After rolling credits on this and playing the epilogue, I find it weird that they even called this The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero in the first place - I really enjoyed the last act of Scarlet & Violet (even if I thought getting there was kind of a slog), and the DLC doesn’t really do anything with the interesting and weird stuff the game starts dropping on you in its last couple of hours. What you get instead is pretty compelling in its own right though, and the core characters that are introduced throughout the two new chunks of game are so full of personality and love that it’s hard not to get caught up in a package that’s otherwise just fine.

Kitakami and Blueberry Academy are much fuller and better realised than Paldea, but the environment design is still the same kind of weirdly frictionless and formless slop that makes it really hard to ever feel like you’re on an adventure. The Pokémon battles in The Indigo Disk are genuinely challenging and dynamic, maybe the most fun the series has ever been - but this is largely because they’re centred around Double Battles instead of the usual Singles format. The more interesting and strategic demands of the doubles format unfortunately brought to mind a lot of the weaknesses of the legacy core mechanics and math happening behind the scenes which has stayed largely untouched since 2003 - why can’t the game as normal be this fun? For everything neat the DLC does, the bad bones of the base game exert their presence at every moment - there’s mostly the same good things and bad things that there were in the core game at launch, so if you already thought this sucked there’s probably nothing here to convince you otherwise. I will still buy the next one without question because I am a horrible little hog snort sniff slorp