Even if Sword and Shield's DLC was probably the best thing about that game, it was the best part of what I'd consider one of the most sauceless Pokémon games ever put out. Scarlet and Violet on the other hand, I actually really liked, which made me excited to see all the cool things they could do with it post release (if it was just fixing the performance, which they didn't). Unfortunately, I came out of this with another conclusion; the way they make these DLCs just pisses me off.

Let's get the biggest caveat out of the way; when are you even supposed to play this? The level scaling is super fucked up. If you played the base game at all after completing the main quest, there's no way your party isn't totally overleved. Do they expect you to catch new Pokémon and make a party out of those? Sure, I did that. It still doesn't work when things jump 20 levels from one area to another. And it's not like you'll ever grow particularly attached to these fucking nobodies you catch unevolved at level 60 something and use for 4 hours. That was already something I felt about the Gen 8 DLC and it undermines any enjoyment I could have playing this. It's not like these games aren't easy, but even if you use terrible underleved shitmons in any main series game just to make it slightly harder, you'll grow attached to them. That's the magic of Pokémon as a franchise, in my eyes. If I'm either plowing through the games with 0 effort or just catching "some guy" that I form no connection to, it makes me judge the rest of the experience way harder and take it at face value, as I do here.

The structure has been simple enough: provide players with a big area to explore, catch returning and a couple of new Pokémon, play some minigames for rewards, do a little story thing, add competitive QOL features that should have been there in the first place and catch a legendary that's slightly overtuned for OU but not so much that it gets banned immediately.

Kitakami itself is surprisingly big but there's not a lot in terms of landmarks that I'd consider particularly notable besides the FPS dropping crystal lake and some nice, hang-outtable parks. There's really only one "town" with a few NPCs. I'd normally consider that a downside but honestly, with how much they've already retreaded similar Japanese settings, it's not like it's anything we haven't seen or won't see done again in the future. If anything, there was an opportunity to do something closer to Paldea's real life inspiration but whatever. It's alright.

In terms of returning Pokémon selection, YMMV. What gets me is how much of the supposedly "new" Kitakami dex are actually just guys who are in the base game. I completed the Pokédex in the base game because it was fun to do so but here it felt really underwhelming since I already had half of the 200 entries done. 100 is a fine amount for new+returning Pokémon, I suppose.. but if they needed to pad it out THAT badly, it's not like 50 more returning ones couldn't have been crammed in just for the sake of feeling fresher.

Getting competitive Pokémon in Scarlet and Violet was already easy but the biggest complaint has always been how much grinding you needed to do for Tera Shards. Now you can get an item to grind them faster so.. cool? It really should have been like that from the start. Same thing with the new EV resetting mochi. It's not like this is the thing that'll stop players from just hacking in their Pokémon... but it's nice to have.

The story content is decent and about what you'd expect from this generation; teens traumadumping on you for 2 hours and uhh, a legendary is there. The school trip set-up is ridiculous when the only other students present are 3 nobody NPCs with no personality whatsoever, but you're not really meant to think about it. If they brought in the main characters from the base game, they'd steal attention from the new characters so that was the only way they could have done it,IMO. I'm interested at how a certain character's development is going to carry on to the next part of the DLC, which is something they've not attempted before.

I was disappointed by how lacking the photography quest was. Judging by the trailers, I was expecting it to be something like BOTW's or TOTK's Hyrule Compedium feature but nah,just a 10 minute section. That ties nicely into a complaint that'll be completely irrelevant in a few months but I really dislike how they promoted this DLC. Why show so much of the second DLC when you're still announcing the first? It ended up just confusing the fuck out of me in terms of what's were, specially since the second one seems to be the meatier offering. The fact that these two are even sold together comes off as a bit problematic to me because... this isn't worth even half the asking price. But there's a vague plot connection between them now, so "obviously" can't be sold separately.

Overall, it doesn't feel substantial enough on any front. If you're a casual player you'd probably tolerate the content at offer but feel ripped off until the second part eventually comes out, by which point you'll have forgetten everything that happened in this one. If you're a competitive player, you'll probably need to pick this up to make life easier but still feel ripped off because it's just not enough to not learn to pkhex better.

Its got some fun character moments between Kieran and Carmine but otherwise its just an additional map and not a very intriguing one. It's new pool of pokemon is fine, and I think the theming is neat but nothing really kept me glued to what was going on. I did try to make a new team out of this DLC and granted this at least helped to bloat my overall time, just so I could train the new 'mons to be up to snuff but if you played this normally with the team you used post-main story you can easily breeze through most of this in an afternoon- as most people did when this first dropped. I kinda wish there was one other major city or location but the only really neat locales are the central mountain, its crater and the starting town's surrounding areas- most of the other areas are bland as hell.

I had a large write up about other issues I was thinking of with regards to ScVi as we near a year after it first dropped but I'll save that for when the next expansion drops.

Its fine but I would say wait for the next part before purchasing since you have to spend $35 for both this and whatever the next expansion is rather than selecting separate parts.

The Sword and Shield DLC made me appreciate a weak Pokemon game much more, but this DLC made the issues with Scarlet/Violet front and center. I’m not a super negative Pokemon fan — Arceus is one of the best games this series has ever had I think — but Teal Mask equates effectively to a 6 hour campaign with an underbaked story and a few new middling Pokemon designs. Not much post game, and it runs almost as poorly as launch S/V. The Pokemon feel loosely scattered around the map, and without a second or third town other than the hub, the map feels small and lifeless. Moreover, a lot of the old mons they featured here were pretty whatever. Some pseudolegendaries and a bunch of nothing.

Hopefully the 2nd DLC is the post game S/V deserves.

Built on a fundamentally weak game technically, and it locks the day/night cycle in Kitakami until you beat its main story? Which is really fucking weird. But the story is solid and I like that the dlcs are genuinely connected this round, and love the balancing changes and batch of mons it introduces and brings back. More interesting terrain than Paldea, level scaling is solid, and some challenge is there. Good stuff, honestly. Idk what I’m supoosed to say, it’s cute and fun and pretty good for the small part of a large package.

To some extent, the dlc for Sword/Shield was just the ideal situation, because I liked the base game and thought "damn they should just make more of the wild area" and then they did that! Since SV is more like an entire game of wild area, I love it but there was less of an obvious means by which a DLC campaign could be as impressive.

What we have here is a tiny little microcosm of the main game. There's new guys, including some really great designs (Ogerpon is my precious baby forever) and a new outfit, which is very much at a premium in SV. The story is not up to the main game's level but it's fine. There's a little riding around minigame.

I'm hoping part 2 adds a little zing and I think there's good stuff here if you're a competitive weirdo but overall this is exactly baseline what I expect and I'm enjoying it.

It’s interesting to see Gamefreak’s ability at crafting little open worlds evolve so quickly as they rapidly iterate and release new content so quickly. This is one of the best of these worlds yet, designed as a wheel with a tall, dense mountain in the middle and several biomes as the spokes, each with containing one of the “Six Wonders of Kitakami” which hilariously range from a circle of rocks to an unremarkable pond. The Kitakami region also contains elements pulling from the aesthetics of the Japanese inaka, reminiscent of aspects of Hisui and Johto in quite a few ways that I found delightful as a fan of those regions specifically.

The fact this is meant to be played in the post game, where players have Pokémon in the level 50+ range leads to a flattened level curve which allows you to go anywhere in the world and have a roughly equivalent experience, with a handful of trainer battles and actually putting me on the back foot and making me use items to stay alive, even in instances where my party outleveled the opponents by quite a bit.

The story also impresses by Pokémon standards, drawing parallels from the ancient regional myth of Ogrepon and the contemporary problems of the loner adolescent Kieran. It’s not deep by any means but it navigates its themes in a way that I just don’t expect from this series anymore. I think it fumbles the bag a little bit at the end, with a scene featuring Kieran that made me lose it laughing, and a cliffhanger for the second DLC that makes this end on an abrupt note.

It's kind of interesting to see Pokemon mess around with DLC storylines now that they're, you know, doing them. SwSh's DLC campaigns were both fairly self-contained and had their own disconnected storylines, while SV's DLC appears to be aiming for a more episodic structure. I don't know, I think it's neat to see experimentation within a series that's had a very long established formula.

Unfortunately, Teal Mask is very obviously a Part 1. It feels like mostly setup designed to introduce you to the characters who will be important in Part 2, and I think it does a pretty great job of that. I'm very excited to see where Kieran goes in Part 2, because I was kind of surprised the game actually decided to go that direction with the player's relationship with a "rival" character. Carmine was also great, and Ogerpon is my beloved daughter. However, there isn't really much outside of that... I think it was kind of a bummer that they chose not to make it postgame content exclusive because it's weird to have your classmates be nameless randos instead of your three buddies from the main storyline.

I do really like the new Pokemon we got with this DLC; all the legendaries are great, Dipplin is fun, and I really like the concept behind the Bloodmoon Beast. I kind of hope they do more weird cryptid variants of existing Pokemon because it's cool as hell. I do think it's kind of a bummer that so much of the Kitakami dex was just Pokemon you could get in Paldea, though. Was the intent behind it that you could get certain Pokemon early...?

I liked Kitakami itself, though. I liked its environmental details a little more than the main game just because it felt more dense. Like. Honestly. If they made different areas about the size of Kitakami instead of a big open world I'd probably be happy. I'm not sure if it'd improve performance because I sure did have slowdown issues during the actual story, but it wasn't as bad more recently...? I don't know if there was a patch or not. But yeah, I did enjoy exploring Kitakami's nooks and crannies. The Ogre Clan sidequest was pretty fun, and I enjoyed Rich People Hunting for Big Money with the Glitterati questline, which takes you back and forth between Kitakami and Paldea and I think is pretty fun.

One thing I most definitely did not like was Ogre Oustin'. Why was that the big minigame they hyped and not the cool Pokemon Snap variant that you only get to do during one sidequest. I would really rather do more Pokemon Photography than a minigame that feels aggressively designed for multiplayer. btw speaking of multiplayer oh my god i'm so tired of the way raids play and trying to trade stuff to fill out the dex just bring me back my gts don't lock it behind a fucking subscription service fuuuuck

If you enjoy the gameplay loop of exploring new areas and catching pokemon that the base game presents, filling your pokedex is a perfectly serviceable way to kill time with this DLC. But even as someone who was very optimistic and very excited to see more from SV's world and characters, this feels unnecesary, padded, and overpriced, failing to play into the base game's strengths and instead delivering what feels like filler content with a story and characters I care significantly less about than the ones that came before. If this was part of the base game, I might consider it impressive, but it's not. Hopefully the Indigo Disk is better (and has more ARVEN I stg.)

It's fine. There's nothing outright bad about it (except the Ogre Oustin' minigame), but nothing that really stands out, either. Unlike Sword and Shield's two waves of DLC, which both took what the main game introduced and built upon it in meaningful and interesting ways, Teal Mask kinda just feels like more of the base game. It's essentially just a fourth main story questline, but this time, it's set in its own area. Kitakami is a much smaller area compared to greater Paldea, being around the size of Area Zero, maybe a little smaller. The world here is small enough to not feel overwhelming, but big enough to house a treasure trove of secrets to explore. This is honestly how I wish the main game was structured: just four or so Kitakamis, segmented from each other, but alas, full open worlds are all the rage right now, game balance be damned in Scarlet and Violet's case. That's more of a side tangent, though; back to the actual topic at hand.

The Teal Mask storyline is short enough that it could have very easily just been postgame content, and this wave doesn't introduce any wacky new mechanics or features to really warrant it being paid DLC. Seriously, there's so little actual content outside of the Teal Mask story in this wave, that I have to wonder why this wasn't just a free update. Outside of the main quest, we have Perrin's side story, the very poorly balanced Ogre Oustin' minigame that is, I kid you not, physically impossible to complete on Hard in singleplayer, and...that's it. By contrast, Sword and Shield's first wave, Isle of Armor, had the various facilities in the Master Dojo, the Diglett Hunt to get the Alolan forms and starters, a swath of new and creative moves, and, of course, the Isle of Armor itself: an intricately designed, sprawling island with diverse biomes that felt twice as big as the Wild Area. There's enough there to where it actually felt like paid DLC; Isle of Armor, and even more so Crown Tundra, were strict, substantial upgrades to the main game, which, in my ideal world, is what paid DLC should be; they added so much new content and features to the game that playing without them just feels wrong. Teal Mask feels more like a side-grade; it doesn't do much, if at all, to improve upon the main game, and instead just adds a bit more of what was already there. Unless you really want to be able to catch the new Pokémon, or are dying to play the Ogre Oustin' minigame (whoever you are, you are a masochist), you can live without this DLC; it doesn't really make the game that much better. Quantity rather than quality, or...something like that.

Basically, if more base-game-style story content is your jam, then by all means, go for it, there's even more down the line with Indigo Disk. Just...make sure you have some friends to play with who also have it if you want the Shiny Munchlax from Ogre Oustin', because you literally cannot get it otherwise. If you're not fully convinced, though, I'd say wait for more details on Indigo Disk to release in the coming months to make a more informed decision on whether or not to get the Expansion Pass. What little we know about it so far makes it look very promising, so if you're at least considering it, I'd keep an eye on this one.

Side note, holy shit, Munkidori is the single ugliest design in this entire generation, why they got the 🍆 monke