For the first time ever, I skipped a Pokemon generation. Generation 8, that is. I didn't really want to, but it just looked...boring. A lot of people seemed to verify that I made the right decision. I thought I was going to do the same thing here to be honest, but when I saw all of the trailers, I saw promise.
My return to the Pokemon series actually started early when I caved and bought Legends Arceus. It was a surprisingly fantastic time. Enough that when I saw that a lot of elements from that game would be present in Scarlet & Violet, it made me want to play again. Had this been just another crack at the old Pokemon formula, I would not have tried it. But I saw a main series Pokemon game that was an open world adventure, featuring no tall grass / random encounters, that allowed you to just play how you wanted to play. That sounded great to me. The game would even go on to be reasonably fun. So why exactly did it fall quite a distance away from greatness?
Well, there were a lot of things in the way. It would be easy to me to start by listing the performance issues the game has. It is true that these issues are present and that it is absolutely embarrassing for a franchise like Pokemon to have these issues. But I don't want to make my review about that, but rather what the game tried to be. The only impact these issues will have on my score is that I won't give the game the benefit of the doubt if I am on the fence on my rating.
I bought this game because of Pokemon Legends Arceus. What I think made me enjoy that game so much was the fact that it actually was an immersive adventure. I ended up caring about the world because I felt like a character with a unique goal of filling out the first Pokedex. (which was actually reasonable in this game!) I felt like I was part of a dangerous and hostile world, which kind of makes sense in a world full of wild animals.
Generation 9 felt like it took some of that, but took some of it away as well. Despite the fact that Generation 9 had a true open world and Legends didn't, the world of Legends somehow felt more believable. The story was more focused for one, but also just the laws of the game world made more sense. Legends wasn't really a JRPG - it was an action adventure with JRPG elements. When you lost all of your Pokemon in that game, you didn't faint. You were just defenseless in a world full of animals that could attack you. That felt real. In that game if you were battling a wild Pokemon, nearby friends of it might join in and make battles even tougher.
The immersion in Violet feels completely shattered the second you realize that there is a set of rules the game has to play by. I can't tell you how many times other wild Pokemon would watch my battles, just to immediately leap at me after my fight ended. Like, these are wild Pokemon, are they not? Why would they wait patiently for your battle to end when they could all just jump you at once? Why can't the player move around or even bail on these wild encounters on their own accord? Couldn't you throw a Poke Ball without initiating a battle?
There are obvious reasons why this all didn't happen here. That's not what main series Pokemon is. However, I think if this is true, perhaps Pokemon is not fit to be this type of game.
I will still say that I think the game was better for being this type of game. Trying to fill out the Pokedex doesn't feel like a waste of time when you can actually see what you are engaging in before you go into the fight. This just makes for less randomized gameplay, and it actually turned me away from pre-determined trainer battles in favor of wild encounters. The beauty of this system is that you no longer have to play a linear path and potential replayability usually opens up when games make decisions like this.
Unfortunately, I think there was a missed opportunity in this regard because while the game doesn't really stop you from choosing the order you want to go in, it still does have an intended route. I think this was a bad decision.
Some battles in my playthrough were quite tough, while others were braindead easy. This is because the order I went in disagreed with the intended route of the devs. This slightly defeats the purpose of having an open world game.
I understand that it can be a lot of work to make a game that is more adaptive, but I think that GameFreak should be able to pull this off. There were many different challenges throughout the game between the gyms, titans, and star raids. I think it should've been pretty easy to make a tiered system where the game evaluates how strong the player should be based on how many things they have completed. If a player loses to a gym leader that has a Maschiff and come back later with more badges, perhaps the leader would then have a Mabosstiff at a higher level. Not only would this prevent players from cheesing certain fights, it would make the game feel like more of a real place where other trainers get stronger as you progress too.
One of the things that made The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild work so well was the flexibility that the game gave you. While some areas in that game were more challenging than others, you would always have the necessary tools to beat any challenge because the game gave you those resources quite early in the game.
Scarlet & Violet had the opportunity to do the exact same thing, with the academy acting as the end of the tutorial. However, they locked certain travelling features behind the defeat of Titan Pokemon, which kind of felt like a bunch of unnecessary barriers. They locked one of the hardest Titans behind the surfing ability, which makes sense: harder challenges should be later in the game. But had they used an adaptive levelling system, this would not have been an issue and players could've just chose the order they wanted, which was a large purpose of changing the game to be how it is.
Passing by an area that you can't access yet interrupts the flow of this type of game, for no good reason. To gain these new abilities, Miraidon apparently just needs to eat a bite of a sandwich, which is part of a cutscene that plays about five different times with little variation. Like... really now? That's what it takes for you to be able to suddenly jump higher? This made me miss the Ride Pokemon from Arceus further - it made not having access to abilities less insulting because in those cases, you just didn't have a relationship with the appropriate ride Pokemon yet. I also felt that the actual ride mechanics were more smooth in Arceus as well.
Ironically, one of the glitches made the game better. This was Miraidon's ability to scale tall mountains with slight inclines, if you made him face the wall backwards. This was extremely useful and acted as a way to get me to the place I wanted to be more than a handful of times. The glide ability felt incredibly underwhelming because it just made executing this glitch more annoying, on top of just being worse than the fly from Legends. Additionally, water travel felt incredibly laggy.
I don't think the forced linearity really did anything to help the game. I understand that it is hard to make a story with adaptive level scaling and the ability to go where you want when you want, but they didn't even take advantage of this forced linearity. If you are going to make some things happen in order, at least have a plot related reason to do so.
It was hard to get hooked on this game until the very end because it didn't feel like much was happening to drive the plot. Having multiple different quests was cool and allowed you to take breaks from each quest while still progressing, but because the story of the game is largely dependent on all of those quests being finished, almost all of the uniqueness to the story of the game comes at the end where it just comes across as shoehorned in. I would've appreciated more of an effort to make the middle of the game more engaging, and like I mentioned earlier with all the different objectives, I think they could've found some set times to potentially introduce new things to the narrative, or to change the world a little.
I still did appreciate what they tried to do with the ending, but it did feel a little bit weird. The game is mainly open world with just a bunch of different tasks all at once. It didn't really embrace that. Rather, they decided thay they needed to fit a full Pokemon story in the last hour after the normal gameplay instead of building the story around said gameplay.
The ending was a cool premise but came across as a homework assignment that was started five minutes before the deadline. It did not even feel real, and I think it doesn't make up for what I saw as a less than engaging main game.
Because they were limited on what the story could be, they really tried to make the characters themselves memorable. This cast of gym leaders felt like the most unique yet, though ironically, the one whose quirk was that he is pretty boring compared to the rest was the one that stood out the most as the most interesting. The Elite Four was also a pleasant surprise, I'm not going to lie. The first member in particular made a strong impression that I find quite rare in Pokemon games, let alone ones from the modern era.
I was not very impressed by the Team Star bosses. At the end of these sections they really tried to introduce the backstory of these characters, but I think one thing they do not realize is that I really don't care about characters I just met five minutes ago. These characters wait in their section the entire game for you to appear, you beat them, and then their scene plays. They might as well be ordinary trainers to the player, but the game treats them as extra important. It does not feel earned. I immediately remember feeling this way about Lily early in Generation 7. When a game tries hard to show a character is important, it almost makes you naturally dismissive. Genuine care about a character in almost any form of media typically happens because you realize that you like the character in some way - not because you feel you are supposed to like them.
Comparatively to X/Y, the friend group ended up being somewhat likeable in my opinion. I was especially surprised to really like Arven by the end of the game - he is handled in almost the opposite way of the star captains, I think.
The exception to liking the main supporting cast was Nemona; she felt like perhaps the most one dimensional rival yet. Rivals are supposed to be battling rivals of course, but when thinking back to characters like Silver, Barry, Bianca, and Hugh, all wildly different rivals for that matter, they all had a personality trait that made them who they were. Nemona's quirk was that she really liked battling. That is completely uninteresting for a rival. Like yes, that was her purpose for existing. It's practically a prerequisite to being a rival. She just doesn't feel like a real character as such. Just a robot that was programmed to do and say certain things, or an AI that really wants to tell you how much it likes battling Pokemon.
One of my other complaints is a quick one: targeting Pokemon on the overworld was infuriating at times. I would look directly at them, press the button, and nothing would appear. Having a feature to tell you which Pokemon you have already caught is great, especially in games where trying to complete the Pokedex doesn't feel like a waste of time. I just wish the feature was accessible 100% of the time, and it isn't because of how picky the camera / ZL is.
I also thought the auto battle mechanic was pretty pointless. This would be one of those things that is a harmless addition, maybe even good for specific players (like shiny hunters apparently), but they forced you to use it in the Team Star hideout areas. They just felt like such a waste of time. I understand they needed more things for the map, but there are better ways to utilize the map than forcing players to use a weird mechanic just to justify development time spent on it.
Terastalizing was another gimmick that I wasn't super in to, but it was better than Z-moves or Dynamaxing. The monotype thing was interesting, and at least trying to explain the idea in the late/postgame made the game a little bit more memorable. Frankly, I wish they had just kept mega evolutions still, but that's just me.
One other comment that doesn't fit anywhere else, but probably needs to be said: this is just about the most underwhelmed I've ever been by a Pokemon soundtrack. There were very few memorable songs, and a lot of the themes you just have to get right were misses for me, notably the gym battle theme.
I'm really torn. I would be lying if I said the game was never fun, or that it didn't do anything that I wanted the series to try. There is an interview that the game has your player take in the late game, where they ask you a question that is a layup for the main character: Do you like Pokemon?
Frustratingly, I sat at the screen and had to think about it for a little bit. It's complicated really. It is possible to care about something and be disappointed still, or feel that it could be so much more. I don't say it out of pleasure, but the series has fell off a cliff since the end of Generation 5. I understand that going from the DS to a home console is a hard change to make and makes living up to your potential harder. I just don't buy that a franchise like Pokemon can't get there.
The good news is that I think the series is actually on an upswing again. I had more fun with this game than Generation 7, the last games I played. I think I liked it more than X/Y too, though it was close.
I actually appreciate that Generation 9 tried to be something different from the games that came before it and a lot of the changes it made I think should be series staples moving forward. However, I don't think it is there yet. And that's okay. Everything needs work. Some good foundational pieces were established here, and I do think there is a lot room for improvement. At the very least, I am a little bit interested to see what happens next now.
My return to the Pokemon series actually started early when I caved and bought Legends Arceus. It was a surprisingly fantastic time. Enough that when I saw that a lot of elements from that game would be present in Scarlet & Violet, it made me want to play again. Had this been just another crack at the old Pokemon formula, I would not have tried it. But I saw a main series Pokemon game that was an open world adventure, featuring no tall grass / random encounters, that allowed you to just play how you wanted to play. That sounded great to me. The game would even go on to be reasonably fun. So why exactly did it fall quite a distance away from greatness?
Well, there were a lot of things in the way. It would be easy to me to start by listing the performance issues the game has. It is true that these issues are present and that it is absolutely embarrassing for a franchise like Pokemon to have these issues. But I don't want to make my review about that, but rather what the game tried to be. The only impact these issues will have on my score is that I won't give the game the benefit of the doubt if I am on the fence on my rating.
I bought this game because of Pokemon Legends Arceus. What I think made me enjoy that game so much was the fact that it actually was an immersive adventure. I ended up caring about the world because I felt like a character with a unique goal of filling out the first Pokedex. (which was actually reasonable in this game!) I felt like I was part of a dangerous and hostile world, which kind of makes sense in a world full of wild animals.
Generation 9 felt like it took some of that, but took some of it away as well. Despite the fact that Generation 9 had a true open world and Legends didn't, the world of Legends somehow felt more believable. The story was more focused for one, but also just the laws of the game world made more sense. Legends wasn't really a JRPG - it was an action adventure with JRPG elements. When you lost all of your Pokemon in that game, you didn't faint. You were just defenseless in a world full of animals that could attack you. That felt real. In that game if you were battling a wild Pokemon, nearby friends of it might join in and make battles even tougher.
The immersion in Violet feels completely shattered the second you realize that there is a set of rules the game has to play by. I can't tell you how many times other wild Pokemon would watch my battles, just to immediately leap at me after my fight ended. Like, these are wild Pokemon, are they not? Why would they wait patiently for your battle to end when they could all just jump you at once? Why can't the player move around or even bail on these wild encounters on their own accord? Couldn't you throw a Poke Ball without initiating a battle?
There are obvious reasons why this all didn't happen here. That's not what main series Pokemon is. However, I think if this is true, perhaps Pokemon is not fit to be this type of game.
I will still say that I think the game was better for being this type of game. Trying to fill out the Pokedex doesn't feel like a waste of time when you can actually see what you are engaging in before you go into the fight. This just makes for less randomized gameplay, and it actually turned me away from pre-determined trainer battles in favor of wild encounters. The beauty of this system is that you no longer have to play a linear path and potential replayability usually opens up when games make decisions like this.
Unfortunately, I think there was a missed opportunity in this regard because while the game doesn't really stop you from choosing the order you want to go in, it still does have an intended route. I think this was a bad decision.
Some battles in my playthrough were quite tough, while others were braindead easy. This is because the order I went in disagreed with the intended route of the devs. This slightly defeats the purpose of having an open world game.
I understand that it can be a lot of work to make a game that is more adaptive, but I think that GameFreak should be able to pull this off. There were many different challenges throughout the game between the gyms, titans, and star raids. I think it should've been pretty easy to make a tiered system where the game evaluates how strong the player should be based on how many things they have completed. If a player loses to a gym leader that has a Maschiff and come back later with more badges, perhaps the leader would then have a Mabosstiff at a higher level. Not only would this prevent players from cheesing certain fights, it would make the game feel like more of a real place where other trainers get stronger as you progress too.
One of the things that made The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild work so well was the flexibility that the game gave you. While some areas in that game were more challenging than others, you would always have the necessary tools to beat any challenge because the game gave you those resources quite early in the game.
Scarlet & Violet had the opportunity to do the exact same thing, with the academy acting as the end of the tutorial. However, they locked certain travelling features behind the defeat of Titan Pokemon, which kind of felt like a bunch of unnecessary barriers. They locked one of the hardest Titans behind the surfing ability, which makes sense: harder challenges should be later in the game. But had they used an adaptive levelling system, this would not have been an issue and players could've just chose the order they wanted, which was a large purpose of changing the game to be how it is.
Passing by an area that you can't access yet interrupts the flow of this type of game, for no good reason. To gain these new abilities, Miraidon apparently just needs to eat a bite of a sandwich, which is part of a cutscene that plays about five different times with little variation. Like... really now? That's what it takes for you to be able to suddenly jump higher? This made me miss the Ride Pokemon from Arceus further - it made not having access to abilities less insulting because in those cases, you just didn't have a relationship with the appropriate ride Pokemon yet. I also felt that the actual ride mechanics were more smooth in Arceus as well.
Ironically, one of the glitches made the game better. This was Miraidon's ability to scale tall mountains with slight inclines, if you made him face the wall backwards. This was extremely useful and acted as a way to get me to the place I wanted to be more than a handful of times. The glide ability felt incredibly underwhelming because it just made executing this glitch more annoying, on top of just being worse than the fly from Legends. Additionally, water travel felt incredibly laggy.
I don't think the forced linearity really did anything to help the game. I understand that it is hard to make a story with adaptive level scaling and the ability to go where you want when you want, but they didn't even take advantage of this forced linearity. If you are going to make some things happen in order, at least have a plot related reason to do so.
It was hard to get hooked on this game until the very end because it didn't feel like much was happening to drive the plot. Having multiple different quests was cool and allowed you to take breaks from each quest while still progressing, but because the story of the game is largely dependent on all of those quests being finished, almost all of the uniqueness to the story of the game comes at the end where it just comes across as shoehorned in. I would've appreciated more of an effort to make the middle of the game more engaging, and like I mentioned earlier with all the different objectives, I think they could've found some set times to potentially introduce new things to the narrative, or to change the world a little.
I still did appreciate what they tried to do with the ending, but it did feel a little bit weird. The game is mainly open world with just a bunch of different tasks all at once. It didn't really embrace that. Rather, they decided thay they needed to fit a full Pokemon story in the last hour after the normal gameplay instead of building the story around said gameplay.
The ending was a cool premise but came across as a homework assignment that was started five minutes before the deadline. It did not even feel real, and I think it doesn't make up for what I saw as a less than engaging main game.
Because they were limited on what the story could be, they really tried to make the characters themselves memorable. This cast of gym leaders felt like the most unique yet, though ironically, the one whose quirk was that he is pretty boring compared to the rest was the one that stood out the most as the most interesting. The Elite Four was also a pleasant surprise, I'm not going to lie. The first member in particular made a strong impression that I find quite rare in Pokemon games, let alone ones from the modern era.
I was not very impressed by the Team Star bosses. At the end of these sections they really tried to introduce the backstory of these characters, but I think one thing they do not realize is that I really don't care about characters I just met five minutes ago. These characters wait in their section the entire game for you to appear, you beat them, and then their scene plays. They might as well be ordinary trainers to the player, but the game treats them as extra important. It does not feel earned. I immediately remember feeling this way about Lily early in Generation 7. When a game tries hard to show a character is important, it almost makes you naturally dismissive. Genuine care about a character in almost any form of media typically happens because you realize that you like the character in some way - not because you feel you are supposed to like them.
Comparatively to X/Y, the friend group ended up being somewhat likeable in my opinion. I was especially surprised to really like Arven by the end of the game - he is handled in almost the opposite way of the star captains, I think.
The exception to liking the main supporting cast was Nemona; she felt like perhaps the most one dimensional rival yet. Rivals are supposed to be battling rivals of course, but when thinking back to characters like Silver, Barry, Bianca, and Hugh, all wildly different rivals for that matter, they all had a personality trait that made them who they were. Nemona's quirk was that she really liked battling. That is completely uninteresting for a rival. Like yes, that was her purpose for existing. It's practically a prerequisite to being a rival. She just doesn't feel like a real character as such. Just a robot that was programmed to do and say certain things, or an AI that really wants to tell you how much it likes battling Pokemon.
One of my other complaints is a quick one: targeting Pokemon on the overworld was infuriating at times. I would look directly at them, press the button, and nothing would appear. Having a feature to tell you which Pokemon you have already caught is great, especially in games where trying to complete the Pokedex doesn't feel like a waste of time. I just wish the feature was accessible 100% of the time, and it isn't because of how picky the camera / ZL is.
I also thought the auto battle mechanic was pretty pointless. This would be one of those things that is a harmless addition, maybe even good for specific players (like shiny hunters apparently), but they forced you to use it in the Team Star hideout areas. They just felt like such a waste of time. I understand they needed more things for the map, but there are better ways to utilize the map than forcing players to use a weird mechanic just to justify development time spent on it.
Terastalizing was another gimmick that I wasn't super in to, but it was better than Z-moves or Dynamaxing. The monotype thing was interesting, and at least trying to explain the idea in the late/postgame made the game a little bit more memorable. Frankly, I wish they had just kept mega evolutions still, but that's just me.
One other comment that doesn't fit anywhere else, but probably needs to be said: this is just about the most underwhelmed I've ever been by a Pokemon soundtrack. There were very few memorable songs, and a lot of the themes you just have to get right were misses for me, notably the gym battle theme.
I'm really torn. I would be lying if I said the game was never fun, or that it didn't do anything that I wanted the series to try. There is an interview that the game has your player take in the late game, where they ask you a question that is a layup for the main character: Do you like Pokemon?
Frustratingly, I sat at the screen and had to think about it for a little bit. It's complicated really. It is possible to care about something and be disappointed still, or feel that it could be so much more. I don't say it out of pleasure, but the series has fell off a cliff since the end of Generation 5. I understand that going from the DS to a home console is a hard change to make and makes living up to your potential harder. I just don't buy that a franchise like Pokemon can't get there.
The good news is that I think the series is actually on an upswing again. I had more fun with this game than Generation 7, the last games I played. I think I liked it more than X/Y too, though it was close.
I actually appreciate that Generation 9 tried to be something different from the games that came before it and a lot of the changes it made I think should be series staples moving forward. However, I don't think it is there yet. And that's okay. Everything needs work. Some good foundational pieces were established here, and I do think there is a lot room for improvement. At the very least, I am a little bit interested to see what happens next now.