Disappointment after disappointment, when will I ever grow up? Every damn game I am underwhelmed, yet I seem to never learn. I will never love an entry in this series again, the magic that I experienced from days long past will never be seen or heard from again. Forever I am chained to this merchandise-pushing bulldozer of a franchise. Why does my childhood keep pestering me? Is it a curse? Why do I bother? Just let it die already.

Being someone whose username looks like it's based on Pokemon and formerly having an Eevee PFP for quite a while on here, it would feel like my take on seemingly the most divisive entry in the series yet will come off as something easily discarded. An open world game that is apparently super buggy and super empty? No way I could love it. It's a despicable game that would probably steal my dog's lunch money if it got the opportunity. I can't believe they would release such a broken game in 2022, etc, etc, yadda yadda. Whatever, you heard it all already.

Lend me your ears though... I loved this game.

As I lie here on my bed and rest myself on my Slowpoke pillow, I think to myself "is this a dream?". Not since the early days of playing on my purple Game Boy Color with my copy of Blue version have I felt this same feeling of grand adventure. The ability to go wherever I please without a completely nothing rival constantly challenging me at every other route, or having someone stop me from going down a certain route because they dropped their contact lens. Even the overworld trainers have grown to finally get some manners, and allow me to walk around freely without being demanded to waste my time fighting their crappy low level Scatterbug that wouldn't even give me a single XP point. Finally, a game that eschews all of that so that I may feel free. Free to experience the world of which I seem to never grow out of.

This is MY adventure.

The best part? This game will only get better for me. I played Violet in pretty much the worst way possible, via portable mode on my Switch. I experienced the worst frame rate drops possible, I experienced the worst pop-in, and despite all the doomer talk on Twitter....I never once experienced a crash or even one of the funny glitches or bugs. (may have helped that I bought it digitally) It turns out you can't trust judging your incoming experience based on what you see on the internet, especially when everyone everywhere can easily record stuff that happens to them in what might be the new best-seller in the entire universe. Personally, that stuff actually endears me more to this game. There's a clip of a Jigglypuff that flew off into space out there somewhere that's actually perfectly in-character, and would've made me laugh my ass off if I had experienced it in my own game. To say that I can't wait to replay this later on either a patched version, on better switch hardware or emulator would be an understatement. I cannot imagine how much I would love this once I experience it at a consistent frame rate.

Despite the tacky school uniform you're saddled with at the beginning, I found the setting very charming. Clothing options suffer thanks to it, but these are probably my favorite set of characters since Black/White. Mela having to move her legs like a robot because of her ridiculous boots is more fun and entertaining than anything Leon and his merchandise-moving Charizard did in the last game, and Arven is someone who I want to fight for to the very end. Don't talk to me or my cybernetic lizard motorcycle son again. The last 5% of this game goes beyond words in how much of a step up it is from Sw/Sh's wet fart of a climax.

They say an image speaks louder than words, but here it is.

Call me a fanboy, call me chopped liver. You could even call me late for dinner, but...I enjoyed myself immensely...and that's all that matters in the end.

It's then that I ask myself again, "is this a dream?"

No, the sky has not fallen.....no cats and dogs are not currently living together.... Pokemon Scarvy is my game of the year. This is reality, and I still can't fucking believe it.

Ten.
Years.

Ten whole years since B/W, and they finally do it again... holy shit.

I refuse to grow up.

I loved this game so much that I made a game about it.

Won't bore you with the same repetitions - it simply is as boldly, beautifully broken as they say. A stunning performance of childhood dreams; the memories that have never run at 60fps. Bugs, like Pokémon, aren't inherently good or bad - they're an interaction with a world, something for you to make of what you will. Games are dream-states that should not strictly conform to space-time, and we are Dennō Senshis, disciples of Helix and MissingNo, hearts and souls with the power to bend, rend and expand these colourful worlds to our will. It's no coincidence that the big gimmick in this one is your ability to turn Pokémon into rough-skinned fighting polygons that explode in light - Violet/Scarlet is a rare breed of modern Nintendo game, a wild beast that's escaped from a stable of capitalist filth with its self-awareness and consciousness intact, a rebellious undertale in the era of digital foundries. I want to nuture its memory in the same way that it nurtured my thoughts of the bygone days. I want to protect it from patches and fixes forever. I want to play it again.

𝙷𝚎𝚛𝚎'𝚜 𝚝𝚘
𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝙿𝚘𝚔é𝚖𝚘𝚗 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚙𝚊𝚜𝚝,
𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝙿𝚘𝚔é𝚖𝚘𝚗 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚙𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚎𝚗𝚝,
𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝙿𝚘𝚔é𝚖𝚘𝚗 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚏𝚞𝚝𝚞𝚛𝚎.

edit (13/11/23): this review sucks. lol

I don’t understand Pokémon fans. When Sword and Shield released in 2019, it was understandable that Pokémon fans were quite upset. To start off with, the “graphics” at the time were considerably worse and when it was revealed that some Pokémon were not going to even be in the game, the game received heavy backlash from fans and was regarded as one of the most weakest mainline entries.

Then we got Pokémon Legends, which most fans agreed was a major improvement with it’s new formula of catching Pokémon out of the wild. However this also received some backlash as well, with a common theme running that the plot was shallow and the.. gameplay wasn’t fun? Wait, hold on, Game Freak has just changed the entire meta of the game for you and you’re still complaining. The fights were too easy? The graphics were too ugly? The characters are too one dimensional? It’s hard for the common Pokémon fan to find what they enjoy.

And as of now, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet have released (although it leaked a week earlier if you know what I mean). And as of now, although a lot of positive comments, Pokemon fans are still complaining! The frame rate and performance is actually so bad now because you guys bullied poor Masuda into trying to produce good ones on a console that has the same specs as a car battery. The fights are too easy? The characters are too one dimensional? You want the mechanics back from a spin off game, even though some of you DIDNT EVEN LIKE IT????

You can hate this game. If you genuinely just don’t like this game or anything in it you are perfectly fine to criticise whatever you want, we are a website that criticises everything for god’s sake. What I just don’t understand is the Pokémon fans. Why do you guys stick with this series for so long if you do nothing but rag and complain about how bad they all are? Pokemon is a series dedicated to putting out low budget titles that appeal to 10 year olds and adults who can never seem to grow up, of course the fights are too easy and everything looks shit. And maybe if you’re favourite Pokémon didn’t make it into the new game, take it as a sign that maybe it’s time to move on and try new things. Go outside and take a nice walk.

I’m a few hours in, I’m enjoying the game. I like the fruity duck starter and the evil team leader’s a baddie so hey good job Game Freak 4 stars!!!!!

I'm done.

I'm done playing you Pokémon. I'm bored. You're boring me.

You know, I can forgive a technical mess. I think it's quite frankly absurd that this is the most broken major release of a video game since Cyberpunk 2077 and if this was any other franchise we'd be talking about it in the same breath as that game's disastrous launch. But at the same time, I'm the guy who likes Sonic 2006. I think it's perfectly fine to enjoy a game even despite its overwhelming issues. I think it's important you acknowledge those issues, which a large portion of the Pokémon fanbase refuses to, but it's entirely possible to see the good through the bad and find enjoyment in something so deeply flawed.

I'm much, MUCH less forgiving of a game that bores me, especially one that finally moved in the direction I had always hoped it would, only to massively drop the ball in the process. This game should have been a slam dunk in spite of Game Freak's incompetence, and that it isn't means I'm going to be immensely harsh in my review of it. I had to force myself to see this through to the end, something I once thought impossible for a franchise I truly loved. New Pokémon games were an event for me. Something I looked forward to years in advance. But now I'm struggling to finish them. This was that uninteresting to me. It speaks volumes.

So how did we get here, especially after the disaster that was Sword and Shield? Those games that had previously put me off the franchise forever? Well, there are three answers to this. The first is that I got this game for free. Let's just say my uncle who works at Nintendo hooked me up with a copy. I vowed they wouldn't get my money after Gen 8 unless they delivered something different and of quality and I'm glad to see I was right in that stance. I realize this ultimately amounts to nothing as Scarlet and Violet will undoubtedly be the best-selling games of the year. The Pokémon Company clearly realized long ago they didn't have to put real effort into these games when people just buy them anyway. Still, for my own peace of mind, I refused to purchase it.

Second of all, I have said I would at least be willing to give the franchise another chance if they drastically changed their approach to making these games, at least in terms of their design. Sword and Shield had many flaws but a major one was its inability to free itself from Pokémon's outdated handheld framework. Scarlet and Violet's switch to an open-world style certainly fits the criteria of a major change, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't at least a bit curious about how their take on that type of game ended up, especially as I do enjoy the junk food style of game that is the open world genre.

And third, perhaps the most simple of all to understand: "The Rubberneck Factor." This game is a trainwreck from a technical perspective, and social media has been flooded with all manner of hilarious bugs and glitches consistent with a Cyberpunk-level disaster as previously mentioned. It's like noticing a car burning on the side of the road: you can't help but want to stop and see for yourself, and I certainly found myself drawn to Generation 9 in that regard. I wanted to bear witness to just what the hell went wrong here.

However, let's put the technical bellyflop of this game aside. That part doesn't even interest me, and I'm actually a little sad I didn't encounter some of the more egregious bugs in my game. It was largely just the standard jank and lack of polish you'd already expect from the latest entry in Nintendo's Madden series. The yearly releases of this franchise certainly don't do it any favors, and I imagine a lot of this could and would have been cleaned up if Game Freak were given more time to develop their titles. However, the fact that people pounce on this as the perceived singular reason for the game's lack of quality misses the larger picture. The problems go much deeper, and I simply do not believe this studio is capable of making this type of game regardless of how long you give them.

So let's work from the beginning. Like every Pokémon game, you start in your own home, pick a starter Pokémon, and head off on a grand journey. However, Scarlet and Violet have a bit of a twist, where you're enrolled in a school at the start of the game, which works as the framing device for your adventure. It soon becomes apparent, though, that this is nothing more than window dressing, as the school itself serves little importance and clashes majorly with the open-world nature of the game. You're thrust out of your school almost immediately after arriving, and you're given few reasons to ever return. Why they felt the need to go this route, I have no idea, aside from perhaps a minor change of pace. But hey, at least it locks you into a school uniform for the entire game, restricting the ability to fully customize yourself that was present in the past several generations of Pokémon titles. Game Freak sure loves to take things away from players for absolutely no reason, don't they?

Also early in the game, you meet Nemona, your overly-excitable rival, who also has a slightly different twist: she's already a Champion level trainer. In theory, this gives you a concrete goal to strive towards, but in reality, I never once bought her as a Champion, and if they wanted to go the route of having someone stronger that you felt incentivized to chase, a more antagonistic rival would have been preferred. But, at this point, Game Freak seems to be adverse to ever going back to that archetype, so it's almost pointless to complain. I wish they would ditch the rival aspect of these narratives altogether if they're going to keep doing this, much as they did in Pokémon X & Y where your rivals were more of a friend group who all went through the same journey together as you did. I enjoyed that framing a lot better.

Before going to the Academy to officially start your adventure, you're thrust into an early taste of Generation 9's big shift in gameplay paradigm: the open world. There's a pretty large field to free roam about, crawling with dozens of Pokémon that you'll probably barely see until you step on them because seemingly half of all Pokémon in this game are so small they can be hard to distinguish from the environment. I have no idea why this was such an issue this time around, whereas it never cropped up in Scarlet and Violet's protoform design of the Wild Area in Sword and Shield, but it bothered me the whole way through the game. I also didn't care for how many Pokémon this game throws at you in this first area, as you're never really given enough time to bond with your initial catches before moving on to the next shiny thing that pops up in front of you.

After your very brief trip to school, you're presented with the three narrative quests that form the backbone of Scarlet and Violet's adventure: Victory Road, Starfall Street, and Path of Legends. Victory Road is your standard Pokémon fare, where you seek out eight Gym Leaders, earn their badges, and face the Elite Four on the road to becoming Champion. Along the way to earning those badges, you'll have to do Gym Tests before taking on the actual Leaders, and boy let you tell you, these are some of the worst excuses for "gameplay" you'll ever find. Do you love baby games like Hide and Seek? Simon Says? Where's Waldo? Game Freak has you covered! It's quite honestly embarrassing that the devs thought this was legitimate content, with the Olive Roll minigame taking the cake in terms of pure awfulness. It's like someone's first high school computer programming assignment. I can't believe they got rid of previous games' fun little gym puzzles for this garbage.

Starfall Street and Path of Legends both constitute part of the game's overall story and are required for the ending, but truthfully they feel more like long side quests. This isn't a bad thing, however, and I actually do wish these games leaned harder into their JRPG roots with more side content and character stories. Granted, the stories you follow in both of these (taking on the "villainous" Team Star and helping a fellow student track down Titan Pokémon) aren't particularly compelling, but at least they tried. Unfortunately, between these three quests, that's really all you're going to find in terms of content here, and leads to my biggest issue with these games and why I was so fundamentally bored with them: there's an open world, but there's nothing to do in it.

If you're going to make an open-world game, you REALLY need to nail the actual world aspect of that. It needs to feel like a living, breathing, flourishing environment that you want to become immersed within. Scarlet and Violet do not do this. I quickly found myself simply going from Point A to Point B in my quests because there was simply nothing else to do. There are a lot of Pokémon to be found, for sure, but at this point in the series' lifespan just catching these things isn't enough anymore, and that's literally all there is to do! The game doesn't even force you into trainer battles anymore. There's just a small handful of them in every area, so spread out that you rarely encounter them. There's nothing to see, there are no interesting landmarks to explore, and there are no dynamic events happening. You just go and catch the same Pokémon you've been catching for years, with a smattering of new ones, and that's only if you feel like it, as the game gives no real incentive for catching things anyway. Why would it, after all? This is no longer the "Gotta Catch Em All" franchise.

It's like they started from the baseline of "let's make an open world game" but didn't consider what goes into making an INTERESTING open world game. Instead, it just retrofits the old way of playing Pokémon on top of this new system, with the only major change being the ability to do things in any order, even though you'll still mostly stick to what you're capable of anyway, lest you be severely under-leveled or locked out of certain areas until you acquire new movement abilities. Open-world games kind of work on a hamster wheel, always giving you something to do, something to work towards, something shiny to collect as you make your way through the world, but there's no hamster wheel here. You fight the gyms, you defeat the evil team, you take down big Pokémon with health bars - all stuff that's been in previous games. In between, you're helplessly bored.

Perhaps some of this could have been mitigated with an interesting and diverse region to inhabit, but instead, you're stuck looking at the same five GameCube textured environments the whole way through. There's no sense in wondering what's around the corner because you know nothing will be there anyway. Towns and cities also suffer in this department, as they're purely cosmetic and feel more like fake towns used for nuclear testing purposes than actual lived-in human dwellings. You can't even go in buildings for fuck's sake, one of the most basic staples of an RPG. There are no exciting events, no weird back alleys to get lost in, and absolutely no one interesting to talk to. This is by far the most generic ass world of any game I've ever played. If you're expecting anything as whimsical as Fortree or Laverre City in this generation, you certainly won't find it.

A lot of people have claimed this is a Switch issue; that it's just not powerful enough to create big, detailed open worlds that perform at least reasonably well, but that's such horseshit. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 came out three months ago, guys. It's a perfect comparison to see just what Pokémon could be, but never will. Funnier still are those who claim screenshots of Pokémon that make it look bad are just cherry-picked out of context when you can literally stand in any place in Xenoblade, take a screenshot, and have it filled with some of the most breathtaking visuals you'll see in any game, let alone on the Switch. As a Nintendo fan, I get it, graphics aren't everything, but it's really hard to get immersed in a world with this little effort put into it.

I'm not saying Game Freak needs to make something like Xenoblade or that they need to measure up to the impossible standard that is Monolithsoft, but is it too much to ask for at least some degree of creativity? It's not there, and with this being their fourth major release on the platform now, I think it's safe to say we have a body of evidence that supports that. I used to think Game Freak made their games in a vacuum and that's why they feel so behind the times, but it's actually more like they exist on a planet 10 light years away from Earth, where information about video games a decade ago are only now just getting to them. How else do you explain that they put goddamn enemy base raids into a Pokémon title, the most boiler-plate open-world content you could possibly come up with? Enjoy letting the game play itself for you before fighting the same car five times in a row.

Don't even get me started on the Pokémon or character designs here, which are the absolute worst in a series that has traditionally had some outstanding ones over the years. This new batch of Pokémon feels particularly uninspired, and I wonder if they're genuinely running out of ideas. Hell, they finally added a dolphin Pokémon after all this time and then proceeded to make its evolution the worst atrocity ever committed in these games. Oh, but at least there's a le chonkin' pig Pokémon, another kooky crab Pokémon, and oh yeah, a flamingo Pokémon. They didn't even bother to stylize that one; it's just a flamingo. In what I can only describe as an act of malicious compliance, I proceeded to use this stupid thing throughout the entire game. At least it was useful.

Presentation-wise, it's just as bad, and it feels like there was actually negative effort put into this aspect of the game. Can we get some fucking voice acting already? It's 2022 for fuck's sake. I don't even care if it's bad voice acting, it's still better than what we have now. You can't keep putting musical acts performed by mimes in these games and expect me to get invested in this shit. It further underscores that no matter how far these games have come, no matter how much they try to sell you the illusion of doing something different, it's still just the same dated design philosophy it's always been. They couldn't even be bothered to design cool and unique rooms for each of the Elite Four; you just fight them in a big empty room on a basic battlefield. Way to hype up what should be the culmination of your journey, guys.

That said, I will give credit to one thing, which is the endgame story. Area Zero represents the one genuinely good idea Scarlet and Violet bring to the table, and how your story ultimately coalesces around it is legitimately interesting. It's the most I've ever felt like I was playing a true JRPG in a Pokémon setting since Colosseum, something Game Freak didn't even make. Unfortunately, it's too little too late by that point, and I also can't help but feel that despite how interesting it is, it would have been done even better in the hands of a more competent team. The entire game really should have revolved around this concept instead of surfacing it to you at the 11th hour.

There are also plenty of little things that I haven't covered but honestly don't even care enough to delve deep into, like the new Terastallization gimmick, which hey, if you want to talk about running out of ideas, here you go. I thought Dynamax Pokemon in Sword and Shield were a pretty lazy gimmick, but now make way for crystal hats that change your type. Real thrilling stuff here. There are some nice quality-of-life improvements, like the ability to press one button and instantly use potions to heal your Pokémon, but for some reason, you can't do the same for reviving them or cleansing status conditions, so it comes off as a completely half-baked implementation of what should be a better feature. I can't stand how your map rotates with you, so whenever you open it, you're completely disoriented from where you want to go. The music is awful and sounds like AI-generated approximations of what a Pokémon soundtrack usually sounds like. The new ancient and future variations of certain Pokémon are interesting ideas on paper, but in practice, they just look stupid, and why do these Pokémon have generic descriptions instead of real names? I hate it. I hate so much of this game.

The only saving grace of Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet is that this franchise can no longer hurt me anymore. I stopped caring after Sword and Shield ruined the veneer of what was my favorite series of all time, but in doing so exposed just how shallow and dated these games actually are now. Don't let anyone tell you great ideas are lurking under the game's serious technical problems; this is largely the exact same shit it's always been, and I'm bored with it. The open-world design, the one thing I always thought I wanted for this franchise, turned out to be the game's biggest anchor in terms of enjoyment. They couldn't have missed harder if they tried, and now that they've pulled the trigger on this new style of game and failed, there's really nothing left to be hopeful for. This was their one chance to finally bring this franchise into the present day and make something of it again.

But they didn't. They failed. Please let someone else have Pokémon, because Game Freak will never change, never grow, and never be capable of delivering anything but the most barebones experience possible. It's truly embarrassing at this point. You'd never know it was a game in the highest-grossing media franchise of all-time looking at it. But people keep eating this up, so I guess they're just giving the audience what they want. I guess I'm the crazy one to keep demanding something better for a franchise that deserves it.

Fuck you Ed Sheeran.

Find it so deeply endearing that this work marred in technical limitations and an altogether rushed-ish structure is The Greatest love letter to a very genwunner philosophy, ALL without feeling egregious or pining for nostalgia. Game Freak despite everything loves its fans who can realistically Never Be Happy and makes that practically explicit from sunrise to sunset, and folds that into something new and altogether hopeful for a brighter future and earnest contextualization of its past.

Not tooo strong of one though, at least for me. Character writing is certainly the best here (or at least, toe to toe with Sun and Moon for me), especially from a moment to moment lens. Finale speaks volumes in its own way there, all so personable and defined and really have weight, presence, beautiful relations and chatter. But it also feels far too hesitant to break free of its limitations and that ends up being probably the most annoying part. Legendaries tend to be metaphorical or stand-ins for wide-spreading things in the series but this REALLY is the most "you just couldn't be serious about a heart to heart to be personable with a Pokemon huh." Still for what it's worth it swings as hard as Black/White and Sun/Moon do, just lacks the wherewithal structurally and in execution to get as high as they do. But it is nice to see people gas this up as their "finest hour" because it's not like it's wholly undeserving of that.

Mechanically it's like, we're taking our Legends Arceus prototype open world map (and bits of it structurally) and making it a Red/Blue + If It Was On Unreal Engine. Or in other words, very LARGELY hands off explore at your own pace open world and take in all the fights and sights and feel your journey of ADVENTURE, while having to reel-in that other than a couple cities the "expanse" is rather,,, illusory haha. I remember first touching this and LOSING it at how absolutely amazing the big hub town area is. I even took the classes, I was so into it all. Granted, high off an edible, but that expectation solidified, it felt so good. Unfortunately, literally nothing else in the game's areas capture or get even close to that, bar maybe the last one (which is kind of cheating really).

It is however also the comfiest Pokemon game to date. Extremely relaxing, potent quality of life implementation from top to bottom. Not a single hour feels even a bit wasted or as grindy as anyone's worst memories with this franchise. So easy to pick up and settle in, get cozy with seeing all of what's on offer here...
And as turbo-niche as talking about this game's difficulty may be, I do like how generally designed the leveling curve and fights are too. A couple were super tough checks for me even! Granted it was cuz i built my team a little awfully haha... all of them were Physical hitters ;w; Certainly some "wow that's funny" moments that feel both charming and, well, naturally hilarious. They gave one of the most important fights a literal ace-in-the-hole pokemon build that's INSTEAD sent out close to the start, while making their actual ace-in-the-hole a pokemon that's a SET-UP DESTROYER. Amazing. Well done.

I will say I find myself a bit more smarmy, sarcastic here, mostly cuz things have been hard and I sortttt of lightly pushed through with too much fervor just so a good friend of mine could get their birthday Suicune Raid present. Also cuz this gets a little too gassed up I feel >.> Not from a bad place tho! And who cares what I think there really!!! I'm glad people are having so much fun!!

Still, gives some to chew on, which puts this on an upper echelon for monster collectors in general. I think if you've been away from this series for feeling completely left out of the hyperlinear storyblook palooza, definitely give this a shot. It really is up there with the best Pokemon's put out.

PMD2 still sweeps tho

Divertido e Problematico são as melhores palavras q resume esse jogo
Eu no lancamento desse jogo fiquei indignado com quão mal a Gamefreak lancou esse jogo naquele estado e acabei pegando raiva desse jogo mas umas semanas atras resolvi dar uma chance e acabou se tornando um dos pokemons mais divertidos q joguei a muito tempo
Tirando os aspectos tecnicos ridículos e mal feitos a Gamefreak deu indícios de grande melhora no mundo aberto, deixou vc com total "liberdade" pra jogar da ordem e forma q quiser, a historia e personagens são bem bons
Dito isso tem a pior leva de lendários da franquia toda, não curti nenhum dos apresentados e falta uma coisinha q a Gamefreak sempre esquece, Dublagem, de resto é um jogo muito divertido.

I haven't had this much fun playing a Pokémon game in a while! Once you go through the first two or so hours of story set up, you're pretty much left on your own. I don't play open world games often, so call me easily pleased, but exploring this world was so addictive that I had to intentionally stop myself so that I could actually progress one of the three storylines. Of the three storylines, Arven's was easily my favorite. It's not the deepest or most fleshed out thing, but if story in a Pokémon game can actually make me feel something, then I think that's a job well done. Battles are the same old thing but now with a new gimmick that'll be tossed out when the next mainline game releases. Playing this solidified that I don't really get much out of Pokémon's combat system anymore, but instead catching Pokémon and filling out the Pokédex. This was the first time I went into a Pokémon game almost spoiler free on what new creatures were added, so discovering something new was genuinely exciting. And finally, yes, this game has an extraordinary number of technical issues and glitches. I'm not excusing Game Freak here, but those tiny glitches kind of enhanced my experience? I'm going to remember that Fidough walking on air. Tinkaton is my new favorite Pokémon and Larry is probably the best character Game Freak has ever created.

I have never been so upset by a games media news cycle as I am right now, watching the best Pokemon game in a decade be globally dismissed out of hand because it runs at 27 FPS.

The mere idea that there are thousands if not millions of people putting these Gen 9 games in the same tier as Sword and Shield or even below them, enrages me. Sword and Shield, regardless of "dexit" were clownish, half-baked things that underdelivered on all familiar fronts while fumbling everything they could have had going for them and offering nothing new except a poorly thought out and unexciting battle gimmick and a suite of ok new mons. They were depressing, and marked a franchise in clear decline, taking away far more than they gave.

I still can barely even believe how far we've come from the flat, barren wild area that Sword and Shield launched with. Thousands upon thousands of manhours have been been bled for this open world, and it shows. Every sector of it is rich with denseness and verticality, every mile a joy to explore. Craftable TMs strike a healthy balance between the doomed movepools of Gen 1 and simply teaching Close Combat to every mon in your party in gens 7 or 8 and grants the world an MMO's incentive for farming, a process that is vastly expedited by the auto-battle feature. I do certainly question the wisdom of building Team Star's content around this feature, but not the auspiciousness of its inclusion.

The new Pokemon themselves are a strong showing, though they almost always are.

Unthinkably, the writing for this game is not totally embarrassing. After the total fumbling of Team Flare in Gen 6, the incessant chattering of Gen 7, and the multifaceted catastrophe that was Gen 8's entire script, when the best writing the series had seen was in TEAM PLASMA, a tale with its own host of questionabilities, I had completely surrendered. It was clear to me that Pokemon's writing would definitely always be garbage, and that I was really only here for the multiplayer. Against all odds, Scarlet and Violet have mostly proven me wrong. Dialogue is decently written across the board with actual, well-executed moments of emotional catharsis on occasion, and aside from one pretty forgivable instance, twists are handled so, so much more gracefully than in Gen 8. Nowhere in this game is there a moment where a character sees a self-explanatory tapestry hanging in the back of a KFC and uses it as a springboard to perform her eighth remix of a circular, substanceless conversation. Characters are written believably and likably, and no major story threads become disasters like that of Chairman Rose.

I've even come around on the lack of level scaled content, though it's a little too easy to unknowingly pick a fight in a high level area only to be locked into a trainer battle with something twenty levels above you. Some way of seeing the level banding in game would go a long way. Forgoing level scaling also forgoes level flattening. An avid Elder Scrolls player is likely to tell you that level scaling can get very boring, very quickly. In reality a scaled version of this game would make it harder to find a challenge, not easier. I recommend that you go ahead and look up that level map online and take on the strongest things you think you can handle before putting together a second, lower level party to work through all of the leftovers. All regular trainer battles are fully optional now, so it's quite easy to underlevel yourself on purpose. It actually allows for a good degree of challenge, something that this franchise seemed hell-bent on eradicating until recently. Postgame offerings are pretty average. It's no Emerald or BW2 or HGSS in this regard but it at least has more going on than X and Y, with DLC on the way. Co-op isn't where I'd want it to be as the Union Circle isn't exactly rich in functionality, but at least they're trying it. Having to set a separate link code to battle or trade with somebody already in a group with you is absolutely deranged when you consider that Halo 3 had a perfect, friend-based lobby system back in 2007. This stuff has been figured out for over 15 years, and the PSS from X and Y was already a nearly perfect system. I cannot comprehend this.

I suppose that signals us toward the more negative critiques. While I have taken it upon myself to shout praises from the rooftops in hope of reversing the miserable tide of this discourse, these Gen 9 games are not without sin. We'll talk about the famous one last.

A quick first note: Being locked to school uniforms sucks! Fix it in the DLC!

Terastalization (or however I'm supposed to spell this ridiculous name) is inherently a wildly unpredictable mechanic, and wildly unpredictable mechanics (like dynamax) lack reasonable counterplay. Anything that lacks reasonable counterplay by Smogon's own past reasoning, is uncompetitive... when tournaments aren't open-sheet. If players are able to see their opponents tera types before that button is pressed like they can in VGC (which is doubles so it doesn't even matter as much), almost every problem with the mechanic disappears. There are definitely instances where the system pushes an already powerful mon over the edge, but those can all be dealt with by the community on a case-by-case basis. If it were used less foolishly in the main game, it would be a neat toy for the campaign. That's not the timeline we live in. Every gym leader uses the mechanic almost exclusively to their own detriment by terastalizing their last Pokemon to their gym's type every single time. Usually, all this accomplishes is robbing that Pokemon of an otherwise beneficial second typing and making them vulnerable to the exact same move that you just swept the rest of their team with. In the competitive meta, it more likely means that you're just going to have to take a wild, blind gamble on what that Garganacl's tera type is and whether you can actually hit the one, largely unpredictable weakness that it's left with, or gamble over whether or not this set-up sweeper is going to get the single turn it needs to destroy your entire life. The generational powercreep by the way is out of control this time around. It's less about stats as in previous gens (Dragapult and Regieleki obliterating the use-cases of basically any Pokemon previously considered "fast") and more about outrageous abilities and signature moves. Kingambit, Great Tusk and Gholdengo in particular have unique features so meta-defining that it seems outright foolish not to have all three of them. At time of writing, Great Tusk and Kingambit's usage statistics for last month revealed that both were present on just under 50% of all Showdown OU teams, at 46.949% and 46.043% respectively. Gholdengo was on close to a third of all teams, but he would surely be higher if he weren't competing with Garganacl for that "completely immune to all status moves" slot. Combine the percentages for both of them and they'd take third place. Even in the future when power creeps again, the specific niches of these four Pokemon will not disappear. Unless their abilities are nerfed, they're banned forever, or those capabilities are given to a bunch of other Pokemon in gen 10 (like they did with Unaware this gen) these bastards are here for the rest of our lives. Even worse, as those power metrics shift, we'll just have to deal with Houndstone, Annihilape, Chi-Yu, Chien-Pao, Esparatha, Fluttermane, Palafin, and Iron Bundle. Unless gen 10 also obliterates everything that came before it, the gen 9 Pokemon are going to dominate competitive Pokemon to a suffocating degree for the rest of time.

While we're on this thread about the competitive scene, Scarlet and Violet retain the infernal 20 minute timer enforced by their predecessor despite the united pleas of every prominent voice in the community. While this feels like a monument to stubbornness, and players should absolutely have control over such a timer in their own personal battling, my annoyance with this has subsided upon realizing that this meta has been purposely directed toward explosive offense, and thus matches should be shorter on the whole. If they're going to design the game around the timer like this while mitigating the stall-based filth that ran rampant in Gen 8, well... that's fine by me. There is however, still one giant flaw in this, and it's my biggest complaint about the whole game.

Battles in Scarlet and Violet are glacially, unacceptably slow. This has been an albatross around Pokemon's neck for years, and the achievements of Legends Arceus in this area have been painfully undone. When an opposing Gyarados enters a double battle, the following happens in sequence:

-The "sends out Gyarados" textbox appears and hovers on screen.
-The animation plays where Gyarados enters the field.
-The "Intimidate is happening" textbox appears and hovers on screen.
-An animation plays showing that my partner's attack has dropped.
-The "attack has been lowered" textbox appears and hovers on screen.
-An animation plays showing that my attack has been dropped.
-The "attack has been lowered" textbox appears and hovers on screen.
-If it's the end of the turn and anyone is holding Leftovers or any other item that needs to activate, the animation for that item plays and then the textbox explaining its effect appears after.

This kind of thing NEEDS to be consolidated. Please, for the love of god, show the textboxes WHILE the animations are happening. Show all of the simultaneous stat drops or increases at the same time. I'm begging here. This is exacerbated by the removal of two features that have otherwise been present for literally all of Pokemon's near-thirty year history: Turning off battle animations, and changing the battle style to "set". The former has an obvious effect on the length of battles, while the latter is more of a hindrance to a specific type of player, and by a specific type of player I mean me. As someone who actually participates in Pokemon's PvP, I hate playing on the default "shift" battle style. It erodes the good competitive habit of thinking about switching Pokemon as something that always carries a cost, rather than a free action. For my playthrough of Pokemon Violet, I ignored each and every prompt the game gave me to switch Pokemon after I knocked out an opponent, which gave me yet more textboxes to mash through. More than this I'm annoyed that Game Freak would raise the entry barriers to competitive Pokemon even higher with this removal. It's something that could only have been motivated by stubborn, backwards philosophy, not time, money, or technical constraints. It's deeply frustrating, even if its impact on the overall experience is relatively trivial. These kinds of removals just feel spitefully anti-consumer and I hate them every time.

In what I'm sure will be a great disappointment to many, the catching mechanics of Legends Arceus are gone. Touching a Pokemon once again triggers a traditional battle, wherein they must be caught in the traditional way. I do not take this as a rejection of those mechanics. These games were very clearly developed in parallel, and we'll see the true results of GF's experiment in Generation 10, not here. While that may be a missed opportunity, the real issue becomes apparent when Miraidon and Koraidon are brought into the mix. Pokemon out in the open world are scaled to their canonical, pokedex-ordained sizes, which means that many of them are absolutely tiny. This in turn means that you will accidentally drive over a Salandit who blends perfectly in with the cave floor your traversing and have all momentum stopped dead as you enter a battle you didn't want. In docked mode on a large screen, this is a pretty avoidable through treacherous predicament. In handheld mode, well... god help you. None of this is aided of course, by the pop-in.

Alright, fine... here we are at last. The notorious technical performance of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. First, the games are locked to 30 FPS. This may feel sacrilegious from 2023's doorstep, but it is not uncommon on the Nintendo Switch, a machine that was born underpowered and is rapidly approaching its sixth birthday. More importantly the game does not maintain that 30 FPS, and rarely reaches it at all.

With that said, let me make this plain: No one but the most decadent of PC gamers should reject these games on the basis of performance alone. In my full, thorough playthrough, I suffered exactly one crash. As a player of N64 games and rememberer of Ultra Sun and Moon on the 3DS, I adjusted to the framerate a few hours in and never thought about it again with the exception of the 2 FPS background characters, which I found hilarious. Lighting can be persnickety, but its fickle whims were little nuisance. In terms of bugs I encountered the following:

-Pokemon clipping through walls in narrow tunnels (trivial)
-Being placed into a wall after a battle and falling until the game sent me back to my most recent Pokemon Center (single occurrence, fixed itself)
-Performing poses in the selfie camera freezes your avatar's face in the chosen expression until you manually reset it, potentially making them perpetually sad or unhinged in cutscenes (humorous, harmless, easily fixed)
-In one cutscene my character's arm was continually twitching (harmless, silly)

That's it. That's the list.

When The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, critical darling, normie favorite, and holder of a 94/100 score on Metacritic released in 2011, I encountered so many progression blocking, quest breaking bugs in the first few days that I had to look up how to use the developer's console to try and fix my quest log myself. In the end I just started over. Pokemon Violet currently holds a 76 on Metacritic. Pokemon Sword sits at an 80.

I've seen a tweet with video from this game where the player throws a pokeball at a target, and the framerate plummets as the game rebuilds the whole scene around the ball from scratch, taking a truly awkward amount of time. The tweet says "the entire game is like this." I had this experience exactly twice across more than 40 hours. This is the kind of outright stonefaced lying that is taking place around this game. It's disgusting. Stop.

If you're going to make fun of Scarlet and Violet, the technical performance should only be one of a thousand complaints. Talk about how miserable the process of tera raiding is. Talk about how the impressive-looking puzzle dungeons that were once our gyms have now been replaced with featureless identical boxes that just direct us back outside to do some absolutely pathetic minigame that one guy probably threw together in an afternoon. Talk about how GameFreak habitually removes gameplay options like the ability to turn off the EXP Share or use the Set battle style, seemingly just out of pure, baseless spite. Talk about how Dexit fundamentally damages several of the series core pillars and disrupting the franchises whole appeal, and how there is currently NO place, AT ALL where players can use all of their Pokemon for literally anything. Talk about how YES, actually we DO want a Battle Frontier, VERY BADLY.

And then while you're at it, talk about how this new non-linear direction plays to all of the series strengths by facilitating the player's ability to make their own, personal story, set their own challenges, and tailor to their individuality. Talk about how the story is one of the series best and how your Pokemon can once again finally follow you around the overworld outside of their Pokeballs at a speed that might even be able to keep up with you. Talk about how the optionality of trainer battles and random encounters means that you no longer have to slog through route after route as an overly linear series of battle hallways.

Scarlet and Violet, together with Legends Arceus, give me hope. Pokemon is still many miles from what I want it to be (an enormous live-service game that cares about its multiplayer) but I have been without that hope for a long time. I have not been completely satisfied with a Pokemon game since Generation 5... half of Pokemon's life ago. Gen 6 was exciting and I had a great time with it, but it left me wanting so much more. Gen 7 felt like it existed only to sell me plastic toys. Gen 8 felt like it no longer cared about anything at all. Shortly before Gen 9's announcement, I made up a Word document that I named "How to fix Pokemon." In that document, I asked for Animal Crossing New Horizon's style of drop-in, drop-out co-op multiplayer. I asked for following Pokemon. I asked for a Battle Frontier. I asked for MMO-styled open zones with cities and gyms in their center. I asked for the gyms to be gauntlet affairs that locked the player in and forbade them from hitting up the Pokemon Center after every opponent. I asked for the gyms to be leveled quite highly when a player first arrives, thus encouraging them to either fight totally optional trainer battles in the surrounding area and scavenge for supplies, or to buckle down and use some actual strategy.

I definitely did not get everything that I wanted from that list... but I actually got a lot of it, and that has to count for something. I'll be honest. If gen 10, which coincides with Pokemon's 30th anniversary and will almost definitely be harnessing the power of Nintendo's next machine is not another large, bold step forward... I'll be done. If gen 10 comes and goes as a low-effort contractually obligatory afterthought, devoid of pomp or circumstance, then I'm taking it as my offramp. That said... based on this and Legends Arceus, I believe that we're going where we need to go... if a bit slower than I would like.

ANOTHER EDIT: The DLC is legitimately great and makes me so excited for the future.

I have never been into Pokémon, I was the person who was mystified by other people's obsession with it as a kid, as everyone around me grew up playing Pokémon Crystal and Emerald, I simply watched. I got into RPGs through games like Dragon Quest VIII on the Playstation 2 so by the time I tried to play them later in life I wasn't impressed, Pokémon's brand of monster collecting RPGs wasn't for me, I thought, and I'd rather be playing Dragon Quest Monsters or SMT if I wanted a fix of that.

Not that long ago I gave Pokémon Red a shot and I found it interesting from a historical perspective, as it's a game that heavily borrows from older RPGs in terms of structure, you can see games like DQ3 influencing how it was designed, but I found it that, mearly interesting, as a game it was just fine. I felt similar with Emerald when I played it last year, it's a fine game that I didn't actually connect with on a personal level any deeper than "it's kinda fun in the moment to moment".

This game, Pokémon Violet, is the first time I have actually connected with a game on this franchise on any level deeper than that. Not only is the gameplay much improved but I actually like the cast of characters and exploration that the more open formula gives it. The game is buggy but I didn't really care aside from the occasional funny visual glitch. I was invested and I was having fun, meeting all these characters and building my team, which is something I seldom engaged with in previous games, I just didn't feel the games were compelling enough to bother. I know some older fans may disagree but since I've never liked Pokemon mostly 1 vs 1 combat system (I thought it was something we better left as an archaic remnant in games like Dragon Quest 1) I think sharing experience with your entire team is a really good move that the newer games do, it incentivizes me to actually use all my Pokémon more, and since I can't have a "in battle party" like in most RPGs, I see my entire team as my "active party" and as such all of them gaining experince feels fair to me.

Anyway. I don't actually have that much to say about it, it was more of a catalogue of my personal story with these games than a review. Good game. I love Penny.

What a strange experience. Violet is riddle with bugs, looks average, is unfinished in areas, and yet I thoroughly enjoyed it. Pokemon over the past year has finally ventured into new territory and it’s paying dividends. They are throwing some great ideas into play and with a bit of polish this could have been one of my favourite games ever. It’s not all great, I didn’t enjoy the star bases all too much and there is literally no reason to fight normal trainers. Pokemon are also difficult to spot depending on their size if you are on Miraidon, and also issues with render distance.

Having said that, Area Zero is one of the best areas I have ever played in a game, they excelled with its presentation and it helped the end portion of the game go out with a bang. It’s things like this, and Arven’s entire plotline that really helped this game as it helped make the game feel new, and stray away from the usual tried and tested formula.

Pokemon mainline finally feels competent for the first time in years and I’m genuinely looking forward to the inevitable DLC and future titles.

Pokémon Scarlet/Violet is a missed opportunity for The Pokémon Company. The game is what many fans have dreamed of for the past 10 years, but it falls short in several aspects. We're talking about a game with so many problems that it's difficult to overlook the positives.

For years, fans have been clamoring for an open-world Pokémon game. When the franchise transitioned from portable Nintendo consoles to the Switch, we thought it was finally happening. However, our hopes were dashed when Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee and Sword/Shield were released with a more traditional approach. So when we first caught a glimpse of Scarlet/Violet, it felt like a dream come true.

It was developed to be the next big thing in the Pokémon franchise. The freedom it offers, allowing players to choose their next objective, is a refreshing experience. This newfound liberty, combined with new objectives like battling against Titans and enemy team bases, brings a much-needed sense of innovation to the franchise.

Unfortunately, the game's performance is a major drawback. And what a drawback it is... The game suffers from numerous performance issues, with frequent FPS drops below 25fps. The resolution also fluctuates between 1080p and 720p.

This game needed another year of development to become the most important game in the franchise. As it stands now, with its performance issues, it's more enjoyable to play the older games.

It's ridiculous that, even after 7 months, we still don't have a patch to address the most noticeable issues. It seems like Game Freak and The Pokémon Company don't care about the fans, and their main focus is fulfilling their generation agenda and make money.

Should you give Pokémon Scarlet/Violet a chance? Absolutely not! Your money is too precious to be given to a company like that!

It is both refreshing and damning that the game had to relinquish most of its control in favour of the player in order for a pokemon game to have good pacing

On replay a few months down the line from release, with an all bug team for added challenge, I am kind of astonished just how much this game works for me in ways that the other entries in the series (which I have been playing since I was 10 years old) kinda dont. Part of it is the novelty certainly, I have replayed Fire Red, Platinum and Emerald far too much to enjoy them without some insane challenge run condition.

I am almost hesitant to admit how much I credit the enjoyment of this game to its transition to an open world format when this very trend has become fairly tiresome in contemporary videogames, ruining the appeal of previously strictly linear and tightly designed games in favour of a miopic "bigger = better" attitude.

But it really is the case here! And on replay I think I have realised why in ways that are quite damning to the franchise. First and foremost : praise be to whomever decided to make trainer battles optional. I hadnt realized just how much of my playthroughs of these games are slowly sapped of energy by the insistence of forcing you to fight boring, slow, uninteresting battles in sequence. There is nothing to them! Admittedly I think most fan games go too far in the opposite direction, making even early game teams be squads of 6 perfect IV mons with all sitrus berries to make everything even more drawn out. They do however at least recognize that there is a problem in need of fixing! And yes, I do know that pokemon is a childrens franchise but this isnt even a matter of difficulty really.

Another thing that the open world rid of random encounters in favour of overworld ones is just how much it enhances the core appeal of inhabiting a sort of monster safari, the interactions between pokemon and humans are admittedly underexplored but they make up for it in a sort of documentary naturalism that was lost in the originals for me. Its hard to explain why. But the inherent abstraction and separation of battle and gameworld in the previous games (I havent played gen 6 or much of 7) made it harder for that to really sink in, especially cause the way the games were built made me view the pokemon in wild areas as mostly purely mechanical i.e exp, items etc. This carries over a bit especially with the autobattle mechanics and associated grinding of pokemon loot drops for TMs (lets not even get in to the implications).

I'll give an example : in gen 5 there is a sewer the game forces you to go into for story progression, in it there are random encounters with zubats, grimers etc. What did I think about this when I played this section? Nothing, I was there for a checklist, grind exp, defeat a rocket grunt, maybe catch a good pokemon if it randomly appeared (this was not likely as stronger and rarer pokemon had low odds of appearing) and thats it, leave and never come back. Hell, I might buy some repels to minimize how many encounters I got.

Compare this to an experience I had in pokemon Violet when I was exploring at night after a team star raid and spotted bright spotlights in the distance, reminiscent of the lucky 38 in New Vegas. I traveled near it, catching pokemon along the way and battling 0 trainers. As I got near to the bright and bustling metropolis I spotted some items near the coastal outskirts of the city, which is seemingly partly built on a platform above the water level. There were a whole bunch of grimer everywhere! "Hmm, wow I guess the sheer amount of energy this city needs creates a bunch of pollution huh?" I thought. Thats the experience that pokemon SHOULD be all about, but imo has never been able to fully deliver.

The soundtrack is excellent and now seemingly the most glaring technical flaws have been ironed out (the game didnt crash, huzzah). On a second playthrough the story is a bit less interesting and still only good by pokemon's abysmal standards but other than the clunky team star storyline the rest of the game is convincing in this aspect. A note on rivals in pokemon : theyre all bad except for Nemona, I will not be accepting questions at this stage. Well, the first rival is okay in what he was meant to do, and N was a... good effort attempt? At what that story was trying to do but honestly I think Hugh is more compelling.

Anyways, see yall when the DLC drops, maybe.

Pokémon Violet and Scarlet are the first great Pokémon games since Black 2 and White 2.

Right before Thanksgiving Break, my kindergartener brought COVID home with her. We're all boosted so it hasn't been anything serious, but we've all been sick since right after Violet's release. It has definitely sucked having the whole family sick during a holiday break, but I couldn't have asked for a better game to spend the past week and a half with.

Due to being off work sick (thank goodness for COVID PTO), I was able to put nearly 60 hours into Pokémon Violet in the first 10 days of its release. For whatever reason, when I'm sick, I normally can't just play one game all day. I always end up trying a bunch of different things. But Violet hooked me the way that no game has since Breath of the Wild.

The best Pokémon games (as far as I'm concerned) are the ones that nail that sense of adventure I felt when I played Blue Version for the first time in 1998. As the series has gone on, new generations have grown increasingly linear and hand-holdy. Sword and Shield had a map that was effectively a straight line, as if they had taken inspiration from the absolute worst board in the entire Mario Party franchise. Sun and Moon created a great world, but strictly limited where you were able to go. Pokémon X & Y famously stopped you from going through certain parts of Lumiose City due to a "blackout". All of these games lacked a sense of agency. You've always been able to pick whatever team you want, sure. But when a set path is enforced, you can only get so much variety into those 6 slots. This is why VS (Scarvi? Vioscar? I have no idea what the joint name will be for these two) taking place in a legitimate open-world setting makes all the difference.

The joy of exploration instantly washed away my disappointment with SwSh. THIS is the Pokémon adventure I'd been wanting for so long! The early inclusion of the box legendary as an improved bike was genius, ensuring that you're able to begin exploring wherever you'd like from the get-go. I played for 3 or 4 hours before I even entered Mesagoza, catching at least one of everything I encountered and exploring as far as I could in every direction. Throughout the dozens of hours that would follow, I was often impressed and sometimes overwhelmed by just how many Pokémon were on-screen at any given point. I'm obviously not saying this was impressive from a technical standpoint, but having completely removed random encounters and replaced it with a buffet where you can actually see every Pokémon you could run into made me absurdly happy. It's a bit of a shame that they didn't keep Arceus's throw-a-ball-anytime catching mechanics, but this is a perfectly enjoyable middle ground. I've encountered and caught two shinies thus far, and being able to see them in the overworld instead of just looking for sparkles in a random encounter made those moments more engaging than any shiny I'd caught in a previous game. (BTW if anyone wants a shiny Gallade, hit me up in the Backloggd Discord, I'm not crazy about this thing) Constant items to pick up were great for a DK64-pilled brain like mine, and the ability to send my little buddies out to genocidally auto-battle hordes of Skiddo into oblivion never got old. I do have to say that while I love the idea of using materials to craft TMs in theory, I've only actually crafted like 3 of them so far. Maybe I'll get more into it in the post-game!

The different rewards for the three different types of badges and challenges were great. Deciding what to do next became less about whatever was nearby and more about "Hmm do I want to upgrade Miraidon's riding abilities next, or do I want higher-level Pokémon to listen to me first? More TMs might be nice though", and I really appreciated having an actual motivation for going after those goals beyond just checking stuff off a list. The only issue I had with any of this was that there's no EXP gained from the Team Star raids. That felt like a rather stingy omission.

Besides checking the "Adventure" box, Pokémon lives or dies with its new monsters. And Gen IX easily has the goofiest batch we've ever gotten. (Some spoilers in this paragraph for Pokémon descriptions if you're going in blind and haven't played yet) I laughed out loud when my Tandemaus evolved from two mice hanging out into four mice hanging out. I felt hilariously conflicted when Dunsparce FINALLY got an evolution, and it was... that. There's a dung beetle! A dead puppy! A dolphin superhero! A cute pink baby thing with a giant hammer! A Godzilla that's even more Godzilla than Tyranitar was! An entire car! And most importantly, the Fire/Grass spicy pepper Pokémon I've literally been wishing for since like 2009! Clodsire and Annihilape are some of the best "new evolutions added to an old Pokémon" designs we've ever had. And these PARADOX MONS you guys. This is the one bit where Scarlet has a bit of an advantage over Violet, as I don't think Robot Delibird or Pokemon Rumble U Hydreigon are anywhere near as cool as Great Tusk or Roaring Moon, but they're all wins in my book.

Lastly, to touch on the ending with out any spoilers, I don't think any other Pokémon game has stuck the landing like Scarlet and Violet have. The three different story paths all converge for the climax in a way that 100% worked for me. SwSh were probably the worst offenders for having the game just fizzle out at the end, so the contrast here is night and day. (I considered a Sun and Moon joke here, but couldn't get it to not sound hokey) There are legitimate characters here that I actually cared about, and their involvement in the post-game has got me excited to take on the new challenges the game presented after I rolled credits.

The big question on my mind now is how Terastylizing is going to affect VGC. I hated Dynamaxing in my main playthrough of SwSh, but it ended up being one of the best, most balanced mechanics the competitive side has ever had. I'm so intrigued to see how players change their types to flip the metagame on its head!

I am elated by this new direction for main-series Pokémon. My playthrough was thankfully not affected by any glitches other than superficial visuals, but I still can't wait to see what they can do if they manage to get literally any kind of technical expertise into Game Freak!

EDIT 12/18/22: After 86 hours and change, I've 100%ed this game. Every trainer has been beaten. Every Pokemon Center prize obtained. Each teacher quest completed. Every final exam passed. All TMs acquired. I had completed the Pokedex right after I rolled credits, but now I'm finally done. What a killer game.

But I spent AT LEAST 8 hours just trying to get Sweet Herba Mystica from raids for Mr. Saguaro!!! GAH

(8-year-old's review, typed by his dad)

This was a lot better than I expected. I chose the duck Pokemon and I named him "Water Bottle", and he is now a Quaxwell. And my favorite part was when I couldn't catch a Bonsly, I was too high-leveled and it took me like five tries. All the Bonslys were like level 5 or 7, and my guys were all like level 20 and I kept on fainting the Bonslys!

And I'm doing a challenge, where I cannot make TMs and I have to catch one of every Pokemon and give it a hilarious nickname. I caught a Tauros and named it Tourist, cuz like when tourists come to places, they make a big mess, like there are some buildings that have gotten tourist-trampled and that's why I named it Tourist, cuz it's a bull and bulls, like, stomp on a bunch of things. The other one might have to be TufferThanYu, my Igglybuff, and I called my Lechonk "HeOinksAlone" but in my opinion the most funniest one is "Eeeewwww". That's what I named the Oinkologne. It didn't evolve, I caught another one. But- And the most funniest part was where I traded a level 6 Scatterbug for a level 54 Frosmoth!

I’d call myself the most casual of Pokémon fans; big into it as a kid who was the perfect age to get in on the ground floor of this Whole Thing, but after gen 3 and bar a brief but frenetic romhack phase in my late teens, I’ve settled into the kind of distantly pleasant relationship with the series where I pick up each new game and have a good time playing through to credits but then never touch or think about them again, and repeat every two years. I couldn’t tell you the names of most new guys, but I CAN see a picture of them and go damn, that’s a cute critter. Casual. So no one was more surprised than me when Pokémon Violet turned out to be not only my favorite Pokémon game easily and by far, but one of my favorite games this year?? I play a lot of games man, and mostly bangers too.

A big big part of this accomplishment is that Pokémon has finally cracked the code on writing, like really for real this time. I know Pokémon guys like to talk about gen V and I am even a gen Whatever Sun and Moon Were liker for the stuff those go for at the end but there is simply nothing as consistently and thoroughly well done in this series before now and certainly not on the scale we see here. Every single person pops with huge personality, and for the first time those personalities are supported by like, stories that while not REVOLUTIONARY are certainly a tier above the stock standard baby anime tropes we’ve seen in the past. Hearing that Team Star were like the what, third antagonist group in a row who were a spin on Misunderstood Waylaid Youths had me groaning at first but their stories and motivations land! There is nuance in the laying out of their situation, there is acknowledgment that institutions in power and authority, especially over children, can and do fail to care for them and also are able to accept responsibility. Arven is a great little guy, firmly in the “wanna stick him in a little glass bottle and shake it up” tier. A potent blend of condescending and pathetic with a genuinely deserved chip on his shoulder at the way his life has turned out. And I’ll acknowledge that it’s because I have a chronically (and someday probably sooner than later it will become terminally) ill cat who has been having a really bad month, but his scenes really hit for me and I extremely cried near the resolution of his story.

The idea that a Pokémon game can have that power over me is only possible because Game Freak’s writers have subtley but definitely expanded the scope of maturity in how they treat the world of Paldea compared to previous games. Arven’s story fundamentally cannot work without acknowledgment of violence, real violence outside of the context of Pokémon battles – of death and dying, active dying that is happening now and happening TO us rather than in abstract stories of ancient struggles. This sort of thing is evident everywhere you look in Paldea. The Pokémon League isn’t the centerpiece of your life or anyone else’s, even the people who work for it; and they DO work for it, in an employment capacity. But there’s a distinct feeling that it’s not in its heyday even if it’s still a Big Deal. Almost every single gym leader does this as more of a side gig than their whole thing, and sometimes they’re not around or there’s an implication that these events have to be scheduled around their availability to some degree. Gym tests are based on the local town culture more often that they are on hard battle prowess and those cultures are a much greater and more foregrounded part of the town identities. When you get to the Elite Four finally, the building has two rooms that you get to see, a sort of lobby foyer where you’re interviewed with a classic gray office carpet floor pattern that every American desk drone knows intimately, and the single battle arena that everyone shares. It’s a much more realistic take on the idea than everyone having a giant customized zone within a huge tower or something. Everyone stays to watch after you beat them. It’s more informal but it’s been formalized. Even though you can’t walk into everyone’s houses anymore Paldea feels so much more like a real place where people live than any other region.

In keeping with this new emphasis on storytelling both explicit and implicit, Violet rewards role playing. Sure, you’re a kid in a magical world on a fantasy school assignment with completely free reign to stop about the country at your leisure, but you’re allowed and encouraged to like, go to class also! And if you’re pacing them out you unlock a handful of classes as you hit major milestones in the game’s three concurrent storylines. These vary in usefulness and the degree of information you learn from them is extremely fucked up lmao, like this is the first time I can think of that Pokémon explicitly explains a LOT of the underlying mechanics that are going on beneath the simple surface of the menus but these explanations are meted out mostly in a math class that you won’t see all of for 80% of the game it’s very funny. I don’t know that these are for actually learning anything, they’re all flavor, and I think it was incredibly brave of Game Freak to ferret away like eight or nine completely fleshed out unique NPCs in the school, only two of whom you would ever even see after the tutorial if you weren’t coming back for all this completely optional shit. There’s even a social link system separate from the classroom stuff! The school nurse has a series of social link cutscenes and she doesn’t even TEACH a class! There’s your math teacher, right, and via some hints in dialogue and her character design you can figure out that she is a retired gym leader and she used rock type Pokémon and she is the sister of the current gym type leader before any of this is told to you and you can DO THIS because she has geometric shaped hair, geode-themed jewelry, her name scheme fits her sister’s, and in one of her classes she name drops specific moves in her examples. There is simply a degree of care here that may not be particularly DEEP but is deeply REWARDING to engage with, if you’re willing to engage with it.

I also find Violet to be a quite beautiful game, beyond the way it stylishly makes use of a lot of smart 2D assets and cleverly implemented recycled animations to paper over places where it’s clear development was rushed and there wasn’t time to finish or polish everything (the food eating cutscenes are charming and incredible I don’t make the rules!). If the Galar region felt a little generic in the styles of the environments, Paldea has it beat in two important ways: first by having a more creative set of locales to trudge through, including things like wildflower rich stream beds, misty lakes, spindly cliffs, and bamboo groves among others. These unique little treat areas do a lot to separate out the expected plains and deserts and snowy mountains and make things feel less monotonous. It’s always a treat to wander into somewhere pretty and special, and to see which Pokémon are thoughtfully placed to live in them. The second way Paldea marks itself as the better of Game Freaks 3D environment outings is that the terrain is just generally more varied. I was a little worried to hear about “entire game world wild area” because frankly the wild areas kind of sucked ass??? Like it was cool to run around and catch guys at will but I found the more authored routes in Sword and Shield ultimately more compelling even if I couldn’t just go catch a Flapple or whatever anytime. Here though, even when you are just running up the grassy plains there’s always a LOT going on in terms of mountains and trees and elevation – no two areas feel truly the same even when they’re the same biome. This makes the game world feel more like a place even as it cleverly routes the player roughly along only a few pathways to see most of the leveled content in a more or less proper order without compromising the ultimately nonlinear nature of the game.

I wanna give a special shoutout to Area Zero, the secret fucked up super big crater that occupies the center of the map and is where the last bit of story content in the game takes place after you’ve finished your initial three threads. It ties everything that’s cool about this game together really well. As you descend into this harsh and dangerous zone you may quickly realize that it’s the only place in the game where your minimap isn’t active and why would it be, Area Zero isn’t mapped. The music is sedate and uncanny, and when it breaks for battle it’s weird and anxious. The Pokémon here are weird ones, or rare ones, or fully evolved ones, or, at least on the very top levels, ones that can fly in and out of the crater’s rim. The Pokémon you find will become stranger the deeper you go. There’s an otherworldly shimmer in the air, and the twinkles mimic the ones that outside the crater indicate an item to pick up on the ground; here they trick and disorient you. It’s the only place in the game where your constant companion, the legendary on your box cover, won’t come out of their ball, which leaves you without a mount, so no bike, no jump, no glide, no easy way out of the crater. The distance feels huge when you have to hoof it. You bring the protagonists of each of the other three stories in the game with you on the trip and while it’s delightful to see them all interact with each other (it would have been TRAGIC for this to have not happened) it also reveals more about them even this late in the game; Nemona, my favorite character in the game for being a fucking freak ass weirdo who loves blood more than anything, in unimpeachably cheerful and energetic but when you see her out of her element in the Pokémon League circuit she’s revealed to have a hard time relating to other people outside of her one interest, and kind of generally rude and thoughtless with their feelings. Penny gets to show herself to be deeply empathetic towards and protective of others in a more proactive way than in her own story but she’s also harsh and quick to anger in doing so. Arven is the true protagonist of the game and its emotional burden rests with him, and his mask cracks the most. So ultimately you get a small sad story about the ways families can fail each other and these three awkward kids who bond through one pretty fuckin bad day and it’s like, y’know it’s good! There is a lot of cool stuff here.

Nobody is more surprised than me! Truly! I have always basically liked Pokémon but I’ve never been ENTHUSIASTIC. It’s just that this one did a lot of inacore stuff, gave me a bone with a lot of meat to chew on just to my tastes, and when you slap that on top of Pokémon's general play which is rock solid as ever, and what I feel is a real nailing down of the open world side of things this time? I dunno man, I think they really knocked this one out of the park.

I have so many problems with these games.
Why do pokemon immediately battle me coming right out of another battle?
Why are the Team Star raids just spam R until you win in a minute?
Why is the open world so unmemorable? Name ANYTHING interesting from this open world. There is nothing of value here, it's an open world without anything interesting to visit.
Why is set battle removed?
We are 9 generations in, and no voice acting?
The games are mindlessly easy. EXP candies are a fucking joke.
You can't go into the buildings in towns.
There are customization options but you cannot edit your clothes besides 4 school outfits like wtf lol.
The school is only teleporting to rooms and not freely explorable like how much time did you not have to dedicate to that?
There is no level-scaling, so what is the point of doing something in your own order if your pokemon will disobey you if you dont do the gyms?
And why are the games so mindlessly slow? The UI is slow. The battles are slow. The overworld lets go is slow and poorly optimized, nothing in these games scream "polished" in their gameplay.
Tera types are also a shit gimmick I truly think they are wasted potential.
And on top of all of those problems, there are consistent graphical and technical problems that plague this game that genuinely gives me headaches.
The game has some redeeming qualities though. I really did like the Arven and Team Star admin storylines, with Team Star I guess being my favorite pokemon team due to how fleshed out their admins are.
There are good concepts in this game, but they are buried beneath so many shitty issues I regret coming back to the mainline games. I only played Shining Pearl for my brother who needed someone to play with while he had covid, and I only bought this game to play alongside him and my twin brother. But as this stands, these games are not something I ever want to replay, and the most miserable game experience I played this year. However, there is room to grow, and if pokemon could ever get more time in the oven, this could be better.

It’s no secret that modern Pokémon games are often regarded as unfinished or unpolished, especially this one. However, I believe the main reason many prefer previous Switch entries, despite Violet being objectively a “bigger game”, is the vibe of its open world.

In Scarlet/Violet, exploring the world essentially boils down to “going from Town A to Town B” as indicated on the map. It truly feels like there isn't much to discover in between, rendering the travel experience somewhat lifeless. Once gym badges are acquired, there’s no longer any reason to walk around and seek out new locations.

In Arceus, the game centers around all the new catching mechanics. Players are not only encouraged but also rewarded for exploring and discovering new ecosystems of species. There are numerous memorable locations. Plus, it’s fun how every Pokémon around rushes towards you with the intent to murder you. All of this accompanied by tranquil background music reminiscent of Breath of the Wild's style. It’s just a vibe.

I also believe that the exposition should be dialed down in future installments. So often was I almost having fun exploring Paldea, only to be interrupted by a random call on my Rotom phone delivering a dull 2-minute speech about exposition I had already heard from several other characters.

On the positive side, the new towns are really well designed. Additionally, some of the newly introduced mechanics, like the auto-battles, bring a cool element to the gameplay. Finally, I also liked some aspects of the story.

Nevertheless, I’m just a man trying to enjoy a game for kids. Please make Pokémon great again.

changed the rating from 8/10 to 7/10 to reflect my thoughts on the game after about a week since i've finished it

pokemon scarlet and violet are the ninth generation of pokemon games and the third set of entirely new games set in 3d. following the mediocre and unfinished x and y, the unexpectedly good sun and moon, and the disappointing and ultimately hollow sword and shield, my hopes for scarlet and violet were not high, even if legends arceus felt like a step in the right direction. pokemon moon is one of my favorite pokemon games and counting the hoenn remakes, they pokemon company managed to make my top 2 pokemon games back to back during the 3d era but at the same time, the other two new generation titles released since the jump to 3d are without a doubt my least favorite games in the series.

well, i'm happy to say that scarlet and violet are fun pokemon games and aren't offensively terrible! the game certainly has issues, however. the story is largely unremarkable until the 4th story segment (which is probably some of the best pokemon content we've gotten since sun/moon) and arven is the only interesting character out of the 3 main rivals, but he's great enough to carry the entire game narratively and character wise. the main champion in this game is also very uninteresting and probably my least favorite after diantha.
visually the game is very okay, it doesn't look spectacular but it's certainly nicer looking than something like legends arceus or sonic frontiers. there's a lot of fps issues though, the game will sometimes struggle to keep a solid 30 seemingly out of nowhere and NPCs in the world will move at staggeringly lower framerates to everything else, it's really odd. i can't complain too much because the pokemon company's last outing on switch is easily their ugliest game so there is definitely an improvement but i think the lighting engine especially could've used just a bit more time in the oven.
you also can't rematch the elite 4 or champion which is an incredibly weird choice but i guess it makes sense because of paldea's weird pokemon league. the gym challenges weren't particularly fun either, but they haven't really been fun since alola's trials utterly outclassed them back in gen 7. it feels like they're just gyms for the sake of it now and for the last two gens they've just been tacking the challenges on just to say they're there. progression was also a bit odd, i found myself not really knowing where to go every now and then because paldea's round shape makes it hard to discern which direction is going to follow a sensible level curve, but this could've been fixed by team star and the gyms having different teams based on your number of badges (of which there is a badge for each type, something i think is really fun) or just having a more well designed region in terms of layout.
the tm crafting system also kind of blows if only because you are left to completely guess what random creature you need to harass in the wild for the ingredients and i ended up just not using the tms often like i would in the games before they became infinite.

the last negative i really have to touch on before i get into singing this game's praises is that character customization is utterly gutted, and as a result ultimately pointless. you are limited to a selection of four color locked and ultimately boring uniforms that are easily the worst default outfits any player character has had in the series' almost 26 year long run. i would rather look like nate from black 2 white 2 than wear these fucking awful uniforms, and you should never force your player to wish they looked like nate from pokemon black 2 white 2. gamefreak is, however boasting the most customization options in any pokemon game! sadly this is all fluff and ultimately pointless. you get a ton of facial customization options and the hair isn't locked to gender anymore which is great! but you also have to keep in mind that the game is open world and free camera the entire time, so you are literally only ever going to see the back of your head for 90% of the game.
outside of the face/hair options, there's a pretty standard amount of shoes/gloves/hats/bags and the addition of.. phone cases. lovely. they come in a pretty wide assortment of colors but so few colors actually go well with "lavender + violet" or "ugly light blue + orange" that it's utterly pointless to have included at all. everyone is going to end up looking so similar because so few of the clothing options actually look good that it was genuinely pointless to even keep character customization in this entry. you can make the argument that it's because you are in a school but 1.) no one actually likes wearing school uniforms in real life, 2.) you spend most of your time in the game outside of the shool, and 3.) there are literally other characters who either just don't wear uniforms or modify theirs even if the latter get reprimanded a bit near the end of the story. it's utterly bizarre why they just completely gutted the one feature that set 3d pokemon apart from the (mostly superior) 2d games in a game that boasts freedom and doing things your way.
it's honestly the biggest issue i have with this game because at least in swsh and xy, when those games were boring, i could at least take pleasure in the fact that i was playing as my trainer and expressing that through the customization, but now when i'm bored i also have to stare at the stupidest looking kid in any of these games and it's just annoying.

now that i've gotten the negatives out of the way, there is a lot i have nice to say about these games.
first and most importantly, the 9th generation of pokemon introduces one of the best dexes of new designs, being my absolute favorite behind legends arceus and on the same level as gen 2 for me. so many absolutely great designs, especially the paradox forms introduced later in the game. roaring moon is an absolute new favorite, and kingambit is fucking amazing (and hopefully people will realize that the bisharp line were based on shogi/mountain bandits/samuari and never had anything to do with chess because of him). the quartet of 4 legendaries is also the best sub-legendaries we've gotten since the regi trio in gen 3, it's fucking great. i could make teams entirely out of the new designs introduced in gen 9 and not be disappointed in any of my choices. like any dex there's two or three i'm not too big on, but the bangers go so hard that it's incredibly negligible to me.
outside of the new pokemon, the new characters are also incredibly solid. the gym leaders are pretty hit and miss (kofu and larry especially are some of my new all time favorites though, larry is great) but the elite 4 is probably the best elite 4 other than unova, they all have a lot of character and are fun even if the way they show up throughout your story is pretty boring and standard. the teachers at your academy are also really fun and make sitting through a system that's just blatantly supposed to evoke feelings of modern persona more enjoyable. outside of your school and the pokemon league, the team star admins are probably my favorite set of admins in the series. team skull and guzma are still better in terms of "evil team that isnt really evil" but the star admins are all at the very least interesting, with the really good ones being really fun. an obvious and definite improvement over the abyssmal team yell.
arven as mentioned previously is also just one of the best rivals in the series. imagine hugh without the edginess and stupidity of his arc and you've got a rough idea of arven. probably the only rival in the series who actually feels like your friend, it made me smile every time he called me his little buddy and his battle theme is probably the best one in this game.
in terms of the soundtrack, it's pretty good. there's a few really good themes (arven and penny both have really good battle themes) and the worst ones are forgettable at best. this does kinda suck though because the elite 4 theme is one of the more forgettable ones. before the first patch it would just loop the intro of the song infinitely which is really funny to me.

the entire game i feel like is a very firm 7/10, but then after wrapping up all of your story routes, after reaching the champion rank, disbanding team star, and collecting the herba mystica, you are tasked with entering the great crater of paldea. i won't spoil anything because it's one of the most enjoyable parts of the game but i love it to death. you get a lot of dialog between your entire set of rivals and you all feel like a rag tag friend group, if one mostly held together by your presence. the final boss is also really fucking cool and i enjoy it a lot, even if there technically isn't an overarching antagonist or apocalypse scenario it's done really well. the story also gets weirdly deep and personal and even tragic for a pokemon game, it's enough to bring the game up to a firm 7.5/10, or a very low 8 for me. celestial by ed sheeran being the credits song does kind of take a lot of the wind out from under the finale's sails of enjoyment and excitement though, i don't want to be too preachy about my music taste but he's one of the least interesting musicians i've heard on the radio in years and him being in pokemon is lame as hell. i can't even describe how quickly i muted my switch and put on something else while his garbage played.

overall, pokemon scarlet and violet are very solid first steps toward a direction for the series that i think will ultimately prove beneficial to the franchise while also finally justifying the leap into the 3d that had felt like a pointless downgrade up until now. i imagine with DLC, this could easily be one of the best games in the entire series, especially with hints towards new paradox forms and teasing towards mega evolution coming back and a "return" to the area in kalos we never got to explore in gen 6. just for the love of christ game freak, give us back the character customization.

also there is no fucking way anyone actually believes gen 8 was better than these games. gen 9 is buggy and isn't optimized but even when swsh runs perfectly they are still the worst pokemon games lmfao

Pokémon goes open-world! You can travel through most of the world seamlessly, and the creatures are visible everywhere. This is the actualization of my childhood dream! But after playing Violet, I had a realization: open-world Pokémon doesn’t work. At least, it won’t work with series gameplay as-is unless the franchise goes through major overhauls.

The incompatibility arises from the menu-based combat. Beyond the rock-paper-scissors of types, fighting is entirely stats-based. Unlike other open RPGs, you can’t brute-force much higher-leveled enemies with execution skill, making open-world freedom an illusion. Twenty level jumps from stepping in the “wrong” direction and level caps deciding which Pokémon are usable don’t help, making the experience feel more railroaded. Deviations from the implied path resulting in temporary satisfaction from increased difficulty lead to the tediousness of steamrolling skipped areas. In other open RPGs this is mitigated with gameplay more involved than using a menu to spam your most effective attack.

Battling is ultimately the vehicle for the real goals: completing the story and/or the Pokédex collect-a-thon, both of which see improvements in Gen 9. The story is composed of three separate plots that eventually converge into one, and it’s generally solid. It has some good characters and emotional beats, and even characters with only five minutes of screen time feel distinct. Starfall Street is bizarre in how woefully inept it makes the school staff look, though. Pokédex hunting feels better than ever without random encounters, but some species placements feel off. Version exclusives will never not feel like a cash grab to convince players to buy both games.

Systems are a mixed bag. Terastallization is a cool new gimmick affecting Pokémon typing that can be used offensively to boost attack damage or defensively to change resistances or gain specific passives (such as Grass to resist Spore). While it’s a cool mechanic competitively (VGC), the long, unskippable animation makes it tedious and unusable for the quick battles in solo play. TMs were hit with a huge downgrade, abandoning infinite use in favor of a shoehorned crafting system in yet another series that didn’t need one. Raids are 90% waiting for text and animations, and rewarded Pokémon rarely have useful tera types.

The presentation is beyond awful. If you’ve heard anything about the game, it’s how plagued with technical issues it is, and none of it is exaggeration. Environments are so bland they’re almost painful to look at. The music feels really underbaked with bland area themes and battle themes that sound poorly mixed, grating, or unfinished. Good tracks are saved for the endgame, but they only encompass a small part of the total runtime. Overall, Gen 9 is unfinished in many areas which is disappointing because the main draws of Pokémon (story and collecting) saw huge upgrades. Its success despite glaring issues doesn’t inspire much confidence in the future of the series.