Pokemon Violet is a promising iteration on the series, introducing changes to the series fans have long clamored for, however it is thoroughly compromised by the long-standing issues of the mainline Pokemon games, and at times threatens to be crushed under the weight of this baggage.
The open, non-linear structure of the game is something fans have begged for since the DS days, however, trainer battles being entirely optional, along with random encounters being a thing of the past, and the new Auto Battle feature, means you don't spend as much time battling, unless a Pokemon sneaks up on you, or you want to catch a new Pokemon to add them to the dex. I understand why these changes have been made with how this game is structured, and I don't think there are many other open world games out there with turn based battle systems, however as someone who enjoys the battle system, it is a little disappointing. I think forced trainer battles at least would have been okay, but here we are.
With the new story routes, the best one by far is Path of Legends. Path of Legends has you going around the world and investigating Titans, huge Pokemon that are disrupting the environment, hunting for Herba Mystica, a herb that can enhance these Titans, or even heal wounded Pokemon. It's a brief story, however the emotional beats of it stroke a chord with me. It may be simple, but it's down to earth and it makes you really care about Arven, the main character of this route. The actual Titans themselves are also pretty fun to fight. They're not particularly challenging, but they reminded me of the Totem Pokemon from Sun & Moon. The best part of Pokemon has always been, well, the Pokemon, so whenever the series gets more into depth with how they interact with nature, and makes Wild Pokemon more interesting, I'll always love that.
Starfall Street has a really strong start at first. The first boss I fought, the fire one, really gave me a tough time, it was insanely challenging, especially for something you could attempt so early in the game. However, from there they got much easier, and with how pointless the actual raids are, where all you do is autobattle, it became something I found to be really boring filler and a waste of time overall. There were 2 other bosses that challenged me, the Fairy and Fighting ones, but that was pretty much it. As for the actual story of this route, it seemed promising at first, being a story that deals with bullying, it felt like it was exposing a darker side of the Academy that I didn't expect. However, it never really gets any deeper than that, and by the end of it I was left wondering what Team Star even did wrong in the first place to be viewed so badly by the people in Paldea, they never seem to do anything actually bad. The way this story is resolved at the end also felt weirdly half-baked, I wasn't sure why any of this even had to happen. Starfall Street overall just fizzles out pretty early on and serves as nothing more than a few cool boss fights.
As for Victory Road, where you collect the Gym Badges and challenge the Elite 4, well....it was okay at best? There's no underlying story for this since it's self-contained from the other routes, so it's really more about getting familiar with the individual gym leaders. None of them are particularly fascinating, but there are a lot of them that are pretty fun to see and interact with, so that's nice. There are Gym Trials you have to take to get a chance to fight the Leader, rather than the traditional Gyms of the past, which is a nice shake up in theory, however most of these Trials end up feeling uninspired and boring. There are some fun ones like the Electric and Ghost gyms, but aside from that you're never asked to do anything particularly interesting. Ram your body into a balloon to bounce it around with Half-Life 2 physics, do a terrible rhythm game, a lot of these just felt like filler. It really doesn't help that, even underleveled, these gym leaders are all pretty easy to deal with, they were some of the most disappointing gym leader fights to me since the 3DS games. Once you're done with the Gyms, you move onto the Elite 4, and weirdly enough, there is no Victory Road (as in the route) for the first time in the series. That was pretty lame, but it's not something I can't move past. The actual Elite 4 themselves were thankfully a ton of fun to fight, and for me represented a real turning point in the quality of the game. Fights actually start to get more difficult for once, with the Elite 4 taking advantage of weather, hazards, typing fake outs, etc, these teams were wonderfully made, and I actually appreciate that you don't find out the typing they specialize in until you're already well into the battle, it eliminates the planning you could do for the Elite 4 in every other game. However....after such a strong, memorable Elite 4, you're left with the lamest Champion battle since X and Y. Even when this game starts to get promising, it always manages to trip and stumble and disappoint you. Almost as an apology for this horrible Champion battle, you're given a battle with your rival for one last time afterwards, and it is so, so much more fun, and so much more challenging than the actual Champion, and I really appreciate that.
After finishing all 3 acts, you're left with one final act. This is something that had been hyped up to me, but it was kind of disappointing to me. You're introduced to a new area, descending to the depths of this massive crater in the center of the region, and the actual area itself is fascinating, with lore sprinkled throughout, weird Pokemon, abandoned infrastructure...however, this fascinating exploration gets undermined by these poorly done Walk and Talk segments. These sections get interrupted by Pokemon battles, which encourages you to ignore the battles, which is not something you want in a turn based RPG. Ignoring the battles makes your descent into the depths much faster and can even make the Walk and Talks interrupted by cutscenes, which leads you to try standing still. However, if you stand still, a Pokemon will almost definitely come and attack you, so it is pretty much impossible to get through this without the dialogue being interrupted. At one point, I fell off a cliff, and that not only interrupted the dialogue, it made it restart to the very beginning. When you combine this with the lack of voice acting, which meant I couldn't pick up items or else the pop-up boxes would obscure the dialogue boxes and make me miss parts of the conversations, by this point I was wishing these were just traditional cutscenes instead of walk and talks. By the time you get past this shoddily executed part of the story though, and reach the bottom of the crater, the story ramps up and increases in quality so much that it's almost easy to forgive how annoying this part of the story was up until now.
The main draw of this game, the Open World, is not great. It has some of the standard draws of an Open World, with a lot of the fun of it being how much you can break it, climbing mountains you're not meant to climb, teleporting across rivers, getting into fights with Pokemon way stronger than you have any right dealing with. Behind these standard conventions of an Open World however, you're left with the ugliest game in the Nintendo Switch's entire library, with bland, featureless plains, single texture deserts, horribly texture mapped mountains, constant clipping issues with the camera not being able to cope with anything, Pokemon just walking back and forth and not doing anything interesting in this world. With random encounters gone, you'd think seeing these Pokemon in their natural habitats would be interesting, but it really isn't. At times the world feels cramped, with hordes of Pokemon just wandering around, waiting for some random 12 year old to show up that they can run up to and attack. That's not interesting to me at all, and if it's going to be handled this poorly I'd rather have random encounters back where I could be left to my imagination to wonder what these Pokemon act like off-screen. It also doesn't help that Paldea itself is boring, featureless, and devoid of human life. There are only a few towns scattered around, there are hardly any NPCs outside of the towns, and all I could think about going through this world was how unbelievably boring and lacking of wonder it was for a Pokemon game. Older games had distinctive features and natural wonders, and the transition to Open World did not look at any of that when deciding what to carry over. There's no Relic Castle, no Tin Tower, no Sky Pillar, no Poni Island... The mystical, fascinating locations of other regions are gone, and Paldea seems to have absolutely no history behind it's locations, and in a game that is all about exploration, I'm left with absolutely zero desire to explore it.
As for battling, this is the most important part of the game I feel. The actual systems are fantastic, the new Pokemon and moves are great, and I love Terastallization and it's potential as both a defensive and offensive mechanic. However, battling is thoroughly compromised by how infuriatingly slow it is. Maybe Game Freak felt nostalgic after releasing BDSP, but this is the slowest game for battling since Gen 4. The cutscene for Terastallization is insanely long, and is SO long that it can actually be a problem for Raids, which have a time limit. The battle system also STILL pauses for every single redundant piece of battle dialogue. This is especially frustrating coming off of Pokemon Legends Arceus, which had the sensibility to speed up the battle system, by cutting down on all of these pointless pauses. On top of all of that, the game's framerate drops, and the game speed being tied to framerate, makes battles much, much slower than usual, with so much more waiting, to the point where half the time I was battling, I wasn't even paying attention to the game, because it was so frustratingly, agonizingly slow. Other RPGs do not feel this painful to deal with, I'd even appreciate an option to skip the Terastallization cutscene, but Game Freak has buried their head in the sand, refuses to look at other RPGs, and is dead set on making battles take as long and slow as possible. It can get so bad that it can kill a player's desire to even play the game, and it's something that I really hope gets looked into for future games. I can't understand how they improved on this with Legends Arceus, but took that away for Scarlet/Violet.
There's also the elephant in the room here with all of the technical issues this game has. A memory leak meaning you have to restart the game to fix slowdown, horrific FPS issues, constant clipping, unloading of assets, horrible pop-in, seizure-inducing visual bugs, this game is just a mess top-to-bottom.
tl;dr: There are vestiges of a good game in here, and for Pokemon diehards I think there is potential to have fun with this game, just like with any Pokemon game. However, I would steer clear of this if you're not already a fan of Pokemon, as the game is so thoroughly compromised by it's flaws that without the nostalgia and fondness for the franchise that Pokemon fans have, I can't imagine being able to forgive this game for it's issues. With how these games sell more and more with each installment, and the absurd amount of money this game makes, Pokemon fans deserve a better game for their unwavering loyalty to this franchise, and I hope Game Freak does better with future games.
The open, non-linear structure of the game is something fans have begged for since the DS days, however, trainer battles being entirely optional, along with random encounters being a thing of the past, and the new Auto Battle feature, means you don't spend as much time battling, unless a Pokemon sneaks up on you, or you want to catch a new Pokemon to add them to the dex. I understand why these changes have been made with how this game is structured, and I don't think there are many other open world games out there with turn based battle systems, however as someone who enjoys the battle system, it is a little disappointing. I think forced trainer battles at least would have been okay, but here we are.
With the new story routes, the best one by far is Path of Legends. Path of Legends has you going around the world and investigating Titans, huge Pokemon that are disrupting the environment, hunting for Herba Mystica, a herb that can enhance these Titans, or even heal wounded Pokemon. It's a brief story, however the emotional beats of it stroke a chord with me. It may be simple, but it's down to earth and it makes you really care about Arven, the main character of this route. The actual Titans themselves are also pretty fun to fight. They're not particularly challenging, but they reminded me of the Totem Pokemon from Sun & Moon. The best part of Pokemon has always been, well, the Pokemon, so whenever the series gets more into depth with how they interact with nature, and makes Wild Pokemon more interesting, I'll always love that.
Starfall Street has a really strong start at first. The first boss I fought, the fire one, really gave me a tough time, it was insanely challenging, especially for something you could attempt so early in the game. However, from there they got much easier, and with how pointless the actual raids are, where all you do is autobattle, it became something I found to be really boring filler and a waste of time overall. There were 2 other bosses that challenged me, the Fairy and Fighting ones, but that was pretty much it. As for the actual story of this route, it seemed promising at first, being a story that deals with bullying, it felt like it was exposing a darker side of the Academy that I didn't expect. However, it never really gets any deeper than that, and by the end of it I was left wondering what Team Star even did wrong in the first place to be viewed so badly by the people in Paldea, they never seem to do anything actually bad. The way this story is resolved at the end also felt weirdly half-baked, I wasn't sure why any of this even had to happen. Starfall Street overall just fizzles out pretty early on and serves as nothing more than a few cool boss fights.
As for Victory Road, where you collect the Gym Badges and challenge the Elite 4, well....it was okay at best? There's no underlying story for this since it's self-contained from the other routes, so it's really more about getting familiar with the individual gym leaders. None of them are particularly fascinating, but there are a lot of them that are pretty fun to see and interact with, so that's nice. There are Gym Trials you have to take to get a chance to fight the Leader, rather than the traditional Gyms of the past, which is a nice shake up in theory, however most of these Trials end up feeling uninspired and boring. There are some fun ones like the Electric and Ghost gyms, but aside from that you're never asked to do anything particularly interesting. Ram your body into a balloon to bounce it around with Half-Life 2 physics, do a terrible rhythm game, a lot of these just felt like filler. It really doesn't help that, even underleveled, these gym leaders are all pretty easy to deal with, they were some of the most disappointing gym leader fights to me since the 3DS games. Once you're done with the Gyms, you move onto the Elite 4, and weirdly enough, there is no Victory Road (as in the route) for the first time in the series. That was pretty lame, but it's not something I can't move past. The actual Elite 4 themselves were thankfully a ton of fun to fight, and for me represented a real turning point in the quality of the game. Fights actually start to get more difficult for once, with the Elite 4 taking advantage of weather, hazards, typing fake outs, etc, these teams were wonderfully made, and I actually appreciate that you don't find out the typing they specialize in until you're already well into the battle, it eliminates the planning you could do for the Elite 4 in every other game. However....after such a strong, memorable Elite 4, you're left with the lamest Champion battle since X and Y. Even when this game starts to get promising, it always manages to trip and stumble and disappoint you. Almost as an apology for this horrible Champion battle, you're given a battle with your rival for one last time afterwards, and it is so, so much more fun, and so much more challenging than the actual Champion, and I really appreciate that.
After finishing all 3 acts, you're left with one final act. This is something that had been hyped up to me, but it was kind of disappointing to me. You're introduced to a new area, descending to the depths of this massive crater in the center of the region, and the actual area itself is fascinating, with lore sprinkled throughout, weird Pokemon, abandoned infrastructure...however, this fascinating exploration gets undermined by these poorly done Walk and Talk segments. These sections get interrupted by Pokemon battles, which encourages you to ignore the battles, which is not something you want in a turn based RPG. Ignoring the battles makes your descent into the depths much faster and can even make the Walk and Talks interrupted by cutscenes, which leads you to try standing still. However, if you stand still, a Pokemon will almost definitely come and attack you, so it is pretty much impossible to get through this without the dialogue being interrupted. At one point, I fell off a cliff, and that not only interrupted the dialogue, it made it restart to the very beginning. When you combine this with the lack of voice acting, which meant I couldn't pick up items or else the pop-up boxes would obscure the dialogue boxes and make me miss parts of the conversations, by this point I was wishing these were just traditional cutscenes instead of walk and talks. By the time you get past this shoddily executed part of the story though, and reach the bottom of the crater, the story ramps up and increases in quality so much that it's almost easy to forgive how annoying this part of the story was up until now.
The main draw of this game, the Open World, is not great. It has some of the standard draws of an Open World, with a lot of the fun of it being how much you can break it, climbing mountains you're not meant to climb, teleporting across rivers, getting into fights with Pokemon way stronger than you have any right dealing with. Behind these standard conventions of an Open World however, you're left with the ugliest game in the Nintendo Switch's entire library, with bland, featureless plains, single texture deserts, horribly texture mapped mountains, constant clipping issues with the camera not being able to cope with anything, Pokemon just walking back and forth and not doing anything interesting in this world. With random encounters gone, you'd think seeing these Pokemon in their natural habitats would be interesting, but it really isn't. At times the world feels cramped, with hordes of Pokemon just wandering around, waiting for some random 12 year old to show up that they can run up to and attack. That's not interesting to me at all, and if it's going to be handled this poorly I'd rather have random encounters back where I could be left to my imagination to wonder what these Pokemon act like off-screen. It also doesn't help that Paldea itself is boring, featureless, and devoid of human life. There are only a few towns scattered around, there are hardly any NPCs outside of the towns, and all I could think about going through this world was how unbelievably boring and lacking of wonder it was for a Pokemon game. Older games had distinctive features and natural wonders, and the transition to Open World did not look at any of that when deciding what to carry over. There's no Relic Castle, no Tin Tower, no Sky Pillar, no Poni Island... The mystical, fascinating locations of other regions are gone, and Paldea seems to have absolutely no history behind it's locations, and in a game that is all about exploration, I'm left with absolutely zero desire to explore it.
As for battling, this is the most important part of the game I feel. The actual systems are fantastic, the new Pokemon and moves are great, and I love Terastallization and it's potential as both a defensive and offensive mechanic. However, battling is thoroughly compromised by how infuriatingly slow it is. Maybe Game Freak felt nostalgic after releasing BDSP, but this is the slowest game for battling since Gen 4. The cutscene for Terastallization is insanely long, and is SO long that it can actually be a problem for Raids, which have a time limit. The battle system also STILL pauses for every single redundant piece of battle dialogue. This is especially frustrating coming off of Pokemon Legends Arceus, which had the sensibility to speed up the battle system, by cutting down on all of these pointless pauses. On top of all of that, the game's framerate drops, and the game speed being tied to framerate, makes battles much, much slower than usual, with so much more waiting, to the point where half the time I was battling, I wasn't even paying attention to the game, because it was so frustratingly, agonizingly slow. Other RPGs do not feel this painful to deal with, I'd even appreciate an option to skip the Terastallization cutscene, but Game Freak has buried their head in the sand, refuses to look at other RPGs, and is dead set on making battles take as long and slow as possible. It can get so bad that it can kill a player's desire to even play the game, and it's something that I really hope gets looked into for future games. I can't understand how they improved on this with Legends Arceus, but took that away for Scarlet/Violet.
There's also the elephant in the room here with all of the technical issues this game has. A memory leak meaning you have to restart the game to fix slowdown, horrific FPS issues, constant clipping, unloading of assets, horrible pop-in, seizure-inducing visual bugs, this game is just a mess top-to-bottom.
tl;dr: There are vestiges of a good game in here, and for Pokemon diehards I think there is potential to have fun with this game, just like with any Pokemon game. However, I would steer clear of this if you're not already a fan of Pokemon, as the game is so thoroughly compromised by it's flaws that without the nostalgia and fondness for the franchise that Pokemon fans have, I can't imagine being able to forgive this game for it's issues. With how these games sell more and more with each installment, and the absurd amount of money this game makes, Pokemon fans deserve a better game for their unwavering loyalty to this franchise, and I hope Game Freak does better with future games.