I have never been so upset by a games media news cycle as I am right now, watching the best Pokemon game in a decade be globally dismissed out of hand because it runs at 27 FPS.
The mere idea that there are thousands if not millions of people putting these Gen 9 games in the same tier as Sword and Shield or even below them, enrages me. Sword and Shield, regardless of "dexit" were clownish, half-baked things that underdelivered on all familiar fronts while fumbling everything they could have had going for them and offering nothing new except a poorly thought out and unexciting battle gimmick and a suite of ok new mons. They were depressing, and marked a franchise in clear decline, taking away far more than they gave.
I still can barely even believe how far we've come from the flat, barren wild area that Sword and Shield launched with. Thousands upon thousands of manhours have been been bled for this open world, and it shows. Every sector of it is rich with denseness and verticality, every mile a joy to explore. Craftable TMs strike a healthy balance between the doomed movepools of Gen 1 and simply teaching Close Combat to every mon in your party in gens 7 or 8 and grants the world an MMO's incentive for farming, a process that is vastly expedited by the auto-battle feature. I do certainly question the wisdom of building Team Star's content around this feature, but not the auspiciousness of its inclusion.
The new Pokemon themselves are a strong showing, though they almost always are.
Unthinkably, the writing for this game is not totally embarrassing. After the total fumbling of Team Flare in Gen 6, the incessant chattering of Gen 7, and the multifaceted catastrophe that was Gen 8's entire script, when the best writing the series had seen was in TEAM PLASMA, a tale with its own host of questionabilities, I had completely surrendered. It was clear to me that Pokemon's writing would definitely always be garbage, and that I was really only here for the multiplayer. Against all odds, Scarlet and Violet have mostly proven me wrong. Dialogue is decently written across the board with actual, well-executed moments of emotional catharsis on occasion, and aside from one pretty forgivable instance, twists are handled so, so much more gracefully than in Gen 8. Nowhere in this game is there a moment where a character sees a self-explanatory tapestry hanging in the back of a KFC and uses it as a springboard to perform her eighth remix of a circular, substanceless conversation. Characters are written believably and likably, and no major story threads become disasters like that of Chairman Rose.
I've even come around on the lack of level scaled content, though it's a little too easy to unknowingly pick a fight in a high level area only to be locked into a trainer battle with something twenty levels above you. Some way of seeing the level banding in game would go a long way. Forgoing level scaling also forgoes level flattening. An avid Elder Scrolls player is likely to tell you that level scaling can get very boring, very quickly. In reality a scaled version of this game would make it harder to find a challenge, not easier. I recommend that you go ahead and look up that level map online and take on the strongest things you think you can handle before putting together a second, lower level party to work through all of the leftovers. All regular trainer battles are fully optional now, so it's quite easy to underlevel yourself on purpose. It actually allows for a good degree of challenge, something that this franchise seemed hell-bent on eradicating until recently. Postgame offerings are pretty average. It's no Emerald or BW2 or HGSS in this regard but it at least has more going on than X and Y, with DLC on the way. Co-op isn't where I'd want it to be as the Union Circle isn't exactly rich in functionality, but at least they're trying it. Having to set a separate link code to battle or trade with somebody already in a group with you is absolutely deranged when you consider that Halo 3 had a perfect, friend-based lobby system back in 2007. This stuff has been figured out for over 15 years, and the PSS from X and Y was already a nearly perfect system. I cannot comprehend this.
I suppose that signals us toward the more negative critiques. While I have taken it upon myself to shout praises from the rooftops in hope of reversing the miserable tide of this discourse, these Gen 9 games are not without sin. We'll talk about the famous one last.
A quick first note: Being locked to school uniforms sucks! Fix it in the DLC!
Terastalization (or however I'm supposed to spell this ridiculous name) is inherently a wildly unpredictable mechanic, and wildly unpredictable mechanics (like dynamax) lack reasonable counterplay. Anything that lacks reasonable counterplay by Smogon's own past reasoning, is uncompetitive... when tournaments aren't open-sheet. If players are able to see their opponents tera types before that button is pressed like they can in VGC (which is doubles so it doesn't even matter as much), almost every problem with the mechanic disappears. There are definitely instances where the system pushes an already powerful mon over the edge, but those can all be dealt with by the community on a case-by-case basis. If it were used less foolishly in the main game, it would be a neat toy for the campaign. That's not the timeline we live in. Every gym leader uses the mechanic almost exclusively to their own detriment by terastalizing their last Pokemon to their gym's type every single time. Usually, all this accomplishes is robbing that Pokemon of an otherwise beneficial second typing and making them vulnerable to the exact same move that you just swept the rest of their team with. In the competitive meta, it more likely means that you're just going to have to take a wild, blind gamble on what that Garganacl's tera type is and whether you can actually hit the one, largely unpredictable weakness that it's left with, or gamble over whether or not this set-up sweeper is going to get the single turn it needs to destroy your entire life. The generational powercreep by the way is out of control this time around. It's less about stats as in previous gens (Dragapult and Regieleki obliterating the use-cases of basically any Pokemon previously considered "fast") and more about outrageous abilities and signature moves. Kingambit, Great Tusk and Gholdengo in particular have unique features so meta-defining that it seems outright foolish not to have all three of them. At time of writing, Great Tusk and Kingambit's usage statistics for last month revealed that both were present on just under 50% of all Showdown OU teams, at 46.949% and 46.043% respectively. Gholdengo was on close to a third of all teams, but he would surely be higher if he weren't competing with Garganacl for that "completely immune to all status moves" slot. Combine the percentages for both of them and they'd take third place. Even in the future when power creeps again, the specific niches of these four Pokemon will not disappear. Unless their abilities are nerfed, they're banned forever, or those capabilities are given to a bunch of other Pokemon in gen 10 (like they did with Unaware this gen) these bastards are here for the rest of our lives. Even worse, as those power metrics shift, we'll just have to deal with Houndstone, Annihilape, Chi-Yu, Chien-Pao, Esparatha, Fluttermane, Palafin, and Iron Bundle. Unless gen 10 also obliterates everything that came before it, the gen 9 Pokemon are going to dominate competitive Pokemon to a suffocating degree for the rest of time.
While we're on this thread about the competitive scene, Scarlet and Violet retain the infernal 20 minute timer enforced by their predecessor despite the united pleas of every prominent voice in the community. While this feels like a monument to stubbornness, and players should absolutely have control over such a timer in their own personal battling, my annoyance with this has subsided upon realizing that this meta has been purposely directed toward explosive offense, and thus matches should be shorter on the whole. If they're going to design the game around the timer like this while mitigating the stall-based filth that ran rampant in Gen 8, well... that's fine by me. There is however, still one giant flaw in this, and it's my biggest complaint about the whole game.
Battles in Scarlet and Violet are glacially, unacceptably slow. This has been an albatross around Pokemon's neck for years, and the achievements of Legends Arceus in this area have been painfully undone. When an opposing Gyarados enters a double battle, the following happens in sequence:
-The "sends out Gyarados" textbox appears and hovers on screen.
-The animation plays where Gyarados enters the field.
-The "Intimidate is happening" textbox appears and hovers on screen.
-An animation plays showing that my partner's attack has dropped.
-The "attack has been lowered" textbox appears and hovers on screen.
-An animation plays showing that my attack has been dropped.
-The "attack has been lowered" textbox appears and hovers on screen.
-If it's the end of the turn and anyone is holding Leftovers or any other item that needs to activate, the animation for that item plays and then the textbox explaining its effect appears after.
This kind of thing NEEDS to be consolidated. Please, for the love of god, show the textboxes WHILE the animations are happening. Show all of the simultaneous stat drops or increases at the same time. I'm begging here. This is exacerbated by the removal of two features that have otherwise been present for literally all of Pokemon's near-thirty year history: Turning off battle animations, and changing the battle style to "set". The former has an obvious effect on the length of battles, while the latter is more of a hindrance to a specific type of player, and by a specific type of player I mean me. As someone who actually participates in Pokemon's PvP, I hate playing on the default "shift" battle style. It erodes the good competitive habit of thinking about switching Pokemon as something that always carries a cost, rather than a free action. For my playthrough of Pokemon Violet, I ignored each and every prompt the game gave me to switch Pokemon after I knocked out an opponent, which gave me yet more textboxes to mash through. More than this I'm annoyed that Game Freak would raise the entry barriers to competitive Pokemon even higher with this removal. It's something that could only have been motivated by stubborn, backwards philosophy, not time, money, or technical constraints. It's deeply frustrating, even if its impact on the overall experience is relatively trivial. These kinds of removals just feel spitefully anti-consumer and I hate them every time.
In what I'm sure will be a great disappointment to many, the catching mechanics of Legends Arceus are gone. Touching a Pokemon once again triggers a traditional battle, wherein they must be caught in the traditional way. I do not take this as a rejection of those mechanics. These games were very clearly developed in parallel, and we'll see the true results of GF's experiment in Generation 10, not here. While that may be a missed opportunity, the real issue becomes apparent when Miraidon and Koraidon are brought into the mix. Pokemon out in the open world are scaled to their canonical, pokedex-ordained sizes, which means that many of them are absolutely tiny. This in turn means that you will accidentally drive over a Salandit who blends perfectly in with the cave floor your traversing and have all momentum stopped dead as you enter a battle you didn't want. In docked mode on a large screen, this is a pretty avoidable through treacherous predicament. In handheld mode, well... god help you. None of this is aided of course, by the pop-in.
Alright, fine... here we are at last. The notorious technical performance of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. First, the games are locked to 30 FPS. This may feel sacrilegious from 2023's doorstep, but it is not uncommon on the Nintendo Switch, a machine that was born underpowered and is rapidly approaching its sixth birthday. More importantly the game does not maintain that 30 FPS, and rarely reaches it at all.
With that said, let me make this plain: No one but the most decadent of PC gamers should reject these games on the basis of performance alone. In my full, thorough playthrough, I suffered exactly one crash. As a player of N64 games and rememberer of Ultra Sun and Moon on the 3DS, I adjusted to the framerate a few hours in and never thought about it again with the exception of the 2 FPS background characters, which I found hilarious. Lighting can be persnickety, but its fickle whims were little nuisance. In terms of bugs I encountered the following:
-Pokemon clipping through walls in narrow tunnels (trivial)
-Being placed into a wall after a battle and falling until the game sent me back to my most recent Pokemon Center (single occurrence, fixed itself)
-Performing poses in the selfie camera freezes your avatar's face in the chosen expression until you manually reset it, potentially making them perpetually sad or unhinged in cutscenes (humorous, harmless, easily fixed)
-In one cutscene my character's arm was continually twitching (harmless, silly)
That's it. That's the list.
When The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, critical darling, normie favorite, and holder of a 94/100 score on Metacritic released in 2011, I encountered so many progression blocking, quest breaking bugs in the first few days that I had to look up how to use the developer's console to try and fix my quest log myself. In the end I just started over. Pokemon Violet currently holds a 76 on Metacritic. Pokemon Sword sits at an 80.
I've seen a tweet with video from this game where the player throws a pokeball at a target, and the framerate plummets as the game rebuilds the whole scene around the ball from scratch, taking a truly awkward amount of time. The tweet says "the entire game is like this." I had this experience exactly twice across more than 40 hours. This is the kind of outright stonefaced lying that is taking place around this game. It's disgusting. Stop.
If you're going to make fun of Scarlet and Violet, the technical performance should only be one of a thousand complaints. Talk about how miserable the process of tera raiding is. Talk about how the impressive-looking puzzle dungeons that were once our gyms have now been replaced with featureless identical boxes that just direct us back outside to do some absolutely pathetic minigame that one guy probably threw together in an afternoon. Talk about how GameFreak habitually removes gameplay options like the ability to turn off the EXP Share or use the Set battle style, seemingly just out of pure, baseless spite. Talk about how Dexit fundamentally damages several of the series core pillars and disrupting the franchises whole appeal, and how there is currently NO place, AT ALL where players can use all of their Pokemon for literally anything. Talk about how YES, actually we DO want a Battle Frontier, VERY BADLY.
And then while you're at it, talk about how this new non-linear direction plays to all of the series strengths by facilitating the player's ability to make their own, personal story, set their own challenges, and tailor to their individuality. Talk about how the story is one of the series best and how your Pokemon can once again finally follow you around the overworld outside of their Pokeballs at a speed that might even be able to keep up with you. Talk about how the optionality of trainer battles and random encounters means that you no longer have to slog through route after route as an overly linear series of battle hallways.
Scarlet and Violet, together with Legends Arceus, give me hope. Pokemon is still many miles from what I want it to be (an enormous live-service game that cares about its multiplayer) but I have been without that hope for a long time. I have not been completely satisfied with a Pokemon game since Generation 5... half of Pokemon's life ago. Gen 6 was exciting and I had a great time with it, but it left me wanting so much more. Gen 7 felt like it existed only to sell me plastic toys. Gen 8 felt like it no longer cared about anything at all. Shortly before Gen 9's announcement, I made up a Word document that I named "How to fix Pokemon." In that document, I asked for Animal Crossing New Horizon's style of drop-in, drop-out co-op multiplayer. I asked for following Pokemon. I asked for a Battle Frontier. I asked for MMO-styled open zones with cities and gyms in their center. I asked for the gyms to be gauntlet affairs that locked the player in and forbade them from hitting up the Pokemon Center after every opponent. I asked for the gyms to be leveled quite highly when a player first arrives, thus encouraging them to either fight totally optional trainer battles in the surrounding area and scavenge for supplies, or to buckle down and use some actual strategy.
I definitely did not get everything that I wanted from that list... but I actually got a lot of it, and that has to count for something. I'll be honest. If gen 10, which coincides with Pokemon's 30th anniversary and will almost definitely be harnessing the power of Nintendo's next machine is not another large, bold step forward... I'll be done. If gen 10 comes and goes as a low-effort contractually obligatory afterthought, devoid of pomp or circumstance, then I'm taking it as my offramp. That said... based on this and Legends Arceus, I believe that we're going where we need to go... if a bit slower than I would like.
ANOTHER EDIT: The DLC is legitimately great and makes me so excited for the future.
The mere idea that there are thousands if not millions of people putting these Gen 9 games in the same tier as Sword and Shield or even below them, enrages me. Sword and Shield, regardless of "dexit" were clownish, half-baked things that underdelivered on all familiar fronts while fumbling everything they could have had going for them and offering nothing new except a poorly thought out and unexciting battle gimmick and a suite of ok new mons. They were depressing, and marked a franchise in clear decline, taking away far more than they gave.
I still can barely even believe how far we've come from the flat, barren wild area that Sword and Shield launched with. Thousands upon thousands of manhours have been been bled for this open world, and it shows. Every sector of it is rich with denseness and verticality, every mile a joy to explore. Craftable TMs strike a healthy balance between the doomed movepools of Gen 1 and simply teaching Close Combat to every mon in your party in gens 7 or 8 and grants the world an MMO's incentive for farming, a process that is vastly expedited by the auto-battle feature. I do certainly question the wisdom of building Team Star's content around this feature, but not the auspiciousness of its inclusion.
The new Pokemon themselves are a strong showing, though they almost always are.
Unthinkably, the writing for this game is not totally embarrassing. After the total fumbling of Team Flare in Gen 6, the incessant chattering of Gen 7, and the multifaceted catastrophe that was Gen 8's entire script, when the best writing the series had seen was in TEAM PLASMA, a tale with its own host of questionabilities, I had completely surrendered. It was clear to me that Pokemon's writing would definitely always be garbage, and that I was really only here for the multiplayer. Against all odds, Scarlet and Violet have mostly proven me wrong. Dialogue is decently written across the board with actual, well-executed moments of emotional catharsis on occasion, and aside from one pretty forgivable instance, twists are handled so, so much more gracefully than in Gen 8. Nowhere in this game is there a moment where a character sees a self-explanatory tapestry hanging in the back of a KFC and uses it as a springboard to perform her eighth remix of a circular, substanceless conversation. Characters are written believably and likably, and no major story threads become disasters like that of Chairman Rose.
I've even come around on the lack of level scaled content, though it's a little too easy to unknowingly pick a fight in a high level area only to be locked into a trainer battle with something twenty levels above you. Some way of seeing the level banding in game would go a long way. Forgoing level scaling also forgoes level flattening. An avid Elder Scrolls player is likely to tell you that level scaling can get very boring, very quickly. In reality a scaled version of this game would make it harder to find a challenge, not easier. I recommend that you go ahead and look up that level map online and take on the strongest things you think you can handle before putting together a second, lower level party to work through all of the leftovers. All regular trainer battles are fully optional now, so it's quite easy to underlevel yourself on purpose. It actually allows for a good degree of challenge, something that this franchise seemed hell-bent on eradicating until recently. Postgame offerings are pretty average. It's no Emerald or BW2 or HGSS in this regard but it at least has more going on than X and Y, with DLC on the way. Co-op isn't where I'd want it to be as the Union Circle isn't exactly rich in functionality, but at least they're trying it. Having to set a separate link code to battle or trade with somebody already in a group with you is absolutely deranged when you consider that Halo 3 had a perfect, friend-based lobby system back in 2007. This stuff has been figured out for over 15 years, and the PSS from X and Y was already a nearly perfect system. I cannot comprehend this.
I suppose that signals us toward the more negative critiques. While I have taken it upon myself to shout praises from the rooftops in hope of reversing the miserable tide of this discourse, these Gen 9 games are not without sin. We'll talk about the famous one last.
A quick first note: Being locked to school uniforms sucks! Fix it in the DLC!
Terastalization (or however I'm supposed to spell this ridiculous name) is inherently a wildly unpredictable mechanic, and wildly unpredictable mechanics (like dynamax) lack reasonable counterplay. Anything that lacks reasonable counterplay by Smogon's own past reasoning, is uncompetitive... when tournaments aren't open-sheet. If players are able to see their opponents tera types before that button is pressed like they can in VGC (which is doubles so it doesn't even matter as much), almost every problem with the mechanic disappears. There are definitely instances where the system pushes an already powerful mon over the edge, but those can all be dealt with by the community on a case-by-case basis. If it were used less foolishly in the main game, it would be a neat toy for the campaign. That's not the timeline we live in. Every gym leader uses the mechanic almost exclusively to their own detriment by terastalizing their last Pokemon to their gym's type every single time. Usually, all this accomplishes is robbing that Pokemon of an otherwise beneficial second typing and making them vulnerable to the exact same move that you just swept the rest of their team with. In the competitive meta, it more likely means that you're just going to have to take a wild, blind gamble on what that Garganacl's tera type is and whether you can actually hit the one, largely unpredictable weakness that it's left with, or gamble over whether or not this set-up sweeper is going to get the single turn it needs to destroy your entire life. The generational powercreep by the way is out of control this time around. It's less about stats as in previous gens (Dragapult and Regieleki obliterating the use-cases of basically any Pokemon previously considered "fast") and more about outrageous abilities and signature moves. Kingambit, Great Tusk and Gholdengo in particular have unique features so meta-defining that it seems outright foolish not to have all three of them. At time of writing, Great Tusk and Kingambit's usage statistics for last month revealed that both were present on just under 50% of all Showdown OU teams, at 46.949% and 46.043% respectively. Gholdengo was on close to a third of all teams, but he would surely be higher if he weren't competing with Garganacl for that "completely immune to all status moves" slot. Combine the percentages for both of them and they'd take third place. Even in the future when power creeps again, the specific niches of these four Pokemon will not disappear. Unless their abilities are nerfed, they're banned forever, or those capabilities are given to a bunch of other Pokemon in gen 10 (like they did with Unaware this gen) these bastards are here for the rest of our lives. Even worse, as those power metrics shift, we'll just have to deal with Houndstone, Annihilape, Chi-Yu, Chien-Pao, Esparatha, Fluttermane, Palafin, and Iron Bundle. Unless gen 10 also obliterates everything that came before it, the gen 9 Pokemon are going to dominate competitive Pokemon to a suffocating degree for the rest of time.
While we're on this thread about the competitive scene, Scarlet and Violet retain the infernal 20 minute timer enforced by their predecessor despite the united pleas of every prominent voice in the community. While this feels like a monument to stubbornness, and players should absolutely have control over such a timer in their own personal battling, my annoyance with this has subsided upon realizing that this meta has been purposely directed toward explosive offense, and thus matches should be shorter on the whole. If they're going to design the game around the timer like this while mitigating the stall-based filth that ran rampant in Gen 8, well... that's fine by me. There is however, still one giant flaw in this, and it's my biggest complaint about the whole game.
Battles in Scarlet and Violet are glacially, unacceptably slow. This has been an albatross around Pokemon's neck for years, and the achievements of Legends Arceus in this area have been painfully undone. When an opposing Gyarados enters a double battle, the following happens in sequence:
-The "sends out Gyarados" textbox appears and hovers on screen.
-The animation plays where Gyarados enters the field.
-The "Intimidate is happening" textbox appears and hovers on screen.
-An animation plays showing that my partner's attack has dropped.
-The "attack has been lowered" textbox appears and hovers on screen.
-An animation plays showing that my attack has been dropped.
-The "attack has been lowered" textbox appears and hovers on screen.
-If it's the end of the turn and anyone is holding Leftovers or any other item that needs to activate, the animation for that item plays and then the textbox explaining its effect appears after.
This kind of thing NEEDS to be consolidated. Please, for the love of god, show the textboxes WHILE the animations are happening. Show all of the simultaneous stat drops or increases at the same time. I'm begging here. This is exacerbated by the removal of two features that have otherwise been present for literally all of Pokemon's near-thirty year history: Turning off battle animations, and changing the battle style to "set". The former has an obvious effect on the length of battles, while the latter is more of a hindrance to a specific type of player, and by a specific type of player I mean me. As someone who actually participates in Pokemon's PvP, I hate playing on the default "shift" battle style. It erodes the good competitive habit of thinking about switching Pokemon as something that always carries a cost, rather than a free action. For my playthrough of Pokemon Violet, I ignored each and every prompt the game gave me to switch Pokemon after I knocked out an opponent, which gave me yet more textboxes to mash through. More than this I'm annoyed that Game Freak would raise the entry barriers to competitive Pokemon even higher with this removal. It's something that could only have been motivated by stubborn, backwards philosophy, not time, money, or technical constraints. It's deeply frustrating, even if its impact on the overall experience is relatively trivial. These kinds of removals just feel spitefully anti-consumer and I hate them every time.
In what I'm sure will be a great disappointment to many, the catching mechanics of Legends Arceus are gone. Touching a Pokemon once again triggers a traditional battle, wherein they must be caught in the traditional way. I do not take this as a rejection of those mechanics. These games were very clearly developed in parallel, and we'll see the true results of GF's experiment in Generation 10, not here. While that may be a missed opportunity, the real issue becomes apparent when Miraidon and Koraidon are brought into the mix. Pokemon out in the open world are scaled to their canonical, pokedex-ordained sizes, which means that many of them are absolutely tiny. This in turn means that you will accidentally drive over a Salandit who blends perfectly in with the cave floor your traversing and have all momentum stopped dead as you enter a battle you didn't want. In docked mode on a large screen, this is a pretty avoidable through treacherous predicament. In handheld mode, well... god help you. None of this is aided of course, by the pop-in.
Alright, fine... here we are at last. The notorious technical performance of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. First, the games are locked to 30 FPS. This may feel sacrilegious from 2023's doorstep, but it is not uncommon on the Nintendo Switch, a machine that was born underpowered and is rapidly approaching its sixth birthday. More importantly the game does not maintain that 30 FPS, and rarely reaches it at all.
With that said, let me make this plain: No one but the most decadent of PC gamers should reject these games on the basis of performance alone. In my full, thorough playthrough, I suffered exactly one crash. As a player of N64 games and rememberer of Ultra Sun and Moon on the 3DS, I adjusted to the framerate a few hours in and never thought about it again with the exception of the 2 FPS background characters, which I found hilarious. Lighting can be persnickety, but its fickle whims were little nuisance. In terms of bugs I encountered the following:
-Pokemon clipping through walls in narrow tunnels (trivial)
-Being placed into a wall after a battle and falling until the game sent me back to my most recent Pokemon Center (single occurrence, fixed itself)
-Performing poses in the selfie camera freezes your avatar's face in the chosen expression until you manually reset it, potentially making them perpetually sad or unhinged in cutscenes (humorous, harmless, easily fixed)
-In one cutscene my character's arm was continually twitching (harmless, silly)
That's it. That's the list.
When The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, critical darling, normie favorite, and holder of a 94/100 score on Metacritic released in 2011, I encountered so many progression blocking, quest breaking bugs in the first few days that I had to look up how to use the developer's console to try and fix my quest log myself. In the end I just started over. Pokemon Violet currently holds a 76 on Metacritic. Pokemon Sword sits at an 80.
I've seen a tweet with video from this game where the player throws a pokeball at a target, and the framerate plummets as the game rebuilds the whole scene around the ball from scratch, taking a truly awkward amount of time. The tweet says "the entire game is like this." I had this experience exactly twice across more than 40 hours. This is the kind of outright stonefaced lying that is taking place around this game. It's disgusting. Stop.
If you're going to make fun of Scarlet and Violet, the technical performance should only be one of a thousand complaints. Talk about how miserable the process of tera raiding is. Talk about how the impressive-looking puzzle dungeons that were once our gyms have now been replaced with featureless identical boxes that just direct us back outside to do some absolutely pathetic minigame that one guy probably threw together in an afternoon. Talk about how GameFreak habitually removes gameplay options like the ability to turn off the EXP Share or use the Set battle style, seemingly just out of pure, baseless spite. Talk about how Dexit fundamentally damages several of the series core pillars and disrupting the franchises whole appeal, and how there is currently NO place, AT ALL where players can use all of their Pokemon for literally anything. Talk about how YES, actually we DO want a Battle Frontier, VERY BADLY.
And then while you're at it, talk about how this new non-linear direction plays to all of the series strengths by facilitating the player's ability to make their own, personal story, set their own challenges, and tailor to their individuality. Talk about how the story is one of the series best and how your Pokemon can once again finally follow you around the overworld outside of their Pokeballs at a speed that might even be able to keep up with you. Talk about how the optionality of trainer battles and random encounters means that you no longer have to slog through route after route as an overly linear series of battle hallways.
Scarlet and Violet, together with Legends Arceus, give me hope. Pokemon is still many miles from what I want it to be (an enormous live-service game that cares about its multiplayer) but I have been without that hope for a long time. I have not been completely satisfied with a Pokemon game since Generation 5... half of Pokemon's life ago. Gen 6 was exciting and I had a great time with it, but it left me wanting so much more. Gen 7 felt like it existed only to sell me plastic toys. Gen 8 felt like it no longer cared about anything at all. Shortly before Gen 9's announcement, I made up a Word document that I named "How to fix Pokemon." In that document, I asked for Animal Crossing New Horizon's style of drop-in, drop-out co-op multiplayer. I asked for following Pokemon. I asked for a Battle Frontier. I asked for MMO-styled open zones with cities and gyms in their center. I asked for the gyms to be gauntlet affairs that locked the player in and forbade them from hitting up the Pokemon Center after every opponent. I asked for the gyms to be leveled quite highly when a player first arrives, thus encouraging them to either fight totally optional trainer battles in the surrounding area and scavenge for supplies, or to buckle down and use some actual strategy.
I definitely did not get everything that I wanted from that list... but I actually got a lot of it, and that has to count for something. I'll be honest. If gen 10, which coincides with Pokemon's 30th anniversary and will almost definitely be harnessing the power of Nintendo's next machine is not another large, bold step forward... I'll be done. If gen 10 comes and goes as a low-effort contractually obligatory afterthought, devoid of pomp or circumstance, then I'm taking it as my offramp. That said... based on this and Legends Arceus, I believe that we're going where we need to go... if a bit slower than I would like.
ANOTHER EDIT: The DLC is legitimately great and makes me so excited for the future.