Simultaneously one of the biggest steps forward and biggest steps back for Pokemon. It's obviously still a Pokemon RPG at its core, and as usual comes with a solid new roster of monsters, cool characters, banging music, etc. The stuff Pokemon has been good at since the beginning. But the big difference is that now it's completely open world. Sword and Shield were the first to experiment with something like this, with a large open area placed in the middle of the rest of the game's linear map. Legends Arceus was pretty close to open world, consisting exclusively of multiple large maps. But Scarlet and Violet were the final evolution, and has one big & completely open world. Overall, it executes it pretty well, aside from no level-scaling for the gym leaders/boss battles. You could make the argument that level scaling would make the difficulty curve much more boring, which I sort of agree with. But it would be nice if the game at least let you know what the "correct" order is to do the boss battles, because for every battle that you are underleveled for, there's another that you will be overleveled for.
However, this game suffers from some of the worst technical issues I've ever seen from a video game series as massive as Pokemon. The game runs terribly on the aging Switch hardware, and the visuals range from "decent" to "complete shit." The Switch was already underpowered at launch, so the fact that it was almost six years old by the time this game came out is certainly part of the equation. But multiple other studios have proven that you can squeeze out a way better performance/visuals ratio, and with Pokemon being the most profitable media franchise in the world, there's absolutely NO excuse for how it turned out. I'm writing this almost a year after the game launched, and it still runs just as bad.
Despite all of that, the game is still playable. Pokemon is thankfully a series that doesn't require quick & precise movement. And it didn't stop me from putting in around 75 hours within the first month. I had a ton of fun with it and I'm excited for the future. But the technical issues absolutely took away a good amount of the enjoyment, and if I didn't enjoy playing this series so much, there's a good chance that it would've ruined the whole thing for me.
However, this game suffers from some of the worst technical issues I've ever seen from a video game series as massive as Pokemon. The game runs terribly on the aging Switch hardware, and the visuals range from "decent" to "complete shit." The Switch was already underpowered at launch, so the fact that it was almost six years old by the time this game came out is certainly part of the equation. But multiple other studios have proven that you can squeeze out a way better performance/visuals ratio, and with Pokemon being the most profitable media franchise in the world, there's absolutely NO excuse for how it turned out. I'm writing this almost a year after the game launched, and it still runs just as bad.
Despite all of that, the game is still playable. Pokemon is thankfully a series that doesn't require quick & precise movement. And it didn't stop me from putting in around 75 hours within the first month. I had a ton of fun with it and I'm excited for the future. But the technical issues absolutely took away a good amount of the enjoyment, and if I didn't enjoy playing this series so much, there's a good chance that it would've ruined the whole thing for me.