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 Sword and Shield had many flaws but a major one was its inability to free itself from Pokémon's outdated handheld framework.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.

You kinda had to be there to fully experience this game during its life cycle. It was such a fun ride to experience this game as it was this fresh new thing that turned a lot of eyes for how original it was. It wasn't perfect at all, but for what it accomplished and went on to be, it's a damn great game that I look back super fondly on. I'll never forget that night I randomly decided to pop this game in my Wii U at around 1 AM and how blown away I was by just how much fun I was having. This series really did go on to change my life for the better and I wish I had enough good things to say about it to justify in my head that I had the privilege to play it during its life. Love you Splatoon. Crazy to think how far the game has come since that first reveal trailer so long ago.

Sonic Frontiers is kind of a miracle. I hesitate to call it good but it's oddly compelling. It's a mishmash of competing ideas and new concepts bolted onto existing gameplay elements, and yet somehow it works. It borrows heavily from other games, often shamelessly, but never strays too far away from what makes Sonic tick. It's got that familiar Sonic Team jank but is also the most polished game they've probably ever made.

In short...yeah, it's alright.

I'll chalk that up to a win for a developer that's truly struggled to find an identity for this franchise going back over 15 years now. I don't know if Frontiers will be that going forward, but there was at least an attempt here to right past wrongs and fully commit to this change in direction until it was truly ready to be released. They weren't lying when they said they would take their time to ensure better quality. There's a lot I'll take issue with as this review goes on but I'll take no umbrage with their execution of what they were going for here.

So what was Sonic Team going for here? Well, an "open zone" game as they'd call it, which is really saying it's a series of segmented open-world areas for you to run around in. And truthfully, they nailed this part of the game in a way I was not expecting. They've created a huge playground for Sonic to have fun in, filled with obstacles, platforming, and puzzles that smartly funnel you from one area to the next as you explore the islands. I wish it was all a little more natural looking and built into the geography instead of appearing like random game elements plopped down all over a Windows XP landscape, but they do absolutely achieve their job of keeping you busy and always giving you something rewarding for interacting with them. It's so basic but it's also why I easily vibe with these types of games. One can't help but wonder how much higher they could have reached with this concept if they were willing to move off established conventions and opt for a more momentum-based system for players to experiment with, but I digress.

Unfortunately, now and then you'll need to pop into Cyber Space to grab a particular collectible and it's here where the experience gets dragged down a notch. The Cyber Space levels are entirely in the style of past Sonic games like Unleashed or Forces and it's very clear Sonic Team didn't have enough confidence in their new vision so they threw these levels in for some misguided sense of variety. Worst of all, these stages reuse both visual designs AND stage designs from past games, cut into smaller chunks, so if you've already played them this will just feel like a bore. I won't mince words: this is incredibly lazy and if they couldn't be bothered to design entirely new levels for this part of the game it should have never been included. I never looked forward to having to grind these levels for the necessary vault keys and quite frankly it's a good showcase for how dated that style of Sonic gameplay has become.

One other aspect of Frontiers' gameplay that also deserves criticism is its upgrade system. I don't mind having to unlock new moves for combat but there's no reason why a game like this requires a system that forces me to increase Sonic's attack, defense, or speed (or the number of rings for that matter, an entirely useless upgrade). It's like they looked at other modern games and said "We need to do this too" without really considering why those systems can often be a detriment to those games as well. If you have to make your character move and feel worse to justify later upgrades and "fix" the problem you created, that's bad game design in my book. And yes, this problem does get mitigated about halfway through the game when you've done enough of the upgrades to where it stops mattering, but that doesn't erase the problems I had with it in the early game, and the best example I can give is the encounter with the Squid enemy on the first island.

The Squid requires you to run along a path until you're in range to attack it, at which point it'll switch to a combat field to allow further damage. The problem is that early in the game, your speed is slow, so it can take minutes for you to catch up before you're in attack range, and that's not even counting the section where it's entirely automated and you simply can't catch it during this time. Once you do achieve this, you find your attack is so low that you simply cannot do enough damage to dispose of it in a timely fashion, forcing you to repeat the chase section. You'll probably have to do this three or four times before the Squid finally goes down. It's unnecessarily tedious and frustrating when all I really want to do is be tested on how well I've mastered the combat. It's a small point in a larger game but this sort of thing is a pet peeve of mine and I think it illustrates the larger point of how unnecessary these systems are. They merely exist to give you the illusion of progression but it's not really required as the sense of progression you get from working through the islands is where the game's real satisfaction comes from.

Moving back to another of the game's strong points, let's discuss the story and characters because at long last Sonic Team has woken up and realized that Pontac and Graff were hacks who were strangling the series with their take on its tone and characterization, and have brought in Ian Flynn to rectify the problem. And boy does he, as not only do the main cast of characters finally get some nuance to them but the story itself is allowed to actually connect back to older games. This gives the Starfall Islands of Sonic Frontiers some immediate credibility as a setting in this universe and helps to bridge the series back to a time when you could get invested in a Sonic game's story because the characters were allowed to grow with it. What a novel concept.

There's so much to like here. I was genuinely worried that the side characters would exist as objects for Sonic to rescue and not have much interaction outside of that, but even in their transient state, they're still able to influence events and have meaningful conversations with Sonic, who himself has returned to a genuinely likable character and not spouting the most obnoxious one-liners imaginable every five seconds. Hell, the entire sidestory with Tails felt like Flynn deliberately calling out how shitty the past 10 years of characterization have been for Sonic's fox friend. It was incredibly refreshing to see the series acknowledge its faults and commit to doing better. If there's one gripe in this department, it's that most of Eggman's motivations were put inside audio logs that you need to do the fishing minigame to acquire. Given Eggman's relationship with the new character of Sage is incredibly vital to the proceedings, I wish this stuff would have been more front and center, but hey, at least the fishing was fun.

I touched a little bit on the game's visuals but I'd like to expand a bit more because I do think how this game looks is a bit on the disappointing side. Not so much in terms of fidelity or framerate; Sonic Team did a surprisingly good job here and overall Frontiers ran extremely well on my PS5, at least in performance mode. This is more to do with the game's visual identity, or perhaps the lack thereof. Despite having five islands, Frontiers only has three level themes: grass and forest, desert, and volcano. Island 4 and 5 looks practically identical to the first one, and the same style of ruins persist across the entire game. From a narrative standpoint, this makes sense; it was one ancient civilization across the whole island chain, but it does give the feeling of sameness and there's an overall lack of variety to the locales here. The realistically rendered worlds also contrast greatly with the cartoonish characters who inhabit them, and I would have much preferred the game to go in a more stylized direction consistent with past Sonic games. This isn't a major point; just a preference of mine.

Much like the visuals, the music can also be a little jarring and inconsistent at times, but this is more toward the good end of that spectrum. You'll go from the quiet and laid-back tracks that inhabit the open world (some of which feel very reminiscent of Sonic 2006), while enemy encounters, cyberspace levels, and boss battles will hit you with more mechanical-inspired themes and vocal tracks that are more akin to the Adventure era. There's a lot of variety here, and it's pretty much all good. One of the safest bets you can make is that a Sonic game will have good music and you will not be shocked to find that Frontiers continues that trend.

If you're a hardcore Sonic fan you'll find a lot to like in this game, but if you're someone who was hoping Sonic Team would be able to elevate this franchise to greater heights, you're not going to find it here. Frontiers pulls the franchise back to the level of "acceptable" and for some that may be enough, but for me, I'm still yearning for something that can give me the highs of Sonic Adventure 2 again. There are moments of Sonic Frontiers that invoke the spirit and energy of that time (especially those boss battles), but there are also moments where you realize this is a game in 2022 and it can encapsulate the worst elements of that. The result is an experience that, again...is fine. Just fine.

Perhaps I should be happy with that.

If you were to ask me what this game was about I could hardly tell you, other than those who made it really, really liked Evangelion. In terms of an actual game, it's a solid, flashy rail shooter that gets bonus points for being a game designed with the N64 in mind. I appreciate their desire to craft the game and its controls around Nintendo's unique controller, even if moving and shooting can sometimes feel like "rubbing your stomach and patting your head" syndrome. There were a few times in the game where it wasn't really clear where and what you needed to shoot to defeat certain enemies resulting in a little trial-and-error but overall I had fun with it. I've wanted to play this game for a long time but never got around to it until now. I came away being genuinely impressed with what they made.