I finished my first playthrough after about 7 hours and 54 minutes, I may have powered through some writing. I enjoy that the game actually feels like it has a lot of different options and choices you can make that affect how the game goes. The card gameplay is pretty simple, but enjoyable. I wish there was a way to ditch useless cards (really don't need a 0 Crawling card near the end of the game) outside of resting, but I suppose that does give the game some difficulty. I know it was at least making things more difficult on me because I wasn't getting rid of small point cards until way later.

The music is nice and atmospheric and the artwork and graphics are nice. The world does absolutely come across as being very foreign with some absolute abominations straight from H.P. Lovecraft. My biggest ask for an improvement on the art/graphics would be for characters to have more than the singular static pose when you talk to them. Or maybe I just talked to Tangent too much and I didn't notice them changing?

Speaking of, character-wise I enjoyed quite a few of them. Somehow I ended up trying to make Tangent my best friend and eventual romance right at the start because she looked the coolest and had dope as hell hair. Then she shaved it and somehow became even colder than before, and I died inside. Thankfully before the end of the game she grew out a dope pixie cut and started interacting, acting like a human more. I also straight off the bat enjoyed Anemone, Cal, Rex, and Nomi-Nomi. I do wish there were more interactions with some of the adult colonists, being able to build friendships with them too. Granted I suppose your decisions are what create your relationships. I just would have enjoyed hanging with Utopia more tbh.

Anyways, it was a solid game. I'm interested to see how things can pan out different in a second playthrough. Considering I put almost nothing into the yellow skills, I think I may go that route this next time.

Overall this is more of the same for Scarlet/Violet, with a bit more tedium.

100 additional Pokémon was nice but it really felt like at times you were just running into the same Pokémon over and over. The diversity through Kitakami somehow felt lacking. There are some nooks and crannies where specific lines are hidden away at that make you need to explore, but once I already had nearly 50% of the additions within 30 minutes it made the DLC feel more like a slog.

Story and characters; Briar was unremarkable though she does look pretty blatantly evil (dem eyes) and I wish the Paldean trainers you went with to Kitakami were fleshed out too. I know the focus was the Blueberry kids but at least put some effort in for the other three so they aren’t just pure others. Carmine and Kieran were a mixed bag for me. I really like Carmine’s design, less so Kieran’s. Them as characters were okay, very anime trope tsundere and afraid weakling that grows into a competent trainer. Looking forward to Kieran wanting revenge or something (lol). Ogrepon and the Three Loyals had a cool story. Also Perrin was probably my favorite out of all. She a baddie and having a photographing story in the main game was different. My biggest gripe with the story was that going back and forth through the same areas of Kitakami over and over sucked. There were a dozen other places you could also go that would have made it feel less repetitive tracking back to the same 4 locations constantly.

And of course there is the performance. It handles about as shittily as the proper game, potentially worse to be honest. I never had issues with the base game freezing but I experience it constantly while playing the DLC.