I just rolled credits, and knowing there are more secrets to wrap up after finishing the game, I am really excited to dig in even further. I was a little skeptical jumping in and wasn't really sure if I would want to thoroughly explore it all, but it won me over. It is very satisfying to discover new things in the areas you have been, new ways to use your tools, and your platforming persistence is rewarded. While it can get difficult it's surprisingly forgiving as long as you have patience.

It can’t be understated how great Animal Well’s art style, lighting, shaders, and visual composition fits together so well. The atmosphere is fantastic and I actually really appreciate just about everything this game to set the mood and tone. It feels as threatening, isolated, and alien as a Metroid game, but as you progress the unique aspects to the areas reveal themselves.

It's very hard to put down without thinking about the many unsolved threads you need to go back and tie up. Wonderful experience.

I'm a casual pokemon player but a big Dragon Quest and classic JRPG fan, and in 2022 when I first played this game, I was not prepared for it to deviate from the formula as much as it did. I never wanted an online, open world 3D platform exploration game. I am a fan of the sense of progression, random encounters, and level design/pacing that the original games had. So jumping into this world I thought the tradeoff was a ripoff. I thought this game has terrible pacing with long, drawn out and poorly written story sections. The exploration zones don't signpost that you're getting overpowered, and thus trivializing a lot of the game. Even the excitement of seeing new monsters is spoiled when you've already caught higher level versions of their evolutions. And of course the glitches, slowdown, low-res textures, aliasing, and animations going 10 frames per second were a big distraction that added to the friction of getting invested in this game. It felt like Pokemon just wasn't special and wasn't moving in the direction I wanted it to. I thought it was below average, 4/10.

Now, I'm at peace with what Pokemon has become. Going through that experience two years ago changed my thought process coming back to it. I was now prepared for some of the worse offenses of the game, and it allowed me to find the fun more easily. Rather than treating this as something a game to actively play, I mostly just played it while traveling and in hotel rooms and doing other stuff and it hit the spot.

The technical issues feel much less intrusive the second time around, despite having a lot of the same issues. I think textures may have been improved, because I did find myself noticing more details in how the monsters look and appreciating their designs more. While I wish the open world was more curated, I see the appeal to it now, and it seems like the areas are more interesting than I originally gave them credit for. Having seen the map, I now knew where to keep the level scaling to not snowball. All 3 questlines and the post game story still feels like some of the worst writing in video games (due to how much these characters say to each other without saying anything of interest), but now I made less effort to engage with that stuff.

This game doesn't live up to the standards I had for Pokemon in 2022, but my standards have started to adapt to what Pokemon is beocming. I think if they iterate on this new formula with more imagination and the learnings from what went wrong with this Scarlet/Violet, the next game could be something very special, and could be an exciting new path for the series.