I won't sugarcoat it, this is yet another bad Pokemon game with a myriad of features and ideas that could elevate it to an amazing game if handled properly, though that can be said about nearly every Pokemon game released in the past decade. And I think a lot of the promise of something truly spectacular is why people rate these titles higher than usual, but being an avid Pokemon veteran I know all too well that it isn't going to mean anything in the long run.
Let's chip away at the positives first. This is arguably the most open-ended a Pokemon game has ever been. At your own pace, you can choose to do whatever you want in any order with 0 sense of urgency or expectations, all while having a lack of an evil team trying to enforce you to take matters somewhat seriously. It's really what Pokemon should be, and was at its narrative peak with the first 2 generations.
And in turn leads into arguably the best story we've seen. Personally I'm not a fan of modern writing, and presenting the story within unskippable cutscenes instead of properly laying out exposition and lore regarding the region and towns amongst NPC's has been a major bane against the franchise ever since Gamefreak started to push narrative heavy plots back in gen 3, but this story really does stand out above the others. Nemona is as battle hungry and as linear as any other generic rival template we've seen in past games, but she works so much better when it's not just her in the spotlight. Arven has an incredibly interesting backstory and connection to the plot, and without getting into the semantics of how bullying works within school systems, the Team Star conflict works out well without having to resort to some sort of generic doomsday plot.
And as far as overt positives, that's really about it. I don't have a lot of nice things to say about it and even compared to its contemporaries released decades prior or even in the same year, it just falls short. I will say nearly every Pokemon design is nice, and coming at the franchise with the bold take of "Gamefreak sucks because ice cream and car keys" only deflects the absolute worst issues plaguing the game. So in the off chance that a good chunk of this write up comes off as nitpicky, just know my true issue is all these issues build up into something as a whole that cannot be ignored, and you really have to tear it apart from the bottom up, otherwise you're simply left with "game bad" and nothing else, which isn't very constructive.
But as I said, we'll start from the bottom. As of writing this, the game still looks terrible and runs terrible. And I've already seen the heaps of rebuttals that graphics don't matter or performance shouldn't have much an effect on what is essentially a turn-based RPG, but let me spin things around and explain my rationale. There are heaps of games that look and run better on the Switch. There are games made by Gamefreak that look and run better on the Switch. And in the grand scheme of things, they aren't doing anything unique or impressive. It really is difficult to peg the graphics without opening half a dozen other can of worms in the process, hence why I've sort of dreaded even bringing this up in full, but it complies as issues nonetheless.
"The game looks bad because it's massively open world" is one of the main counter arguments I've seen against these claims, but it looks bad in spite of Gamefreak taking so many shortcuts already, and the performance plays a huge part of this as well. Characters popping in and out of existance even from a very short distance. Frame rates on characters and objects slowing down to a complete crawl if they are in view from a distance. Textures dilluting themselves almost to a comedic extent unless you're brushing your character completely against the model. Some textures not even loading in properly like if you hop on a building in Levincia. The game is ugly, and if it were a linear, turn-based RPG we could just leave it at that. There's also just a sheer amount of emptiness and isolation you'll face exploring Paldea. Most areas don't feel crowded with Pokemon, and you'll barely see any unless you've either purposefully isolated yourself to a single zone or you're standing completely still for a minute so all the Pokemon can phase into existance and start crowding around you. The few towns and cities feel empty with very little to explore within them all while many idle NPC's function as pesudo ghosts just phasing in and out after reaching the border of the area. Outside of within the academy, you really do just feel alone, something I never really felt in any other Pokemon title.
But there's more to it when its poor graphics and performance affect the experience as a whole, because again it's an open-world title. You're meant to traverse the entirety of Paldea soaring through the skies, swimming through the lakes, scaling the mountaintops, and all the while you see on full display just how off the entire experience is, all while the game struggles to maintain a consistant 20fps. If this were a linear corridor with a few open paths every other route, then yeah this presentation would make a lot more sense. But currently it feels like we have the worst of both worlds, when most features lack detail or true polish while lacking the linearity for its own saving grace to boot. The wild area in Sword and Shield looked absolutely dreadful while many of the enclosed routes and towns looked on par to even better than what we had experienced with Gamefreak's 3D capabilities prior, and yet they decided to triple down on the former here to blisteringly poor effect.
And the absolute worst of it is we've seen what Gamefreak can do when they aren't phoning it in. Pokemon Legends Arceus at worst has poor textures from afar like if you were to fly overhead to Lake Verity in the Obsidian Fieldlands, but outside of that? Tons of Pokemon litering every area, detail and foliage in things like grass and trees to sprinkle in that extra amount of detail. Jublife Village feeling, ironically, more alive and active than the entirety of Paldea and all of its towns and cities combined. All while taking very minimal, if any, hits to the general performance. And this isn't to put PLA on its own golden pedestal, but compared to SV it like comparing Crysis to Daggerfall in terms of visuals and presentation. Really makes me question the development for these games where they can absolutely nail one game while bombing on another in the SAME YEAR.
But yeah to surmise, this is easily the worst looking and worst performing title Gamefreak has ever put out, so much so that Nintendo even stepped in weeks later to apologize on their behalf for the incredibly shoddy performance. It's just a real sad state of affairs, and we're nowhere close to being finished.
Gamefreak has been cutting features from their games since gen 5, and they range from major events and activities to very minor stuff they had to go out of their way to cut like enforcing Exp Share when the 3DS family of games had no issue keeping it as a simple toggle. In this latest iteration, you can no longer change battles from Shift/Set. What this did was ask if you wanted to change Pokemon in-game after KOing a Pokemon on the opposing team, and instead you're now always asked if you want to change for every single Pokemon you KO with no way to opt out. Not only does this make the game much easier by default, but it also increases the tedium. Now I have been labeled for wanting the games to be like Dark Souls simply by calling the latest iterations way too easy compared to what we had, which is and will always be a ridiculous counter claim, but my main issue is just having to waste time between Pokemon mashing B through text. If anything should be changing between titles, it should be the severe reduction of tedium, and in some aspects Gamefreak gets that right. For example, it's incredibly easy to get a Pokemon up to competitive snuff compared to the old days of breeding endlessly just for a decent chain of good IVs while spending a good hour or 2 grinding out EV points, longer if you never got lucky enough to get Pokerus, whereas it can take only a few minutes to go from freshly caught to online ready provided you have the income, and changes like these where you're forced to sit through more and more text with each new release is antithetical on what we should be expecting from sequel titles, especially ones running on this long. Imagine if they brought back the limited RBY inventory spacing with the sole intent of cutting more corners, people would be furious, yet dozens of changes that make QoL all the worse are always handwaived away, like animations which are always on, meaning you're forced to sit through every single animation and attack during battle. Now granted I never turned this feature off myself, but it's yet another option that's gone for no good reason, and the people that relied on that feature just to speed things up get punished for no reason.
Speaking of which, inventory management has gotten far messier compared to its contemporary with SwSh. Putting all your stat increasing items, evolutionary items and held items all in 1 tab makes sorting and finding specific items you want nothing more than a chore, while digging through your TM list to find a specific move remains just as tedious, despite a clear solution of dividnig TMs up by typing exists in the crafting system at Pokemon centers. You also can't move Pokemon in bulk like you could in SwSh, so instead of picking up a stack, clicking the box button and putting them in a freshly new box, you're now forced to mash through the LR bumpers through a somehow laggy and buggy iteration of the PC box just so you can move that bulk stack to another section. Finally, the new Pokedex entries are amazing and a step up from what we had before, but between not having the option to change specific forms (ie Lycanroc) or visuals in the Pokedex, or not being able to press one of the bumpers to quickly cycle through the dex, having to manually scroll past 200+ Pokemon just to see the one you specifically want is yet another layer of tedium. And I completely understand this stuff can come across as nitpicky, but not only does it all add up to make the entire experience just feel ever more clunky, but it was always a non-issue in previous titles. Again SwSh didn't have most of these problems, and only showcases that Gamefreak refuses to invest in simply checking their games for quality.
Let's talk about gameplay! As far as combat goes, it's exactly the same as it's been for over 20 years, and many detractors will say that makes SV objectively better than PLA for not taking things in such a different direction, but I would argue otherwise, and not for contratian exclusive reason because, yeah SV has the complex combat system we've spent over 2 decades learning, but what does it do with that combat system? A lot of the really intriguing portions of it never come up in single player, and with each new iteration they provide less and less double battles. Pair that with the removal of the Battle Tower, the only place you could emulate online and complex battling in a single player environment, and what does SV do with its combat system that somehow makes it better than PLA? You aren't worrying about speed tiers, you aren't thinking about defense and special defense values, you aren't taking into account how much power your opponent's Pokemon may be packing. You're just clicking on the super effective move. And that's it. Despite not having abilities and held items, PLA has some fairly tough encounters and scenarios that force you to actually take other variables into account, while none of that is present in SV. And again this isn't me wanting the games to be hard per say, but why praise a combat system when the games themselves refuse to take advantage of it? You're basically playing a lengthy 40+ hour tutorial and then MAYBE partake in online in case hitting the SE move over and over again really sold you on how great competitive battling really can be. Inversely, not having online battling hurt PLA a bit for me since testing out such an experiemental battle system against others in an online environment would had been amazing, but oh well I suppose.
After obtaining your starter and sitting through your mandated academy tutorial cutscene, you have 3 primary objectives; clear all 8 gyms and become Pokemon Champion, beat every single titan Pokemon scattered throughout the land, and clearing out every Team Star base, leading to an apt pseudo dungeon as the resolution past these 3 events, and as simple concepts these are all fine, but as a hateful nitpicker all 3 of these display some form of laziness that wasn't demonstrated in previous titles.
Let's start with the gym challenges. For the most part it's fine though, and there are some portions that have repeatable minigames upon completion. Nothing extraordinary, but a cute extra they didn't need to include. My main issue comes from how simple and linear these fights end up being, and that's partially in part to the new terastallize mechanic, which hard changes your Pokemon's type. Mechanically, it actually has a considerable amount of depth that the in-game process will never take advantage of. Going into a same tera type will give you a significantly higher same type attack boost, while defensive applications like switching a hyper offensive Pokemon to water or fairy can demonstrate an indestructable monster. It is a lot better than dynamaxing which simply doubled your health and gave you 3 turns of free z-moves. And what the gym leaders do with it is take one a Pokemon not of their regular type, and tera into their designated type. The grass gym leader will tera his Sudowoodo, a rock Pokemon, into a grass type, and it is a cute nod and play the first time, but doesn't necessarily live up to the same hype after the 12th time. Leave it an ironic state that Gamefreak actually makes a new mechanic with a decent amount of depth and do absolutely nothing inventive with it outside of a gag or 2. Which leads gym battles as a whole to be the most disappointing aspect of the 3 main quests. Also as a subjective take, I think the hats look incredibly stupid and would had been nicer if they did literally anything else for transformation designs. As one positive step note, you aren't fully healed doing the E4 challenge like you were in SwSh, so at the very least there's some bite left to that.
Next up is Arven and his quest to hunt every titan Pokemon. This ties in with the Pokemon that's used exclusively for your mobility, your Koraidon or Miraidon, as with each titan defeaded, your ridemon gains a new traversal ability, be it letting it jump higher, climbing mountains, swimming or even flying. (with style) It serves as a beneficial way and has arguably the best incentive of the 3 questlines since it affects how you traverse this rather sparce map, but the issue is the titan battles themselves are incredibly shallow. Comparing to the noble Pokemon fights in PLA which had its own entirely unique affair and multiple loss conditions, with titan Pokemon you walk up to the Pokemon in question, battle it once, chase it somewhere else, and team up with Arven to finish it off. That's it. There's no battle complexity here or test of skill, it's just another instance of testing numbers, and after seeing what they COULD do with boss Pokemon, I left really disappointed by comparison. To somewhat make up for it, Arven does have a fairly touching story tied to clearing out each titan Pokemon, so despite being the most simplistic, it's also the most rewarding.
Finally there are the Team Star bases. There's an interesting narrative tying each base leader to the big boss of the team, but it's yet another mechanically unintersting affair as well. The team bases exemplifies the new auto battling mechanic. That's right, auto battling. You tap the shoulder button and send your Pokemon in a direction, as it picks up any item or fights any Pokemon in its radius. It's a novel mechanic and you can perform it while mounted, but it's just so unintersting, especially when once again PLA did it better, trading the ability to auto battle Pokemon with being able to manually throw your pokeball and have your Pokemon collect whatever at a very generous distance, all while not having that air of clunk reside around it, where sometimes sending it off to auto battle would result in it going in the wrong direction or stopping after a few steps to do absolutely nothing. And in order to fight a base leader, you have to run around and auto battle 30 Pokemon. There's again no real strategy here, and you're rewarded with a pseudo gym fight where their final Pokemon will always be their car, which is a beefed up Revavroom with the team's appropriate typing. I'd say mechanially it's the worst of the 3 quests because it ends up being such a repetitive formula.
And it is a positive you can do any of these in any order you prefer, it's just a bit of a shame that each quest ends up being so painfully surface level. Which leads to the final dungeon, or the exploration of Area 0. I won't really talk about it much since there are some nice story beats worth experiencing unspoiled, but instead segway into talking about the game's other "gimmick" being paradox Pokemon. Generally, they're extreme regional variants with stat buffs and their own unique abilities with both versions exploring past and future variants, but that's really as far as paradox Pokemon go. Now I'm a fan of all their designs but the fact that these Pokemon and the 2 professors is as far as the games will go with exploring different timelines is disappointing. Going into Area 0 and expecting either a lush prehistoric forest or chromitized mechanical city only for the trek down to be the exact same in both versions really took away what could and should had been, and remains yet another statistic of wasted potential. Really seeing Gamefreak never going all out with a concept and experiencing years of blueballing is one of the largest disappointments of the franchise, and a refusal to commit to what will probably be a once in a generation feature when something like Black and White could manage 2 entirely unique, version exclusive zones is just disappointing. So basically I'm a fan of the idea of not too fond of the result.
The last thing to really talk about are the raids. Raiding is a 4 player fanfare where 4 people (or 1 person and 3 NPC's) work together to take down a boss Pokemon. These are procedurally generated and I imagine served as the post-game activity Gamefreak expects players to do ad infinite upon hitting the credits, and just like in SwSh, they really don't do it for me. Anything under 5 can be overcome by just spamming SE moves to the specific tera type, and while it may seem like 5-7 raids create nuance and depth for differential team-building, there's a universal setup to clear all of them with no effort. Pokemon like Azumarill, Iron Hands, Gholdengo and Slowbro/Slowking can solo even the hardest content with no issue, and your rewards for winning are herbs for making sandwiches, items for competitive team building, or treasures to sell for items for competitive team building. Just like in SwSh, it's as deep as a puddle and serves as the game's infinite content, but it's a bit worse than how raids were handled then.
See rather than keep things turn-based, raids are now on a timer. In theory this helps raids always last a set amount of time and not feel like a chore, but in practice it's a complete, inconsistent mess, either through the timer always ticking down regardless of action, or that continual lack of polish that has you locked in some menus with no ability to do anything, and of course this is made all the worse in an online environment. You could spend a 4th of the timer doing absolutely nothing because of poor load times and the raid Pokemon just doing way too many moves in succession, and despite having the ability to one shot most raids, it still ends up feeling inconsistent because of these technical abnormalities. Like most other problems in the game, a 2nd review over and even the lightest coat of polish could had made raiding feel better, but given there's no true reward unless you're really into shiny hunting, and the fact that you can raid whenever you want in the game, it just feels like yet another forced, undercooked feature.
And for the most part that's Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. Once you hit credits, besides grinding out raids you can partake in some school courses or dialogues for some minor rewards. You can redo some of the gym activities for a one off reward. You can check into the auction marketplace to bid on overpriced apricorn balls (maybe) once a day. And you can hunt down spikes to capture the 4 hidden legendaries, but unless you're avidly into either shiny hunting or competitive battling, which are sub groups that barely make up 1% of the entire fanbase, that's really it. It's yet another game with a sparse amount of post-game activities in a franchise that fanfared how much content you have to do with the introduction of gen 3, and was only built upon since then. There are no contests. There is no battle tower. There's no national dex to incentivize building up on a living dex. There's a very limited amount of one-off legendaries that are always in static positions. There's just really nothing to do once you finish this 40 hour tutorial.
And that's really the saddest part. From start to finish, the game just feels empty. It feels like they checked off the minimal amount of ticks to have this pass as an open world game, and did absolutely nothing to emphasize that you were playing a Pokemon game. There's no bite, no challenge, no content, no stargazing features, and in most of the areas that matter, the Pokemon game that launched in the same year as it does it all better, and it's hard to really know what to blame for all of it. Given SwSh's beta leaks, we know these games get 2 years minimum development time, which is enough time for Ubisoft to recreate most of Egypt and have it showcased in museums for study purposes. We know it can't be publisher interference since no other Nintendo title shares these vast amount of issues, and I really doubt Nintendo is telling Gamefreak to step back on GOOD changes they made in another game IN THE SAME YEAR. Maybe it's the lack of passionate developers, since there are glass door reviews stating how many of the veterans no longer have a passion or fire for making these Pokemon games, which fair enough but at that point some newer, more passionate blood should be injected instead of these non-caring old heads sticking around.
Regardless though, the game sold over 10 million copies in 3 days, so them doing the bare minimum while still pushing out these insane sales numbers is working for them. It's just sad to had been a fan of this series for decades and seeing themselves continually degrade and make mistakes the last game never came close to making, how each new entry ends up worse and worse in several areas, to the point where even poor performance is now a trademark issue.
Anyway there's my rambling review of Pokemon Scarlet. I'm sure it's come off as extremely disjointed, but that's exactly the feelings that this game conveyed to me gave off, and I'm probably giving the games way too much credit in the first place writing up something this long for its sake. Given Nintendo, not Gamefreak, acknowledged and apologized for the games releasing in such sorry states though, my only solice of hope left is if someone from Nintendo actively steps in and starts taking over projects, since despite all my rage I would rather not see the franchise I grew up with completely degrade itself into a multi-billion dollar joke.
Let's chip away at the positives first. This is arguably the most open-ended a Pokemon game has ever been. At your own pace, you can choose to do whatever you want in any order with 0 sense of urgency or expectations, all while having a lack of an evil team trying to enforce you to take matters somewhat seriously. It's really what Pokemon should be, and was at its narrative peak with the first 2 generations.
And in turn leads into arguably the best story we've seen. Personally I'm not a fan of modern writing, and presenting the story within unskippable cutscenes instead of properly laying out exposition and lore regarding the region and towns amongst NPC's has been a major bane against the franchise ever since Gamefreak started to push narrative heavy plots back in gen 3, but this story really does stand out above the others. Nemona is as battle hungry and as linear as any other generic rival template we've seen in past games, but she works so much better when it's not just her in the spotlight. Arven has an incredibly interesting backstory and connection to the plot, and without getting into the semantics of how bullying works within school systems, the Team Star conflict works out well without having to resort to some sort of generic doomsday plot.
And as far as overt positives, that's really about it. I don't have a lot of nice things to say about it and even compared to its contemporaries released decades prior or even in the same year, it just falls short. I will say nearly every Pokemon design is nice, and coming at the franchise with the bold take of "Gamefreak sucks because ice cream and car keys" only deflects the absolute worst issues plaguing the game. So in the off chance that a good chunk of this write up comes off as nitpicky, just know my true issue is all these issues build up into something as a whole that cannot be ignored, and you really have to tear it apart from the bottom up, otherwise you're simply left with "game bad" and nothing else, which isn't very constructive.
But as I said, we'll start from the bottom. As of writing this, the game still looks terrible and runs terrible. And I've already seen the heaps of rebuttals that graphics don't matter or performance shouldn't have much an effect on what is essentially a turn-based RPG, but let me spin things around and explain my rationale. There are heaps of games that look and run better on the Switch. There are games made by Gamefreak that look and run better on the Switch. And in the grand scheme of things, they aren't doing anything unique or impressive. It really is difficult to peg the graphics without opening half a dozen other can of worms in the process, hence why I've sort of dreaded even bringing this up in full, but it complies as issues nonetheless.
"The game looks bad because it's massively open world" is one of the main counter arguments I've seen against these claims, but it looks bad in spite of Gamefreak taking so many shortcuts already, and the performance plays a huge part of this as well. Characters popping in and out of existance even from a very short distance. Frame rates on characters and objects slowing down to a complete crawl if they are in view from a distance. Textures dilluting themselves almost to a comedic extent unless you're brushing your character completely against the model. Some textures not even loading in properly like if you hop on a building in Levincia. The game is ugly, and if it were a linear, turn-based RPG we could just leave it at that. There's also just a sheer amount of emptiness and isolation you'll face exploring Paldea. Most areas don't feel crowded with Pokemon, and you'll barely see any unless you've either purposefully isolated yourself to a single zone or you're standing completely still for a minute so all the Pokemon can phase into existance and start crowding around you. The few towns and cities feel empty with very little to explore within them all while many idle NPC's function as pesudo ghosts just phasing in and out after reaching the border of the area. Outside of within the academy, you really do just feel alone, something I never really felt in any other Pokemon title.
But there's more to it when its poor graphics and performance affect the experience as a whole, because again it's an open-world title. You're meant to traverse the entirety of Paldea soaring through the skies, swimming through the lakes, scaling the mountaintops, and all the while you see on full display just how off the entire experience is, all while the game struggles to maintain a consistant 20fps. If this were a linear corridor with a few open paths every other route, then yeah this presentation would make a lot more sense. But currently it feels like we have the worst of both worlds, when most features lack detail or true polish while lacking the linearity for its own saving grace to boot. The wild area in Sword and Shield looked absolutely dreadful while many of the enclosed routes and towns looked on par to even better than what we had experienced with Gamefreak's 3D capabilities prior, and yet they decided to triple down on the former here to blisteringly poor effect.
And the absolute worst of it is we've seen what Gamefreak can do when they aren't phoning it in. Pokemon Legends Arceus at worst has poor textures from afar like if you were to fly overhead to Lake Verity in the Obsidian Fieldlands, but outside of that? Tons of Pokemon litering every area, detail and foliage in things like grass and trees to sprinkle in that extra amount of detail. Jublife Village feeling, ironically, more alive and active than the entirety of Paldea and all of its towns and cities combined. All while taking very minimal, if any, hits to the general performance. And this isn't to put PLA on its own golden pedestal, but compared to SV it like comparing Crysis to Daggerfall in terms of visuals and presentation. Really makes me question the development for these games where they can absolutely nail one game while bombing on another in the SAME YEAR.
But yeah to surmise, this is easily the worst looking and worst performing title Gamefreak has ever put out, so much so that Nintendo even stepped in weeks later to apologize on their behalf for the incredibly shoddy performance. It's just a real sad state of affairs, and we're nowhere close to being finished.
Gamefreak has been cutting features from their games since gen 5, and they range from major events and activities to very minor stuff they had to go out of their way to cut like enforcing Exp Share when the 3DS family of games had no issue keeping it as a simple toggle. In this latest iteration, you can no longer change battles from Shift/Set. What this did was ask if you wanted to change Pokemon in-game after KOing a Pokemon on the opposing team, and instead you're now always asked if you want to change for every single Pokemon you KO with no way to opt out. Not only does this make the game much easier by default, but it also increases the tedium. Now I have been labeled for wanting the games to be like Dark Souls simply by calling the latest iterations way too easy compared to what we had, which is and will always be a ridiculous counter claim, but my main issue is just having to waste time between Pokemon mashing B through text. If anything should be changing between titles, it should be the severe reduction of tedium, and in some aspects Gamefreak gets that right. For example, it's incredibly easy to get a Pokemon up to competitive snuff compared to the old days of breeding endlessly just for a decent chain of good IVs while spending a good hour or 2 grinding out EV points, longer if you never got lucky enough to get Pokerus, whereas it can take only a few minutes to go from freshly caught to online ready provided you have the income, and changes like these where you're forced to sit through more and more text with each new release is antithetical on what we should be expecting from sequel titles, especially ones running on this long. Imagine if they brought back the limited RBY inventory spacing with the sole intent of cutting more corners, people would be furious, yet dozens of changes that make QoL all the worse are always handwaived away, like animations which are always on, meaning you're forced to sit through every single animation and attack during battle. Now granted I never turned this feature off myself, but it's yet another option that's gone for no good reason, and the people that relied on that feature just to speed things up get punished for no reason.
Speaking of which, inventory management has gotten far messier compared to its contemporary with SwSh. Putting all your stat increasing items, evolutionary items and held items all in 1 tab makes sorting and finding specific items you want nothing more than a chore, while digging through your TM list to find a specific move remains just as tedious, despite a clear solution of dividnig TMs up by typing exists in the crafting system at Pokemon centers. You also can't move Pokemon in bulk like you could in SwSh, so instead of picking up a stack, clicking the box button and putting them in a freshly new box, you're now forced to mash through the LR bumpers through a somehow laggy and buggy iteration of the PC box just so you can move that bulk stack to another section. Finally, the new Pokedex entries are amazing and a step up from what we had before, but between not having the option to change specific forms (ie Lycanroc) or visuals in the Pokedex, or not being able to press one of the bumpers to quickly cycle through the dex, having to manually scroll past 200+ Pokemon just to see the one you specifically want is yet another layer of tedium. And I completely understand this stuff can come across as nitpicky, but not only does it all add up to make the entire experience just feel ever more clunky, but it was always a non-issue in previous titles. Again SwSh didn't have most of these problems, and only showcases that Gamefreak refuses to invest in simply checking their games for quality.
Let's talk about gameplay! As far as combat goes, it's exactly the same as it's been for over 20 years, and many detractors will say that makes SV objectively better than PLA for not taking things in such a different direction, but I would argue otherwise, and not for contratian exclusive reason because, yeah SV has the complex combat system we've spent over 2 decades learning, but what does it do with that combat system? A lot of the really intriguing portions of it never come up in single player, and with each new iteration they provide less and less double battles. Pair that with the removal of the Battle Tower, the only place you could emulate online and complex battling in a single player environment, and what does SV do with its combat system that somehow makes it better than PLA? You aren't worrying about speed tiers, you aren't thinking about defense and special defense values, you aren't taking into account how much power your opponent's Pokemon may be packing. You're just clicking on the super effective move. And that's it. Despite not having abilities and held items, PLA has some fairly tough encounters and scenarios that force you to actually take other variables into account, while none of that is present in SV. And again this isn't me wanting the games to be hard per say, but why praise a combat system when the games themselves refuse to take advantage of it? You're basically playing a lengthy 40+ hour tutorial and then MAYBE partake in online in case hitting the SE move over and over again really sold you on how great competitive battling really can be. Inversely, not having online battling hurt PLA a bit for me since testing out such an experiemental battle system against others in an online environment would had been amazing, but oh well I suppose.
After obtaining your starter and sitting through your mandated academy tutorial cutscene, you have 3 primary objectives; clear all 8 gyms and become Pokemon Champion, beat every single titan Pokemon scattered throughout the land, and clearing out every Team Star base, leading to an apt pseudo dungeon as the resolution past these 3 events, and as simple concepts these are all fine, but as a hateful nitpicker all 3 of these display some form of laziness that wasn't demonstrated in previous titles.
Let's start with the gym challenges. For the most part it's fine though, and there are some portions that have repeatable minigames upon completion. Nothing extraordinary, but a cute extra they didn't need to include. My main issue comes from how simple and linear these fights end up being, and that's partially in part to the new terastallize mechanic, which hard changes your Pokemon's type. Mechanically, it actually has a considerable amount of depth that the in-game process will never take advantage of. Going into a same tera type will give you a significantly higher same type attack boost, while defensive applications like switching a hyper offensive Pokemon to water or fairy can demonstrate an indestructable monster. It is a lot better than dynamaxing which simply doubled your health and gave you 3 turns of free z-moves. And what the gym leaders do with it is take one a Pokemon not of their regular type, and tera into their designated type. The grass gym leader will tera his Sudowoodo, a rock Pokemon, into a grass type, and it is a cute nod and play the first time, but doesn't necessarily live up to the same hype after the 12th time. Leave it an ironic state that Gamefreak actually makes a new mechanic with a decent amount of depth and do absolutely nothing inventive with it outside of a gag or 2. Which leads gym battles as a whole to be the most disappointing aspect of the 3 main quests. Also as a subjective take, I think the hats look incredibly stupid and would had been nicer if they did literally anything else for transformation designs. As one positive step note, you aren't fully healed doing the E4 challenge like you were in SwSh, so at the very least there's some bite left to that.
Next up is Arven and his quest to hunt every titan Pokemon. This ties in with the Pokemon that's used exclusively for your mobility, your Koraidon or Miraidon, as with each titan defeaded, your ridemon gains a new traversal ability, be it letting it jump higher, climbing mountains, swimming or even flying. (with style) It serves as a beneficial way and has arguably the best incentive of the 3 questlines since it affects how you traverse this rather sparce map, but the issue is the titan battles themselves are incredibly shallow. Comparing to the noble Pokemon fights in PLA which had its own entirely unique affair and multiple loss conditions, with titan Pokemon you walk up to the Pokemon in question, battle it once, chase it somewhere else, and team up with Arven to finish it off. That's it. There's no battle complexity here or test of skill, it's just another instance of testing numbers, and after seeing what they COULD do with boss Pokemon, I left really disappointed by comparison. To somewhat make up for it, Arven does have a fairly touching story tied to clearing out each titan Pokemon, so despite being the most simplistic, it's also the most rewarding.
Finally there are the Team Star bases. There's an interesting narrative tying each base leader to the big boss of the team, but it's yet another mechanically unintersting affair as well. The team bases exemplifies the new auto battling mechanic. That's right, auto battling. You tap the shoulder button and send your Pokemon in a direction, as it picks up any item or fights any Pokemon in its radius. It's a novel mechanic and you can perform it while mounted, but it's just so unintersting, especially when once again PLA did it better, trading the ability to auto battle Pokemon with being able to manually throw your pokeball and have your Pokemon collect whatever at a very generous distance, all while not having that air of clunk reside around it, where sometimes sending it off to auto battle would result in it going in the wrong direction or stopping after a few steps to do absolutely nothing. And in order to fight a base leader, you have to run around and auto battle 30 Pokemon. There's again no real strategy here, and you're rewarded with a pseudo gym fight where their final Pokemon will always be their car, which is a beefed up Revavroom with the team's appropriate typing. I'd say mechanially it's the worst of the 3 quests because it ends up being such a repetitive formula.
And it is a positive you can do any of these in any order you prefer, it's just a bit of a shame that each quest ends up being so painfully surface level. Which leads to the final dungeon, or the exploration of Area 0. I won't really talk about it much since there are some nice story beats worth experiencing unspoiled, but instead segway into talking about the game's other "gimmick" being paradox Pokemon. Generally, they're extreme regional variants with stat buffs and their own unique abilities with both versions exploring past and future variants, but that's really as far as paradox Pokemon go. Now I'm a fan of all their designs but the fact that these Pokemon and the 2 professors is as far as the games will go with exploring different timelines is disappointing. Going into Area 0 and expecting either a lush prehistoric forest or chromitized mechanical city only for the trek down to be the exact same in both versions really took away what could and should had been, and remains yet another statistic of wasted potential. Really seeing Gamefreak never going all out with a concept and experiencing years of blueballing is one of the largest disappointments of the franchise, and a refusal to commit to what will probably be a once in a generation feature when something like Black and White could manage 2 entirely unique, version exclusive zones is just disappointing. So basically I'm a fan of the idea of not too fond of the result.
The last thing to really talk about are the raids. Raiding is a 4 player fanfare where 4 people (or 1 person and 3 NPC's) work together to take down a boss Pokemon. These are procedurally generated and I imagine served as the post-game activity Gamefreak expects players to do ad infinite upon hitting the credits, and just like in SwSh, they really don't do it for me. Anything under 5 can be overcome by just spamming SE moves to the specific tera type, and while it may seem like 5-7 raids create nuance and depth for differential team-building, there's a universal setup to clear all of them with no effort. Pokemon like Azumarill, Iron Hands, Gholdengo and Slowbro/Slowking can solo even the hardest content with no issue, and your rewards for winning are herbs for making sandwiches, items for competitive team building, or treasures to sell for items for competitive team building. Just like in SwSh, it's as deep as a puddle and serves as the game's infinite content, but it's a bit worse than how raids were handled then.
See rather than keep things turn-based, raids are now on a timer. In theory this helps raids always last a set amount of time and not feel like a chore, but in practice it's a complete, inconsistent mess, either through the timer always ticking down regardless of action, or that continual lack of polish that has you locked in some menus with no ability to do anything, and of course this is made all the worse in an online environment. You could spend a 4th of the timer doing absolutely nothing because of poor load times and the raid Pokemon just doing way too many moves in succession, and despite having the ability to one shot most raids, it still ends up feeling inconsistent because of these technical abnormalities. Like most other problems in the game, a 2nd review over and even the lightest coat of polish could had made raiding feel better, but given there's no true reward unless you're really into shiny hunting, and the fact that you can raid whenever you want in the game, it just feels like yet another forced, undercooked feature.
And for the most part that's Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. Once you hit credits, besides grinding out raids you can partake in some school courses or dialogues for some minor rewards. You can redo some of the gym activities for a one off reward. You can check into the auction marketplace to bid on overpriced apricorn balls (maybe) once a day. And you can hunt down spikes to capture the 4 hidden legendaries, but unless you're avidly into either shiny hunting or competitive battling, which are sub groups that barely make up 1% of the entire fanbase, that's really it. It's yet another game with a sparse amount of post-game activities in a franchise that fanfared how much content you have to do with the introduction of gen 3, and was only built upon since then. There are no contests. There is no battle tower. There's no national dex to incentivize building up on a living dex. There's a very limited amount of one-off legendaries that are always in static positions. There's just really nothing to do once you finish this 40 hour tutorial.
And that's really the saddest part. From start to finish, the game just feels empty. It feels like they checked off the minimal amount of ticks to have this pass as an open world game, and did absolutely nothing to emphasize that you were playing a Pokemon game. There's no bite, no challenge, no content, no stargazing features, and in most of the areas that matter, the Pokemon game that launched in the same year as it does it all better, and it's hard to really know what to blame for all of it. Given SwSh's beta leaks, we know these games get 2 years minimum development time, which is enough time for Ubisoft to recreate most of Egypt and have it showcased in museums for study purposes. We know it can't be publisher interference since no other Nintendo title shares these vast amount of issues, and I really doubt Nintendo is telling Gamefreak to step back on GOOD changes they made in another game IN THE SAME YEAR. Maybe it's the lack of passionate developers, since there are glass door reviews stating how many of the veterans no longer have a passion or fire for making these Pokemon games, which fair enough but at that point some newer, more passionate blood should be injected instead of these non-caring old heads sticking around.
Regardless though, the game sold over 10 million copies in 3 days, so them doing the bare minimum while still pushing out these insane sales numbers is working for them. It's just sad to had been a fan of this series for decades and seeing themselves continually degrade and make mistakes the last game never came close to making, how each new entry ends up worse and worse in several areas, to the point where even poor performance is now a trademark issue.
Anyway there's my rambling review of Pokemon Scarlet. I'm sure it's come off as extremely disjointed, but that's exactly the feelings that this game conveyed to me gave off, and I'm probably giving the games way too much credit in the first place writing up something this long for its sake. Given Nintendo, not Gamefreak, acknowledged and apologized for the games releasing in such sorry states though, my only solice of hope left is if someone from Nintendo actively steps in and starts taking over projects, since despite all my rage I would rather not see the franchise I grew up with completely degrade itself into a multi-billion dollar joke.