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.