Pokemon Scarlet and Violet constitutes the ninth generation from the familiar catching, trading, and battling franchise which has consumed popular culture worldwide for over 25 years. Expanding off its most recent iterations, Scarlet and Violet provides the franchise’s first main-line fully open world for players to navigate uninhibited and proceed through in whatever direction they please because they strive to complete three story paths or, simply, to trap ’em all.
It’s been a long while since I’ve attempted to function as the very best. Sun and Moon were my most recent main-line forays, plus they were short-lived when compared with my halcyon Gen II-III days. Pokemon has changed a great deal through the years, and for players who haven’t been for some time, it’s vital that you calibrate expectations for the numerous quality-of-life improvements and mechanical tweaks that Scarlet and Violet make to the tried and true formula. At its heart, Gen IX is exactly what Pokemon happens to be. A journey via a vast world full of amazing creatures to befriend, quirky characters to come across, along with a feeling of a world larger than your own at your fingertips.
All three of those factors continue to ring true. With an open world environment comes a global where Hundreds of diverse Pokemon actually roam the wild, visible all the time and a area of the environment in ways you’d expect icing beings to be. The gym leaders and various schoolmates and faculty in the school your character joins at the start add personality to every turn. And altogether, you cannot help but feel completely sucked into the Paldea region and the realm of Pokemon.
Of course, assuming you can get past the graphical challenges. As i personally experienced without any game-breaking or bizarre graphical moments (as well-documented within the But Why Tho Discord and beyond), it is quite obvious that Scarlet and Violet’s graphics are underbaked overall. The fidelity is low, textures and models load slowly and shift around awkwardly, movement looks ridiculous from a distance, and frame rates are often dropped drastically. It’s frankly unacceptable for the game to have shipped with such glaring and unfinished graphics and memory leakage.
While I do not absolve the sport of this sin, I am able to look past it due to how simply fun and satisfying it's to experience nonetheless. Residing in an age of over 1000 Pokemon means endless options of companions to choose from as you decide whether to take on the Pokemon League and it is gym leaders, the villainous Team Star, or uncover the secrets of the Titan Pokemon around the game’s three plot lines. I appreciate that, truly, there isn't any set order.
Level scaling early in the game is dull, allowing you to overcome the very first 1 / 2 of the game’s challenge with absolute ease, but it’s a necessary fixture to permit exploration and experimentation with different Pokemon teams. The brand new auto-battling mechanic mixed with the return of automatic experience sharing among all of your team means you can more quickly than ever train up new Pokemon and feel a lesser burden experimenting with different types of coverage and move sets. That doesn’t mean you won’t get attached to your starting team as I did and proceed to train an Everstoned Mareep up to glory, but when the 2nd 1 / 2 of your adventure commences, the leveling does hit a sharper incline. Although, random trainers rarely follow suit. Most, disappointingly, only have one Pokemon to battle and barely provide a challenge, especially considering they all are completely optional.
Other quality-of-life updates like navigation via your Koraidon or Miraidon and fast travel are a double-edged sword. On one hand, it’s wonderful not to have to waste a celebration slot on a Pokemon who's purely for navigation in order to waste your four progresses a navigation move you don’t care to actually use. But, on the other, it's created a bit of an oversimplification of the game’s navigation. Perhaps I’m a bit nostalgia-bound on this front, but there was, for me, an enjoyment to the sense of progression that continuously achieving moves like Strength and the gym badge requisite for implementing it beyond combat. Not because that mechanic itself was fun. But because you felt progression. In Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, there's rarely, if ever, that level of the feeling of progression, regardless of how fun it's leveling up your Pokemon and collecting badges.
Which is an antecedent to my overall issue with the sport. For as full of life because the world is by using its wild Pokemon and myriad characters, still it feels totally void of personality. The wild environments you traverse are just vast, largely empty spaces composing the most frequent elements: grassy fields, snowy mountains, dark caves, deserts, and so on. One muddy area feels kind of unique, but overall, it just seems like an empty world that any game could inhabit. The towns have some charm for them, with flower festivals and open-air markets, but your incentive in which to stay them for longer than it takes to conquer their gym is nearly non-existent.
There are pre-gym challenges that has to be completed before you can undertake a gym leader-essentially mini-games that split up the game’s pace and are mostly innocuous-so you do obtain a splash of amount of time in the towns. However when you’re done? I feel no reason to return to many of them besides to look, maybe. There’s no real side-questing with random denizens you need to fetch lemonade for, strange houses from the side of the road, or roadblocks you need to navigate around outside of the pre-gym tests and also the Star bases, sometimes fencing roads off before you beat them. The background music doesn’t even offer anything especially memorable and earwormy besides the jam that blasts when you reach a gym leader’s final Pokemon, plus they terastallize. That's a bop.
The new gimmick of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, terastallization, is a pretty interesting one. Every Pokemon presently has a tera type completely outside of their actual type, which, when activated, changes the Pokemon to that particular type and buffs them up to defeated or the battle ends. It can’t be reused until it recharges and can be a total game-changer in a match. As i firmly think that this may be a really interesting mechanic comparatively, within the single-player game, it’s still a little mundane for me personally. In gym battles, you always understand what tera type the final Pokemon may have, so preparing accordingly isn’t that much of a hassle, especially because of the wide accessibility to hundreds of Pokemon to select from from the second the sport begins. But certainly, it can be a way to provide defensive coverage to your own team or boost you offensively through these changes, so it’s a mechanic worth further consideration.
The ways through which you can catch Pokemon with diverse tera types are generally by encountering them within the wild in set locations or through four-person tera raids. The former could possibly get quite difficult, as the levels of these Pokemon are far greater than anything else in the area, and moreover, they’re buffed up. The latter is a mixed bag. You are able to play these solo or online with friends (a whole separate world of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet content to be covered separately), and the battles rank by stars. In all my hours playing, though, I never could encounter a raid greater than two star-difficulty, so that they became exceedingly easy after my team could dispatch them in a single hit every time.
The lack of personality to the world and sense of progress really are a shame, but they still don’t completely mute the joy of playing Pokemon Scarlet and Violet at its core. Battling is smooth as always, with an endless array of moves to test out. Because you are now able to forget and relearn moves when needed, build TMs from material gathered by defeating Pokemon as well as rename your crew on the spot all make some of the simplest things that much more enjoyable to navigate since they’re not blocked off behind your fourth gym, or the like.
As a whole, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet is the most fun I’ve had on a Pokemon adventure in a long, very long time. However this is totally in spite of itself. There are unforgivable graphical issues, and despite endless charming creatures and characters, outdoors world itself lacks nearly completely in personality or perhaps a feeling of progression. Nonetheless, it has never felt better being a Pokemon trainer of computer does in Gen IX, thanks to the smoothest mechanics yet and quality-of-life improvements.
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet is currently available on Nintendo Switch.
