as it is, and when you reach there you wipe everything instantly and it kills all the hype of those bosses. And do not tell me that you can beat one gym and take the other door; you probably can, but it’s still a very boring alternative imo (and even nurse joy tells you to keep going the way you were, but that system just works like shit). I’ll say that the boss battles that are around your level are pretty fun, but they were rare in this long game, mostly the late game stuff.
Open world ruins everything. Trainer battles became glorified normal encounters most of the time. The UI is hell, especially the map. The world itself feels like a minecraft server with towny, this is not a jab towards the graphics, it’s a design issue, I just can’t explain further, just look at the world with that thought in your mind and you’ll see. And populating the world are the pokemon, that look like mmo monsters walking around their spawn spots. Compared to the old, invisible random encounters, seeing them in the overworld makes them less special, it strips the encounters from the surprise, and finding the rarer forms stops feeling special; your mind used to fill in the gaps and all that. At first thought they were going to go with a bugsnax-style approach for the mon hunting, but outside of the occasional wigglet, just throw a ball at them and fight, that’s all. And sometimes you will accidentally step on a microscopic pokemon with your giant koraidon, starting a battle. Random encounters, please come back. I need you baby.
The only thing that redeems such an empty feeling world, is the characters themselves. I love their designs and, while still being unidimensional asf, they successfully managed to give a feeling that they like to be around each other. They carry this game’s world. Director Clavell is GOD. I really like the team star storyline, love what they tried to do there.
But yeah I hated this most of the time. I can’t wait for Palworld, that’s gonna rock.

tl;dr si hubieran puesto el juego acá en burzaco en lugar de españa hubiera sido bueno

its like what if cavia made a pokemon game except they locked the bathroom door while yoko taro was in there to keep him from making it perverted and evil. most everyone's kinda ugly and it runs at like 10fps, moving around feels sorta off but in a way that becomes deeply inexplicably compelling, they find a lot of clever ways to bake texture into the environments without needing to make billions of new assets, and there's a bit where expository dialogue happens automatically while you run along a fancy corridor. idk man i really genuinely loved every single moment and you know that's saying something because i went into it thinking i was going to hate it and then without my even realizing it the good time hat was on my head and i was constantly climbing into places i shouldnt be and bathing my mareep and making fucked up sandwiches and grinding for a shiny froslass, playing through the whole game significantly underlevelled and getting my ass kicked over and over again and having a blast.

Pokémon Scarlet is the first new game I’ve played in the series since Sun back in 2016. While I enjoyed that game well enough, I felt like the series was going in a direction that no longer appealed to my sensibilities. I still kept up with the series, but I was content to stave off trying a new game until something new sparked my interest. Had I reviewed Sword and Shield, I likely would have been immensely unkind to it. While I understand that the true value of Pokémon for many is its multiplayer, the truth is that many players make it through the campaigns and post-game quests before never going through again. Their own multiplayer experiences would likely boil down to a few matches against friends with their in-game teams. The increasingly pilpul-like reasons given in interviews behind the stripped-down story quests of newer entries, and the willingness of the fanbase to defend virtually any decision made by GameFreak, turned me off to the series for a long while.

I never cared about the “dex cut” that occurred in Sword and Shield, to be clear. I have never once transferred old Pokemon to new games, and frequently wipe the slate clean on save files. Cycling Pokemon in and out was an inevitability as the catalog of monsters grew larger and larger. I found it immensely unfortunate that this potentially reasonable development decision became the chief criticism of GameFreak’s work when there was so much more to complain about. Of course, there were many people arguing the point with more nuance, pointing out how the production value and content density/quality of the game was clearly not compensating for the dex cut, but sadly the waters were already muddied. Those darn entitled gamers were at it again, bullying the hardworking developers. All the bitching was to no avail, as Sword and Shield obliterated sales charts, and it seemed like GameFreak would never have any reason to improve or reassess their insane yearly churn out of games.

So what drew me back in here? Well for one, I was gifted an early copy of the game for my Nintendo PC, so the opportunity cost was literally just my time. Secondly, this game swerves off hard from Sword and Shield’s literal straight line region and Sun and Moon’s tiny unfinished areas. It’s a full-on open world with 18 main quest missions that can be completed in any order. For me, this is the final nail in the Cofagrigus for any excuse over the main campaigns being lacking in order to quickly shuffle players along to the multiplayer. Pokemon is supposed to be an adventure, and for more reasons than just that open world, Scarlet and Violet occasionally succeeded in bringing that feeling back to the franchise for me. They got there stumbling all over themselves but they sort of did it. Please bear in mind that my experience does not involve much engagement with Pokemon Legends: Arceus, which to my understanding is similarly open ended but dissimilarly not so focused on battles. I know many people who disliked Sword and Shield walked away from Legends feeling pretty positively about it, so these last few releases may bode well for the future of the franchise so long as GameFreak can please, please get someone else to help them make the game.

So with these 18 missions, there is no level scaling. This can be a bit of a double edged sword. With this format, the world definitely feels more alive, particularly wild Pokemon encounters way outside the average level of your team. You can also challenge yourself by taking on higher level bosses earlier. This was my experience with the game, going after the highest level gym fourth, the highest level Team Star boss third, and the highest level Titan third as well. Hilariously, I would often ignore the victory road storyline until I reached the obedience level cap that demanded I drag my ass to the nearest gym so that my character would stop trying to roleplay as the average pitbull owner. The world was not accommodating me, and I liked that, even though I knew where it was leading. Eventually, I had to go back and blitz through those lower level missions I had ignored. I quickly decided to only use Pokemon around the same levels as those missions, which made for a more enjoyable experience. However, I know most players won’t think about self-policing that way. Games are meant to be beaten, so people don’t even think twice about doing the most optimal, low risk task in order to destroy any semblance of fun. A Quick Ball at one overleveled wild pokemon that may not even obey, four gym badges in, and then you go back and stomp the entire rest of the game. I can’t help but feel that a lot of people will be robbing themselves of something much more memorable, but GameFreak designed the game this way. They’ve always let you play Pokemon in just about the most boring way possible, just look at all those starters with four STAB moves twenty levels higher than the nearest boss.

SPEAKING OF GameFreak and boring design decisions, let’s talk about SET MODE and how everyone who defends its removal with “Just press B lmao” is brain damaged. Yes, Set Mode is no longer available, a totally baffling decision. Like I stated above, people don’t even think about just how boringly they can play games if it’s less stressful to win by being boring, not even necessarily accomplishing things more expediently. I have played plenty of ROMhacks, and I can tell you that even the toughest hacks eventually lose their luster if you stick with Shift Mode. Knowing what your opponent is sending out and being able to swap to another Pokemon at no risk to you is objectively the best decision you can make. Developers usually put some degree of separation between easier options that allow anyone to beat the game and tougher options they think will be more fun. These are usually called “difficulty modes'' for the uninitiated. Many people considered Set Mode to be a difficulty option, and indeed people who defend the often braindead difficulty curve of the games tell you to just turn on Set Mode. I can only speculate, but I’m sure that those same people are now defending Set Mode’s removal by telling others to “just press B”

The problem is that most people don't even think about how much Shift Mode affects the experience, or how GameFreak removing Set further removes the singleplayer experience from the multiplayer experience completely unnecessarily. They already have VGC, a double battle format, as their main competitive option, something the singleplayer does virtually nothing to garner interest for. Now they’ve gutted yet another way to have singleplayer battles to remotely reflect multiplayer battles. Imagine the frustration a kid will feel when all the power granted to him by Shift is gone the moment he battles a friend, having no means of understanding that’s an intended part of the game. Yeah, I can just press B, in fact, I did press B. Every time. The whole game. Nor did I use items in battle, and it was better for it. These games don’t need ROMhack level difficulty to be interesting. The games are fundamentally expressive enough for you to find a lot of your own fun. The problem is that GameFreak is pretty hellbent on making that expressiveness less palatable. You are presented with an optimal decision constantly, and you have to deny it. Your brain interprets denying the switch as an objectively bad decision nearly every time you see the prompt. You're talking about one decision, turning the game to Set Mode, versus hundreds, denying shift every time you're given the option. Passive versus active. Imagine if you had to hit LB in Halo every time you met an Elite's line of sight in order to activate its good AI. Nobody would find that acceptable except for Pokemon fans. You also get to know what pokemon is coming next which OBJECTIVELY removes part of the game's ability to surprise on a first playthrough. Go ahead and tell me to play blindfolded next.

There’s the biggest issue with the gameplay experience of SV. You need to have the self-discipline to make the game more enjoyable. This isn’t going to apply to everyone, and of course Pokemon games have never been hard, but there are people out there who will walk through the latter half of the game dozens of levels higher than the opponents they need to beat in order to progress due to the openness of the game. Players who aren’t just kids with overleveled starters, doing this completely by accident. There are some solutions to this. One might be having moderate scaling based on your progression, with certain opponents having higher minimum and maximum levels for their pokemon. That leaves the game fairly open without giving you as much exp.

Further muddying the divide between singleplayer and multiplayer is the TMs. It seems like GameFreak just can’t decide whether or not their decision to make these items infinite use in Gen 5 was good or not. Here, they are back to single use, but you can make new TMs at any time by using materials from wild Pokemon. This is a pretty new thing for Pokemon that brings it a little closer to a traditional RPG. I found it to be a pretty neat idea for singleplayer but its implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Most people have severe loss aversion. As such TMs before Gen 5 were notorious for being nothing but bag space from those suffering from analysis paralysis. With them becoming unlimited in their use, they could act as much better rewards for exploration or progression, and do more than sit in your bag until you were ready for multiplayer. Here, you might have had the best of both worlds; You have more decision-making added to your playthrough, asking yourself if it’s going to be worth it to teach this Pokemon a certain move without it feeling like a total loss. Except it’s still kind of a grind to acquire these once you want to jump to multiplayer, not nearly the grind it used to be, but it’s just going to feel like unnecessary extra time once we all move past the main campaign. Among all the ways GameFreak has tried to make transitioning to viable competitive teams more smooth, they still find ways to make it a little bit silly. However, this may be a compensatory measure for a lack of move tutors in the game, as the list of TMs is substantial. You can ask yourself whether or not those were worth it to grind for as well, or whether or not you should just boot up Showdown. It seems like GameFreak wants you to earn that optimal team, and in this case, it’s certainly among the easier grinds for moves.

The way these TMs are displayed in the menu where you craft them is pretty subpar though. It reminds me of how modern digital storefronts just show you a thumbnail of the game’s box art, that either doesn’t have the title visible or has it displayed with an illegible font. No font here or anything, but I wish there was. You just have a zoomed in picture of the move in action. You can sort by type but there was no reason the UI had to be so unintuitive.

Quality of life features have always been a mixed bag with Pokemon. Here, for example you can still reset EVs for your team, but not with the same ease you could after Sword and Shield’s DLC. I guess GameFreak considers that feature a premium service. You can, however, have your Pokemon relearn any moves they previously knew at any time, including TMs they had, should they have been deleted. This carries over from Legends, I believe. This is honestly a great change, and helps open up team building for the whole game. While I can see the appeal of more committal decision-making previous games had, even going down to how the much maligned HMs affected team building, I much prefer this system. This is one feature that makes the games easier at basically no expense to their ability to craft interesting encounters, even if they don’t choose to make those encounters. With this set up, you can basically go about every major mission with a completely new team made up of each area’s surrounding Pokemon, which is exactly how I plan to play it next.

The major battles seem to have finally gone back to having decent coverage and preparation for certain Pokemon you plan to sweep with. I’ve always felt like type specialists should really ease off on just how much they specialize in their type by the late game. Players should understand type matchups by that point, and in fact they can even see what types are effective against what Pokemon at all times now. I absolutely never understood the criticism when bosses didn’t have a full team consisting of their preferred type, this should almost always be considered a good thing. Even if cases like Flint in Diamond and Pearl only got that way from desperation. Both the Team Star and Titan Pokemon quest lines involve taking down boss Pokemon with health bars equivalent to that of the Tera Raid you encounter on the overworld. Each Team Star boss has a magic car of their respective type that you fight. Interestingly, the game never tells you this car has taken on their type, but it’s easy to surmise. Go ahead and spam that same super effective move, kiddo.

Each quest line provides a lower stakes adventure for you that eventually opens up to a typical storyline where you save the world, but I liked the ride getting there. Operation Starfall involves you running through each base before engaging in a boss battle. The base raids have you run through on auto-battle mode in a “race” to KO thirty Pokemon. This timer is all too generous, and in most cases all you need to beat these challenges within 2-3 minutes is a slight level advantage and type advantage, as that is all that goes into determining whether or not you even take damage in an auto-battle. However, if you go in underleveled, you might find these moderately interesting, as you have to select who among your three chosen Pokemon you send out at what time to deal with what enemies are throwing out. Dual types on both sides mean that certain Pokemon may be more vulnerable than you thought going in.

There’s an adorable little anti-bullying message for the kids in this storyline. It didn’t do much for me but I appreciated the effort. The game is sadly afraid to fully commit to the premise of Team Star becoming the bullies they hated. They did nothing but act truant, they are completely innocent and have nothing to apologize or be held accountable for. GameFreak seems to have settled into the villainous teams no longer being the world ending threat for each game, which I think is a better tone to set for something as laid back as Pokemon. That being said, I’m sure people will eventually want to go back to something more threatening than kids playing hooky. For the time being though, I don’t mind it in concept. This is still the weakest part of the game thanks to the poorer structure of its storytelling that seems unshakable in these Ohmori-directed games.

Secondly, there’s the Titan Pokemon storyline. This is a more intimately character driven story, and I think it shows that GameFreak’s storytelling abilities CAN get better. They’re still nothing special, but this is an improvement over Sun and Moon and a huge improvement over Sword and Shield. While I may have enjoyed certain aspects of SM’s story more, SV is clearly more competent at actually presenting its story. SM’s story is highly intrusive and you are often made to feel like a bit player in it. You just want to get through your island trial but you’ve got to mend this broken family first. It made subsequent playthroughs of the game much harder to stomach than any of its predecessors. Sword and Shield could win an award for being just as intrusive as SM while having absolutely nothing going on in its plot. In SV, you have to go out and pursue these story segments when you feel like it, and you feel like a much more active presence in the story yourself. Arven, the principal role of the Titan’s story, has a very down-to-earth struggle to heal his wounded friend. Something the player is made to relate to, as this quest is used to power up your lizard bike buddy. I wasn’t a fan of either box legendary’s design this time, but it’s hard not to be at least a little endeared to Koraidon after spending so much time with it and watching it regain its strength before finally coming through in a (scripted) battle sequence. If ever there was a time where “Pokemon held on so wouldn’t feel sad” felt appropriate, this would be it.

Lastly there’s Victory Road. This is the traditional run through eight gyms you expect from Pokemon. These gyms, like most of the boss fights, might surprise you with decent coverage, but they have a disappointing flaw. They use Terastalyzation to change the type of one of their nonconforming team members to the type they specialize in. So you can safely spam that STAB super effective move if you want. Go right ahead. The Elite Four and champion is comparatively more challenging because they just Terastalyze to their own specialized STAB that the Pokemon already has, giving them a free boost. Just a very boring use of the mechanic.

You also have your rival, Nemona, checking in on your progress throughout the way. Framing for rivals is pretty important, and I think SV succeeds here. Many people mistakenly focus on a lack of “asshole” rivals in newer games, even though we have examples like Gladion and Bede. I think the problem is that rivals should feel like people you really want to bring down and the games have often struggled with this. Bede is basically broken and never comes off as anything but pathetic. For comparison, Blue has an awful team, you beat the hell out of him every time you see him, but he never takes you seriously even when he loses, and he’s always one step ahead of you in the story. When you get to the League and find out this little shit you’ve slapped throughout the game actually beat you to being champion, you want to teach him a lesson. Like I said, framing is important.

Nemona is a friendlier rival, and she’s built up by the story as highly competent, the best of the best. She’s testing you, she’s holding back in fights against you until the very end of the game. So even though she loses every time, bringing her down remains a credible goal throughout the game. She does use the starter weak to yours, which many players have taken umbrage with through the years. I agree with this as an issue to an extent. It is probably better to teach players about type matchups by giving them something to wail on that they’re strong against. A rival with the starter that counters yours means that you won’t even get to start with STAB moves. I see the logic, but I also think it harms the feeling of you as an underdog overcoming the odds. That being said, the games have become so adamant about worshiping at your feet that I’m not sure if GameFreak even wants to give players that impression. Anyway, it would have been much better if Nemona used Terastalyzation to change her starter’s type to one that countered your own. That would have been the best of both worlds right there.

A persistent problem with some of these Ohmori-directed games compared to Masuda-directed games, even “post-decline” so to speak, is that they’re totally in love with their own characters. It’s like Ohmori is straight up limerent for characters he has full control over, so it’s weird that it feels like they don’t love him back. They spend just a little too much time on “quirky” traits for these characters that come off as shallow and insincere. Perhaps the poor production value is to blame for that. Characters are still completely silent and move like automatons on an axis. There is a rap battle in this game, a fucking rap battle, and it manages to be more lifeless than it is cringeworthy. That’s got to be an achievement. Hip-hop in children’s media is almost always pure, organic cringe, but here it’s just befuddling. The game can really fall flat here with the Team Star members. It wants to sell you on their personalities and friendships, and I guess it’s a better effort than Ohmor’s other work, but not enough to get me to read most of their dialogue. I got the gist, their ending was kind of cute. Each member did not need their own flashback. Especially when each flashback is not about their individual problems but more about what each of them did to bring Team Star to life, not ideologically, but in terms of presentation. Like a fucking friendsgiving.

Enough story bullshit though, what the hell is so good about this game that I basically enjoyed it despite everything? Well, the world is densely populated with Pokemon to find, team building is intuitive, routes feel expansive, the game is truly not lying about it being open. I genuinely like the idea of feeling blocked off by high levels and either needing to find somewhere else to go or toughing it out up a dangerous trail. Picking up items no longer stops you in your tracks. If you do want to challenge yourself, you still can. I genuinely liked Arven’s storyline. The weakest link as far as the quests go isn’t dragging things down too horribly, as the boss fights were a good time. The movement options opening up over the course of the game feels empowering. I got to see Sudowoodo and Toedscool book it from me hilariously. Ditto and Zorua never appear on the overworld because they’re always disguised as other Pokemon. When the world feels alive for a bit, when you come across an old favorite roaming in the wild, something about the game genuinely sings for a moment.

That is the thing though, the game is basically a series of boss fights. Your mandatory battles are the gym leaders, E4, Champion, Nemona a few times, each team star boss, the titans, a few wild pokemon in Area Zero, and your game’s respective professor. Probably about thirty battles. You can run by every trainer, they’re all optional. Like a lot of decisions for this game, it’s a double edged sword. I’m rarely jumping into anything I’m not asking for beyond accidental wild encounters. Going about each open area to find every trainer and get your TM/item gift can be fun, but you can’t replace the feeling of overcoming a harder fight you were completely caught off guard by. You run into a trainer you didn’t want to see, your lead goes down, but a Pokemon you thought very little of pulled through and helped you to keep going. It’s a feeling that’s lost here even on the more perilous routes. Even knowing there were a few trainers who very nearly kicked my ass, I still know I asked for that ass kicking.

This might be a sharp step down from Legends. To my knowledge, that game tried to mix up the mission structure with modified tasks focused on capturing Pokemon. There’s no progression within any of the main storylines that doesn’t just involve battling here. The best you get as a pace breaker is gym “puzzles” that barely qualify as such. I understand that SV and Legends were developed at the same time, but it’s just odd that this open world game doesn’t have any side missions to tackle. You have Tera Raid battles. Okay, fine I guess. What about something like Totem Battles from SM? Double battle focused side quests? Triple and rotation? Oh sorry, GameFreak doesn’t want you to remember those. A sidequest that’s all inverse battles? Restricted quests with rental Pokemon? Rewards for quests like rare Pokemon or rare Tera types?

At the end of the day, the huge world is really neat to go through for the first time. Discovering every ecosystem and every Pokemon that dwells in it, but I’m unsure if this would hold up on subsequent playthroughs. That’s all there is to do here except fight the bosses. Pokemon’s formula is still the most sustainable solid gold in all of video games. Even at its worst it’s still probably mindlessly enjoyable, but even with all the expressiveness the games give you, the developers always seem confused over whether or not they want to give you anything interesting to express yourself to. One thing’s for sure, it’ll be a pain to get through that intro again. My god, that had to have been nearly two hours before I felt like I could do anything.

SPEAKING OF slow as fuck. This game is Shuckle slow. I thought it was the PC at first, but apparently reports are coming out that the Switch version has the same performance issues. Stuttering framerate, major pop-in, outright freezing, long load times. All the stars are here. Not to mention, this battle engine seems like it’s giving Gen 4 a run for its money with the lulls between text boxes and animations. By the way, YOU CAN’T TURN OFF ANIMATIONS ANYMORE. Yeah, it looks like GameFreak took those comments about their animation work in SwSh to heart. They were so proud of their work this time that they wanted you to see all of their high quality animations forever. All at a stunning 21 fps. The lack of interiors to buildings sure is disappointing but damn you have to wonder how much worse the game would have run if they were present. In fact there appears to be MORE issues on the official console release of the game than the day -10 PC version.

Not to mention, we are so far beyond Pokemon’s current battle presentation at this point. Tell me the necessity for all these text boxes and animations playing out separate from one another. Persona 5 was able to communicate relevant information on screen in a very timely manner. At one point, I realized that things like Leftovers recovery, poison damage, or sandstorm damage occurred at the same time as the prompt displaying your team receiving exp and I’m like HOLY SHIT IMAGINE THAT. How the hell are those five-hit moves still the way they are? Pick up the pace. Also I don’t need to see a text prompt telling me that the move hit three times AFTER the Pokemon I hit it with already fainted. Display the information on screen as it’s happening, it CANNOT be that hard. Move makes contact, visual indicators for CRITICAL HIT and SUPER EFFECTIVE pop up at the same time the health bar is going down and maybe even slap on a KO on top of that. Like I need an extra prompt to see my Pokemon’s HP reaching zero. Jesus Christ. Cut down on this dead air. POKEMON USED MOVE - ANIMATION - it’s SUPER EFFECTIVE - FAINTING ANIMATION - POKEMON FAINTED - USE NEXT POKEMON? Dead air between every single one of those prompts and animations.

There have been a FEW improvements to the presentation. The Pokemon models really are updated this time. Tropius and others are at last free from Sky Battle hell. Charizard has its caveman brow back. Pokemon now have actual interiors to their mouths and their eyes are modeled rather than just being painted on. Pokemon are more properly scaled to get a sense of their size. This is a huge boon for making the world feel more lively, with some monsters being so small you have no idea you’re running into them. Just pray you’re not caught in a crowd because it will be a constant stop and go. The scaling is handled a little strangely in battle. In the open routes, you control the camera during battle, so you can move it to get a better view of things. During important battles, the camera is fixed, and many Pokemon on your side are viewed from such angles that you basically never see them during fights.

Many Pokemon have cute overworld animations, and most have sleeping animations. Near inexplicably, none of these sleeping animations make it into battle. Pokemon don’t even close their eyes when sleeping in battle anymore. I thought the removal of such a thing was a result of the aforementioned modeled eyes, but they close their eyes in the overworld. What the hell did they mean by this?

Among the most important parts of presentation in a Pokemon game would be character design. This is just about as subjective as it gets. Everyone has wildly different favorite Pokemon. I’m of the mind that Gen 3 had the most consistently decent designs across the board despite having very few of my personal favorites. By contrast, I consider Gens 5 and 7 to have some odd choices for designs, yet they have way more of my favorites, so maybe there’s something to be said about polarizing design philosophies yielding stronger results. You can still go too far with that polarization though, as Gen 8 was what I considered to be a clear low point in design quality. Little did I know that Gen 9 was just around the corner to give it a run for its money. Running the math, I liked about 4/10 new designs on average.

The starters in particular are still leaning a little too hard into these fixed character archetypes. I’ve always felt that starters are better off feeling more general in personality. The best one, Skeledirge, is saved by virtue of still feeling like an animal first and a guy second. Even then, it is trying to balance things like emulating the relationship between the crocodile and the Egyptian plover bird, Dia de Los Muertos, and being a vocalist. That’s a lot at once and the design is made weaker for it. At least it was spared the humiliating fate of Quaxly, becoming a large-rumped duckperson with giant sausage toes instead of its first form’s webbed feet. Still, it’s nice to see “animal + element = Pokemon” is going strong all these years later with designs like Killowattrel and Mabosstif. Other designs like Ceruledge and Armorouge just throw caution to the wind and go all in on being as cool as possible, your expectations of Pokemon designs be damned, and they did this to great success. Those designs are cool and you have no inner child if you say otherwise.

My friend Steve is a noted crab hater. The man just hates crabs. He hates Klawf and he hates any crabs reading this review. I however, think Klawf is an immensely welcome addition with its horrifying eyes that follow you wherever you go. Among all the new designs, Klawf is the one that most feels like an unpredictable, dangerous animal, that cannot feel anything resembling love or affection. Its silliness actually lends itself very well to that sense of unease around it. Klawf will never be my “bro” and that’s beautiful.

Bug types seem like they got the short end of the stick in this generation. Rather than drawing them out first, these designs look like they were modeled in Blender with thirty minutes of work before calling it a day. There’s a great looking snail Pokemon, but it’s not a Bug type. There’s at least Slither Wing, but that’s just comfy pajama Volcarona.

It’s tough to really assess what exactly the design language behind each new generation is. There are several different designers, after all. There is a clearer throughline for things like the ancient and future variants of existing Pokemon, though. Ancient Pokemon clearly got the better roll here. They have some thematic consistency with more spikes and tails, but they don’t feel needlessly uniform. The future variants fell flat on their faces. They’re all robots. Some just look like a robotic sheen slapped on an existing design. I’m not usually one to complain when Pokemon do not always reflect their types, but these completely fail to visually communicate their general lack of Steel typing. In the future, all these Pokemon become robots that exhibit the exact same animal behavior. Dumb. Don’t give me any BS about cyborgs. These are robots, get out of my face.

Of all the complaints Sword and Shield received, character design wasn’t really one of them. Many have observed a change in human design philosophy over the years to favor a more “cosplay” style of dress, but it’s more like a passive acknowledgment rather than a straight criticism. So what exactly is going on with this sudden change for SV? Characters look almost doll-like, and no longer reflect their official artwork nearly as accurately as the past three entries on Switch. This velvety texturing of skin and clothing along with the glossy eyeballs only serve to make the animations look more unnatural and automaton-esque. Certain characters clash just standing next to each other. Geeta’s eyes are three times the size of other characters. Also bitch is the goddamn big boss of the league and uses a fucking Gogoat holy shit.

Player character designs have remained a pretty important part of each new game’s identity, but Scarlet and Violet seems like the first time the developers chose to make the player characters as blank as humanly possible. It’s not necessarily bad, it’s just another notable change. The default male and female designs used for promotion were previously distinct, but now really feel like identical twins. It’s both fitting and strange that the school uniforms are the context through which this blandness is achieved. Of course this was the golden opportunity to scale back the importance of a default trainer to identify, given that you’re uniformed at all times. But you’re uniformed at all times, so you don’t even have anything close to the range of fashion customization available to you in XY, SM, and SwSh. You do however have a greater number of options for your head, and both genders share those options. So you can really live out that discord moderator dream. I however, was content to just give my guy a signature jewfro and call it a day.

Strangest of all is the absolutely hideous crop of random NPCs. Many of them are adults dressed in school uniforms. I suppose framing the school as something more like a college for Pokemon enthusiasts is meant to lend itself to the franchise being all-inclusive to everyone everywhere. The result is instead a bunch of creepy looking adults waiting around for you in the dead of night. Also some very broad shouldered women. Why the hell are they so broad? Are they okay? They look like they’re in pain.

However, there is this character named Rika, an Elite Four member. This character is unreasonably sexual. Only Anabel’s Sun and Moon design compares. Designs like these are so beyond degenerate in appearance and I need this stop before they destroy my life.

I have many, many negative thoughts on the state of pokemon, on the directions it’s taken, and even the very idea of calling this game a step in the right direction. How many steps in the right direction are we going to have? How many indicators of great things to come will we need before we’re ready to properly judge the here and now? It’s undeniable though, that my curiosity about this series is back, and Scarlet offered enough novelty that I’m interested in replaying just to see how much further I can push it. There may come a day where GameFreak strips me of any ability to create something fun out of Pokemon, but it hasn’t come yet. If nothing else, it has the absolute craziest ending to a Pokemon game ever, complete with Ed Sheeran coming out of nowhere to scare the living shit out of me.

Please get someone else to make the games.

As per usual lately in Pokémon games, there are some nice ideas in this but they are heavily overshadowed by big problems.

The performance is unacceptable and I'm usually not even noticing these kind of problems in games, I played docked the entire time and there are some areas (specifically when it rains and/or you're surfing on water) where it goes south of 5fps. On the graphics side it's trash, but that was evident from watching any screenshot.

Gameplay-wise, like mentioned before, some features could be a step in the right direction but considering Legends: Arceus came out this same year (and with all its problems Legends is miles ahead of this game) everything feels like the usual one step forward, five steps back.

Worth your time only if you are an hardcore Pokémon fan, and still you'll probably be frustrated by the experience and the wasted potential.

its very upsetting that this game came out the way it did because if you look past the awful optimization issues, bugs, glitches, bad graphics, and frame rate issues (which is a LOT to look past i know) the game is genuinely pretty fuckin good

it has its issues still like i dont care about the team star story like at ALL, some of the gym challenges fucking blow, and some of the story beats couldve had more build up without going out of your way to find it. But outside of that you have a good mainline pokemon game with probably the best story since gen 5's black and white.

i wish i could say its a home run for the series but sadly it is extremely held back from being fully complete.

Genuinely the first Pokemon game I mostly enjoyed since.. ORAS really. I have not played PLA so idk what exactly carried over from there, but this flexible direction and take on 3D Pokemon worked better for me than XY/SM/SWSH's guided tours did (and I imagine the same goes for many others).

If the performance issues, unpolished graphics and some other aspects of the presentation (e.g. no VA) weren't as comically underwhelming as they are, I'd probably rate this higher than I do. (i.e., from an 8 to an 8.5)

We're at the point where any features cannot be taken for granted in this serie. They removed set mode, the national dex, the battle tower, any postgame content. You can't even explore most houses and the stores are just menus. All of these sacrifices for a mediocre open world game that is barely able to run at 30 fps, a shitty gimmick that makes your pokémon change its typing and is very competitively balanced :) . And a pokédex smaller than DS titles that look like they could have been on the SNES. A disgrace to the franchise and to gaming in general.

Played with BertKnot.

With each new iteration of Pokémon comes another wagon of this train headed for indignity and turpitude. Year after year, one could point out the structural roots of this situation – the inability to scale up after the extraordinary operational profits made since 2016 or the need to constantly release games for the sake of cross-media –, but none of this makes the end result any more palatable. The result is an abysmal technical polish, which we're getting used to. As soon as the game was released, thousands of comments pointed out the horrible graphics and bugs, which are still not fixed to this day. I won't go into this at length, but it's worth bearing in mind. Pokémon Scarlet seems to be heading in the same experimental direction as Pokémon Legends: Arceus (2022), whose goal was to make the world more dynamic and immersive. Critics were generally very positive about it, highlighting the attempt at innovation and forgiving its shortcomings – technical or game design-wise. This reception was matched by its sales, an exceptional start with 6.5 million copies sold in a fortnight. One might have feared that this situation would lead Game Freak to continue in this direction, brandishing their commercial successes and the totem of immunity that the community has so graciously granted them. But generally speaking, for corporate philosophy reasons, Game Freak is unlikely to make radical changes to their development process, especially as their cycles become shorter and shorter.

In this opus, the player explores the region of Paldea in the company of the legendary Koraidon, as part of a treasure hunt organised by the Naranja Academy. The great innovation is the non-linear aspect of the adventure, made possible by an open world and a division of the objectives into three different storylines. It is possible to follow Nemona to triumph over the classic arenas and the League, but the title also proposes to help Arven hunt Titans and find Mystic Herbs to give back strength to his Mabosstiff; or Cassiopeia to confront Team Star, responsible for bullying in the Academy. However, every one of these plots is a narrative failure.

The open world structure is mostly reminiscent of the Ubisoft formula, which the industry has started to turn away from in recent years, under the influence of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017). This throwback is staggering and breaks the pace of the adventure by sequencing it into an exploration that never manages to charm. The game's technical problems are paired with lacklustre environments. If Pokémon Scarlet is inspired by the Iberian Peninsula, it's only on paper. The layout of the biomes makes no sense and, like Pokémon Legends, the title fails to create realism in the Pokémon biodiversity. At best, the game forms a few groups of creatures, but they never interact with each other. In Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (2022), carnivores can be seen in packs hunting other animals: the absence of such elements in Pokémon Scarlet is surprising and very underwhelming.

On the other hand, the game never manages to create relationships between the protagonist and the different characters. All of their development is done in the last region, where their lives, families and dreams are discussed. It is unfortunate that this information is never present in the first twenty hours. It is only possible to appreciate their presence in the last hour of the game. Nemona, Arven or Penny never accompany the protagonist, which would be the best way to dynamise an open world, through dialogues interjected in the exploration. Such an approach would surely have worked to introduce the backgrounds of Nemona and Penny, who are completely independent from the main plot. Some may have said that the three narrative threads converge in the last act, but this is hardly true: it is purely and simply Arven's story and the presence of the other characters is artificial, even superfluous.

This narrative failure is saddening given that the game shows in its final section that it understood what could have worked. Unfortunately, the first twenty hours are riddled with aberrant flaws and poor design choices. The Team Star bases are a miserable piece of gameplay, sort of pseudo-Pokémon Warriors, that make Musou games look like Devil May Cry. The arena challenges never manage to energise the progression: for example, the auctions are reduced to their strict minimum and give a false impression of interactivity, whereas they only blow smoke. They are not even contextualised as a mini-game, as was the case in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2002). The rest is equally forgettable and futile: the descent of the mountain only highlights Koraidon's poor controllability.

Sometimes it is the technical realisation that violently bruises these various quests. Before the duel against Larry, the restaurant changes completely, obviously murdering all the customers who were enjoying their meal. Some triggers don't work at all and it was necessary to restart the game several times to activate some essential cutscenes. The lack of clear markers or the impossibility to change the day and night cycle are other shortcomings that contribute to an unpleasant experience. This lack of attention to detail is both a testament to a development team under the pressure of an overly severe deadline and a general lack of concern for such matters: Game Freak understands that the game continues to break sales records anyway. So why put any effort into the details?

The most blatant evidence of this lack of respect is surely found in the cultural representation of the Iberian Peninsula. Pokémon Sword/Shield (2019) was already weak in this respect, but the duels in the stadiums operated in the spirit of English football matches. Here, the world is empty and incoherent. While the beginning of the game charms with a nice set-up – the short walk to Nemona's house is really lovely, with beautiful vegetation – the edifice quickly crumbles as the player approaches Mesagoza. The smooth textures contrast horribly with the city's gaudy mosaics, just giving the whole thing a muddled look. The buildings all appear similar and it's no longer possible to enter the houses. Instead, the game lines up a dozen or so similar restaurants, which offer the same menu. The player can choose to eat sandwiches or Chinese food, in a restaurant with a clichéd façade. Iberian Peninsula, mind you. The other cities follow the same approach and are sorely lacking in identity. The Pokémon themselves share this misrepresentation. Quaquaval is inspired by the Rio carnival, while Garganacl looks like a ziggurat or a pre-Columbian pyramid. These confusions show a particularly regrettable disregard from Game Freak. The cleaning lady in Nemona's mansion is another unfortunate example: she is a Black character – the first one to be seen – which is a particularly cruel and tasteless irony, regardless of whether it was intentional or not.

The gameplay remains largely unchanged. The main mechanic in this game is the Terastal Transformation, which is generally irrelevant. When it prevents the opposing Pokémon from using certain attacks, the mechanic becomes more interesting, but it doesn't go beyond being a simple end-of-battle expedient, growing more tiresome than anything else with the time it wastes. The title feels much easier than its predecessors, at least in terms of progression. Since the arenas and various objectives never scale with the player's level, adversity is non-existent, except for a few rare fights. The very artificial splitting of the areas does not help this. Even if the player fails, the fact that each objective is placed within a few meters of a Pokémon Center nullifies any dramatic tension. As a result, the game remains consistently flavorless in its gameplay phases. The Academy lessons are a good reflection of this fact: they are a sort of contextualised tutorial that drags on and teaches the player mechanics that they would have already seen for themselves. Besides, their non-ergonomic aspect never encourages the player to do them.

Despite these lengthy criticisms, the game is not without merit. Nemona carries the cast single-handedly: as a solid interpretation of the rival, after the era of antipathetic characters, she has a great chemistry with the protagonist – this is an observation I make with the girl protagonist; I think that with the boy counterpart, the result would be more of a very angsty heterosexual dynamic. Game Freak also gives a lot of space to non-binary characters, without insisting on their gender: this is very satisfying and is clearly a step in the right direction. Again, the last area and the discussions between the characters about their lives should have been the whole game. It shows that Game Freak is able to come up with good concepts, but it is infuriating that they never integrate them organically into the adventure, whose formula is, inevitably, always the same.

Pokémon Scarlet appears as this deceptively lighthearted adventure. The treasure hunt ends with the classic observation that the friends made along the way are what matters. Why not, this is a perfectly workable theme for children. But the hypocrisy lies in the fact that the protagonist never travels with their friends during the dozens of hours of gameplay, unlike the manga or anime. The other themes are treated with the same carelessness, while ignoring them in the core of the game design. This muddled feeling can be found everywhere, from the gameplay to the technical execution, from the music to the cultural representation. For a company that boasts hundreds of millions of dollars in operating profits, these failings are inexcusable. As much as one appreciates the franchise – and I admit I have no particular nostalgia or affection for it –, it seems to me that it is appropriate to be uncompromising about the quality of titles the community religiously buys every year. It is clear that this is still not the case: Game Freak and the Pokémon Company have no reason to change a development strategy that, for the worse, works.

I think more games should have glitches, actually. It will cull the weak from the strong.

I feel conflicted even joking about that because that level of discourse has reached such a weird level among the online gaming community, especially with Pokemon. Its got such an unpleasable, toxic, spiteful fanbase that its gained a counter-discourse machine of people who see any complaint as some kind of personal slight. Navigating gaming discourse is bad enough without those two extremes to balance. So in regards to that element of Pokemon, I guess I come down to "the developers needed more time and less crunch" and "this game is pretty neat and charming." I think those thoughts can coexist pretty easily.

For as new to the Pokemon scene as I am, I've always wanted more freedom to choose gyms in any order. The open-world gimmick of the game leans into that idea on such a vaster scale than I anticipated. Even beyond just the gyms, the different challenges all over the map add such a fascinating variety to a player's experience. The team battles and the Titan Pokemon hunts are really novel ways to split up the standard gym badge routine. It helps that the characters you meet along the way are almost universally charming. The bond you build with your rivals also feels more personal than previous games have. Despite how disparate their plotlines feel at first, the main cast comes together in a beautiful way in the final dungeon to really form a trusty band of adventure teens.

The final dungeon in particular is where this game really soars. There's a pattern to games that were put under crunch where the early game can be stunning, while the final levels fall apart. Get those early reviews to look flattering, you know? Which is why I was so surprised when the final dungeon is easily the most gorgeous, well developed part of the game. Its a stunning, emotional climax with some of the best music and vibes I've ever seen. For once, the game's writing excels in the unspoken. There's an aching void left in our heroes, wondering how much of the truth they'll ever understand of the situation. We don't get full answers, only pieces. And that writing is deliciously intentional, reveling in its ambiguity. I've gradually realized that Pokemon really excels at using gameplay to tell its story. A rival has a secret heart of gold only seen through how high their frendship points with their Pokemon must be. Pokemon Black/White's boss uses attacks that can only be used by Pokemon that really hate their trainer. Their writing skillset has always been the subtle details, rather than the actual dialogue or story crafting. The game manages to sort of use the franchise's weaknesses as strengths in such a creative way. By giving you less information, the game makes you sit in those unanswered question. It works! I like the Pokemon! This might be my favorite one!

Pay GameFreak more, give them more time to make games, the industry can't survive like this.

hmm.... lot of feelings about it, really! it's the first pokémon game in years that was interesting enough for me to play it begin to end. honestly i had fun most of the time, though a lot of this was just mindless fun tbh: star team had the best storyline but also the worst "gyms" -- just a very bad raid where you just run pressing R and... that's it. the gyms were cool in majority, wish the challenges were better worked and it was cool to expand koraidon's abilities as well! but i must admit that the open world kind of falls apart once you get all the powers and you can just break throught everything. the open world, by the way, was fun! but i really miss entering in houses and stuff, specially when the interior design of this game looks so cute! is hard for me to rate it, since i've had a lot of fun but when i really try to think about it, i see it mistakes and makes me less happier than i was... pretty much like highschool, i guess!

This game is pretty frustrating. It is definitely better then Sword/Shield, the Let's Go games, or Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl but it is dragged down by very in your face performance issues and bugs to a greater extent then any of those. I actually feel a bit sick after every session playing this it's so bad. It's a shame because this is definitely the direction I've wanted these games to go in, which is why I still enjoyed it more then those other games, but I can't bring myself to recommend it.

There are two basic types of Pokemon fans: those that play the games for the battling aspects (I'm including stuff like team building, breeding, and online play in here), and those that play it for the catching and collecting mechanics. I fall pretty firmly into the latter camp, which is probably the reason I enjoy games like Snap and Legends Arceus as much as I do. It's also the reason why, despite its laundry list of flaws and nonexistent difficulty, I had a great time with Scarlet.

I'll start with the negative stuff, just to get it out of the way. The game runs like shit. The game looks like shit (except the models for Pokemon and major characters, those are actually kind of okay). The only interiors in towns are gyms and sandwich shops, both of which use the exact same template regardless of the town they’re in. Even though there are way more options to customize your trainer's face, the clothing options are worse than every other game in the series with character customization. The forced EXP share coupled with the more open nature of the three main questlines basically forces you to handicap yourself (I cycled through like 20 Pokemon, switching them out once they were five levels below whatever my limit for obeying me was) if you ever want a trainer to take out even one of your own Pokemon. The overworld catching mechanics from PLA are gone, so even if you just want to throw a quick ball at something and run away if it doesn’t work, you need to start a battle. There’s no more fishing because Pokemon appear on the overworld, even though SwSh did the same thing but still gave you a fishing rod to use in a few places. Shiny Pokemon don’t have an indicator like they did in PLA and since some of the newer shinies are nearly identical to their original colors, it’s possible for a shiny Pokemon to spawn without you even noticing. There really isn’t any kind of battle facility in the game, but that could possibly be added in a patch like how the Eternal Battle Reverie was added to PLA, or more likely in the inevitable paid dlc that in accordance with TPC’s unshakable release schedule will probably release some time in 2023. The only minigames in the game (the Emotional Spectrum Practice thing in Alfornada and the Snow Slope Run at the Glaseado gym) are way too simple, and they don’t even involve your own Pokemon. The thing that made side modes like the Pokeathalon or contests so interesting to me was that they gave you reasons outside of combat to raise and train up Pokemon, while also just being fun to mess around with and play. Yeah that kind of stuff has been absent from the series for a while (the contests in BDSP were a simple rhythm game kind of thing and a lot simpler than their gen 3/4/6 versions), but even Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon had the surprisingly fun Mantine Surfing minigame, and Legends Arceus had the shooting gallery minigame and the balloon popping races. Most of these issues add together to make a region that feels kind of lifeless. It’s less like an actual place and more like a theme park that exists just so your battles have cool backdrops. That’s basically what the world in every Pokemon game is, but there was at least the illusion of more depth to the world than there is now. Simple things like being able to go into people’s houses or seeing how people and pokemon interacted outside of battles really helped with that, so even though they’re not integral parts of the Pokemon formula, their absence in Paldea is pretty noticeable.

Despite all of this, there are actually a lot of things I really enjoyed. I thought the soundtrack was great, especially compared to SwSh’s lackluster music. The story was surprisingly good even if I would have liked to see Team Star have some kind of presence outside of their bases, and the major characters were all really charming. The Paldean Pokedex has a lot of great designs in it, and I didn’t have any trouble with finding new pokemon that I actually wanted to use unlike in SwSh. The terastallization mechanic is a lot more interesting than Z-moves and dynamaxing were, and although it isn’t quite as cool as mega evolution it can still be used in some pretty creative ways to round out a team. Making dumb sandwiches out of nothing but eggs and watercress is way more amusing than it should be, and since it uses actual models instead of images, the whole process feels way more involved than the curry making from SwSh. Koraidon actually felt pretty good to ride around on once it was fully upgraded, despite the complaints I’ve seen from other people playing the game. I wonder if this is an animation thing since most people are playing Violet and Miraidon seems to be floatier than Koraidon, but I don’t know. The thing I enjoyed the most about the game, however, was the way it distributed the Pokemon in its dex throughout Paldea. Every field, cave, and mountaintop was home to Pokemon I hadn’t caught yet, and my drive to complete the Pokedex (I have about 260 species caught at the time of writing this review) kept the world feeling fresh, even when there really isn’t that much to do other than battle underpowered trainers and participate in mediocre raid battles. Constantly finding new Pokemon encouraged me to explore every nook and cranny of Paldea’s otherwise empty landscape, and managed to create a sense of adventure and exploration on par with Legends Arceus. If I was someone who only caught Pokemon I actually wanted to use and ignored everything else, I could see how Scarlet wouldn’t be any fun, but that goes back to the statement I made at the start of this review.

Pokemon as a series has been shifting towards appeasing the collecting side of its fanbase ever since Pokemon Go, and some could argue that Gamefreak was doing so even before that with things like the DexNav in ORAS. This is at the cost of cutting out things like the Battle Frontier, or coming up with a new gimmick every generation instead of fleshing out the mechanics that are already in place. The only thing people who play Pokemon for battling really have left is multiplayer, and Pokemon Showdown already fills that niche even if it is unofficial. At some point Game Freak or The Pokemon Company should probably put out another game like Stadium or Battle Revolution that’s almost like a hub for different battle modes if they’re going to keep shifting the focus of the main titles away from the battling side of things and towards just collecting Pokemon. Or they could just bring the Battle Frontier back but everyone knows that’s never going to happen.

Also Clodisre is the best I love this dumb guy so much it’s unbelievable.

The motto of gamefreak - For every 1 step forward, make 2 grand leaps backwards.

Though truthfully, at this point I can't blame them anymore. I have to wonder if gamefreak has any control over the game at all. Pokemon games are essentially mandated to come out at a certain time to follow along with the anime schedule, and will NEVER be delayed, so any internal conflicts and problems are never allowed to be polished. Not only that, gamefreak only has what, 130 employees? Incredibly small for a game studio. You have to start wondering if the suits at the top of the pokemon chain see the games as anything more than a formality.

Okay, with that bit aside, hows the game? Mid. Very, very mid. It's a significant increase from gen 8's absolute disaster that was the wild area, but it's overall a mixed bag. A bunch of interesting ideas on paper with the most basic execution possible on every front.

The open world of Pokemon Scarlet/Violet essentially amounts to a large square of tall grass, with lots of pokeballs strewn about, and some palette swaps every now and then. There's nothing really to do except hunt trainers, which are nice loot baskets of EXP for your team, and go from story progress to story progress, and catch pokemon, and do raid battles. You know, same ol same ol, except much wider distances.

There was one thing I was interested in initially - the towers that gold the Gimmighoul chests and coins. Imagine my surprise! A reward for exploring! A small reward, sure, but it was working towards an evolution for a... weirdly designed but strong as hell pokemon! And... you need 999 coins. And theres nothing else like it in the game. Shame on me.

As far as the paths go, all of them are... okay. Maybe a hot take though, but I think the totem pokemon and ultra necrozma from gen 7 absolutely windmill dunk over this games attempt at big 'boss' pokemon. The titans as they are... have nothing that differentiate them from being just a large grass pokemon. No gimmick, no field, no stat changes, nothing. At the very least I thought the story strong of Arven, while cliche and obvious, was at least... nice to see conclude? It's decent relative to pokemon, I guess.

Likewise same for the team star path, which are a combination of gym + titan, where you fight a big car. These fights are decently fun, but preluded by 2 minutes of time wasting and making you comprehend your life choices as you stand around and mash the R button without paying attention. I'm not at all sure what the design intent of this part of the game is. It's like a mario party minigame.

The gyms themselves are your usual affair, but maybe more depressing of the game is the sad state of the towns. They have themes and personality, but it's truly sad how there is NOTHING to do in any of them. You can't even go inside most of the houses, there's barely any npcs to talk to... you just buy the few pieces of costume customization you can (because gamefreak decided to axe a thing people liked which is their usual) you just show up, beat a gym, and then leave, without ever doing anything. ANYTHING.

What we're left with is essentially a standard pokemon game gaining some, and losing other, features and ideas from others. There's some original ideas but nothing in the game tries to use it in any interesting way. This isn't even going into the massive performance problems the game suffers from.

Honestly, the main reason I'm not rating this game lower is because I think competitively this gen has some potential to be pretty fun in both singles and doubles, and it IS better than gen 8. But overall, this is not a good path for pokemon to take.

I'll also repeat myself from my other pokemon reviews: Gen 5 and 7 for life.

I don’t think any series has come and gone throughout my whole life quite like Pokémon has. Thinking back to 2019: I played through Pokémon Crystal with a band of friends, and it brought back a lot of my dormant love for it. We planned our teams together, helped come up with nicknames, and tried to each catch a shiny of choice before the end of the game. By the end of the game, not only did it have that usual special Pokémon feel like you really went on a journey with your lovingly raised lil guys, my other friend’s Pokémon had also floated vaguely through my mind. Pokémon’s natural strengths of telling little wordless stories through your playthroughs all seem to shine when you do it side by side with others. Recently I’ve been playing Dragon Quest 3 - I named my party after my friends, and was really endeared by how their classes naturally make them interact with each other. 2 of my other friends, who are besties, are a mage and a priestess, and the mage is frail so the priestess has to heal them a bunch. Gotta love how classic RPGs remind me of people, but I gotta love how Pokémon brings my friends together at least just as much.

And at this point, it’s fair to say that Pokémon’s natural social subtleties are proven to be more than theory or novelty. The iconic 90s Pokémon boom pushed the series so far into the collective consciousness that it made people fear it was a cult - and they were probably right. Those catholics laid in bed in a cold sweat despite the pistols in their wardrobes, because they knew that Zubat was an entity that could not be killed in as simple ways as bullet murder. The uniqueness of every person’s playthrough would prove to lend itself perfectly to internet content; nuzlockes and all their siblings spawning an endless stream of noise forever. Twitch Plays Pokémon proved to us that democracy is not real, only for Pokémon Go to prove that world peace might still be possible regardless. So when I tell you all of this, you have to believe me that 4 player co-op is the most natural evolution to the series since Scizor.

Scarlet and Violet arrives as the first games in the series with cooperative multiplayer, and well, I think they nailed it! Mind you it’s not true co-op in the sense you battle against enemies together, but more MMO-esque in that you all simultaneously exist together while the story goes by. I recall the first few hours of the game; me and 3 friends immediately came together to make absolutely no story progress, and just spelunk around looking for some of the new weirdos this game added. Pokémon’s social nature has always linked me up with people to have casual conversations suddenly interrupted by a “DUDE IS THAT PHANPY”, but this time, we were all screaming. Stumbling onto cool Pokémon spots feels particularly special when I’m bugging my friends to follow me so we can catch that Flamingo Pokémon.

One story that stuck out to me the most is one much further in. I bugged my friend to check out this giant cave I found, and they say they’ll search for the new rock Pokémon Glimmet in it before logging off. We spend like, literally an hour running around, trying to find this thing, and we just can’t. I came up with this plan on the spot: dude…what if we just make a bunch of sandwiches until one of them gives us a rock encounter buff. And I scroll through the unchanged 2000s interfacing of Serebii, and find out that the combination of bacon, watercress, mustard, jalapeno, and egg might do the trick. This game forced my hand into making bizarro sandwiches, and I obliged faithfully; not too long after succeeding, we found a little crevice in the corner of the cave where a bunch of them spawned. It’s kinda silly, but that moment felt special - Pokémon Scarlet had forced my hand to try strange tricks to find an equally strange obscure new Pokémon in its corners. Simulacrum of Pikablu-flavoured playground rumours waft through this game endlessly, and unraveling even the most incidental of secrets feels like a revelation. At this moment I had to equate Scarlet and Violet to a dungeon master, casually weaving scenarios for my friends to lightly problem solve together. But of course, in a game as big as this, superficiality isn’t absent.

So here we enter the “oh god oh fuck they messed up” section of this: this game launched like it needed at least another year of polish. I continuously thought while playing “how do i even like…talk about this game”. Rather than outrage or laughter, I’m in this middle of the road perspective where all I’m thinking is…I hope the people who developed this game are okay, it looks like a crunch nightmare. Seeing a composer of all people apologize publicly for a music related glitch broke my heart. I just tried to ask myself as honestly as I could: how much does this game’s launch state actually affect my enjoyment? And the answer is like, yeah, it hurts the game a lot. Where it hits the game the hardest is its pacing - you can really feel how vestigial Pokémon is of 80s game design. As my game sputtered and paused in battles, I really felt the slowness of the game reporting the weather, every individual stat’s increase, every little attack in a multi-hit move, and so on. It didn’t help that this game is lacking the ability to turn off attack animations or “would you like to switch your Pokémon” prompt, unlike previous entries. But anyone who has ever loved a low budget PS2 game like it was family knows that sometimes you don’t just love the game barring the jank, you roll with the jank.

When Nintendo announced this game would have no level scaling, fans took it as something worth controversy, but I saw opportunity. I inject difficult scenarios into these games more every time I replay them: just earlier this year, I did a Pokémon Yellow playthrough where I did the second half of the gyms backwards to fight the hardest ones early. I was ready to be my own dungeon master once again, and I kept my rules simple: no using items from my bag during battle, rely only on held items only, and no use of the new gimmick. I’ll be honest, it didn’t start out all great: I went through the first 2 gyms overleveled from all the catching I was doing, so I had to break out the heavy artillery. I started using 2 teams instead of one, so one could ferment in my box and be underleveled for any challenges I needed. The third gym I fought was the first serious challenge the game had thrown at me; its leader uses the game's gimmick to create a Pokémon with no weaknesses, and it was pretty tight with my team of trashy level twenties. This game has eighteen badges split across its three storylines, and I had challenged one of the Titans already - a boss fight against a giant solo Pokémon. I realized my team was perfectly fit to disable them with ease, having lots of attack and special attack dropping moves, so a thought came to my mind…what if I beat them all right now?

And well, I did it! My entire team was dead besides my Dachsbun, who managed to deal the killing blow to this level 56 Titan. Every titan gives you a new mode of overworld control, and so I had beaten the Metroidvania out of Scarlet to make the rest of my story progress breezy. It definitely felt like the biggest achievement I ever made in this game. Every Team Star boss fight except one took me multiple tries as well, they use special boss Pokémon designed around inflicting specific status effects on you. But I’ll admit, I felt like I would never have a Gym fight harder than that electric gym for the rest of the game after that. I just kept getting to them later than the game expected me to! Worst of all, my best ally had turned against me; the sandwiches I made gave all my Pokémon magic Power of Friendship dodges during story fights.
All things considered, I think this first run I did had decent success, but the amount of times I got to a gym overleveled only to be underwhelmed was a bit frustrating; there’s no indication of a badge’s challenge until you start the fight. Weirdo RPG difficulty obsessives definitely have a lot to chew on here, though - I can only imagine a more thoroughly planned run would be able to turn this game inside out. Especially with how none of the basic overworld trainers are mandatory fights, this game is basically a challenge runner’s dream: a Pokémon boss rush game where you can challenge level 40 bosses with level 10s without large amounts of prep.

The most interesting thing about Scarlet and Violet’s approach to open world is how fermented it feels. Only a few traces exist here of the tried-and-trash Ubisoft tower design, and this certainly isn’t Grand Theft Auto: Like a Dragon - the reality is that this game is basically an 8th Gen AAA NES RPG. Dying ligaments of game design ripped out of Miyamoto’s attic seem to cake both this game’s biggest strengths and flaws. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are the 2nd best Dragon Quest 1 remake, and they are a D&D session with all of your gay friends. While I see a lot of its core game design as inelegant, this game is all I could ask for when it comes to naturally conducting spontaneous storytelling. Pretty fun ostensible corporate trash to recommend your friends with eighteen asterisks.