This review contains spoilers
Before I start this review I’m gonna go on a somewhat unrelated tangent: for the love of all that’s holy, do NOT under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES buy anything digital from Best Buy. I am warning you now for your own sanity. Buy physical media there all you want, whatever, that’s well and good, but DO NOT buy any digital products from them whatsoever. So, here’s a fun story, just kidding it’s actually incredibly aggravating, but my sister got me the DLC for Pokémon violet for my birthday recently. She purchased the card from Best Buy and the receipt contained the online code to download said DLC, otherwise the card itself it a useless hunk of plastic. Here’s the thing though: she never got the code. Ever. It was never on the receipt and we checked her junk or spam in case it got lost somewhere: nothing. There was no code to be found anywhere, either on the receipt she received or in any section of her junk or spam email. So, I took this up with Best Buy and the best they could do is shrug their shoulders and go “Whoop, sorry! Nothin’ we can do about it!”. The card was effectively worthless. To make matters worse, we had to wait an entire MONTH for our bank to process a refund for the stupid thing. After the refund was processed, I decided to purchase the DLC myself using the same card my sister bought it on, this time making sure the receipt would be sent to my personal email so I have full control over viewing what comes in. I purchased the card, and…nothing. No receipt was even sent my way. Went to talk to Best Buy about this once again and once again they were all like “Whoop, sorry! Nothin’ we can do about it!”. I was flabbergasted. I eventually got so frustrated that I gave up and after refunding the product once again, I purchased the product from GameStop instead, and what do you know? They provided a PHYSICAL RECIEPT this time, and not only that, but the receipt HAD THE CODE PRINTED ON IT FRONT AND CENTER FIRST TRY!!!!!!! Who would’ve thought that would work huh? So yeah, don’t buy anything digital from Best Buy. Save yourselves the headache and just get any DLC from games like these from other local game stores, I’m begging you. Now that my tirade has gone on long enough, I guess it’s time to actually TALK about the DLC itself, yeah?
If you haven’t already read my Backloggd review of Pokémon Violet, I’ll give you a basic cliffnotes version. I still maintain that the game is fun and has the potential to be something truly great: The characters are outstanding. I still love all of your classmate friends Nemona, Penny and ESPECIALLY Arven and the relationship they all share with each other and the protagonist. The story is really well done, the game truly gives you the freedom to progress the way you want to progress, the new Pokémon are almost all winners, Terastallizing is quite possibly the best gimmick Pokémon has introduced thus far, the list goes on. There’s just one problem that compromises everything I just mentioned: the games are blatantly unfinished. They look like crap, run even worse and are filled to the brim with bugs and glitches. I’m not even exaggerating when I say that this is probably the one of the worst performing Switch games ever released, if not THE worst. Even worse is how this was sold at full price with a $60 tag in spite of all of this. With how shockingly awful the presentation is and how putrid the performance is, what should be some of the best games in the franchise get dragged down to the status of “pretty good with a HUGE asterisk at the end”, which is a damn shame. I’d still play this any day of the week over Sword and Shield and, heck, even Legends Arceus didn’t really do a whole lot for me after I beat it. But in its current state, no matter how much I sing its praises, I can’t recommend it to anyone with the amount of issues it has with that kind of price tag. The games were so unfinished and bug riddled that Nintendo themselves offered a public apology stating that they would eventually improve the game’s problems. However, despite this claim, here we are with the first official DLC release and…that hasn’t happened yet. In fact, to jump the gun here a bit, this DLC somehow, beyond all reasonable possibilities, performs even WORSE than the base game. I wish I were making this up; a huge chunk of my Violet playthrough felt like I was walking through molasses, sections constantly dipping under 20 fps and making the game essentially play in slow motion for most of it. In the Teal Mask however, it’s pretty much runs like this throughout THE ENTIRE DLC. I don’t think it ever once lets up or improves which is…admittedly pretty impressive. I didn’t think it was possible to make this game perform even worse but here we are I guess.
Anyway, on to the DLC contents itself. Sadly, to my disappointment, Nemona Penny and Arven are not in this DLC in any capacity which sucks. Hopefully they’ll be in the next part. For this field trip you get a bunch of no name personality-less NPC students to accompany you to the land of Kitakami, a region inspired by rural Japan. As someone who recently took a trip to Japan last summer, I appreciated what they were going for with this region and I did enjoy the land’s aesthetic. I also appreciated the new outfits that came with the DLC, the jinbei you wear is cute even if it kinda murdered my character’s hairstyle and I had to travel back to Paldea to restore her hair to what it originally was lol. The new outfits outside of that are limited but also pretty good. The main objective I would want out of a DLC expansion for Pokémon Violet, an objective I would set before playing this mind you, would be to create a brand-new experience while still retaining everything that was good about the base game: that being a great story, great characters, freedom to do whatever you want with a variety of things to do, and a ton of new Pokémon to catch. Unfortunately, this DLC just feels so much lesser than the base game in each of these individual areas. We’ll start with the new characters and story: we have 3 new characters, 2 being the “main” characters/rivals accompanying you with one being available in an optional side mission. The rivals you get are siblings Carmine and Kieran, students at the blueberry academy (which we’ll get to in the next part of the DLC) and natives to Kitakami. They were…fine, I guess. Carmine is the typical hotheaded jerk rival that eventually befriends you at the end, although she isn’t really rude or aggressive towards you per say, she’s more standoffish like Arven though on a higher level. She does have reasonings for why she is the way she is and eventually realizes the error of her ways. She was fine; the one thing I didn’t like about her was how…aggressive she is towards her little brother. Granted most of it feels like typical sibling bickering but there’s a lot of moments that feel downright kinda uncomfortable, both with her suddenly snapping and Kieran’s response afterwards. Speaking of Kieran, he started out pretty good. He’s this super shy socially awkward kid that slowly befriends and forms a bond with you with how outgoing you are, but eventually situations unfold that feel very forced, and he instead does a heel faced turn and becomes extremely jealous of you and super self-doubting of himself. Maybe these plot threads will tie up in the second part of the DLC but first impressions of these characters so far are not exactly the greatest. They aren’t Nemona Penny or Arven that’s for certain. Perrin was cool though. I liked her story and personality/backstory quite a bit, and her survey minigame was cute as well. That being said needing to catch 150 Pokémon to get to that point is more than a bit tedious, I only ended up doing so out of morbid curiosity.
The story also just kinda exists. Again, it’s mostly centered around Kieran, Carmine, and the local legends of Kitakami, how the legends aren’t “exactly as they appear”. And while it was fun to listen to them and to have revealed the true story of really happened, that’s really all that ends up happening in this entire story. The Loyal Three show up for a bit to cause trouble, they’re swiftly dealt with, and that’s about all that comes from it. The main bulk of the story is mostly dealing with Kieran’s shenanigans. Again, the second part will probably expand more on this plot point so it’s likely to be still ongoing but the first part didn’t really “hook” me so to speak. That wouldn’t be so bad if I felt that there was more stuff to do in the story but there just aren’t. The region of Kitakami is much much smaller than Paldea, which makes sense I suppose but I also feel there’s nowhere near as much to explore and experience with this region outside of the main campaign. There’s this one minigame you can play at the festival that I played once and didn’t really feel the need to play again. That’s really about it. Again, Perrin has a pretty neat side section but it’s fairly short and you need to grind 150 Pokédex entries in order to access it at all. There’s not really any new Pokémon to speak of outside of Ogrepon, who is pretty cool, and the Loyal Three, who are imo very bland, same-y and uninteresting in design. There are a lot of returning mons from previous gens, and while I do love me some Yanmega and Staraptor, there’s a reeeeeeally high amount of flying Pokémon hanging around Kitakami from my experience. So much so that for a bit, when I crafted a new team from scratch, 5/6 of my party consisted of nothing but part flying type Pokémon. Applin got a new evolution (not really something I care for since I don’t like the Pokémon in general or any of its evolutionary lineup) and Polteageist got a new regional form (I know it’s technically a separate species according to the Pokédex but still, eh. Not super invested in that lineup either). The music was really good at least, glad they kept to that tradition from Violet.
At the end of the day, I didn’t necessarily HATE my time with the Teal Mask DLC, I just wasn’t that impressed with what I managed to experience. It’s fine, but that’s really all I can say about it to be honest. It doesn’t play into the strengths the base game had, and the new stuff it accomplishes is, as I’ve reiterated repeatedly throughout this review, fine. Nothing more, nothing less. Hopefully the second part will offer more exciting content to delve into.
If you haven’t already read my Backloggd review of Pokémon Violet, I’ll give you a basic cliffnotes version. I still maintain that the game is fun and has the potential to be something truly great: The characters are outstanding. I still love all of your classmate friends Nemona, Penny and ESPECIALLY Arven and the relationship they all share with each other and the protagonist. The story is really well done, the game truly gives you the freedom to progress the way you want to progress, the new Pokémon are almost all winners, Terastallizing is quite possibly the best gimmick Pokémon has introduced thus far, the list goes on. There’s just one problem that compromises everything I just mentioned: the games are blatantly unfinished. They look like crap, run even worse and are filled to the brim with bugs and glitches. I’m not even exaggerating when I say that this is probably the one of the worst performing Switch games ever released, if not THE worst. Even worse is how this was sold at full price with a $60 tag in spite of all of this. With how shockingly awful the presentation is and how putrid the performance is, what should be some of the best games in the franchise get dragged down to the status of “pretty good with a HUGE asterisk at the end”, which is a damn shame. I’d still play this any day of the week over Sword and Shield and, heck, even Legends Arceus didn’t really do a whole lot for me after I beat it. But in its current state, no matter how much I sing its praises, I can’t recommend it to anyone with the amount of issues it has with that kind of price tag. The games were so unfinished and bug riddled that Nintendo themselves offered a public apology stating that they would eventually improve the game’s problems. However, despite this claim, here we are with the first official DLC release and…that hasn’t happened yet. In fact, to jump the gun here a bit, this DLC somehow, beyond all reasonable possibilities, performs even WORSE than the base game. I wish I were making this up; a huge chunk of my Violet playthrough felt like I was walking through molasses, sections constantly dipping under 20 fps and making the game essentially play in slow motion for most of it. In the Teal Mask however, it’s pretty much runs like this throughout THE ENTIRE DLC. I don’t think it ever once lets up or improves which is…admittedly pretty impressive. I didn’t think it was possible to make this game perform even worse but here we are I guess.
Anyway, on to the DLC contents itself. Sadly, to my disappointment, Nemona Penny and Arven are not in this DLC in any capacity which sucks. Hopefully they’ll be in the next part. For this field trip you get a bunch of no name personality-less NPC students to accompany you to the land of Kitakami, a region inspired by rural Japan. As someone who recently took a trip to Japan last summer, I appreciated what they were going for with this region and I did enjoy the land’s aesthetic. I also appreciated the new outfits that came with the DLC, the jinbei you wear is cute even if it kinda murdered my character’s hairstyle and I had to travel back to Paldea to restore her hair to what it originally was lol. The new outfits outside of that are limited but also pretty good. The main objective I would want out of a DLC expansion for Pokémon Violet, an objective I would set before playing this mind you, would be to create a brand-new experience while still retaining everything that was good about the base game: that being a great story, great characters, freedom to do whatever you want with a variety of things to do, and a ton of new Pokémon to catch. Unfortunately, this DLC just feels so much lesser than the base game in each of these individual areas. We’ll start with the new characters and story: we have 3 new characters, 2 being the “main” characters/rivals accompanying you with one being available in an optional side mission. The rivals you get are siblings Carmine and Kieran, students at the blueberry academy (which we’ll get to in the next part of the DLC) and natives to Kitakami. They were…fine, I guess. Carmine is the typical hotheaded jerk rival that eventually befriends you at the end, although she isn’t really rude or aggressive towards you per say, she’s more standoffish like Arven though on a higher level. She does have reasonings for why she is the way she is and eventually realizes the error of her ways. She was fine; the one thing I didn’t like about her was how…aggressive she is towards her little brother. Granted most of it feels like typical sibling bickering but there’s a lot of moments that feel downright kinda uncomfortable, both with her suddenly snapping and Kieran’s response afterwards. Speaking of Kieran, he started out pretty good. He’s this super shy socially awkward kid that slowly befriends and forms a bond with you with how outgoing you are, but eventually situations unfold that feel very forced, and he instead does a heel faced turn and becomes extremely jealous of you and super self-doubting of himself. Maybe these plot threads will tie up in the second part of the DLC but first impressions of these characters so far are not exactly the greatest. They aren’t Nemona Penny or Arven that’s for certain. Perrin was cool though. I liked her story and personality/backstory quite a bit, and her survey minigame was cute as well. That being said needing to catch 150 Pokémon to get to that point is more than a bit tedious, I only ended up doing so out of morbid curiosity.
The story also just kinda exists. Again, it’s mostly centered around Kieran, Carmine, and the local legends of Kitakami, how the legends aren’t “exactly as they appear”. And while it was fun to listen to them and to have revealed the true story of really happened, that’s really all that ends up happening in this entire story. The Loyal Three show up for a bit to cause trouble, they’re swiftly dealt with, and that’s about all that comes from it. The main bulk of the story is mostly dealing with Kieran’s shenanigans. Again, the second part will probably expand more on this plot point so it’s likely to be still ongoing but the first part didn’t really “hook” me so to speak. That wouldn’t be so bad if I felt that there was more stuff to do in the story but there just aren’t. The region of Kitakami is much much smaller than Paldea, which makes sense I suppose but I also feel there’s nowhere near as much to explore and experience with this region outside of the main campaign. There’s this one minigame you can play at the festival that I played once and didn’t really feel the need to play again. That’s really about it. Again, Perrin has a pretty neat side section but it’s fairly short and you need to grind 150 Pokédex entries in order to access it at all. There’s not really any new Pokémon to speak of outside of Ogrepon, who is pretty cool, and the Loyal Three, who are imo very bland, same-y and uninteresting in design. There are a lot of returning mons from previous gens, and while I do love me some Yanmega and Staraptor, there’s a reeeeeeally high amount of flying Pokémon hanging around Kitakami from my experience. So much so that for a bit, when I crafted a new team from scratch, 5/6 of my party consisted of nothing but part flying type Pokémon. Applin got a new evolution (not really something I care for since I don’t like the Pokémon in general or any of its evolutionary lineup) and Polteageist got a new regional form (I know it’s technically a separate species according to the Pokédex but still, eh. Not super invested in that lineup either). The music was really good at least, glad they kept to that tradition from Violet.
At the end of the day, I didn’t necessarily HATE my time with the Teal Mask DLC, I just wasn’t that impressed with what I managed to experience. It’s fine, but that’s really all I can say about it to be honest. It doesn’t play into the strengths the base game had, and the new stuff it accomplishes is, as I’ve reiterated repeatedly throughout this review, fine. Nothing more, nothing less. Hopefully the second part will offer more exciting content to delve into.