I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Pokemon Scarlet seems rushed. It’s buggy and unpolished, but also brimming with ambitious ideas that try to bring Pokemon into the modern day without compromising the core of what makes these games so eminently addictive, and not addictive in such a predatory way as many modern games lean. It’s as easy to pick up and hard to put down as ever, regardless of any technical issues, which never hampered my enjoyment in the slightest. But while those are the most obvious way the game was rushed, the part that hurt my experience the most was the way that ambition feels… not fully realized.

Backing up a bit, my first Pokemon game (as well as one of my first video games) was Pokemon Diamond, and playing Scarlet really brought some things that I value about Diamond and my other favorite Pokemon games (SoulSilver, Emerald, Black/White) into focus. Primarily that those games are really streamlined in progression, often giving you only one path forward. No matter what you want to do, you’re gonna do everything in the order the game wants you to.

Scarlet takes an approach more reminiscent of Breath of the Wild, a large open world with a few objectives and points of interest marked on your map, but kinda fumbles this structure. Er well, it’s more just missing any sort of structure. You wanna complete all the objectives, but that’s all your direction, and that works great in Zelda where all the Divine Beasts are equally difficult, but here its more complicated. Broadly, the objectives get harder as you get closer to the top of the map, but this rule isn’t hard and fast, and there’s a big gaping hole in the middle of the map that makes keeping a comfortable difficulty curve tough. There’s a nice sense of freedom and exploration gained from this structure, but the game feels so much less tight as a result. To be as reductive as possible, it’s laid out like Fallout 3 and I wish it was laid out like Fallout New Vegas.

The other main issue I’ve got is that each of the objectives in the game feels a little bit insubstantial? The gyms are all preceeded by “tests” instead of weird little obstacle course puzzle things as they used to, and while the literal things you do aren’t all that different than the older games, there’s a missing sense of place to it all, and it makes each gym feel less unique. Not to mention the tests vary wildly in terms of fun factor and difficulty. The team star bases have a similar issue, but worse, as they don’t vary at all outside of themed type and the boss’s personality. The titans are a bit like this too but it doesn’t feel as weird there, probably because the context is just fighting big wild Pokemon.

Luckily, the end of the game is fantastic, and really pulls the loose threads of the rest of the game together in a satisfying way, which I wasn’t expecting at all tbh. In a game as loosely defined as this, having such a tight ending really felt like a breath of fresh air.

Anyways, it’s great fun, but for me it didn’t have that special tightly designed spark the series used to have. Plus it pretty obviously needed another year in the oven, between the missed opportunities and lack of QA testing. I’d recommend it if you like the series beyond the first 4 or 5 entries, or just the franchise as a whole, but if you want a tight RPG you might wanna skip it.