I don't care what glitches and bugs are still in the game at the time of writing. This was everything I hoped it would be and more. The open world and playing with your friends is everything I wished SwSh would do with the Wild Area. Obviously the game points you in the intended directions, but otherwise you can explore to your discretion. The Tera Raids feel more fun and fast-paced than in SwSh as well, always enjoyable. If you can look past the obvious flaws, you'll find something amazing. Super cliché to word it this way, but this game is a treasure.

(Since the game needed an actual review, and not people using it as a personal message board...) I'm really enjoying it so far albeit with the caveat it ha(s/d) potential to be much better if GameFreak wasn't trying to push a title every single year to capitalize on the Holidays. It has a lot of great ideas and is the first (modern/recent) title of the series to not derail you every few steps to explain some mechanic or plot to you and does not railroad you into a set goal in a predetermined order - you are expected to complete every path afforded to you, but the order in which you do so is up to you.

If the game gets its bugs/optimization issues (lag, crashing, insert twitter thread or video of numerous glitches here) fixed it'll be a passable title worth the money albeit it's currently evidence enough of an overworked development team rushing another title to market before it's ready.

Without the polish it's still doing better than SWSH, which isn't too hard in retrospect, but I'd call it an accomplishment. The bar is low, but they did meet the expectation here.

Would I suggest getting it? If they patch out all the issues, maybe. You're not missing anything terribly adventurous but if you stopped playing Pokemon Games when they started really holding your hand and if you enjoyed Breath of the Wild or Skyrim you'll probably like it well enough.

Am I satisfied with the money I paid? Mmm. No, but I knew I was buying an unfinished buggy mess before I walked into the building, so it's par the course for me.

Am I enjoying the buggy mess? Yes! For what it's worth, I've had a lot of fun running around and adventuring. I've been playing it almost nonstop since release and still haven't beaten it, which is a nice change of pace from previous titles.

Is it good enough for there to be justification for being a completely unfinished game? Oh, absolutely not; I wouldn't recommend anyone spend money on a game that isn't finished. In a few months after they've dumped a few patches into it, maybe. If you have children who won't really notice the quality, sure. If your expectation is to be entertained and you like Pokemon, you'll probably be fine.

To be clear, I am a Pokémon fan and I’d go as far to say I pretty massively enjoyed playing this video game. I want to give it a much higher rating. Unfortunately there is no amount of fun that justifies the performance and visual quality in current year. It’s all been said a million times so I wont harp on it too long. I am part of the problem since game freak has my $60, but we will continue to see games like this until a mainline game manages to crash and burn for it (never).

If you like the series you will always like the new game, plain and simple. They know what has worked and that will not change. The changes that do exist are generally welcome but somehow there are still steps back from Legends.

I wouldn’t say the open world is good at all, but the structure of it helps the game a lot. The world level doesn’t scale or anything but the progression literally just goes bottom up so it’s hard to fuck up. I like that there are 3 separate quests that add up to the main story. I wish they felt more important before the straight up climax. I also wish gym leaders were actually challenging. Music ranges from mid to badass.

Defending this game’s faults makes you delusional, but it’s still an enjoyable game. Calling it garbage, while true in some capacity, is equally annoying. However, this game’s quality is indefensibly poor for the biggest franchise in human history. If you are on the fence, do not follow my example. do not support this game.

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

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

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

From a non-Pokémon fan's perspective, Pokémon Scarlet feels a bit refreshing. Non-linear open world games appeal to me more than the linear pathing that Pokémon games have been narrowly traveling down for years. As that type of open world game, it's definitely more of a beginner's version of that game. A lot of the core of the gameplay is simply running around battling and catching Pokémon, which is addicting in some regard. Being able to play with friends and run around in a world that's asynchronous is fun, and it's like we're all going on our own adventure together. Being able to tackle gyms or other big content in a somewhat non-linear factor is nice, and welcomed. It doesn't go far enough with this concept, but it's still fairly fun to do. Even the story, while stock standard the majority of the time, still managed to squeeze a smile out of me towards the end. There's small, but pleasant enough character arcs that are simple and enjoyable for this type of game. The changes to this entry are enough to say that I've enjoyed my time with the game. It's an okay-enough game on the mechanical spectrum. It's still got problems that's been affecting Pokémon since it's very beginning, however.

Your first Pokémon will always be your most overleveled. Overleveled Pokémon will always be your most dominate Pokémon. And for the most part, depending on if you catch anything of a higher level, will almost always be your primary attacker. You do have to switch in relation to your type advantage, but to me, it always feel like these Pokémon are just there for the off chance that I can't kill something in one hit, rather than feeling that their abilities are closely tied to the game design. The goal of all of this, is to make your team feel like your team, that you've loved and cared for to make it as far as you've gotten. But as a result to this design, it just doesn't play as well as it could. This is something within the very foundation of the series, and it's something that's even harder to get rid of given the main appeal of the series.

Ontop of the problems Pokémon has always had, you have the many glitches that are frequent within the game. Pop-ins, texture issues, character model glitches, a variety of ways to get stuck, frequent game crashes. Worst of all, the frame rate for almost the entire game is abysmal, and makes the game feel incredibly sluggish. As a AAA title from one of the largest game franchises in the world, it's inexcusable. The management pushing for 3 separate games in a single year is the result of these glitches, and it's aggravating that the Pokémon company did this to it's employees.

There's a lot of little things that I could list that bring down the experience, but I think it's unnecessary to say. At the end of the day, it's still, primarily, Pokémon as it's always been, with a bit of a more substantial twist. If you can look past the technical issues, you can have fun with it. It's not the best, worst, or most average game I've ever play, but it's enjoyable enough to be vaguely interesting for me.

Best game since Sun and Moon? Some things are better than X and Y. It doesn't touch the pixel games but I'm satisfied with it. The ending is kind of messed up and sad, I truly feel bad for that one homie (iykyk). Really annoying that mechanics were taken out of Legends Arceus that just should not have been taken out, and the graphics are terrible.

The game is poorly made from an engine standpoint. There are areas that are so laggy and buggy and you simply can not blame the switch. I played this game directly after Xenoblade 2 and the graphics + optimization do not compete with Xeno 2. There is no reason it should be running this poorly when this system is filled with great open-world-like games that look fine. Frustrated with mostly that and the extreme downgrade when catching Pokemon from Legends Arceus.

7.8/10

God Sonic Frontiers and now this can I please get a good game to play for the end of 2022...

I didn't actually plan to play this game at all I just did it because someone told me it was released and I felt like taking a break from my Red Dead Redemption 2 playthrough and oh boy do I regret it. It's actually really sad when the first thing you hear about a game that just released is that it's full of game-breaking bugs.

After a tiresome full playthrough of the game in about 20 to 25 hours of playtime, I can affirm that this game is really rough and I wish GameFreak would wake the fuck up!

So the game is a mix Between Sword and Shield with the basic 3D and turn-based gameplay like we all know and lov- enjoy depending on the pokemon game in question... And the newly released Pokemon Legends: Arceus earlier this year. Yep, two mainline pokemon in a single year and we are wondering why each installment of the franchise sucks, quality over quantity Gamefreak! Get the Miyamoto mindset!

As much as an open-world pokemon game sounds cool I doubt they can actually successfully do this right I mean... Wait Pokemon Legends: Arceus did it right so why not this game?

Here's my main issue with the open world in this game, first of all, it's utterly worthless since level scaling doesn't exist. This isn't an MMORPG, the world should grow over the existing player instead of stagnating depending on the area. I know this can be useful if you somehow get rid of all your pokemon and have to start from scratch but honestly, this could've been fixed easily by making an option where you can switch the difficulty around like adjusting if you want the enemies to be level 10,20,30,... So you can get most pokemon at the level you can currently master instead of just grabbing the random high-level ones and then force yourself to level up the ones you can only find at a low level which can be frustrating and also a waste of time.

Secondly, what's the point of an open world if most of the areas are locked due to high-level enemies? There is no point exploring this empty open world other than to find pokemon and random items on the floor, why not make it linear like all of the other ones where it's much simpler to level up and have a smooth, simple, and tranquility walkthrough without having the hassle to make sense of these empty, laggy pokemon wastelands.
And the fact that the game is meant to be played in a linear way makes it even more stupid since the pokemon center lady tells you where to go once you get a new badge, there is no sense of exploration you are just playing a basic pokemon game with the illusion of freedom.

Thirdly, the open world ruined the XP pacing. By that, I mean the trainers that the game used to force you to fight barely serve a purpose here. I know it was kinda frustrating to fight almost all of the trainers on the roads from city to city in the older titles even though I honestly never really had an issue with it personally helped the pacing of the XP making it so that you barely had to grind XP to finish the original story.
In this game, you are forced to do random fights if you want to level up your characters which sucks because I don't want to grind on purpose I want to go to the end!
I ended up fixing that issue by just capturing the highest-level pokemon I could find and just readapting my team every time I caught a new strong one and just removing the weakest one of my team to replace it.
And yes at the end of my playthrough I didn't even use my stater because it was way too underleveled compared to the other pokemon I found in the wild.

I think that's all about the open world, now it's time to talk about the obvious, the graphics.
This is most likely the most controversial part about the game other than the graphical bugs which flooded Twitter the week of its release.
To clear the obvious, Yes the game looks god awful, the Switch isn't powerful but stops blaming the hardware we all know GameFreak is responsible. I could bring the basic "look at Xenoblade 3 compared to Pokemon Scarlet" and you know I will since the difference is fucking insane. We can't bring the "it's a different art style" argument here because dogshit isn't an art style.
Other than the world itself looking like cowshit, the pokemon themselves look good I think I got no complaints about their models and I don't care if they reused them from old games or whatever it looks decent.
But got the humans... Nobody told me this was a Nintendo Switch Sports sequel! They really just ruined one of the only good parts about pokemon, the character design used to be so good in the 2d games! I mean honestly they also look really good in Sword and Shield I just don't know why they made them all look like copypaste characters made in a character creation tool.

Let's not forget about the awful optimization of the game, like it's sad when your game runs better on fanmade emulators than on your own software. I'm not insulting the switch here since the fans themselves makes patch so that the game runs smoother on the emulator and it's pathetic when the fans have to fix the game for them.

What about the gameplay? it's fucking pokemon it's still a decent game at heart and by that, I mean this game can reproduce the mechanic of a rock-paper-scissors game which isn't too impressive because all pokemon games are just that.
But yeah the gameplay is fine, it's what you would expect out of a pokemon game. My main issue would be that the combats are super slow especially due to the useless textbox taking so long to appear and disappear also the combat animations which cannot be skipped makes the combats a slog to go through.

And now is the time I talk about the new gimmick used in combat because it can't be a pokemon game without a new gimmick. That gimmick would be called Terastallizing, and it's just something that changes the pokemon type based on the attack you picked and also slightly raises your base atk/def, kinda wish they'd brought back the giant thing it made me horny.

Last but not least (least would be the open world) the story.
It's bad, like a toddler-type story you'd find in a children's cartoon like pokemon- fuck!
Though there's a vaguely interesting twist in this game, it's separated into three different storylines which end up becoming one after finishing the three for the ending, and honestly, it's kinda cool. I mean it's nowhere near anything original but it's a fucking pokemon game let's say it's novel.
Actually thinking about it it's kinda lazy since the first storyline is about the excepted getting all 8 gym badges and that's fine but the two others are about helping some rando cure his dog by finding herbs guarded by pokemon guardians and the other one is about fighting a gang of school delinquents to teach you about how bullying is bad.

My issue is that the final one is a bit random and comes out of nowhere it's kinda linked to the boy and his dog storyline but it's just a cheap way to put the legendary pokemon in the spotlight at the last minute.

I guess that's all I have to say about this very mediocre title of this mediocre franchise. I hope GameFreak will wake the fuck up and give us something on par with black & white or something because this is just sad...

Last-minute complaints, the beginning is awful, you just follow your "rival" for 2 hours and suffer through useless text and bad cutscenes to end up being thrown in this shitty open wasteland.
And like I just said the quality of the dialogue is overall very shitty and boring like none of it matters it's just making me waste time with the slow text speed and lags of the game.

In conclusion, I do not recommend this game at all It's not unplayable but it's not good either. Just play black & white again.

Here are some thoughts on this game. I have yet to finish it, but as someone who has played every Pokemon game I felt I needed to give others some insight on this game.

Pros:
- The game is fun
- The Pokemon variety is almost unmatched. The amount of Pokemon you can have on your team and use in your playthrough is huge.
- Terrastalizing is a fun mechanic and is not a "get out of jail free" card that Dynamax was. You can terrastalize and still get completely OHKO'd.
- Exploring the huge map is fun and I could do it for hours without progressing the story at all.
- The three "stories" provides a changeup to the core series that is great to have.
- The character designs are top notch, especially the Team Star bosses.
- Some of the new Pokemon are really great.
- The new abilities and attacks are a great way to change up Pokemon and I hope they introduce more like them in the future.
- The internet connectivity features are FAR better than in Sword and Shield.
- The towns are huge
- The map overall has verticality and there are just loads of nooks and crannies to explore.

Cons:
- The techincal aspect of the game is absolute shambles. It runs like complete ass at times to the point of hitting 10 FPS.
- Glitches abound. This is by far the least polished Pokemon game I have ever played.
- Some of the new Pokemon designs are just not good.
- The towns are overall empty. You can't enter the houses or really interact with people at all like in all other Pokemon titles.
- The gym buildings are pointless and only serve as way points. Why have them at all?
- The lack of real trainer customization is a step backwards.
- What is the academy even for? I have classes I can take? Why would I even want to do that? This is a Pokemon game, not a school simulator.
- The lack of aiming when throwing your pokeball makes no sense. It was perfect in Legends: Arceus, but is gone now for some reason.
- I would rather be able to just catch Pokemon without battling them like you were able to do in Legends: Arceus.
- Textures are pretty ugly in some places.
- Gym Tests are boring to pointless sometimes, few are actually fun.
- The lack of a true open world is annoying. You can't face the gyms in any order, there is a "right" order to face them and level scaling doesn't exist.
- Shiny Pokémon that spawn in the overworld do not sparkle or make a noise when they appear as they did in Legends: Arceus. I have no idea why this feature was removed.

I'll likely update this when I beat the game.

Messy.

But they were cooking with the story, designs, everything

They gave us the best set of side characters the series has seen in Nemona, Arven, and Penny

Story was real clean, too, top stuff for the series. Strong gen. Just needed more time in the oven.

A tired meme in three acts:

ASTONISHED GIRLFRIEND: Less reliance on text to relay feedback in combat, wild Pokemon that actually live and eat and breathe and don't just stand around waiting to be killed or kidnapped, dynamically scaled story events, status effects that don't add entire minutes to each fight
MAN WITH WANDERING EYE: the 10 gamedevs still working at Game Freak
PASSING WOMAN IN TIGHT DRESS: Fortnite glider :)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Le bajo dos puntos de nota. Uno porque aún le falta pulir algunos flecos a nivel jugable para ser el Pokémon ideal. Y otro porque a nivel puramente técnico este título es un desastre absoluto. Cuando pulan esos dos aspectos, probablemente estemos ante un nuevo 10 de un videojuego de Pokémon.

El mundo abierto le da a la saga, como ya hizo en Pokémon Leyendas: Arceus una sensación de libertad y un placer en perderte increíbles. En este aspecto falta hacer que realmente tu camino sea puramente optativo y que haya un escalado real y consecuente del entorno para adecuarse a tus niveles.

A nivel narrativo sigue siendo una historia muy básica, como el 90% de los juegos de la saga, y creo que cuidar un poco más este aspecto a futuro también le sentaría muy bien.

Y, sin duda, el aspecto técnico es lo peor del juego, lo que echará a mucha gente para atrás en las primeras horas o incluso harán que no quieran ni darle una oportunidad. Negarlo es negar la evidencia, tiene de todo. Desde caídas de fps constantes, a cierres random de la aplicación, a cargas absurdas por hacer lo más mínimo como pasar las cajas del PC... Todo va mal. Supongo que mucho lo corregirán con actualizaciones, pero el estado en el que ha salido a la venta este título es totalmente inadmisible.

Ahora me quedan por delante muchas horas de completar la Pokedex, crianza y seguir descubriendo secretos por el mapa. Sin duda, un juego recomendable si todo lo que he dicho no te echa para atrás y le tienes cierto cariño a la saga y al género de la que es madre.