Overall, I had a good time with Pokemon Scarlet, despite its many flaws. It had some nice steps forward, some flubs, and of course some crashing and burning as modern Pokemon games always do.
The story was generally more enjoyable than expected, but not some masterpiece like people are saying. It was still, in summary, a Pokemon game story. The Team Star stuff was more fun than expected (especially Clive), but was still basically a simple anime plot. And of course, no voice acting, which I think is fine for this kind of game generally, but it fails to work if the game just ignores that there's no voices and throws in full cutscenes and even songs... again.
Gym challenges are not very fun. Most are just throwaway 30 second minigames before a gym leader which makes gyms feel super bite sized and unimpactful. Sure, they have to coexist with 5 bases and 5 titans, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to have a little more pomp and circumstance. Bases/titans were pretty small and formulaic too, but that's more expected for what they are, I think. I wish at least one of these main activities had a little more meat on it, but I get that they're not the main draw, which is of course the open world.
The open world is generally pretty good. It's a modern open world Pokemon game, and plays out pretty much exactly as you'd expect with no real surprises. It's fun to see Pokemon just exist in the world, and try to get to areas you "shouldn't" be in yet, and all of those familiar trappings. One complaint I do have here is that the common Pokemon are way too common. It's a large world, and there's hundreds of Pokemon in the game. I don't need to see Oinkologne and Deerling everywhere I go, spread out the "cooler" Pokemon a little more to keep each area feeling unique and interesting.
Also, I'm specifically talking about the overworld, outside of the cities. The cities were super dry and also painful to explore due to performance. I checked out one or two past Megasoza, then kind of gave up to save myself the trouble.
New pokemon are overall solid, there's some nice new ones as always and some misses, and I especially liked a few cross gen evolutions like Kingambit. Please stop forcing the starters to have jobs as a theme. I did not warm up to the box legendaries too much either.
Raids are better than they were in Sword/Shield, but they still get old very quickly and while not quite as glacial, are still pretty slow. A good chunk of this friction is from how bad the online services are, though. Speaking of slowness, I saw people calling this game fast, and I mean, if you compare it to Diamond/Pearl, maybe? Otherwise, the general pace of battles is still painfully slow. Waiting for stat changes to resolve, abilities and items to proc, etc, makes battle feel as slow as ever and not something I'd ever want to endure vs using something like Showdown if given the choice.
The idea of multiplayer is cool, but again with these online services, it was not something I dipped into very much.
Performance, polish, and presentation have been talked about to death. They are, overall, a travesty. There's a moment early on where they try to really "wow" the player with a shot of the open world, saying how beautiful it is, and I laughed out loud at the mess I was looking at. I don't consider myself much of a graphics snob or anything, and I still had a lot of fun with the game, but come on. Aside from extremely low fidelity visuals, which I can mostly get used to, I ran into plenty of visual glitches in every play session. There's also the bad experience of using the box, which struggles to load the sprites for each Pokemon when switching boxes and really makes it painful to look around, which honestly probably contributed to me not quite finishing my living dex. This is all on top of more deliberate choices in presentation like the extremely bland Elite Four room and not being able to enter most shops, too. Just lackluster all around, though I'll give a little bit of credit for things like the animations around the borders of the screen when entering a battle.
-1 star for general performance/polish reasons, just unacceptable for what this game is. Would be a 4/5 otherwise.
The story was generally more enjoyable than expected, but not some masterpiece like people are saying. It was still, in summary, a Pokemon game story. The Team Star stuff was more fun than expected (especially Clive), but was still basically a simple anime plot. And of course, no voice acting, which I think is fine for this kind of game generally, but it fails to work if the game just ignores that there's no voices and throws in full cutscenes and even songs... again.
Gym challenges are not very fun. Most are just throwaway 30 second minigames before a gym leader which makes gyms feel super bite sized and unimpactful. Sure, they have to coexist with 5 bases and 5 titans, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to have a little more pomp and circumstance. Bases/titans were pretty small and formulaic too, but that's more expected for what they are, I think. I wish at least one of these main activities had a little more meat on it, but I get that they're not the main draw, which is of course the open world.
The open world is generally pretty good. It's a modern open world Pokemon game, and plays out pretty much exactly as you'd expect with no real surprises. It's fun to see Pokemon just exist in the world, and try to get to areas you "shouldn't" be in yet, and all of those familiar trappings. One complaint I do have here is that the common Pokemon are way too common. It's a large world, and there's hundreds of Pokemon in the game. I don't need to see Oinkologne and Deerling everywhere I go, spread out the "cooler" Pokemon a little more to keep each area feeling unique and interesting.
Also, I'm specifically talking about the overworld, outside of the cities. The cities were super dry and also painful to explore due to performance. I checked out one or two past Megasoza, then kind of gave up to save myself the trouble.
New pokemon are overall solid, there's some nice new ones as always and some misses, and I especially liked a few cross gen evolutions like Kingambit. Please stop forcing the starters to have jobs as a theme. I did not warm up to the box legendaries too much either.
Raids are better than they were in Sword/Shield, but they still get old very quickly and while not quite as glacial, are still pretty slow. A good chunk of this friction is from how bad the online services are, though. Speaking of slowness, I saw people calling this game fast, and I mean, if you compare it to Diamond/Pearl, maybe? Otherwise, the general pace of battles is still painfully slow. Waiting for stat changes to resolve, abilities and items to proc, etc, makes battle feel as slow as ever and not something I'd ever want to endure vs using something like Showdown if given the choice.
The idea of multiplayer is cool, but again with these online services, it was not something I dipped into very much.
Performance, polish, and presentation have been talked about to death. They are, overall, a travesty. There's a moment early on where they try to really "wow" the player with a shot of the open world, saying how beautiful it is, and I laughed out loud at the mess I was looking at. I don't consider myself much of a graphics snob or anything, and I still had a lot of fun with the game, but come on. Aside from extremely low fidelity visuals, which I can mostly get used to, I ran into plenty of visual glitches in every play session. There's also the bad experience of using the box, which struggles to load the sprites for each Pokemon when switching boxes and really makes it painful to look around, which honestly probably contributed to me not quite finishing my living dex. This is all on top of more deliberate choices in presentation like the extremely bland Elite Four room and not being able to enter most shops, too. Just lackluster all around, though I'll give a little bit of credit for things like the animations around the borders of the screen when entering a battle.
-1 star for general performance/polish reasons, just unacceptable for what this game is. Would be a 4/5 otherwise.