Disappointment after disappointment, when will I ever grow up? Every damn game I am underwhelmed, yet I seem to never learn. I will never love an entry in this series again, the magic that I experienced from days long past will never be seen or heard from again. Forever I am chained to this merchandise-pushing bulldozer of a franchise. Why does my childhood keep pestering me? Is it a curse? Why do I bother? Just let it die already.
Being someone whose username looks like it's based on Pokemon and formerly having an Eevee PFP for quite a while on here, it would feel like my take on seemingly the most divisive entry in the series yet will come off as something easily discarded. An open world game that is apparently super buggy and super empty? No way I could love it. It's a despicable game that would probably steal my dog's lunch money if it got the opportunity. I can't believe they would release such a broken game in 2022, etc, etc, yadda yadda. Whatever, you heard it all already.
Lend me your ears though... I loved this game.
As I lie here on my bed and rest myself on my Slowpoke pillow, I think to myself "is this a dream?". Not since the early days of playing on my purple Game Boy Color with my copy of Blue version have I felt this same feeling of grand adventure. The ability to go wherever I please without a completely nothing rival constantly challenging me at every other route, or having someone stop me from going down a certain route because they dropped their contact lens. Even the overworld trainers have grown to finally get some manners, and allow me to walk around freely without being demanded to waste my time fighting their crappy low level Scatterbug that wouldn't even give me a single XP point. Finally, a game that eschews all of that so that I may feel free. Free to experience the world of which I seem to never grow out of.
This is MY adventure.
The best part? This game will only get better for me. I played Violet in pretty much the worst way possible, via portable mode on my Switch. I experienced the worst frame rate drops possible, I experienced the worst pop-in, and despite all the doomer talk on Twitter....I never once experienced a crash or even one of the funny glitches or bugs. (may have helped that I bought it digitally) It turns out you can't trust judging your incoming experience based on what you see on the internet, especially when everyone everywhere can easily record stuff that happens to them in what might be the new best-seller in the entire universe. Personally, that stuff actually endears me more to this game. There's a clip of a Jigglypuff that flew off into space out there somewhere that's actually perfectly in-character, and would've made me laugh my ass off if I had experienced it in my own game. To say that I can't wait to replay this later on either a patched version, on better switch hardware or emulator would be an understatement. I cannot imagine how much I would love this once I experience it at a consistent frame rate.
Despite the tacky school uniform you're saddled with at the beginning, I found the setting very charming. Clothing options suffer thanks to it, but these are probably my favorite set of characters since Black/White. Mela having to move her legs like a robot because of her ridiculous boots is more fun and entertaining than anything Leon and his merchandise-moving Charizard did in the last game, and Arven is someone who I want to fight for to the very end. Don't talk to me or my cybernetic lizard motorcycle son again. The last 5% of this game goes beyond words in how much of a step up it is from Sw/Sh's wet fart of a climax.
They say an image speaks louder than words, but here it is.
Call me a fanboy, call me chopped liver. You could even call me late for dinner, but...I enjoyed myself immensely...and that's all that matters in the end.
It's then that I ask myself again, "is this a dream?"
No, the sky has not fallen.....no cats and dogs are not currently living together.... Pokemon Scarvy is my game of the year. This is reality, and I still can't fucking believe it.
Ten.
Years.
Ten whole years since B/W, and they finally do it again... holy shit.
I refuse to grow up.
Being someone whose username looks like it's based on Pokemon and formerly having an Eevee PFP for quite a while on here, it would feel like my take on seemingly the most divisive entry in the series yet will come off as something easily discarded. An open world game that is apparently super buggy and super empty? No way I could love it. It's a despicable game that would probably steal my dog's lunch money if it got the opportunity. I can't believe they would release such a broken game in 2022, etc, etc, yadda yadda. Whatever, you heard it all already.
Lend me your ears though... I loved this game.
As I lie here on my bed and rest myself on my Slowpoke pillow, I think to myself "is this a dream?". Not since the early days of playing on my purple Game Boy Color with my copy of Blue version have I felt this same feeling of grand adventure. The ability to go wherever I please without a completely nothing rival constantly challenging me at every other route, or having someone stop me from going down a certain route because they dropped their contact lens. Even the overworld trainers have grown to finally get some manners, and allow me to walk around freely without being demanded to waste my time fighting their crappy low level Scatterbug that wouldn't even give me a single XP point. Finally, a game that eschews all of that so that I may feel free. Free to experience the world of which I seem to never grow out of.
This is MY adventure.
The best part? This game will only get better for me. I played Violet in pretty much the worst way possible, via portable mode on my Switch. I experienced the worst frame rate drops possible, I experienced the worst pop-in, and despite all the doomer talk on Twitter....I never once experienced a crash or even one of the funny glitches or bugs. (may have helped that I bought it digitally) It turns out you can't trust judging your incoming experience based on what you see on the internet, especially when everyone everywhere can easily record stuff that happens to them in what might be the new best-seller in the entire universe. Personally, that stuff actually endears me more to this game. There's a clip of a Jigglypuff that flew off into space out there somewhere that's actually perfectly in-character, and would've made me laugh my ass off if I had experienced it in my own game. To say that I can't wait to replay this later on either a patched version, on better switch hardware or emulator would be an understatement. I cannot imagine how much I would love this once I experience it at a consistent frame rate.
Despite the tacky school uniform you're saddled with at the beginning, I found the setting very charming. Clothing options suffer thanks to it, but these are probably my favorite set of characters since Black/White. Mela having to move her legs like a robot because of her ridiculous boots is more fun and entertaining than anything Leon and his merchandise-moving Charizard did in the last game, and Arven is someone who I want to fight for to the very end. Don't talk to me or my cybernetic lizard motorcycle son again. The last 5% of this game goes beyond words in how much of a step up it is from Sw/Sh's wet fart of a climax.
They say an image speaks louder than words, but here it is.
Call me a fanboy, call me chopped liver. You could even call me late for dinner, but...I enjoyed myself immensely...and that's all that matters in the end.
It's then that I ask myself again, "is this a dream?"
No, the sky has not fallen.....no cats and dogs are not currently living together.... Pokemon Scarvy is my game of the year. This is reality, and I still can't fucking believe it.
Ten.
Years.
Ten whole years since B/W, and they finally do it again... holy shit.
I refuse to grow up.
Reviewed on Nov 26, 2022
15 Comments
i'm more interested in this game than any other pokemons because people say it's terrible. This review saying otherwise has made me 1% less interested.
Killer review. I'm 35 hours in so far and haven't been this sucked into a game since BotW.
SAME. The only time since launch that I've played anything else has been when my kids are playing it lol
performance may hurt my eyes but this is a really well done review & I'm glad you enjoyed it
@appreciations It's absolutely worth ragging about the performance, but I eventually kinda just.....got used to it. I'm also just optimistic in the long run, because at some point the issues will be ironed out whether it's by Game Freak themselves or fans, because that's like....honestly the only thing that really bothered me at least when I began playing. Fix that and make battles not have to sit at a standstill because I have to wait for Klawf to power up for thirty seconds.
Thanks for your compliment, that stuff helps me out a ton.
Thanks for your compliment, that stuff helps me out a ton.
I'm liking your review and I generally liked the game overall, but I couldn't be on a more different page about the evolution in this direction (other than not having to fight every pointless trainer in existence because you're right -- their mons aren't worth it and nobody really wants to play a dodging game). I'm glad you enjoyed the game, and I think anyone that's an ardent fan is going to enjoy it even with the ridiculous amount of technical issues (the current count for competitive crashes between my spouse and me is sitting at 7-3, so I'm winning with way less crashes despite more time). There's just a lot of design issues that get in the way of me enjoying the game as much as I intended. I might write a wall on it, since I feel a bit inspired after reading your own review. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts! <3
You're welcome, game kinda fucked me up emotionally at one point I'm frightened to say.
I honestly have no idea what's going on with the crashing situation, me and a bunch of guys in a discord haven't really had that issue as far as I know. Like I'm wondering if it has to do with playing the game physically versus digitally, or maybe even if one version is more unstable than the other? I noticed Scarlet on here is scoring worse compared to Violet which is slowly drifting towards the four star mark.
I'm glad I haven't gotten crashes, but I feel for people who keep getting them. I heard a memory leak issue was also a thing and I kept shutting my game off completely when I was done instead of sleep moding, so no idea if that helped or not, though I did notice frame rate improving one time. I hope they fix it soon, cause I firmly do believe it's the most fun I've had in a very long time with the series, aside from New Pokemon Snap.
I honestly have no idea what's going on with the crashing situation, me and a bunch of guys in a discord haven't really had that issue as far as I know. Like I'm wondering if it has to do with playing the game physically versus digitally, or maybe even if one version is more unstable than the other? I noticed Scarlet on here is scoring worse compared to Violet which is slowly drifting towards the four star mark.
I'm glad I haven't gotten crashes, but I feel for people who keep getting them. I heard a memory leak issue was also a thing and I kept shutting my game off completely when I was done instead of sleep moding, so no idea if that helped or not, though I did notice frame rate improving one time. I hope they fix it soon, cause I firmly do believe it's the most fun I've had in a very long time with the series, aside from New Pokemon Snap.
"-No new eeveelution despite the existence of a certain character, what the fuck Game Freak?"
Drakeon will be real one day, I still believe
Drakeon will be real one day, I still believe
Drakeon or at the very least Insecteon or something, preferably after they finally buff Bug types. It feels like they're going slow on purpose to drag these out, by the time I'm on my deathbed they'll finally make a Steel-type one called Tankeon that hopefully has a heavy machine gun on it's tail.
I'm quite far in and like, outside of the performance issues this is basically the best mainline Pokemon ever. I really wish they had sorted those out because it'd let that be the conversation instead of the performance overtaking the conversation. I also haven't encountered any crashes or game breaking bugs and, TBH, I've felt it is less buggy than a lot of prominent well liked releases, so it hasn't hurt my opinion of the game much since most of the stuff just...hasn't affected me as I play.
Totally geti t for people who HAVE had it crash or bug out, though. That's experience ruining shit.
Totally geti t for people who HAVE had it crash or bug out, though. That's experience ruining shit.
@FrozenRoy Yeah, was doing a second playthrough recently with a Bug only team and now rarely do I ever feel the need to go "oh god the performance is so bad!". Like I get it's still worth comment, but it was a shame it took over conversation over like....literally everything else the game did. Admittingly it's part of the reason I went out of my way to make this kind of review to kind of combat all the half-stars and one-stars I was seeing for a bit, lol. Had to stand my ground against the overwhelming storm of negativity at the time.
Bug chads rise up! Shoutout to my focus sash Frosmoth for taking the final blow from Nemona's Skeledirge and returning it in kind with mirror coat.
@LordDarias I was legit doing a Bug only run too for my second playthrough as well! lol, it's the most fun typing to run imo since it's basically hard mode. Love bugs and I ended up liking Lokix more after that.
Vee
1 year ago
-Battles are slow, the overworld trainers being skippable is a boon, because otherwise I think I would've disliked this game.
-Animations cannot be turned off, this undoubtedly would've helped the battles feel less slow for me.
-Sprigatito evo doesn't do it for me, sorry. Fuecoco and Quax mains win as predicted.
-The corny "ooooo wooooooaoooh!" theme during the last fight with gym leaders is still lame as all hell, didn't care for them re-using it from Sw/Sh.
-The worst frame rate I got was during a few random gym challenges, why did Sunflora chug my switch so bad?
-No new eeveelution despite the existence of a certain character, what the fuck Game Freak?
-Please make Ice SE against Water, and Bug SE against Fairy. I beg of you. Why the fuck are Fairies resisting Bug pokemon? What do you have against Insects for them to be resisted by like seven hundred things and everyone's grandmas?