I’d call myself the most casual of Pokémon fans; big into it as a kid who was the perfect age to get in on the ground floor of this Whole Thing, but after gen 3 and bar a brief but frenetic romhack phase in my late teens, I’ve settled into the kind of distantly pleasant relationship with the series where I pick up each new game and have a good time playing through to credits but then never touch or think about them again, and repeat every two years. I couldn’t tell you the names of most new guys, but I CAN see a picture of them and go damn, that’s a cute critter. Casual. So no one was more surprised than me when Pokémon Violet turned out to be not only my favorite Pokémon game easily and by far, but one of my favorite games this year?? I play a lot of games man, and mostly bangers too.
A big big part of this accomplishment is that Pokémon has finally cracked the code on writing, like really for real this time. I know Pokémon guys like to talk about gen V and I am even a gen Whatever Sun and Moon Were liker for the stuff those go for at the end but there is simply nothing as consistently and thoroughly well done in this series before now and certainly not on the scale we see here. Every single person pops with huge personality, and for the first time those personalities are supported by like, stories that while not REVOLUTIONARY are certainly a tier above the stock standard baby anime tropes we’ve seen in the past. Hearing that Team Star were like the what, third antagonist group in a row who were a spin on Misunderstood Waylaid Youths had me groaning at first but their stories and motivations land! There is nuance in the laying out of their situation, there is acknowledgment that institutions in power and authority, especially over children, can and do fail to care for them and also are able to accept responsibility. Arven is a great little guy, firmly in the “wanna stick him in a little glass bottle and shake it up” tier. A potent blend of condescending and pathetic with a genuinely deserved chip on his shoulder at the way his life has turned out. And I’ll acknowledge that it’s because I have a chronically (and someday probably sooner than later it will become terminally) ill cat who has been having a really bad month, but his scenes really hit for me and I extremely cried near the resolution of his story.
The idea that a Pokémon game can have that power over me is only possible because Game Freak’s writers have subtley but definitely expanded the scope of maturity in how they treat the world of Paldea compared to previous games. Arven’s story fundamentally cannot work without acknowledgment of violence, real violence outside of the context of Pokémon battles – of death and dying, active dying that is happening now and happening TO us rather than in abstract stories of ancient struggles. This sort of thing is evident everywhere you look in Paldea. The Pokémon League isn’t the centerpiece of your life or anyone else’s, even the people who work for it; and they DO work for it, in an employment capacity. But there’s a distinct feeling that it’s not in its heyday even if it’s still a Big Deal. Almost every single gym leader does this as more of a side gig than their whole thing, and sometimes they’re not around or there’s an implication that these events have to be scheduled around their availability to some degree. Gym tests are based on the local town culture more often that they are on hard battle prowess and those cultures are a much greater and more foregrounded part of the town identities. When you get to the Elite Four finally, the building has two rooms that you get to see, a sort of lobby foyer where you’re interviewed with a classic gray office carpet floor pattern that every American desk drone knows intimately, and the single battle arena that everyone shares. It’s a much more realistic take on the idea than everyone having a giant customized zone within a huge tower or something. Everyone stays to watch after you beat them. It’s more informal but it’s been formalized. Even though you can’t walk into everyone’s houses anymore Paldea feels so much more like a real place where people live than any other region.
In keeping with this new emphasis on storytelling both explicit and implicit, Violet rewards role playing. Sure, you’re a kid in a magical world on a fantasy school assignment with completely free reign to stop about the country at your leisure, but you’re allowed and encouraged to like, go to class also! And if you’re pacing them out you unlock a handful of classes as you hit major milestones in the game’s three concurrent storylines. These vary in usefulness and the degree of information you learn from them is extremely fucked up lmao, like this is the first time I can think of that Pokémon explicitly explains a LOT of the underlying mechanics that are going on beneath the simple surface of the menus but these explanations are meted out mostly in a math class that you won’t see all of for 80% of the game it’s very funny. I don’t know that these are for actually learning anything, they’re all flavor, and I think it was incredibly brave of Game Freak to ferret away like eight or nine completely fleshed out unique NPCs in the school, only two of whom you would ever even see after the tutorial if you weren’t coming back for all this completely optional shit. There’s even a social link system separate from the classroom stuff! The school nurse has a series of social link cutscenes and she doesn’t even TEACH a class! There’s your math teacher, right, and via some hints in dialogue and her character design you can figure out that she is a retired gym leader and she used rock type Pokémon and she is the sister of the current gym type leader before any of this is told to you and you can DO THIS because she has geometric shaped hair, geode-themed jewelry, her name scheme fits her sister’s, and in one of her classes she name drops specific moves in her examples. There is simply a degree of care here that may not be particularly DEEP but is deeply REWARDING to engage with, if you’re willing to engage with it.
I also find Violet to be a quite beautiful game, beyond the way it stylishly makes use of a lot of smart 2D assets and cleverly implemented recycled animations to paper over places where it’s clear development was rushed and there wasn’t time to finish or polish everything (the food eating cutscenes are charming and incredible I don’t make the rules!). If the Galar region felt a little generic in the styles of the environments, Paldea has it beat in two important ways: first by having a more creative set of locales to trudge through, including things like wildflower rich stream beds, misty lakes, spindly cliffs, and bamboo groves among others. These unique little treat areas do a lot to separate out the expected plains and deserts and snowy mountains and make things feel less monotonous. It’s always a treat to wander into somewhere pretty and special, and to see which Pokémon are thoughtfully placed to live in them. The second way Paldea marks itself as the better of Game Freaks 3D environment outings is that the terrain is just generally more varied. I was a little worried to hear about “entire game world wild area” because frankly the wild areas kind of sucked ass??? Like it was cool to run around and catch guys at will but I found the more authored routes in Sword and Shield ultimately more compelling even if I couldn’t just go catch a Flapple or whatever anytime. Here though, even when you are just running up the grassy plains there’s always a LOT going on in terms of mountains and trees and elevation – no two areas feel truly the same even when they’re the same biome. This makes the game world feel more like a place even as it cleverly routes the player roughly along only a few pathways to see most of the leveled content in a more or less proper order without compromising the ultimately nonlinear nature of the game.
I wanna give a special shoutout to Area Zero, the secret fucked up super big crater that occupies the center of the map and is where the last bit of story content in the game takes place after you’ve finished your initial three threads. It ties everything that’s cool about this game together really well. As you descend into this harsh and dangerous zone you may quickly realize that it’s the only place in the game where your minimap isn’t active and why would it be, Area Zero isn’t mapped. The music is sedate and uncanny, and when it breaks for battle it’s weird and anxious. The Pokémon here are weird ones, or rare ones, or fully evolved ones, or, at least on the very top levels, ones that can fly in and out of the crater’s rim. The Pokémon you find will become stranger the deeper you go. There’s an otherworldly shimmer in the air, and the twinkles mimic the ones that outside the crater indicate an item to pick up on the ground; here they trick and disorient you. It’s the only place in the game where your constant companion, the legendary on your box cover, won’t come out of their ball, which leaves you without a mount, so no bike, no jump, no glide, no easy way out of the crater. The distance feels huge when you have to hoof it. You bring the protagonists of each of the other three stories in the game with you on the trip and while it’s delightful to see them all interact with each other (it would have been TRAGIC for this to have not happened) it also reveals more about them even this late in the game; Nemona, my favorite character in the game for being a fucking freak ass weirdo who loves blood more than anything, in unimpeachably cheerful and energetic but when you see her out of her element in the Pokémon League circuit she’s revealed to have a hard time relating to other people outside of her one interest, and kind of generally rude and thoughtless with their feelings. Penny gets to show herself to be deeply empathetic towards and protective of others in a more proactive way than in her own story but she’s also harsh and quick to anger in doing so. Arven is the true protagonist of the game and its emotional burden rests with him, and his mask cracks the most. So ultimately you get a small sad story about the ways families can fail each other and these three awkward kids who bond through one pretty fuckin bad day and it’s like, y’know it’s good! There is a lot of cool stuff here.
Nobody is more surprised than me! Truly! I have always basically liked Pokémon but I’ve never been ENTHUSIASTIC. It’s just that this one did a lot of inacore stuff, gave me a bone with a lot of meat to chew on just to my tastes, and when you slap that on top of Pokémon's general play which is rock solid as ever, and what I feel is a real nailing down of the open world side of things this time? I dunno man, I think they really knocked this one out of the park.
A big big part of this accomplishment is that Pokémon has finally cracked the code on writing, like really for real this time. I know Pokémon guys like to talk about gen V and I am even a gen Whatever Sun and Moon Were liker for the stuff those go for at the end but there is simply nothing as consistently and thoroughly well done in this series before now and certainly not on the scale we see here. Every single person pops with huge personality, and for the first time those personalities are supported by like, stories that while not REVOLUTIONARY are certainly a tier above the stock standard baby anime tropes we’ve seen in the past. Hearing that Team Star were like the what, third antagonist group in a row who were a spin on Misunderstood Waylaid Youths had me groaning at first but their stories and motivations land! There is nuance in the laying out of their situation, there is acknowledgment that institutions in power and authority, especially over children, can and do fail to care for them and also are able to accept responsibility. Arven is a great little guy, firmly in the “wanna stick him in a little glass bottle and shake it up” tier. A potent blend of condescending and pathetic with a genuinely deserved chip on his shoulder at the way his life has turned out. And I’ll acknowledge that it’s because I have a chronically (and someday probably sooner than later it will become terminally) ill cat who has been having a really bad month, but his scenes really hit for me and I extremely cried near the resolution of his story.
The idea that a Pokémon game can have that power over me is only possible because Game Freak’s writers have subtley but definitely expanded the scope of maturity in how they treat the world of Paldea compared to previous games. Arven’s story fundamentally cannot work without acknowledgment of violence, real violence outside of the context of Pokémon battles – of death and dying, active dying that is happening now and happening TO us rather than in abstract stories of ancient struggles. This sort of thing is evident everywhere you look in Paldea. The Pokémon League isn’t the centerpiece of your life or anyone else’s, even the people who work for it; and they DO work for it, in an employment capacity. But there’s a distinct feeling that it’s not in its heyday even if it’s still a Big Deal. Almost every single gym leader does this as more of a side gig than their whole thing, and sometimes they’re not around or there’s an implication that these events have to be scheduled around their availability to some degree. Gym tests are based on the local town culture more often that they are on hard battle prowess and those cultures are a much greater and more foregrounded part of the town identities. When you get to the Elite Four finally, the building has two rooms that you get to see, a sort of lobby foyer where you’re interviewed with a classic gray office carpet floor pattern that every American desk drone knows intimately, and the single battle arena that everyone shares. It’s a much more realistic take on the idea than everyone having a giant customized zone within a huge tower or something. Everyone stays to watch after you beat them. It’s more informal but it’s been formalized. Even though you can’t walk into everyone’s houses anymore Paldea feels so much more like a real place where people live than any other region.
In keeping with this new emphasis on storytelling both explicit and implicit, Violet rewards role playing. Sure, you’re a kid in a magical world on a fantasy school assignment with completely free reign to stop about the country at your leisure, but you’re allowed and encouraged to like, go to class also! And if you’re pacing them out you unlock a handful of classes as you hit major milestones in the game’s three concurrent storylines. These vary in usefulness and the degree of information you learn from them is extremely fucked up lmao, like this is the first time I can think of that Pokémon explicitly explains a LOT of the underlying mechanics that are going on beneath the simple surface of the menus but these explanations are meted out mostly in a math class that you won’t see all of for 80% of the game it’s very funny. I don’t know that these are for actually learning anything, they’re all flavor, and I think it was incredibly brave of Game Freak to ferret away like eight or nine completely fleshed out unique NPCs in the school, only two of whom you would ever even see after the tutorial if you weren’t coming back for all this completely optional shit. There’s even a social link system separate from the classroom stuff! The school nurse has a series of social link cutscenes and she doesn’t even TEACH a class! There’s your math teacher, right, and via some hints in dialogue and her character design you can figure out that she is a retired gym leader and she used rock type Pokémon and she is the sister of the current gym type leader before any of this is told to you and you can DO THIS because she has geometric shaped hair, geode-themed jewelry, her name scheme fits her sister’s, and in one of her classes she name drops specific moves in her examples. There is simply a degree of care here that may not be particularly DEEP but is deeply REWARDING to engage with, if you’re willing to engage with it.
I also find Violet to be a quite beautiful game, beyond the way it stylishly makes use of a lot of smart 2D assets and cleverly implemented recycled animations to paper over places where it’s clear development was rushed and there wasn’t time to finish or polish everything (the food eating cutscenes are charming and incredible I don’t make the rules!). If the Galar region felt a little generic in the styles of the environments, Paldea has it beat in two important ways: first by having a more creative set of locales to trudge through, including things like wildflower rich stream beds, misty lakes, spindly cliffs, and bamboo groves among others. These unique little treat areas do a lot to separate out the expected plains and deserts and snowy mountains and make things feel less monotonous. It’s always a treat to wander into somewhere pretty and special, and to see which Pokémon are thoughtfully placed to live in them. The second way Paldea marks itself as the better of Game Freaks 3D environment outings is that the terrain is just generally more varied. I was a little worried to hear about “entire game world wild area” because frankly the wild areas kind of sucked ass??? Like it was cool to run around and catch guys at will but I found the more authored routes in Sword and Shield ultimately more compelling even if I couldn’t just go catch a Flapple or whatever anytime. Here though, even when you are just running up the grassy plains there’s always a LOT going on in terms of mountains and trees and elevation – no two areas feel truly the same even when they’re the same biome. This makes the game world feel more like a place even as it cleverly routes the player roughly along only a few pathways to see most of the leveled content in a more or less proper order without compromising the ultimately nonlinear nature of the game.
I wanna give a special shoutout to Area Zero, the secret fucked up super big crater that occupies the center of the map and is where the last bit of story content in the game takes place after you’ve finished your initial three threads. It ties everything that’s cool about this game together really well. As you descend into this harsh and dangerous zone you may quickly realize that it’s the only place in the game where your minimap isn’t active and why would it be, Area Zero isn’t mapped. The music is sedate and uncanny, and when it breaks for battle it’s weird and anxious. The Pokémon here are weird ones, or rare ones, or fully evolved ones, or, at least on the very top levels, ones that can fly in and out of the crater’s rim. The Pokémon you find will become stranger the deeper you go. There’s an otherworldly shimmer in the air, and the twinkles mimic the ones that outside the crater indicate an item to pick up on the ground; here they trick and disorient you. It’s the only place in the game where your constant companion, the legendary on your box cover, won’t come out of their ball, which leaves you without a mount, so no bike, no jump, no glide, no easy way out of the crater. The distance feels huge when you have to hoof it. You bring the protagonists of each of the other three stories in the game with you on the trip and while it’s delightful to see them all interact with each other (it would have been TRAGIC for this to have not happened) it also reveals more about them even this late in the game; Nemona, my favorite character in the game for being a fucking freak ass weirdo who loves blood more than anything, in unimpeachably cheerful and energetic but when you see her out of her element in the Pokémon League circuit she’s revealed to have a hard time relating to other people outside of her one interest, and kind of generally rude and thoughtless with their feelings. Penny gets to show herself to be deeply empathetic towards and protective of others in a more proactive way than in her own story but she’s also harsh and quick to anger in doing so. Arven is the true protagonist of the game and its emotional burden rests with him, and his mask cracks the most. So ultimately you get a small sad story about the ways families can fail each other and these three awkward kids who bond through one pretty fuckin bad day and it’s like, y’know it’s good! There is a lot of cool stuff here.
Nobody is more surprised than me! Truly! I have always basically liked Pokémon but I’ve never been ENTHUSIASTIC. It’s just that this one did a lot of inacore stuff, gave me a bone with a lot of meat to chew on just to my tastes, and when you slap that on top of Pokémon's general play which is rock solid as ever, and what I feel is a real nailing down of the open world side of things this time? I dunno man, I think they really knocked this one out of the park.
Reviewed on Dec 06, 2022
PalapaSlaps
1 year ago