Scarlet and Violet are a buggy, ugly mess, but also kind of so good they've restored my faith in Pokemon? It's awkward to look at these games, which are clearly rushed out the door and riddled with flaws and say "actually this is what I want", but it is. Obviously I’d prefer if Game Freak were actually given time to finish their games, or maybe allowed to pull the scope back to something a little more manageable for their team, but after a series of titles that really frustrated me, Violet drew me back in and is far and away my favourite of the Switch games.
The first major improvement is that there is just a lot more stuff to do in the story content. Gyms, titan pokemon, star raids, an endgame and postgame, compared to Sword’s anaemic single player experience it’s night & day. The character writing and plotting is also a marked improvement, although anything would be better than the double whammy of Hop and Professor Laventon. Nemona, the game’s rival, is a particular highlight for me, I haven’t looked forward to a rematch with a rival like this since the DS era. All the characters benefit enormously from the biggest change: the game’s structure.
Here’s the problem with older pokemon games: NPCs standing at the end of a road telling you to go and watch a load of awful cutscenes before they’ll let you pass to the part of the game you actually want to play. Scarlet & Violet have the solution: the NPC is gone, you can do what you want. If you want to pursue a mad minmax strategy and take on the 8th gym before the first, you absolutely can. There are powerful incentives for doing the story content- gym badges allow you to control high level pokemon, titan badges grant additional mobility for exploring the world- and it feels more cause and effect. I wanted to beat gyms and titans in this game, whereas in PLA doing the main story felt like eating my peas before the game would deign to hand over Braviary. I cannot stress enough, this is IT, this is THE difference, the game is packed with things to do and I actively wanted to do them because of the structure. I was sceptical of an open world pokemon game beforehand, but the game completely won me over.
I don’t want to spend too much time gushing, but one more thing I have to say: the new pokemon are killing it. I had a whole team of brand new Paldea native pokemon going into the endgame and was astonished to find pokemon so exciting that I wanted to bring on a full new team of six. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a set of pokemon so much conceptually since the Ultra Beasts.
Okay, so that’s all good, what about the bad stuff? The game has more bugs than Viridian Forest. I have multiple times jumped or fallen or exited battle into a crevice in the terrain where Miraidon slides around hopelessly for 5-10 seconds before the game warps me back to the path. Twice the game has crashed and closed out completely, although in both instances I lost no more than 30 seconds of playtime because of the frequent autosaves.
Even if all the bugs are patched, it’s not exactly a good looking game. You will spend a lot of time looking reeeeeal close at an unadorned ground texture, because that’s just what 90% of the world is, and when two kitten-sized pokemon are fighting 12 feet apart from each other, the camera is going to show you a lot of ground. One of the big technical shifts is that battles take place in the same world-space as the overworld exploration rather than a separate scene, replacing carefully choreographed and dressed battle scenes with a freeform camera floating around uneven terrain. One time I legitimately could not figure out physically where my pokemon was in battle because it had spawned underneath the bridge we were fighting on. A lot of the time the pokemon look tiny and plain, a far cry from the 2D era where you may only get two angles on a pokemon but they were designed to show off all the appeal they had. It’s possible to toggle a more cinematic battle camera but it can’t fix everything that’s wrong here. I’m sympathetic to the developers, it’s hard to imagine how to make a world and camera that solve all these problems, but regardless, it’s a challenge they have set for themselves and failed to overcome.
So it’s a flawed gem, perhaps an appropriate metaphor for a game whose gimmick is all about magical crystals. If you’re a longtime pokemon fan and you’re sceptical after the last couple of games I urge you to give this one a shot. You’ll need a little patience, but the good stuff is in there, I promise.
The first major improvement is that there is just a lot more stuff to do in the story content. Gyms, titan pokemon, star raids, an endgame and postgame, compared to Sword’s anaemic single player experience it’s night & day. The character writing and plotting is also a marked improvement, although anything would be better than the double whammy of Hop and Professor Laventon. Nemona, the game’s rival, is a particular highlight for me, I haven’t looked forward to a rematch with a rival like this since the DS era. All the characters benefit enormously from the biggest change: the game’s structure.
Here’s the problem with older pokemon games: NPCs standing at the end of a road telling you to go and watch a load of awful cutscenes before they’ll let you pass to the part of the game you actually want to play. Scarlet & Violet have the solution: the NPC is gone, you can do what you want. If you want to pursue a mad minmax strategy and take on the 8th gym before the first, you absolutely can. There are powerful incentives for doing the story content- gym badges allow you to control high level pokemon, titan badges grant additional mobility for exploring the world- and it feels more cause and effect. I wanted to beat gyms and titans in this game, whereas in PLA doing the main story felt like eating my peas before the game would deign to hand over Braviary. I cannot stress enough, this is IT, this is THE difference, the game is packed with things to do and I actively wanted to do them because of the structure. I was sceptical of an open world pokemon game beforehand, but the game completely won me over.
I don’t want to spend too much time gushing, but one more thing I have to say: the new pokemon are killing it. I had a whole team of brand new Paldea native pokemon going into the endgame and was astonished to find pokemon so exciting that I wanted to bring on a full new team of six. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a set of pokemon so much conceptually since the Ultra Beasts.
Okay, so that’s all good, what about the bad stuff? The game has more bugs than Viridian Forest. I have multiple times jumped or fallen or exited battle into a crevice in the terrain where Miraidon slides around hopelessly for 5-10 seconds before the game warps me back to the path. Twice the game has crashed and closed out completely, although in both instances I lost no more than 30 seconds of playtime because of the frequent autosaves.
Even if all the bugs are patched, it’s not exactly a good looking game. You will spend a lot of time looking reeeeeal close at an unadorned ground texture, because that’s just what 90% of the world is, and when two kitten-sized pokemon are fighting 12 feet apart from each other, the camera is going to show you a lot of ground. One of the big technical shifts is that battles take place in the same world-space as the overworld exploration rather than a separate scene, replacing carefully choreographed and dressed battle scenes with a freeform camera floating around uneven terrain. One time I legitimately could not figure out physically where my pokemon was in battle because it had spawned underneath the bridge we were fighting on. A lot of the time the pokemon look tiny and plain, a far cry from the 2D era where you may only get two angles on a pokemon but they were designed to show off all the appeal they had. It’s possible to toggle a more cinematic battle camera but it can’t fix everything that’s wrong here. I’m sympathetic to the developers, it’s hard to imagine how to make a world and camera that solve all these problems, but regardless, it’s a challenge they have set for themselves and failed to overcome.
So it’s a flawed gem, perhaps an appropriate metaphor for a game whose gimmick is all about magical crystals. If you’re a longtime pokemon fan and you’re sceptical after the last couple of games I urge you to give this one a shot. You’ll need a little patience, but the good stuff is in there, I promise.