To say this game is a technical mess would be an understatement. Frame rate is constantly poor and often dips even lower. Resolution is horrid. Distracting pop-in. Low-poly models and cut animation frame rates at easily noticeable distances. Some menus take too long to load. The camera clips through world geometry. Animations occasionally glitch out. Its embarrassing how unpolished the game is.
There's a whole host of other problems and personal gripes I have with the game as well, but whats most frustrating about it all is that the game still manages to be a lot of fun.
Become desensitized to the poor performance, and you'll be adventuring through the world discovering Pokemon, fighting trainers, and earning gym badges. Character/Pokemon design in the series is typically pretty good, but this generation has some real top notch stuff in both aspects. The three paths of the game are just different enough and bouncing between them as the game goes on keeps things interesting. The characters and writing are both really enjoyable, albeit not ground breaking. I was engaging and entertained for hours on end despite many frustrations.

Beat the game, completed the Dex and thought of trying a Battle Tower mode because I've always wanted to beat it but putting in so much time to make a team has always been a chore for me but, luckily, this game makes it so much easier to build a competitive team but, unlucky, no Battle Tower.

The game is pretty... lacking? I don't know what to say because the world was very boring for me, it felt like a huge sandbox with nothing standing out particularly. You can do the gyms in any order but there isn't any level scaling to that.

The story is the same thing, bad guys, beat 'em and gym challenge, beat the gym leaders but they packed the game with interesting lore to areas in the world. The evil team has an interesting story to tell this tike around like in Sun and Moon and their bosses can be challenging if it gets out of hands.

I was happily surprised by how they put more focus on building the world's lore and through the finale of the game, after you beat the Champion, you get an other-worldy story experience such of any good crafted JRPG that I was enjoying so much.

Sadly, the game taking so long to tell me something interesting at the very end of the game doesn't make up to the three main arcs being repetitive and the world being uninteresting.

They make competitive team build easier with each game but it always seems they're taking smalls steps and never adding any in-game encyclopedia to understand competitive so you will always have to seek it out yourself on the internet, it's silly.

Music is lit, as always with Pokémon games.

There's a lot to love about this game. I didn't expect to enjoy the story, but it gets pretty interesting and exciting at the end. There's plenty of great quality of life features, and an open world filled with Pokemon is amazing. Changing types is also my favorite generational gimmick so far.

I just wish this game was finished! The bugs and frame drops were too frequent for me to look past. While there's plenty of new ideas, I didn't find myself engaging with some of them as I found them lame or boring. And I think I don't really like traditional Pokemon battles nearly as much as I used to.

Still, I'm glad this game made so many steps in the right direction. With a bit more polish, it would've been great.

The sad part about Pokemon Scarlet & Violet is that the tradeoff for finally getting freedom in a Pokemon game is getting shackled back down by an abysmally unoptimized experience. This is the single worst optimized video game I’ve ever played, and that’s saying a lot because I own Fallout: New Vegas on PS3. The core gameplay is alright, though even playing through it is excruciating at times due to the choppiness. Game Freak pulls a first in the franchise by telling a story with some semblance of emotion towards the end, which is certainly a breath of fresh air (even if it is shallow). Overall, however, S&V are severely held back by performance issues that almost entirely wash away any positives.

Easily the best Pokemon game we have ever gotten, especially in terms of story. Pokémon's story has always been super simple with characters being memorable more so by their visual style rather than their personalities. SV manages to give us new characters and rivals that have defined goals that are independent from the main character.

Open world does end up suiting Pokemon well and I hope this game is essentially the blueprint going forward. What drastically holds this game back is the lack of optimization. It is plagued with framerate drops and unloaded textures.

It is in no way the worst Pokémon game we have gotten and people do judge this game too harshly. But the technical issues around the visuals and the clunky online Raid battles are unacceptable with a budget like Pokémon.

This could've been the best Pokemon game ever.

Pokemon Scarlet was luckily gifted to me, because I'm not sure I would've bought it otherwise. I adore the Pokemon games, and have since I was young, but the lack of polish Gamefreak has been putting into their games has really been driving me away from wishing to actually buy them at launch. Scarlet really reflects this. It has a strong narrative and soundtrack, but it's world, systems and even animations in some cases really lack any sort of care or polish. The state this game came out in is frankly embarrassing for a company as big as Gamefreak, and they seriously need to evaluate how many resources or how much time they're giving to their teams.

This game has so many elements that made me want to love it. I thought its use of a more open progression made it a lot easier to play through, and its characters and writing actually struck a cord with me for once. Just, all of the stuff you need to sift through to enjoy this game is too much for me, and I pray that this game gets patched.. otherwise I can only recommend playing this game emulated.

Pokémon Scarlet is easily the most solid mainline entry on the Switch in that I have no qualms in calling it a good game. Do I think it’s among the best entries in the series? No, but if you’re looking to have an enjoyable time with Pokémon, you’ll certainly find it here.

Obviously what makes this entry distinct from every entry before it is the open world. I’m honestly kind of impressed that Game Freak tried to tackle something with this massive of a scope in this day and age. The implementation of an open world, along with the decision to give the game three separate story routes (I’m not sure what else to call them) demonstrates a further willingness to experiment beyond what was implemented in Pokémon Legends: Arceus, and leads me to believe that Game Freak deserves maybe a little more credit than we’ve been giving them as of late. It’s just a shame they have to stick to such strict deadlines for what I can only assume to be marketing purposes, because uh, it shows.

When Pokémon Sword and Shield first came out, people kept criticizing them for being ugly, but in retrospect, those games look fine. A couple muddy textures here and there, but nothing compared to the smeary visual aesthetic of Pokémon Legends: Arceus, and certainly nothing compared to the absolute trainwreck of Pokémon Scarlet’s graphical… everything. Aggressive pop-in, low-poly and low-framerate models intended for far away objects that are placed right in front of the camera, and flat, visually unappealing textures. They’ve got it all. It’s actually incredible how every Switch Pokémon game has managed to look exponentially worse than the last. Pretty much the only things that look okay in this game are the character models. I usually don’t even care if a game has poor graphics or frame rate, but I have never seen a game more eager to compete with Final Fantasy VII for the title of “ugliest game ever” than this one.

Back to the topic of the open world itself though, while it’s a solid idea, in execution, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. My main problem with Pokémon Scarlet’s open world is how hard it is to navigate. The world is filled with bodies of water and large rock walls that impede movement and force you to take longer, more obtuse routes to get to your destination until you obtain the late-game upgrades that allow you to traverse them. I don’t see the point in walling off parts of the open world like this, it just makes it less fun to explore. The game already essentially blocks off the higher level areas by opting not to implement level-scaling (a decision which itself limits the “openness” of the open world) in its major combat encounters, so this just feels like adding insult to injury. These seem like such antithetical design decisions for an open world game to include, I just don’t get it. It’s fun to explore when the world actually is open, but too often exploration is made intentionally tedious.

I also think the story was a bit overhyped. It’s certainly not bad, but it felt a bit like 20 hours of setup for a solid 2 hours of plot right at the very end. I appreciate how Scarlet went for a bit more emotional depth than the average Pokémon story, but I think it still left something to be desired. Going one route at a time, the Pokémon League route didn’t have much of a plot, it was mostly just Nemona being a raving lunatic, but to be fair, that was extremely entertaining even if she didn’t have any character development. Penny’s route was kind of underwhelming unfortunately. The plot was totally predictable, and Penny doesn’t get much of a backstory beyond having intense social anxiety, which surprised me, because I was expecting the game to really delve into Penny’s character at the end of her route. Arven’s route is the best of the three writing-wise, but again, it feels more like setup than anything else.

The final act is really solid, but serves as a weird tonal shift from the rest of the game. For this final area, you get a little party to explore with in the form of Penny, Arven, and Nemona, who team up to assist you. (I’m actually kind of disappointed that they only assemble here at the end, because this trio has such a fun dynamic.) The ending is a lot darker than the rest of the game too. Lots of talk about unusually violent Pokémon and that whole thing with the professor, which I will keep vague for spoiler reasons. Finally, it strikes me as a bit of an odd move that they chose to save this game’s gimmick regional form for these final 2 hours, and it annoys me that they’re counted as separate Pokémon in the Pokédex when they are clearly different forms of the same creatures, but neither of those are writing-related complaints, so I digress. I just wish the whole game followed the tone and form presented here at the ending, because from a writing standpoint I think it could’ve made for a very different, more interesting Pokémon game.

As a closing note, it’s been really hard to be a Pokémon fan recently. I used to be crazy about these games, but after being in denial for most of the Switch generation, I finally came to the conclusion everyone else had years ago: the games are just not as good as they used to be. And that’s really sad, because I still want to be crazy about Pokémon, but they’re just making it so hard to get invested. Game Freak needs to demand a year off, stop making these proofs of concept, and put together something that lives up to the ideas they’re so clearly trying to cultivate, because as it stands, Pokémon on Switch has been a series of good ideas that never really coalesce into anything. They came close with the ending of Scarlet, but it felt too little too late at that point. I want to be cautiously optimistic for the future, I really do, because I see the potential, but they just keep swinging and missing. Eventually, they’ve got to hit something.

Mais um mundo aberto genérico dos trilhões que tem por aí.

Um jogo sem alma. Alías, um beta test, já que está inacabado.

Uma ofensa aos fãs de pokemon.