So, Pokémon Scarlet/Violet...Generation 9 of Pokémon is here, in the same year as Legends Arceus too. For a long time, I was cautiously optimistic of the game. It looked promising to me, but after Sword/Shield disappointed me so much I wasn't sure if I could trust this would be good in my opinion. Mind you, Pokémon is a series I've always loved, so I didn't want to expect this game to not be good. The more info that came out about it, though, the more optimistic I became. The day after release, I got both versions physically as an early Christmas present. I decided to play through just Violet version for now, I will perhaps play through Scarlet at a later date. Now that I've beaten the game to see the credits roll (as far as I know there is no important story stuff in the post game), I'm honestly happy to say that I enjoyed my time with it. I genuinely think it is so much better than Sword/Shield and on par with Legends Arceus. I am prepared to type up another huge review. Be warned, there be spoilers in these here waters...not only for Scarlet/Violet, but also a brief spoiler for Sun/Moon and Sword/Shield.

I am going to start off this review by talking about visuals and performance, since its the main thing I've seen people buzzing about with Scarlet/Violet. I'll just begin with mentioning that I really like the new Pokemon designs in this generation. There genuinely isn't a single one I dislike, but there's also very few Pokémon I dislike in general so take that with a grain of salt. Similarly, I like the designs of all the important story characters in this game, and even all the teachers at the school (more on that in its own dedicated section) have nice designs. My only real gripe with the designs of Pokémon in this game is that, for some reason, a lot of shinies suck. They barely look any different from the original, which is a big problem since this game made it to where any shinies that appear in the overworld don't make the sparkling sound effect they do in Legends Arceus. Okay, design talk aside, let's talk graphics and performance. This subject is going to take up the bulk of this long-winded paragraph. I'm not knowledgeable on graphics myself, but even I can plainly see how rough around the edges this game looks. Certain areas like Cassowary Lake cause constant slowdown and frame drops just trying to get through the area, at some points the game lagged so much that I was worried it might crash on me like how LEGO Star Wars The Skywalker Saga sometimes experienced such intense slowdown that the game crashed (somewhat unrelated but felt it was relevant to mention here). I was surprised by just how much weirdness the visuals of this game has, like how pretty much any NPC walking in the background moves at a much slower frame rate than you or anything else in the world. Whenever I successfully caught a Pokémon, the game's camera had a tendency to clip through the ground, showing me a blue void of nothingness. In one of the gym battles, my Pokémon's model was slightly sunk into the ground. I noticed the game's shadows would appear and disappear seemingly at random. The pop-in sticks out like a sore thumb, worse than any game I played recently. The textures of the world also look awful, but I will say the textures on the Pokémon themselves look pretty good to me. These visual issues didn't ruin my experience, of course, but it is embarrassing that one of (if not the) best selling game series in the world has released a game with such little visual polish. Thankfully I haven't encountered much of the more goofy bugs that other people have found, but the fact that they exist at all is baffling to me. There's an infamous clip of a glitch in multiplayer mode where the player model transforms into this freakish glitch person with wacky proportions whenever both players hop on a bicycle. I can't claim to know why that happens or that it happened in my game. Glitches aside, there's also other oddities that are present in the game's processing. For some reason, the game seems to take a while to process the effects of moves happening; for instance, if you use a move that raises multiple stats, there is a noticeable delay of the game needing to stop to recognize that each stat was raised and relay that to the player. Using multi-hit moves have a similar result. It didn't bother me too much, but it does make things very sluggish for seemingly no reason. Its weird that certain things in the game move so slowly considering how other things, like saving the game, are very quick. I don't think this slow processing issue was present in other Switch era games so why is it a problem here? I think that statement sort of sums up this whole rant on the visual fiasco that Scarlet/Violet is. Why did the developers seem to have so many problems making this game function properly as far as visuals go? I'm not trying to throw blame on them; perhaps its just poor management or time crunches, I don't know, but its just so odd to me how all of these issues are present in a game release as comically large as Scarlet/Violet.

So, the visuals and performance are out of whack. How about the gameplay? Well...it's pretty standard Pokémon stuff. I quite enjoy it, but you're not going to get an insanely different experience here from other recent Pokémon titles as far as the core gameplay goes. It's pretty much the exact same core system its always been, but I guess its as they say: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." At this point, the only things new Pokémon games can really add to shake up the core formula are gimmicks. Terastalization is the new kid on the block for the obligatory battle gimmick shoved into every new game since X/Y. The idea behind it is that you can either add an extra type to your Pokémon or power up their current type. I have to admit that I think it is pretty cool, I love the visual design behind Terastalization since each type gets a special Tera jewel that your Terastalized Pokémon wears as a crown and it makes every Pokémon look crystallized. For as long as I've been playing this damn series, I'm still no competitive player, so I don't often think about what these battle gimmicks mean for competitive play and can't really tell you how good it is in that sense. As far as regular battles do, yea I didn't really use it a ton personally but it did serve a good purpose in letting me plow through trainers easier. I think it has potential to be used in very creative ways, it pretty much feels like a weird way of letting just about any Pokémon get a third type. Your Pokémon's Tera type is determined when you catch it (when a Pokémon has a special Tera Type you'll know because it always either comes from a raid or the overworld where it would have been glowing a bright yellow for everyone to see) but you can also change it at the Treasure Eatery in Medali. I never tried it but the game was sure to let me know about that. Speaking of eateries, yea the whole curry thing in Sword/Shield that I didn't bother with even once is replaced with picnics and sandwiches in this game. I guess the idea behind it is cool and it seems like the sandwiches offer you nice benefits (they give you special abilities like making Pokémon eggs hatch faster), but this system also replaces breeding which I don't really understand why they did considering that breeding has been the same ever since it was introduced. I don't think anyone complained that you had to put your Pokémon in a Day Care and wait for them to breed, but I guess if you really wanted that to change you may be glad to hear that you can only get eggs from picnics now. One last thing I'll mention in this paragraph is difficulty. Everyone whines about how Pokémon games aren't hard, and yea I've always thought that's kind of the whole point. Play Red/Blue and you'll see for yourself that the originals aren't hard either. Nonetheless, Scarlet/Violet did manage to at least get me to lose sometimes; the final boss is actually quite tough and took me a few tries to beat, which even the champion fights were unable to do. I also lost to the Water gym leader once, but that's only because I made a goof and forgot what type Crabominable is (I did not lose to a single gym leader after him).

The choice to set the game in a school and have the player take classes is just strange to me. Yes, I am dedicating a whole paragraph to this. To me, it kind of just felt like another objective to throw at you. For the uninitiated, basically the game starts with introducing you to Uve Academy (it has a different name in Scarlet but its exactly the same as Violet's academy otherwise) and having you enroll in it. From there, the game has like one or two mandatory cutscenes of your character doing schoolwork, then a time-skip happens and you get the freedom to do what you want because the school is having a treasure hunt event. The treasure hunt isn't for treasure in the physical sense, but rather a metaphorical sense; you go out into the world to experience new things and gain knowledge, which I guess is sort of like unearthing treasure. Its like the excuse the game gives to open up after about a few minutes to an hour of bombarding you with cutscenes and scripted encounters for plot progression. The thing is, once the treasure hunt begins, you're encouraged to go take classes by talking to the lady at the counter. More classes even open up as you start taking on gym leaders. I think this is meant to be something to help new players, but admittedly some questions actually stumped me as someone who's been a fan of this series for as long as I've been on this earth. I suppose its a neat side activity, but it felt way longer than it needed to be. There's seven different classes and six...uh I'll just call them "parts" for now since I'm not sure what else to call it. Whenever you take a class, a cutscene begins and you listen to the teachers give a spiel. The game will give you an opportunity to shout out answers to a question they bring up, which you can do. There's no punishment for choosing the wrong answer (even in Pokémon I'm god awful at math so naturally I got some answers wrong there), though you'll want to remember the answers or just look them up online since you get a Midterm exam and a Finals exam for each course. Really makes this feel like a school experience, eh? There's one extra side thing related to the academy involving what are basically extremely dumbed down Persona social links with all the teachers. I know everyone makes this corny joke, but, as the guy that literally calls himself Bob on the Cob, I'm no stranger to corniness...and that's also pretty much what it feels like. You can go to different rooms of the academy, which sometimes have neat stuff to interact with like the lore books in the big entrance hall and the lunch ladies in the cafeteria (you can buy sandwiches from them), but I found myself mainly going there to do these diet Coca-Cola social links. As you go through the classes of a certain teacher, you can talk to the teachers to bond with them. I mostly just did it as a fun flavor thing and found myself surprised with how much I liked the characters of all the teachers. They're not super deep or anything, but they all have at least something going on in their backstories which you learn through bonding with them and they all had pretty fun personalities. Nonetheless, the rewards for going through the tedium of doing all these classes and moving around through many different areas of the academy to keep talking to them...man it really did not feel all that worth it. I will say that the tons of EXP Candies you get showered with for passing all the exams was nice, but for bothering with the social link stuff you don't get much. The most useful reward is from Ms. Raifort, the history teacher, who marks those little stakes on the map you have to interact with to get the legendary Pokémon for you. Mr. Salvatore, the language teacher, does give you an Galarian Meowth, which I think is the only way to get it in this game. All in all, they try to make doing all the classes and getting good diet cola social links with all the teachers feel worthwhile, but I ultimately feel like this whole system could have been axed and no one would have complained. Tying legendaries to all this filler was lame, although I do hear it is still possible to find all the stakes needed to activate the caves the legendaries are hiding in without getting it all marked on your map by the history teacher.

Okay, enough ranting about the classes. What about the story? I think it was pretty alright. I'm not a big story buff myself and I don't expect my Pokémon games to have groundbreaking narratives, but I appreciate that this game at least tried to do something cool. The big unique thing with this game's story is the three divulging paths you can choose to go on: Starfall Street, Path of Legends, and Victory Road. In Victory Road, its just the basic Pokémon story of taking down every Gym Leader and then fighting the Elite Four. Path of Legends is a bit different, involving you taking down some big Pokémon (not Dynamax lol) known as Titan Pokémon to get mystical herbs for Arven so he can use them to save his Pokemon from a fatal illness (honestly a pretty touching little story). Finally, there's Starfall Street, which focuses exclusively on taking down the evil team of this game, Team Star...except they're not necessarily an evil team, but that's something I'll detail when I start talking specifically about characters. I really like the idea behind this system, but I think it falls short in a few ways. In my opinion, the main problem here is that you're highly encouraged to do all three paths anyway. You'd think you should have a choice in the matter, but honestly you kind of don't. If you try to skip Victory Road completely, it won't be long until you get railroaded into your Pokémon not listening to you because that still relies on gym badges, so its pretty much mandatory unless you really like your Pokémon refusing to do anything in battle. When I finished up the objectives in Path of Legends and Victory Road so that I could focus more on doing Starlight Street, I still ended up being right at the same level as the last Team Star boss. There is no level scaling, so there seems to be a set intended order to which Team Star bosses, Titan Pokémon, and Gym Leaders you're meant to fight at which time. This intended path includes the objectives of all three story paths, which I just think is odd considering how much the game seemed to emphasize the importance of choosing which path you want to do. You can finish the final objective for all three stories so you don't have to choose just one, but you also have to finish all three story paths to truly see what the story has to offer since they don't give you endings in a traditional sense. Once you beat Arven in Path of Legends, Penny in Starlight Street, and Nemona in Victory Road, then Arven calls you to let you know he's ready for exploring Area Zero with you. This starts a new fourth story path that didn't exist before called "The Way Home" and the credits only roll once you finish that path. All of this is to say that the story really seems built as if it was all one big story instead of three different story paths. Ultimately this wasn't a big problem for me since I wouldn't want to miss out on what the other paths offer, but the game definitely seems balanced for people like me when I really think there should've been the option to feasibly focus on only one story path. What if someone wanted to only do Starlight Street and finish the game that way, you know? It really undermines the game's sense of freedom.

The characters of this game are pretty neat. I've already mentioned how I like the visual designs of all of them; I'm not sure why but Game Freak has really been making some excellent charming character designs lately. I think the motivations for the main important characters of the narrative are interesting in their own ways. Nemona is your rival who seems to think of literally nothing but battling, she is obsessed with it and mentions it every time she sees you. She is also the champion, but not in the Blue/Green way where he becomes champion because of your rivalry. Nemona was the champion the whole time and was merely adjusting her teams to fit each fight with you because she loves battling with you that much, and I think that has a certain charm to it. People find her annoying, and I can definitely understand why, but personally I like to headcanon her as an autistic person like I am, so I found myself relating to her looking at her with that lens. I'm probably a little biased in liking her since she reminded me a lot of Barry, the rival in Pokémon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum. Nonetheless, I find her to be a neat character, plus I like the idea of a champion that got so bored looking for worthy challengers that she decided to cling to you as soon as she saw your potential. Arven is a character I was very unsure of if I was going to like when I first saw him, but I ended up enjoying his character. Arven seems to be the emotional core of this game honestly when it comes to characters. Professor Turo - Arven's father and the professor of Pokémon Violet - was so focused on his work that he never came home, so Arven hates his father because of that. From what I hear, this plot point is exactly the same in Scarlet except Sada is Arven's mother instead of Turo being Arven's father (I would have liked if Sada's existence was at least mentioned in Violet since it just sounds weird to me to see her suddenly be in that role). Arven even says that he doesn't have a single memory of Turo playing with him. Arven's main Pokémon, Mabosstiff, was his only companion, but Mabosstiff is also the Pokémon that happened to get struck with an illness that couldn't be cured by anything except the Herba Mystica. That happened because Arven went down to Area Zero. Of course, this started Arven's whole journey with you to take down the Titan Pokémon. The last character that takes center stage in one of the story paths is Penny. She is a shy nerdy hacker classmate. I'm just going to say it, the twist of Penny being the secret leader of Team Star is so obvious. Professor Clavell threw a fast one at me claiming he was the boss - I almost believed it honestly - but Penny is the leader like basically everyone thought. Speaking of Clavell, he shows up to help you take down Team Star as "Clive", who is very obviously Clavell in a wig. I found him to be a pretty entertaining character, although I think the joke of him being an out-of-touch overly professional old guy is used a little too much. The last thing I found rather notable about the characters in this game is their interactions with each other. In the last story path - The Way Home - you get to see Penny, Nemona, and Arven talk and get to know each other better as you explore through Area Zero with them. You get neat little background details to the characters through this that I really enjoyed seeing. It's the kind of thing that they didn't have to put in, but is a great addition nonetheless. The characters have pretty charming interactions in general, like how Penny and Arven like to poke fun at each other in an almost rival type way. I found it funny how Penny would often comment on how annoying and ditzy Nemona can be, but Penny also seems to admire her bravery. We also learn how Nemona seems to not understand emotional cues: there's a scene where your Miraidon meets another Miraidon and is clearly afraid, but after the encounter, Nemona does not understand why your Miraidon is acting the way it does until Penny chastises her for it. Another point for the autism headcanon? Perhaps. We also learn a little bit about the families of Nemona and Penny through these conversations. Nemona's father is on the board of a Rotom Phone company, but that's all we get to learn about him. Penny finds her dad to be overbearing and she hates how he calls her by cutesy nicknames. Arven kind of comes out of his shell when interacting with the player, Nemona, and Penny in a few ways. He has an amusing character quirk of being attention seeking, since he often looks to either one-up their stories or grab their interest, only to be shut down immediately. Honestly Penny is kind of an ass to him at times, but she softens up once she realizes everything he's gone through. Arven also reveals why he's always seemed to harbor a grudge against Miraidon: its because he felt jealous of Miraidon. In his own words, he felt Miraidon was stealing Turo's attention away, which really just made me sympathize with Arven even more. Overall, I just wanted to give a shoutout to this whole portion of the story since it adds a lot more likeability to the characters and makes them seem more realistic. The conversations really feel like something teenagers would just casually talk about amongst each other.

I'm going to dedicate a paragraph for Team Star themselves that was meant to be included in the previous paragraph but just got TOO in-depth to be mashed in there. The Team Star bosses are all technically pretty important to the story considering that the majority of Starlight Street is focused on them. I'm really not sure how to feel about Team Star as a whole, although I will say it's pretty interesting how they're not really an evil team. I like subversions of the usual Pokémon tropes - I love Team Skull and they're basically a walking parody of evil Pokémon teams - and Team Star really subvert expectations even further by being seen as bad guys even though they pretty much did nothing wrong. The gist of Team Star is that they were all bullied and eventually tried to stand up for themselves because the school failed to stop the bullies. The story seems to be making a critique of the school system itself and how it ostracizes people that were bullied instead of taking action to stop bullying, since the old figureheads of the school were the ones that did nothing to help Team Star with bullying. Professor Clavell initially almost fell for the narrative of them being troublemakers, too, but, when he joined you in your invasion of Team Star bases (of course under the Clive persona), he took the opportunity to learn more about them and their situation. Penny and the Team Star bosses were in danger of being expelled because of the bad reputation the team was getting, so Penny decided that they must be stopped to prevent that from happening. The reason she had the player go invade their bases and defeat the bosses one by one was because she had tried several times to get the team to disband and they wouldn't listen (the team has a code where they must step down if they are defeated and the bosses are all very loyal to this code). The bosses and Penny have this big emotional reconciliation at the end of Starfall Street's story, where Penny reveals who she is to you and tries to disband the team once you defeat her, but Clavell gets the bosses together with Penny to reveal to them that the team will stay together as the staff of a new facility based off the team. He also mentions that he will make up for the school's failure to stop bullies. My opinion has kind of flipped on Team Star, I went in expecting to not like this "Actually they were right all along" narrative with them but I think it was handled well. Nonetheless, I do think its weird how there's no real villains in this game. Sun/Moon and Sword/Shield had a bunch of clowns as the "evil team" you see for most of the game, but there was still a real evil team at the end (Macro Cosmos in Sword/Shield and the Aether Foundation in Sun/Moon). Also, if I remember correctly, we don't even learn what the team did to stop bullies after the team was formed. They just have bases of operation around the map where they do...stuff, I guess?

This paragraph is probably going to be comparatively brief to the others, but I feel its important to discuss the twist behind Professor Turo revealed at the very end of The Way Home (and, in turn, the end of the game). The Professor Turo you've been talking to all game actually an AI clone of the real one, created to help him make the time machine that brought the Paradox Pokémon to this world. I can give this twist credit for being unexpected and making for an interesting ending, but it just feels indescribably silly to me and I'm not sure why it makes me feel that way. It's not even like weird sci-fi stuff like this doesn't have a place in the series - Mewtwo, the Ultra Beasts, and Deoxys exist - but its just kind of off-putting to me nonetheless. Basically the story behind this is Professor Turo created a time machine with the help of his AI clone, ended up dying for his research, then the AI has been helping you for the sake of having you come to Area Zero to destroy the time machine they built (and you were chosen specifically because the AI is programmed to attack when the time machine is tampered with and it knew you were strong enough to stop it). From what I hear, there is also an AI clone of Sada in Pokemon Scarlet, and I can only imagine how odd that is. One thing I will praise about this is how this is sort of a reversal of how the trope of AI clones usually goes: Turo is pretty much the only person in this game you can call a bad guy and his AI clone knows that. The AI wants to be a better person than the man it was based on, to the point where it even tells Arven that it loves him and knows his real father still would have loved Arven. I think the end of the AI is a bit lame, I was thinking it would go for a heroic sacrifice or something but instead it goes through the time machine right before you destroy it, saying it hopes to go on an adventure too. Despite my gripes with this ending, I really think it elevated the whole story by a considerable margin. I genuinely believe it is one of the most heartfelt endings in Pokémon and it is the main reason I said Arven is the emotional core of this story. It really makes you want to give Arven a hug or something after all he's had to go through, but thankfully it ends on a happy note since everyone escaped and got to return back to normal life. Shaking off the trauma of your real dad having been dead for years, which you didn't even know until it was thrown onto to you by an AI version of your dad that also ended up having to leave you, is no easy feat, that's for sure.

I think this is probably the longest review I've written on this website. If you've read all of it, that really does mean so much to me and I appreciate you taking interest in my rambling. All things considered, the game gets a solid 4 stars from me. It has some very noticeable issues - mainly in presentation and graphics - but I think it is easily one of the best Pokémon games out there when you can look past all of that and just appreciate its gameplay and the kind of story its telling (nothing super deep but still pretty interesting and heartwarming).