Pokemon Scarlet/Violet are an event horizon for Pokemon games. It is actually unbelievable how unfinished these games are. It's when playing these games that you realise that every single Pokemon game since they went 3D about 10 years ago has been unfinished. Every single one has blacked out the screen in place of actual animations whenever a character does anything even remotely active, every single one up until now has re-used the same Pokemon models and attack animations, and every single one has had barebones world design, plot and characters that you're just railroaded along with no freedom because the devs likely didn't have time to design anything other than an incredibly linear experience.

When I tell you this game is unfinished, I mean that there are frame drops during the opening cutscene and the CREDITS. THE CREDITS. THERE ARE LITERALLY FRAME DROPS ON A BUNCH OF FUCKING NAMES SCROLLING DOWN A BLACK SCREEN. This game's technical performance is unbelievable in the absolute worst way, there is never a moment where its utter lack of polish is not a total distraction. Frame drops, hideous PS2-looking textures, egregious pop-in everywhere you go, NPCs fading out of existence because they can't make it up a flight of stairs, Pokemon turning invisible mid-battle. I could go on. I have never played a game in a state as rough as this.

And what pisses me off the most about that is that it puts a huge damper on what is otherwise a really fucking good Pokemon game, the best since Generation 5, in my opinion. Fundamentally, from a design perspective, I think this is just really good shit - it does a lot of things I've been pining for from the series for a long time. The open world isn't a lie, it truly is open! Shockingly so, in fact! Even with the supposedly open world being all over the marketing I really was expecting this game to do the classic Pokemon, "oh you can't go there yet there's been an outbreak of Sugma" or whatever and have some fuckin' dude blocking my way at 3/4 of the exits of every city, but nope! You really are just let loose in this world, allowed to beeline straight to areas with Level 50+ trainers and Pokemon and get your ass beat right away! It's super refreshing to not have my hand held every step of the way! Yet it does subtly tell you which parts of the map are intended to be taken on later through some nice and sensible design. There's a cave in the southwestern part of the map that leads to a city with a gym, but to get through the cave your "mount" (the game's "box legendary") needs to unlock a high jump that you get from progressing elsewhere in the game. HOWEVER that city is not blocked off from you entirely early on because there's a slightly harder-to-find hidden path that lets you get to the city without needing to unlock the upgrade! Wow! Thanks for telling me that the area is hard but not entirely blocking me off from going there anyway, Game Freak! Junichi Masuda leaves and suddenly you learn game design! What's up with that?

Scarlet and Violet despite having similarly condescending and 2-dimensional dialogue (even by kid's game standards) to previous Pokemon games, do also genuinely have a pretty good story! There's some interesting stuff going on here ESPECIALLY towards the game's climax! Narrative-wise, I think the last 4 hours or so of this game are some of the best stuff Pokemon has ever done!

A shame then, that all the cutscenes and moments around this part of this game and indeed all the way through are undercut by the devs only having time to put like 6, whack-ass MIDI sounding songs in it, and having to constantly watch hideous textures glitch out in the background whilst none of the characters emote or animate at all. At this game's emotional climax, it plays this incredibly cheap, wafer-thin "emotional music cue" song that you've heard numerous times throughout the game, and that on top of everything else just robs it of all its emotional weight. This game frequently deserves better. It has genuine freedom, a fair and reasonable sense of difficulty and challenge and a story with far more intrigue and nuance behind it than any other Pokemon game in the last decade. What a shame that it's buried under the weight of what has to have been a horrible amount of crunch.

For the first time in a long time I find myself feeling sympathy for Game Freak. No dev ever wants to release a rushed or unfinished game, and they will definitely have KNOWN what state it was in before it came out. There is no doubt in my mind that the state of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are far less to do with incompetence on Game Freak's part and far more to do with corporate interference and this increasingly ridiculous and unsustainable "new generation every 3 years" release pattern that well and truly killed them here.

How sad. If these games had been given another year or even 6 months in the oven they would have absolutely been the best Pokemon games ever in my mind. My dream scenario is that some kind of "Deluxe" version of these games comes out in a few years (and maybe for SwSh too, which were also clearly unfinished) for the next, more powerful Nintendo console that includes all the DLC from jump, HUGELY touches up the graphics and technical performance, adds in some new animations and general polish and maybe adds just a few little extra bits of content here and there. Realistically I think the best I can hope for is that they continue on with Scarlet/Violet's open world design philosophy in the next games, which I'd like to get excited for! But if they have to shit out another one in just another 3 years?

I don't know. Just give them more time next time. Jesus christ.