Elongated sigh of mediocrity.

Pokémon Violet opened my eyes to how I truly feel about the franchise. I no longer feel the same exhilarating rush I used to get when I would play an entry I hadn’t experienced yet.

Why is this? Maybe I simply just grew up, maybe my preferences changed, or maybe Pokémon simply no longer tries. Remember Gen 5’s groundbreaking DS graphics? The 2.5D to give a pseudo 3D effect that really landed? Remember the outlandish sprite designs that we laughed at then, but wish we could go back to? This is just no longer what Game Freak is about.

Of course the semantics of why Game Freak isn’t like this float around the discourse of every Switch exclusive Pokémon game, but I just feel as if they aren’t truly trying their hardest. Especially after a game like Legends Arceus, even if it was full of uninteresting, uninspired dialogue. Gen 9 suffers from the same thing, but there’s somehow even more. Like, please brother, shut the FUCK up every once in awhile. You can’t go more than 5 minutes without wandering into a full on yap session.

I would give them credit of the open world design, if the world didn’t look like a late era Wii game. There are so many beautiful looking games on the Switch, and this just isn’t one of them. Textures feel flat, cities look identical, environments look colorless. There are 2 open world Zelda games on the Switch that not only look better, but run better as well. Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild are 7 years old and absolutely blow new Pokémon out of the water, both stylistically and graphically.

I love the ability to progress how I please, but levels are already set instead of scaled. That means I don’t truly have a choice, I just have the option to go to higher level areas where I’d get my ass kicked trying to train.

Let me go back to the pointless dialogue thing I mentioned, because Pokémon has actually had great storylines before. Black and White, Ruby and Sapphire, Platinum, all memorable. I legitimately just played this game, like, today, for hours, and can’t remember shit. A huge reason for this is the ungodly amount of dialogue that just does NOT matter, so I may have ended up skipping important sections.

This game is also on the verge of being broken. Constant frame rate drops, human characters and Pokémon sprites popping in and out of existence, getting stuck on terrain, 2022 did not ask for this.

The music does slap though. Top tier Pokémon OST.

There are so many better, similar games on the Switch than this, and there’s even a better Pokémon game on the console too. Pokémon Violet succeeds at nothing but the basics, being a somewhat playable game that sounds good, with almost zero memorability to make up for the dreadful gameplay you’ve forced yourself to get through. A good idea, a very bad execution. 3/10.

I’ve been playing with my CoC on and off for about 10 or so years now. I remember when it was relatively new, and all of my friends in middle school were hyping up their TH7 bases asking everyone to join their clans. That inner child in me will always love CoC for the memories of warm summer mornings checking my base on my iPod 5, but the more popular it got, the less accessible it became.

One thing that has truly ruined CoC is YouTube. There are way too many people with massive fanbases of impressionable children. The more popular they got, the more buying your way to the top became the norm. The only issue, though, is the fact that those YouTubers can afford it. The people who want to casually play this game, cannot.

I started a new base back in 2020 with the intention of reaching the top without ever spending a dime. I got to about Th9 until I realized that you really just can’t. If you have the patience to wait months to max out your base before upgrading then sure, you don’t have to spend money at all. But, the perks of something like Gold Pass is something that’s nearly mandatory. I know $6.99/mo. compared to the hundreds/thousands of dollars people spend in other free online games seems insignificant, but when the entire game is advertised as free and they start bombarding you with “TREASURE CHEST OF GEMS ONE HUNNID DOLLA!!!!” it starts to irritate me.

So I caved, and now I have Gold Pass. The abundance of spell books, builder potions, wall rings, etc. is great. Yet I have to live in shame knowing I’m paying money to play a mobile game faster. Not just faster, but at a tolerable pace. Speaking of the potions and spells, it takes WAY too long to upgrade ANYTHING after TH8. I believe they even had some huge update years ago where they reduced the time of upgrades, and plenty of things are over a week now. Not to mention how many troops there are to upgrade, how long they all take, and how expensive they all are. At least they made training troops free, it helps to farm.

I play this game a lot. Not as much as I used to, but I go through phases of how often I open the app. I guess my appreciation for CoC is more nostalgic than how fun the game is, but I wouldn’t play it at all if I didn’t find it fun. Attacking bases, upgrading your weapons and buildings, figuring out the best placement of your base, it makes for fun strategizing. The gradual movement of your placement in leagues or the different troops you use when you realize you’ve moved too far up to use an army you’ve grown accustom to, it’s just relaxing.

Unfortunately, CoC is practically pay to win. You don’t HAVE to, and it isn’t impossible to move up far without spending a dime, but the rewards that $6.99 can get you are too tempting, and important to the game, to pass it up. That’s a huge flaw. If you don’t pay for anything, it just takes forever. But, it’s incredibly fun at the style of play it aims to achieve. 7/10.