It's better than Teal Mask thanks to a focus on more interesting/harder battles as well as some more interesting content around the margins, but the DLC here continues to make the problems with S/V immensely more visible. I won't even fixate too much on the jarring lack of voice acting (not even samples) for a fully 3D JRPG nor how the game still runs like doodoo.
As they give us more Scarlet and Violet, I realize more that the open world they've given us is actually rather lifeless. Even compared to Arceus, which was by design more focused on being in the wild, the open world feels weird, slapdash, lumpy, and with little to explore. It doesn’t give back what you put in.For a game that should be all about exploration, all of the amazing moments of exploration in previous Pokemon games -- stumbling on a crazy legendary or finding a powerful trainer, or even just finding a cool location by crawling around the edge of an area -- are gone. Instead, we have side content locked behind menus and boring repeatable quests, and the handful of interesting Pokemon designs these DLCs introduce are locked behind tedious Pokedex completion requirements.
The story is a little better than Part 1 (mostly because it is less wordy) but the stories and characters are still pretty boring and cookie cutter. It teases things like a new Tera type, Area Zero expansions, and the ability to control your Pokemon, only to give you the most boring version of each of those things. We're going back to Unova? What if we go to an underground terrarium instead of a place even a little evocative of Pokemon New York???
Still, the DLC introduces a few new Pokemon designs, some harder battles, a couple fairly nifty twists, and a better selection of returning old monsters. This is by no means a disaster. That said, for as much as I enjoyed aspects of base S/V, I feel like every piece of new content sours my memory of it a little bit. Nagging questions like "Why does launch Arceus run circles around S/V's performance on Switch a full year later?" and "Why do these towns just feel slapped down in the middle of nowhere?" keep getting louder. I remember starting up Violet after a midnight launch and watching the opening cutscene where the whole ugly world just popped in and out of view.
To be clear, I love Pokemon and think Arceus is one of the best games in the series. Just, man, how do you sell 15-20 million copies of each game in this series and this is what you put out for sale?
As they give us more Scarlet and Violet, I realize more that the open world they've given us is actually rather lifeless. Even compared to Arceus, which was by design more focused on being in the wild, the open world feels weird, slapdash, lumpy, and with little to explore. It doesn’t give back what you put in.For a game that should be all about exploration, all of the amazing moments of exploration in previous Pokemon games -- stumbling on a crazy legendary or finding a powerful trainer, or even just finding a cool location by crawling around the edge of an area -- are gone. Instead, we have side content locked behind menus and boring repeatable quests, and the handful of interesting Pokemon designs these DLCs introduce are locked behind tedious Pokedex completion requirements.
The story is a little better than Part 1 (mostly because it is less wordy) but the stories and characters are still pretty boring and cookie cutter. It teases things like a new Tera type, Area Zero expansions, and the ability to control your Pokemon, only to give you the most boring version of each of those things. We're going back to Unova? What if we go to an underground terrarium instead of a place even a little evocative of Pokemon New York???
Still, the DLC introduces a few new Pokemon designs, some harder battles, a couple fairly nifty twists, and a better selection of returning old monsters. This is by no means a disaster. That said, for as much as I enjoyed aspects of base S/V, I feel like every piece of new content sours my memory of it a little bit. Nagging questions like "Why does launch Arceus run circles around S/V's performance on Switch a full year later?" and "Why do these towns just feel slapped down in the middle of nowhere?" keep getting louder. I remember starting up Violet after a midnight launch and watching the opening cutscene where the whole ugly world just popped in and out of view.
To be clear, I love Pokemon and think Arceus is one of the best games in the series. Just, man, how do you sell 15-20 million copies of each game in this series and this is what you put out for sale?