I could barely finish this game. Performance is really bad, people aren't exaggerating. This is probably one of the buggiest games I've played since Skyrim. Beyond that, the open world and story of the game just isn't very fun. It feels like a very lifeless map with items and trainers just tossed onto it haphazardly. The scale is weird, the textures look awful, storming villain bases is a painful chore, hunting Titans and battling gyms offered no challenge. There are some pretty good Pokemon designs in this generation though to be fair. Unfortunately, I think this will be the last new Pokemon game I play unless there are drastic improvements to the series.

It's really just frustrating me with how un-great it is, i actually liked Sword and Shield AND Arceus despite how unambitious the former was, it just felt like a good Pokemon game, Scarlet feels like it's caught inbetween both of those good games, and what comes out is that horribly okay.

Terastallizing is by far the worst gimmick Pokemon has ever had, and i'm not a fan of any of the gimmicks, they're horribly forced and make you play a certain way every single time, and leaning them is a chore because you know they're just going to remove them in the next game, they're wastes of time that divert resources from actually improving the game. This one is so, so much more awful than all the others. Tera types can be anything for any pokemon, so type advantage as an entire concept is essentially thrown out the window when they're in play, any pokemon can be any type, but this doesn't even work in your favor because afaik the tera type is fixed to a specific pokemon and there is no way to change it, no idea how this is supposed to work in multiplayer, if it's even there. I encountered a gym leader who's main pokemon just doesn't have weaknesses due to their ability and tera type, not having any weaknesses at all is absurd, and a terrible way to try and create difficulty. The entire point of type advantages is so the game comes down to something other than just numbers, it's what makes the game about playing smart and not hard. Without type advantage the only solution to beating a pokemon that can one-shot all of yours is to just go and grind, and that's in a game where every single battle takes forever.

They still have yet to make the combat faster, it takes several minutes just for random battles sometimes. A good gym fight can take half an hour just because of how long it takes for messages and and animations to play out, and the animations don't look good enough for them to force you to watch them every single time. Fire Emblem has let you skip animations since 2012, technically 2007, and Pokemon still refuses to catch up on making the game more playable rather than more watchable. The performance wouldn't bother me as much if it wasn't making an already slow game slower.

The non-technical aspects of the game are very mixed. The region simply isn't interesting, the areas to explore just feel like stock video game settings, mountains, forrests, deserts, we've been here before. The civilized areas have some good detail to them, just not as much personality. I can remember the tropical setting of Alola, and the industrial setting of Unova, but even while looking at this game i find it's setting tepid and dull, and i can't say i feel like i'm going to think about it after i'm done playing it. The character designs are mixed, some are great, some are the most boring i've ever seen. There are some good new pokemon designs, but nothing killer.

The story and characters are a step-up, as they feel more unique and more expressive than any game before. The open-world nature of the game makes the story's lack of focus work in it's favor.

The open-world isn't a meaningful addition for multiple reasons, it's gatekept by level, it's not an interesting setting, and there's not enough to actually do in it. Being able to challenge the gym leaders in any order would be cool if it actually had a level-scaling system, instead they still clearly have a right way and wrong way to do things, it's actually made even more rigid by removing weaknesses to exploit, i don't see any way you're supposed to beat a significantly higher level gym leader, so a vast majority of all players are just going to go in the exact same order.

I can't see any reason why this game would be considered better than the previous two, it removes all of Arceus' improvements, and accentuates Sword and Shield's flaws.

Update: Starting to have fun with it again.

Damn, very conflicted feelings on this one. Disappointment out of the gate: the presentation is far below where it should be. I shan't bore with details of performance quality, as that is well trodden ground. Less discussed but still relevant is the story presentation, which is a step above Sword & Shield for sure, but still subpar featuring framedrops, poor and few animations, and a general absence of polish. The region is severely lacking in character, though some towns stand out as quite well-realised.

However, over the course of a game this long I adapt. All these issues become like rain, noise that I barely notice. And what lies underneath that noise is a damn fine game indeed.

While lacking in character, the region is actually really well designed, with great verticality, plenty of nooks and crannies, multiple routes, and true freedom. The open world is no lie; the player is welcome to explore right into high-level areas if they want. Smart decisions are made about how to balance the high-level Pokémon the player can catch, and how experience is handed out by these and trainers' Pokémon, to keep the player from becoming over-powered. This is achieved without level-scaling, thank god. I don't want a smooth difficulty curve in an open-world game, I want pure chaos, and Scarlet is more than happy to oblige. That some objectives were rendered trivial didn't matter to me, as this was the result of pushing myself to do late-game challenges while under-levelled, and thus the ease of these objectives was a product of my agency.

While the story presentation is problematic, the actual story itself contains a number of high-points and is generally well-written. It all comes together at the end, featuring a surreal final area with an atmosphere that actually feels bolstered by the game's unsightliness and poor performance. The climax has pretty great presentation, and is unusually bold and emotional for a Pokémon game. At least one, probably more, of the Pokémon I caught have canonically killed actual humans. Absolutely crazy.

I rinsed this game. I did literally everything. I caught all 400 Pokémon, I did all the main and side quests, I redid the final post-game objective until I'd beaten all the randomised opponents you can fight. Fuck, I even did the exams. I love this game... but I can't give it more than a 3.5/5. It's a great game buried in a miasma of awful, undercooked, unpolished nonsense. While I have much disdain for the Pokémon Company's business practices, Game Freak proved in 2022 that they can do great work, putting out the two best Pokémon games since generation 5 in the same year despite the massive time pressures placed on them. My sincere hope is that Game Freak can now thrive within the awful system they find themselves in to put out even better work, using Legends: Arceus and Scarlet/Violet as starting points to iterate, improve, and polish these two styles of Pokémon game without needing to start again. I'm cautiously optimistic.

Something that has become increasingly common in online discourse is the idea that if a studio makes a game with a certain feature or quality, another studio with a lot of money can easily, and is in fact expected to, replicate that success, delivering on a product with that and more. It's a truly baffling take, for a variety of technical and creative reasons, but more fundamentally, that viewpoint ignores that money isn't the only resource at play in the games industry: time is also in short supply. Between console cycles, trends, holiday seasons, to name a few, it's rather common for a project to be more pressed for days than it is for dollars.

No series demonstrates that better than Pokémon: it is the largest media franchise in the world, which proves to be both a blessing and a curse. Not only are they bound to all the aforementioned time constraints, but also, new generations are tied to new anime seasons, new card game packs, manga, all sorts of merchandise... All of which led to the puzzling decision to release the ninth generation on November 2022. That's less than a year after Legends: Arceus, with whom the new games share most of their staff, making it highly likely that they had less than a year of full-steam production.

The result was the most chaotic release in series history, games that were clearly unfinished, with broken features and a myriad bugs ranging from funny to game-breaking at release. There's still some lingering issues months later as Game Freak no doubt shuffle to manage patching and live ops while working on the DLC. This situation, understandably, led to a lot of frustration, but since Pokémon has been the internet's favorite punching bag as of the last couple of years, it got blown way out of proportion, with every texture and animation scrutinized and even emulator glitches farmed for clicks, not unlike what happened to Legends: Arceus.

It's that vitriol that kept me from writing about the game for several months now, the discourse surrounding the series having become exhausting to take part in (and puzzlingly, frequently dominated by people who haven't played Pokémon in years). But hey, if only to get this off the way, please indulge me as I get into why I'm personally disappointed in Pokémon Scarlet. As you may have noticed from the score, it's not "this is bad and this series is dying", it's "this game had so much potential and it pains me that it will never fully realize it".

SV introduces an open world to the mainline series: a real open world this time, unlike Legends Arceus, which had a series of open maps to explore. Paldea is a contiguous map that can be explored from edge to edge, no loading screens at all. It's also... barren. It features rather bland environments, defined only by the color of the ground and vegetation density (ranging from sparse to none). That it looks nothing like the actual Iberian Peninsula is a given, but that wouldn't matter much if not for a lack of natural beauty and a near total absence of landmarks. It's hard to even understand what Paldea's areas are meant to be, not to mention remember them in the long run.

That said, even though the map is clearly the weakest part of the game, it's possible to see some positives. The biggest irony is that, because so much of the world feels generic, it's very easy to get lost in, which is a feeling I hadn't had since the sprawling caves of Johto. It's common to take some random detour and wind up somewhere entirely different where there's something cool to find, with no idea how you got there -- a situation that yields a sense of adventure that was slowly lost as the series' graphics improved and its design became more focused and linear.

Of course, because this is Pokémon, exploration is almost always rewarded, if not with some useful TMs, with new Pokémon. The Paldean dex has a nice 400 of them, a regional dex count that has been more or less stable since Alola and that mixes old favorites with new mons at a ratio of about 3 to 1. These 400 mons are spread around the region in a way that you'll be finding uncaught creatures all the way to the end of your adventure, but also, because there's no linear path to follow and multiple areas close to the starting area, there's also unprecedented variety of Pokémon to catch while still in the opening hours. I suspect this will earn SV a higher replay value in the long run.

It's clear there was a vision to the map design, as even though biomes are not well defined, the shape of the terrain is, with the idea behind the game being to navigate that with your partner, Koraidon. Koraidon is introduced still in the prologue, and it also joins the player's party at that point, serving as a mount that is the main mode of transportation for the entire journey. As the game progresses, Koraidon gains more abilities, from jumping higher, to swimming, to flying, meant to open up new areas and change how the player approaches the map. And it works: the map feels daunting at first, but later on, Koraidon feels unstoppable. Revisiting locations from earlier on is also made rewarding as there are plenty of optional areas and items that can't be reached at first but become accessible the right abilities.

Because this design is successful, Koraidon is also a success. In fact, due to being so inseparable from the way the game plays, as well as being deeply tied into the narrative in a way that's almost poetic, and having lovable and expressive body language, sound design and overall behaviour as a creature, Koraidon is the best cover legendary to ever grace the franchise, and it's by a long shot. For many of the series' entries, cover legendaries feel bolted onto their entries and/or not developed past "whoa, it's the legendary thing!". Nebby, then later Zacian and Zamazenta, attempted to remedy this by being present from the beginning of the story, but this little sandwich-loving, drooly, motorcycle fellow won over my heart in a way none of the others ever did.

Cover legendary is not the only category SV achieves a best of in: it's also home to the best rivals in franchise history. There are three of them: Nemona is an enthusiastic young woman who's been successful as a trainer and is eager to have a new rival to battle with; Arven is the son of the region's Professor Sada, and also has a penchant for cuisine; finally, Penny is a young introvert who, along with you, gets pulled into the fight against Team Star. Nemona, Arven and Penny are my precious children: they're well developed characters that help propel the narrative forward and make the time in Paldea all the more worth it.

Each of the three is tied to one of the main quests, which you are free to pursue in any order, but are most likely to do more or less concurrently. The most prominent story is the Victory Road, the traditional eight gym gauntlet before facing the Pokémon League. Nemona keeps an eye out for you as you travel the region gathering your Gym Badges, with the occasional battle here and there to keep you on your toes. Much has been said about Paldea's Pokémon League and its Chairwoman being boring and bureaucratic, but that's actually the point: SV's take on the League is that of an exam, a bureaucracy, with the real spark being your growth alongside your friends. It's a refreshing take that nevertheless does not change much about the rest of the quest, with Paldean Gym Leaders being a diverse and fun bunch, ranging from cheerful artists to soul-crushed criticisms of our result-obsessed society.

Speaking of criticisms of society, since the flop that was Team Flare, Game Freak has been upping the ante when it comes to their antagonist teams, giving them a deeper meaning than just grunts to fight with. On that note, Team Star is up there as one of my favorites. Starfall Street is another main quest that has you visiting the strongholds of Team Star and fighting their five leaders in intense contests of strength, leaders who are not only extremely noteworthy character designs in a series known for having excellent ones, but are also, much like the rivals, fascinating characters on their own. Team Star's story is a relatable and emotionally charged one -- just as much as the third main quest.

Arven's Path of Legends closes out the starting trios of quests with his pursuit of Titan Pokémon around Paldea and the rare spices that supposedly made them that way. During that quest, you'll get to learn more about Arven's motivations for his search, his history with his mother and the origins of Koraidon, the latter of which is also the focus of the endgame. Once the other main quests are complete, Path of Legends gives way to The Way Home, the final quest, that looks into Professor Sada's research and how Koraidon came to be loose in Paldea. The Way Home is the best endgame questline we've had in a Pokémon game since at least the Delta Emerald arc in ORAS, cashing in on some setups that had been enacted still in the prologue. I won't detail any of it because it deserves to be experienced blind and firsthand.

And I didn't even get into how the faculty at Naranja Academy all get their own sidestories, or how much resolution is offered to other characters even after The Way Home is complete. The harm done by the evidently rushed quality of the titles does not stop SV's plot and characters from being unforgettable... but it has to be said, it's felt regardless, and one has to wonder just what heights could have been reached in a truly polished game. A similar feeling pervades the postgame content, i.e. raids and competitive play, and to talk about those, let's first discuss yet another best of achieved by SV in with Terastalization.

Since Gen VI, every generation has had its own battle mechanic, and Gen IX is no different, with Terastalization allowing a trainer to change the type of any of their Pokémon once per battle. Like with Dynamax, I had no faith in Terastalization from the moment it was announced, thinking it looked gimmicky and stupid. Like with Dynamax, boy was I wrong: Terastalization might not look as exciting as some of its predecessors, but it is the best generation mechanic we've had yet, adding unprecedented flexibility and strategic depth to Pokémon battles. It can be used offensively or defensively, it can make unusual picks completely viable, and it has kept the meta shifting constantly since the games' releases.

Terastalization also contributed to making raids much more interesting, though this is also owed to other changes more suited for a PvE mode. No longer can you just Zacian your way to victory every single time, with each raid demanding specific strategies and typings, motivating the player to keep a roster of different Pokémon builds. On that note, Scarlet and Violet have the most accessible Pokémon training yet, further enhancing the improvements brought by SWSH on that front. Almost every relevant competitive item can now be bought with in-game money or exchanged for easy to find items, from TMs to held items to even Nature Mints and Bottle Caps -- for us who suffered through Gen III/IV breeding, getting competitive or raid ready mons is unbelievably fast.

It would have been the best era for online play... but of course, it wasn't that simple. Raids were flat out unplayable at launch. They have since been patched, but event raids still have issues due to bad raid configurations being pushed to players, signaling a lack of a forced update mechanism as well as deficient live ops tooling -- yet another consequence of development crunch. On the competitive front, PvP battles are even more unstable than SWSH -- an accomplishment, no doubt -- leading to serious issues during tournaments that in themselves already suffer from the lack of a spectator mode. Let's not even mention the complete fiasco conducted by TPCi with the Asian region tournaments, which will no doubt further sour large swathes of the player base towards the game.

And that-- that's what hurts so much about Gen IX. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet were meant for the favorites' list. Had they been given six more months, maybe a year had Legends: Arceus gotten pushed forward too, these versions would have been set up to be the best Pokémon games yet. Instead, they're just... fine. Excellent ideas marred by an execution that came way too short, that will probably harm the franchise in the long run. I have no doubt about the creative vision behind it nowadays, but their technical roadmaps and release schedules need to be reviewed if the franchise is to be remembered by the young players of today as well as it is by us adults that started with earlier gens.

Oh golly gee wilikers. Where to even begin? (INCOHERENT RAMBLING WARNING)

Well, you see my rating so let me make this clear: Yes, it runs badly. Yes, it ain't that great looking. Yes, the shadows appear and dissappear whenever they feel like it. Yes, the camera during battles clips into the ground all the time. Yes, other games on the Switch look and run way better.
Here's the thing: I don't care.

OK to be more specific, I stopped caring. Because I was having fun with the game. Does that mean I have low standards? Maybe, though it might just be because... it's Pokemon.
It's a series that I've poured thousands of hours across nearly a dozen games. For context, I started with second gen and played until seventh. Why did I skip Galar? Well, I got a job. ("Yes Pokemon is only for unemployed people") I could finally buy and play so many games that I never could before. This included a lot of other RPGs, namely Dragon Quest and Shin Megami Tensei. I kept saying to myself "I'll get to eighth Gen soon", but I never did. I honestly couldn't put my finger on why. I certainly didn't have as many initial grievances as other people before release, including the infamous national dex controversy. "I wouldn't want to play a new Pokémon game without using the new Pokémon anyway, I don't need all the old ones back", at least that was what my thought process at the time. Yet I kept pushing it off as I kept playing more and more games, greatly expanding my taste in this medium. And Pokemon just didn't seem to be... interesting anymore. I actually tried replaying an older game (my mind is blanking on which) but I couldn't make it too far without wanting to move on from it.

To move on from Pokemon even...

Then Legend Arceus comes out am I like "Welcome back childhood!" That game brought me back to that cozy feeling of raising monsters of utter carnage while adding some fun traversal mechanics. Like Scarlet, it had a lot of faults, and these faults I eventually just got over. If you wanted to be blunt, "ignore" might be a better way of putting it.
Not long after I got done with completing Legends, I replayed one of my all time favorite games: Fallout: New Vegas. Nothing quite like calling a technical disaster with subpar combat mechanics and slow as snails traversal one of my favorites. I'd say that game has way more faults then any Pokemon game, but we aren't robots. Our enjoyment shouldn't be categorize by ""objective scoring"", I gave New Vegas a 5 star ranking and I'm not changing my mind. Yeah it is not fair comparing Pokemon and Fallout at all, especially when one of them is hardly a month old at the time writing. Point being is that how a game makes me feel is the single most important thing for a game, and if I feel like I'm having fun with a a open world game with monsters that pop in ten feet in front of you, then I'll simply accept that my player character is near sighted or something. Technical issues in games can affect my enjoyment for the record. I tolerate it in a turn based game, but action games is way more difficult for me to look past if it requires quick reaction times or simply looks very ugly.

Now to actually talk about the freaking thing: open world ain't very elegant but I always love it when a game allows me to tackle areas at a much lower level. I love seeing what I can get away with, sneaking by Pokemon that'd annihilate my party as I scavenge for high level items. The new Pokemon are some of the best in series, especially the end game ones. Loved that idea.
I actually care about the characters. It ain't no masterful RPG epic, but going from a kid who literally skipped all the text in every Pokemon game cause "reading is boring" to actually paying attention because it engrossed me is still bizzare to this day. Personally found it more interesting then Sun and Moon, as I know a lot of fans like that ones plot. The game just keeps giving you rewards at every turn, kept me hooked to keep exploring, if at the cost of the games challenge. That last part might be because I used so many highly offensive Pokemon to eradicate every HP bar I see, but I hardly struggled at any point. As I've seen, end game content ain't too great, which is generally where my playtime goes to triple itself. But you know, being content with a Pokemon game is probably better for me then sticking to one game for months. No shame if you have a game like that, by the way.

I guess the only other thing I can add is: don't buy this game if your hesitant on it. I didn't buy it day one and I heard all about its issues from other people, yet I also kept hearing things that made me go "That's really cool what they're doing" and as you can tell, that interest won out over the hesitancy. I'd be lying if I said I bought this with zero caution, but if your really unsure then don't bother unless you can afford to be disappointed spending $60 (or $120 for both... ugh that is one practice I will NOT defend).

As for me, thank you Pokémon. I don't know where I'd be without out you. (Not the Pokemon Company, you guys need to stop with this game scheduling hell.)

Do not sleep on Gen 9 because muh bugs.

Let's make this clear: the bugs and performance issues in Gen IX are inoffensive and or outright funny IF you encounter them. Facts are: Game Freaks made a game within less than a year after the release of Arceus on a console that's less powerful than a base PS4 from 9 years ago, yet did not let that limit their ambition. This aint launch Cyberpunk. If we can give bethesda a pass for this, we can for pokémon.

This game is beautiful and extremly heartfelt. The open world is vast yet compact and you never feel like you spend too much time on the road rather than doing something interesting. You have fun the whole way through. I especially loved the fluidity of the battle transitions. Althrough I do think that some form of level scalimg could have been welcome.

But where this game really took me by surprise was in its story and characters. It was extremly well written and I really came to care for its core cast, especially Arven. And the final act of this game, Area Zero, is legendary tier in its presentation. That being said it loses several points for not including voice acting. Seriously even Zelda does it now, there's no excuse.

Still, jank and all. I loved this game.

I think SV had their head in the right path with this game, but the execution was kind of bad. Pokemon games these last years have focused on giving us new features and forms. In my opinion, I think it's kind of not necessary to always give us something "new". Sure mega evolution changed the Pokemon ecosystem forever and so did the alolan form. But this trend of always creating something new seems too forced, in this Pokemon game we have the crystals. The crystal make the typing change, but also boost the attack of the same Tera type to be stronger. Compared to Mega evolutions, shadow pokemon and regional variants this feature seems very lackluster. To conclude on this point, they don't need to add something new to make the game fresh and good, they can instead build on the very fundamentals that made this series great.

The story felt very weak, they decided to focus on bullying for this game. Even in the last part, how "given" Pokemon had to stand up to face their own demons, in other words their bully. Apart from story, the game was ambitious in the way that we got to choose our own path, what gym/titan/boss we decide to defeat first. The school introduction is very taste like, I didn't mind it that much and found it quite fun.

This is more of a preference point, but the constant handholding gets a little annoying. Before choosing a move, you see opposing Pokemon's weak type and don't get to explore what moves is bad and which isn't. Memorizing typings was one of my favourite feature of Pokemon. The sense of achievement have been a little lost in translation with these new games.

and yes .. the game ran really poor, BUT YET we finished the game! We dealt with low FPS for 50+ hours, with this in mind they must've at least done something right with this game, right?

Extra:
Main Pokemon Team at the End (Nicknames):

1. Skeleridge (Bronny)
2. Squawkability - Yellow (Larry)
3. Great Tusk (Cannonbolt)
4. Bellibolt (Chuck)
5. Ceruledge (Akai)
6. Kingambit (Magneto)

Honorable mentions:
Heracross, Gholdengo, Cyclizar, Orthworm, Pawmot, Klawf, Roaring Moon

Rules for team picking:
Must use your starter
At least 5 Pokemon must be from that current Gen
1 Maximum Pokemon from another gen allowed
1. Legendary allowed if it ain't too OP

i'm a sucker..
the game is astoundingly rough! even when excusing the poor performance and issues, things like cutscenes that should-100%-be-voiced simply being silent is WILD for a franchise that makes this much money
AND YET
oooo game make me feel like a kid again.
it's equally as charming as it is rough and i couldn't help myself from smiling for most of my playthrough.
the characters are really fun, new structure and open world/no random battles is a fantastic step forward and overall the story was interesting enough and well written.
shoutout to larry, i love you man.
even the silly teraforming thing reminds me of those fake shiny sticker pokemon cards you would get when you went on holiday to turkey.
music is fantastic.
got online with the lads, trading, running about doing goofy shit and taking on raids.
tinkaton is a new fav mon.
yeah. POKEMON!

Gameplay is absolutely phenomenal, until you try swimming and you’re watching a slideshow. the game is very fun and addicting but the tech issues keep it from being my favorite Pokemon game. The story was surprisingly very cool, it drags in the beginning but they really did make it feel like an adventure. I liked Arven’s story and Nemona is the only rival post-asshole era that feels like a genuine and good character. The end of the game was definitely a massive lore dump, but it was genuinely really pretty and probably where all the graphics budget went. I would recommend this to any Pokemon fan, but for anyone that’s still not decided, I would wait until a patch to fix performance issues. Otherwise, a very fun and enjoyable Pokemon game. I will probably bump up the score if they ever do fix performance.

A really great game, the best Pokemon has been since Alola, the issue is the technical problems that come with this entry. It's very clear almost from the getgo that the project was rushed to fit the holiday season. Which is honestly a shame.

I get why they do it, because the Pokemon game has to match up with the toys and the anime and the cards and all the other things that have made Pokemon a multi billion dollar conglomerate. But maybe, just maybe, delay the game for a few months? You could have the anime be an advertisement for the games, like in the old days. Pokemon always has had a winning formula to some degree or another. This one just needed some time in the oven to really optimize performance. But based on sales records, it's pretty clear that people are willing to look past bugs if the game is actually fun.

The game is a big mess, but everyone knows that already. For me the only truely fun part of the game was discovering the new Pokemon & also the difficulty at times. Other than that, the game has great ideas but the execution is either "ok" or just doesn't work.

My thoughts:
(+ = (mostly) positive; - = (mostly) negative)
+- Gameplay;
The gameplay at times is pretty addicting. Looking at every corner to find something new. Only to realise after a while the game doesn't really reward you for doing so. You either find a regular item or a gimmighoul. Finding koroks in botw for example was way more fun to do.
The different areas didn't do much and especially the snow mountain was super disappointing. Usually the snow areas are my favorite, but in this game it's just nothing, like really really nothing.
The battles were hard at times, which I enjoyed. I also liked that you could """"choose """" your own path. There wasn't really much to choose, because the game pretty much forces you to choose a different path when Pokemon are suddenly a much higher level than yours. I have to admit the variation in missions and such was a nice attempt. Has potential to become something great.

+ Music;
The music is very nice like every Pokémon game. Only this time it didn't have as many bangers compared to previous games. When you get to end game, the music gets a lot better imo.

-- Graphics;
Don't even think I've to explain myself here. You can count the frames, random pop-ins, lighting is horrible, textures are arse, areas like the snow mountain and desert are just empty. But can't blame them, they're a indie studio after all.

+- Story/Characters;
I'm a bit mixed about the story. The start was super slow, which made me lose interest in the story really fast. But the further i got into the game, the more "interesting" it got (for a Pokémon game). The main characters were more involved than in any other Pokémon game before I feel like and that's a good thing.

Recommend?
Only if you like Pokémon. Otherwise there are plenty of other open world games who can give you a better experience.

Looks like shit and even mobile games run better without that many framedrops

Otherwise big step in the right direction for the series and breaking of the boring formula

They just need to make a game completlty build like the last act of the game (soul)

Don't let the rating fool you; Pokemon Scarlet is a deeply flawed, frustrating experience that is dead set on sabotaging itself throughout its run time. It has earned four stars despite its best efforts, and in the hands of a competent studio the game would have easily been a five. Its only saving grace is a formula that is tailor made to psychologically satisfy people on the most base, primal level. Anything one's higher functions might appreciate or notice is woefully under-cooked.

I suppose the latter is the best place to start; what exactly doesn't work here? In a word: everything. The game's frame rate is extremely inconsistent. Whether in the over world, in a battle, in a cutscene, wherever, one will be dealing with varying degrees of sub-30 frames. This even causes an amount of desync with the audio in the cutscenes. Had the frame rate been locked to a low number, that would have been frustrating but mostly fine. Instead, the game oscillates wildly when determining which extremely low amount of FPS it wants to present at any given time thereby ensuring the player will never get used to it.

The speed of the game is another element that drags it down. The game is slow. Glacially, monumentally, horrifyingly slow. This mostly manifests in the battles, which seem shackled to an engine that predates most of the series's fan base. Any stat change in battle takes a couple of seconds to come across to the player. Any attack needs to have its animation play out. Status effects like poison or sleep add time to every turn when their effects are possibly the easiest to automate.

What's frustrating about the issue is that it had previously been solved. The ability to turn off all of these animations has been mysteriously removed. This is a vexing change as it presents literally no gain to the player at the cost of their agency. Put more simply: who wanted this? Who wanted to lose options? This one change likely adds more than an hour to the average player's time with the game.

I need to beleaguer this issue further: Not long into the game I caught a big crab guy. This guy's ability was that when he would get hit four of his stats would change. Rather than playing the stat change animation once for all four, or two times for both the positive and negative stat changes, it played it four times. Every time it got hit in battle! My ability to use my favorite guy was impacted by the 60 seconds of waiting he'd add to my fights. It quickly became apparent that the optimal strategy for playing Pokemon was to dick around on one's phone while the battle's various loading screens played themselves out.

Speaking of loading, for some reason there's a ton of that going on as well. Not the typical loading screen, but every action Pokemon take in battle has a one to two second bit of loading before it comes through. Even throwing a Pokeball has this issue. Nothing at all feels smooth in this game, and that weighs more heavily on the player the longer they play.

The dual release nature of the game is also a glaring problem. I don't know how Gamefreak has been enabled in doing this for years, but whatever, I bought this game too so I cannot complain. Still, it is a transparent way of gating content for dollars. The core conceit of the game, the reason it works at all, is the "catch them all" ethos. This just doesn't work when the player knows from the onset that several of their favorite guys aren't in the game so Gamefreak can sell marginally more units. It's an incredibly anti-consumer move that should be called out every release cycle.

The story of the game is also a fumble. The framing device for the proceedings is a school. The player character takes classes, bonds with their teachers, and picks up little sidequests from the school. Or, they would, if anyone knew that content was there. So much of this content is essentially hidden from the player, as they are never told it is there nor incentivized to explore the school and find it. I imagine most people completed their game with taking the final exams nor getting their bond with their teachers to the highest level. It's hard to categorize it as a throwaway when this school veneer is the loudest of the game's design. Your character can never change from their uniform yet they will almost never actually go to class? A missed opportunity for a more satisfying integration of the school elements with the larger game systems.

Adding to the frustration of all of these issues is that they were fixed. Pokemon Legends Arceus, a singular release that was solidly constructed, was a major step forward for the franchise. It was fresh, fun, and a new take on the same formula. Arceus was developed as Scarlet was coming together, so it's not shocking the Scarlet doesn't borrow anything from that game, but man does Scarlet feel like pure regression. Arceus's frame rate was fine. Battles were quick and smooth. It had no partner game that siphoned off content. Hell it didn't even have DLC. The time travel story, while not extremely satisfying, was thoroughly referenced through to the end. It was a rock solid experience that will surely be forgotten now that we can see the sales divide between it and Scarlet. Gamefreak had a perfect opportunity for evolution with their franchise, but unfortunately it looks like they're going to press 'B'.

So then, what saves Scarlet from being abject garbage? Well, it's a Pokemon game. The core conceit of exploring a world, catching guys, training guys to evolve, and bonding with a team is a fun one. If anything, Scarlet proves that formula is impossible to bomb. If anything, the formula is heightened by the open world, a change to the series (A change first seen in Arceus) that I quite enjoyed. That, plus the appearance of Pokemon in the open world rather than traditional tall grass, made hunting them down an enjoyable experience.

As always when I play these games, I completed my Pokedex, and unlike past games in the series this isn't a tedious endeavor. Only the holdover mistakes from ghosts of Christmas past rear their ugly heads: some Pokemon must be traded to evolve; others only appear in Violet. With 400 guys to find, doing so in an open world is a big upgrade from having to shuffle around tall grass and sit through encounter loading screens for hours on end.

Another system that benefits from the open world is the progression through the story, or stories. Pokemon Scarlet has three different campaign threads for the player to follow and complete at their leisure. All three of these were enjoyable on some level, though there is a clear ranking to the quality here. The Team Star battles come in last place, with the titan Pokemon hunt winning out. Still, the ability to complete these and there various stages in whatever order the player wishes is a level of freedom I truly was not expecting. It was a necessary step to follow through with the promise of open exploration, but I wouldn't have been surprised to see this bungled as well. Regardless, what we got is what works best for the conceit of the game, and this is probably what will stick with me most after finishing up with Scarlet.

It's hard to understate this. It was fun to leave the "first" gym battle for the last of my 18 events just so I could bully some bug Pokemon. It's fun to climb a mountain range you've never been to before only to fall off the other side and land on some new gym you weren't expecting. It's fun to make a plan and then have it get sidetracked because you got lost. I cannot possibly imagine a Pokemon game without this set up, at least not one in the mainline series. If anything sticks around from Scarlet, I hope this is it. Hopefully Gamefreak doesn't then remove the map feature for seemingly no reason.

The common discourse about Pokemon Scarlet is something along the lines of "Wow this game is buggy but I've having fun! Look at these wacky glitches!", which is an accurate sentiment, but it's also a dangerous one. This game is fun in spite of itself, and any amount of forgiveness levied simply because of enjoyment is an anti-consumer attitude. We should not accept games this broken. We should not overlook flaws that run this deep. This game is fun, yes, but it could have been so much more than it is right now. These "wacky" glitches actively detract from the experience, and in dunking on the game that should never be forgotten.

Gamefreak has continuously been enabled by Pokemon. People are psychologically primed to enjoy collecting. The Pokemon themselves are often designed by committee to appeal to the most people as possible. The studio does not have to try to have a hit with these elements, and it's difficult to say that they were trying with Scarlet. Regardless of the game's quality, that feeling pervades the experience: nobody cared when making this. They shipped a broken, chugging game and just didn't care because it would make a billion dollars anyway. And it did.

It's up to all of us to personally decide how we feel about this arrangement. I knowingly bought the game so I'm a culpable party, but voicing dissatisfaction is important. Enjoying a flawed, janky experience is fine too should one do it knowingly. But the "Don't care; had fun" sentiment that seems so popular is a destructive one, and the destruction wrought is on this franchise.

Decent Pokemon adventure. Would have scored a little higher if not for its performance issues.

I do have to say I don’t like the current state of pokemon. I don’t necessarily dislike the newer games, but they just don’t hit like they used to. A couple reasons as to why include:

No longer in 2D sprites, No National Dex, Bland rivals, Boring stories, Dumb gimmicks that only stick around for one game, Regional forms, and several more depending on the game.

Black and white really was peak. But that’s just my correct opinion

✔
GameFreak cooked, but they probably should've left it in the oven a little longer. That's precisely how I'd describe this title. This is gonna be a longer one than usual, so grab a snack and get comfy.

Pokémon Scarlet is probably best described as my Cyberpunk 2077: a video game broken at launch that I had such a fun time with, even though the flaws are so obvious to me that I won’t be defending those. I’d like to preface that the bugs I dealt with were minimal at best. I didn’t get any crazy glitches or anything. I just got graphical bugs and the occasional weird goofy thing. The Switch could absolutely run this game no problem, but the fault is with the developers who didn't give the game enough time to get properly optimized for the system it was running on.

The gameplay is largely the same as most Pokémon titles. Catch, battle, and do what you have to do to be the very best. One of the big hooks is that you're running around in a big open world. While I do like the freedom this allows, I think this also causes the routes and paths the game takes you on to lose some of that Pokémon sparkle. Even Generation 8, as bad as Sword and Shield were objectively, had unique areas that stuck out in the mind (Ballonlea, as an example). Scarlet and Violet had maybe two or three places that stuck out in my mind and for a game with many places you can go to, that isn't great. The game feels less "free" and more "unrestricted" at times, if that makes sense. You're able to go wherever you want, but you can only do the things you want if you do them correctly.

The other big hook is Terastalization, the Mega Evolution/Z-Moves/Dynamax of this generation. This is where things get a bit spicier (even though I hardly used Terastalization during my playthrough). This mechanic essentially allows you to change a Pokémon's type during battle. This has a LOT of potential both casually and competitively (I hear, because I'm not in the competitive scene that much, admittedly).

However, the gameplay is where my bigger complaints come in. The Pokédex grind still sucks and in order to have a seamless 100% experience, you need one of three things to be true. You have to have both versions, you have to know someone who has your opposite version, or you have to get extremely lucky with raids (which is really difficult when the raids don't have Pokémon you need). This also becomes a problem when the online functionality for raids requires payment for an online service. The game is also fairly easy, with battles not really scaling to your level if you're going in order (and if you're not, there's a good chance you'll die your first time around). Despite that, I really think that some of the battles in this game are amazing. When you get to the late-game, the battles may not be hard, but they go hard.

You know what else goes hard? The music. This is in no small part thanks to Toby Fox coming on to compose the best tunes in this game. There's a certain theme in the postgame that rocks so hard that he composed and I'm listening to it as I write this. Despite the bangers on this OST, there is one weird song choice that was by someone you probably wouldn't associate with Pokémon normally. You'll know it when you hear it, but it's in the main story.

Speaking of the main story, let's talk about that for a second. It was the one thing that caught my attention. I know not a lot of people come to Pokémon for the story (and I also don't to an extent), but ever since I played Mystery Dungeon, I wanted to see the main series hit that stride. I'm happy to say that while Scarlet and Violet still have the usual Pokémon story, they manage to pace it a lot better than in most of the 3D era (Generation 6 onward).

One more small complaint. I really don’t like how the shiny sound and sparkle from Legends: Arceus is gone. It’s such a small change, but it’s the feature I miss the most. They’d better bring that back in a patch or in the next generation because it’s so easy to unfairly miss a shiny Pokémon now.

Missing those shinies is even more of a shame since I really liked a lot of the Pokémon this generation. Koraidon, the mascot of Scarlet, is a doofy lizard that I adore. Quaxly, one of the starters, is in the running for my top 10 favorite base form starters. Oh, and who could forget Clodsire? My bumbling muddy boy makes me smile every time I see him. There weren't as many misses this time in comparison to things like Dhelmise or Bruxish from Alola for example.

On the whole, I liked it a lot, but it is 100% not without its shortcomings. The bugs can be annoying, the Pokédex grinding was pretty annoying, and some of the online components were less than ideal. None of that bothered me enough to hate it.

Also, yes. I 100% completed the Paldea Pokédex. I'll take my trophy now.

Final team, I think the most enjoyment I got out of this game was the different setups I could do with each team member. Everything else just felt tedious. I'm not a fan of open world Pokemon, and I honestly much prefer the set random encounters in just regular patches of grass. Instead, I found myself, on multiple occasions, running laps around specific areas over and over again just to find the one thing I was looking for, made extra arduous by the smaller Pokemon that would tend to be show up in inconvenient spots, making it real damn difficult to see them in time.
Battles are also unnecessarily long, with the removed options of turning off animations, as well as removing the Set style of battle, which ?????? I cannot for the life of me find any reason as to why they would do that?? That combined with the slow text boxes, mid-battle dialogues that don't pass until the opponent has completely finished their talking animation (still unvoiced), and the animation that plays every time a Pokemon terrastalizes.
Pokemon Scarlet & Violet are just slow as shit, and it makes the entire game a chore. But at the very least, the battling, outside of the new mechanics (and several of the mechanics that they removed for whatever reason), is still fun. I enjoyed my team and what I could do with them, even if most of my wins were from toxic stalls and weather abilities boosting evasion. 6/10. I really don't see myself coming back to it any time soon.

Was this game an unoptimized mess that validated your frustrations/concerns of Game Freak being unable to create a high quality 3D game due to some combination of being lazy, incompetent, time-crunched, and/or simply mismanaged?
Yes: ☑️ No: 🔲

Did you allow yourself to have fun after accepting that it will never get better?
Yes: ☑️ No: 🔲

If you unironically like this game and gave it more than 2 stars you are the reason gamefreak will continue to make absolutely garbage and horrendous pieces of shit games. Pokemon scarlet and violet will continue a line of horrifyingly shit pokemon games all because of people with no taste in games continue to glaze them so much. The last good pokemon games were on the 3DS and gamefreak will never make anything as good again because of how ignorant a lot of pokemon fans are and how horrible they are at being honest to gamefreak about how shit their new games are.

"A delayed game is eventually good. A bad game will sell 10 million copies in 3 days" - Shigeru Miyamoto.

As a starter for this review i must preface that no Pokemon game without natdex would get more than a 2.5 from me.

That being said this game is comedic with how mediocre/bad it is in every aspect. Story is 3 different ones that felt under cooked and the fourth final story that ties them together does it in a really lazy way. Gameplay is just Pokemon which has mostly been stagnant for the past near decade since X and Y. Graphics are also terrible not even counting the constant visual glitches, without any actual style besides being cartoony/anime which is given no visual flair.

Saving the obvious talk about bugs, glitches, and performance issues last yes the game has many of them and in all honesty if it wasn't for the fact that it looked like garbage I probably would have not paid it any attention due to lack of natdex. I don't think i ever had a consistent frame rate the entire time I played the game, every where i went had many visual bugs, and about every 3 hours I'd restart the game so that it would run smoother again (smoother not smoothly big difference).

Now for positives in concept this could have been interesting, the open world can be fun to traverse but its not very interesting, The gameplay is fun for the basic Pokemon formula but it is again stagnant, And unintentionally was a great experience for me and my friend who isn't even into Pokemon as it constantly gave us a good laugh with how bad it is.

I won't give any pity points for it due to it being the largest media franchise, plenty of money could have been poured into this. Fans should only demand more and more but more often settle for less and less which is a shame really.