I don’t think any series has come and gone throughout my whole life quite like Pokémon has. Thinking back to 2019: I played through Pokémon Crystal with a band of friends, and it brought back a lot of my dormant love for it. We planned our teams together, helped come up with nicknames, and tried to each catch a shiny of choice before the end of the game. By the end of the game, not only did it have that usual special Pokémon feel like you really went on a journey with your lovingly raised lil guys, my other friend’s Pokémon had also floated vaguely through my mind. Pokémon’s natural strengths of telling little wordless stories through your playthroughs all seem to shine when you do it side by side with others. Recently I’ve been playing Dragon Quest 3 - I named my party after my friends, and was really endeared by how their classes naturally make them interact with each other. 2 of my other friends, who are besties, are a mage and a priestess, and the mage is frail so the priestess has to heal them a bunch. Gotta love how classic RPGs remind me of people, but I gotta love how Pokémon brings my friends together at least just as much.
And at this point, it’s fair to say that Pokémon’s natural social subtleties are proven to be more than theory or novelty. The iconic 90s Pokémon boom pushed the series so far into the collective consciousness that it made people fear it was a cult - and they were probably right. Those catholics laid in bed in a cold sweat despite the pistols in their wardrobes, because they knew that Zubat was an entity that could not be killed in as simple ways as bullet murder. The uniqueness of every person’s playthrough would prove to lend itself perfectly to internet content; nuzlockes and all their siblings spawning an endless stream of noise forever. Twitch Plays Pokémon proved to us that democracy is not real, only for Pokémon Go to prove that world peace might still be possible regardless. So when I tell you all of this, you have to believe me that 4 player co-op is the most natural evolution to the series since Scizor.
Scarlet and Violet arrives as the first games in the series with cooperative multiplayer, and well, I think they nailed it! Mind you it’s not true co-op in the sense you battle against enemies together, but more MMO-esque in that you all simultaneously exist together while the story goes by. I recall the first few hours of the game; me and 3 friends immediately came together to make absolutely no story progress, and just spelunk around looking for some of the new weirdos this game added. Pokémon’s social nature has always linked me up with people to have casual conversations suddenly interrupted by a “DUDE IS THAT PHANPY”, but this time, we were all screaming. Stumbling onto cool Pokémon spots feels particularly special when I’m bugging my friends to follow me so we can catch that Flamingo Pokémon.
One story that stuck out to me the most is one much further in. I bugged my friend to check out this giant cave I found, and they say they’ll search for the new rock Pokémon Glimmet in it before logging off. We spend like, literally an hour running around, trying to find this thing, and we just can’t. I came up with this plan on the spot: dude…what if we just make a bunch of sandwiches until one of them gives us a rock encounter buff. And I scroll through the unchanged 2000s interfacing of Serebii, and find out that the combination of bacon, watercress, mustard, jalapeno, and egg might do the trick. This game forced my hand into making bizarro sandwiches, and I obliged faithfully; not too long after succeeding, we found a little crevice in the corner of the cave where a bunch of them spawned. It’s kinda silly, but that moment felt special - Pokémon Scarlet had forced my hand to try strange tricks to find an equally strange obscure new Pokémon in its corners. Simulacrum of Pikablu-flavoured playground rumours waft through this game endlessly, and unraveling even the most incidental of secrets feels like a revelation. At this moment I had to equate Scarlet and Violet to a dungeon master, casually weaving scenarios for my friends to lightly problem solve together. But of course, in a game as big as this, superficiality isn’t absent.
So here we enter the “oh god oh fuck they messed up” section of this: this game launched like it needed at least another year of polish. I continuously thought while playing “how do i even like…talk about this game”. Rather than outrage or laughter, I’m in this middle of the road perspective where all I’m thinking is…I hope the people who developed this game are okay, it looks like a crunch nightmare. Seeing a composer of all people apologize publicly for a music related glitch broke my heart. I just tried to ask myself as honestly as I could: how much does this game’s launch state actually affect my enjoyment? And the answer is like, yeah, it hurts the game a lot. Where it hits the game the hardest is its pacing - you can really feel how vestigial Pokémon is of 80s game design. As my game sputtered and paused in battles, I really felt the slowness of the game reporting the weather, every individual stat’s increase, every little attack in a multi-hit move, and so on. It didn’t help that this game is lacking the ability to turn off attack animations or “would you like to switch your Pokémon” prompt, unlike previous entries. But anyone who has ever loved a low budget PS2 game like it was family knows that sometimes you don’t just love the game barring the jank, you roll with the jank.
When Nintendo announced this game would have no level scaling, fans took it as something worth controversy, but I saw opportunity. I inject difficult scenarios into these games more every time I replay them: just earlier this year, I did a Pokémon Yellow playthrough where I did the second half of the gyms backwards to fight the hardest ones early. I was ready to be my own dungeon master once again, and I kept my rules simple: no using items from my bag during battle, rely only on held items only, and no use of the new gimmick. I’ll be honest, it didn’t start out all great: I went through the first 2 gyms overleveled from all the catching I was doing, so I had to break out the heavy artillery. I started using 2 teams instead of one, so one could ferment in my box and be underleveled for any challenges I needed. The third gym I fought was the first serious challenge the game had thrown at me; its leader uses the game's gimmick to create a Pokémon with no weaknesses, and it was pretty tight with my team of trashy level twenties. This game has eighteen badges split across its three storylines, and I had challenged one of the Titans already - a boss fight against a giant solo Pokémon. I realized my team was perfectly fit to disable them with ease, having lots of attack and special attack dropping moves, so a thought came to my mind…what if I beat them all right now?
And well, I did it! My entire team was dead besides my Dachsbun, who managed to deal the killing blow to this level 56 Titan. Every titan gives you a new mode of overworld control, and so I had beaten the Metroidvania out of Scarlet to make the rest of my story progress breezy. It definitely felt like the biggest achievement I ever made in this game. Every Team Star boss fight except one took me multiple tries as well, they use special boss Pokémon designed around inflicting specific status effects on you. But I’ll admit, I felt like I would never have a Gym fight harder than that electric gym for the rest of the game after that. I just kept getting to them later than the game expected me to! Worst of all, my best ally had turned against me; the sandwiches I made gave all my Pokémon magic Power of Friendship dodges during story fights.
All things considered, I think this first run I did had decent success, but the amount of times I got to a gym overleveled only to be underwhelmed was a bit frustrating; there’s no indication of a badge’s challenge until you start the fight. Weirdo RPG difficulty obsessives definitely have a lot to chew on here, though - I can only imagine a more thoroughly planned run would be able to turn this game inside out. Especially with how none of the basic overworld trainers are mandatory fights, this game is basically a challenge runner’s dream: a Pokémon boss rush game where you can challenge level 40 bosses with level 10s without large amounts of prep.
The most interesting thing about Scarlet and Violet’s approach to open world is how fermented it feels. Only a few traces exist here of the tried-and-trash Ubisoft tower design, and this certainly isn’t Grand Theft Auto: Like a Dragon - the reality is that this game is basically an 8th Gen AAA NES RPG. Dying ligaments of game design ripped out of Miyamoto’s attic seem to cake both this game’s biggest strengths and flaws. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are the 2nd best Dragon Quest 1 remake, and they are a D&D session with all of your gay friends. While I see a lot of its core game design as inelegant, this game is all I could ask for when it comes to naturally conducting spontaneous storytelling. Pretty fun ostensible corporate trash to recommend your friends with eighteen asterisks.
And at this point, it’s fair to say that Pokémon’s natural social subtleties are proven to be more than theory or novelty. The iconic 90s Pokémon boom pushed the series so far into the collective consciousness that it made people fear it was a cult - and they were probably right. Those catholics laid in bed in a cold sweat despite the pistols in their wardrobes, because they knew that Zubat was an entity that could not be killed in as simple ways as bullet murder. The uniqueness of every person’s playthrough would prove to lend itself perfectly to internet content; nuzlockes and all their siblings spawning an endless stream of noise forever. Twitch Plays Pokémon proved to us that democracy is not real, only for Pokémon Go to prove that world peace might still be possible regardless. So when I tell you all of this, you have to believe me that 4 player co-op is the most natural evolution to the series since Scizor.
Scarlet and Violet arrives as the first games in the series with cooperative multiplayer, and well, I think they nailed it! Mind you it’s not true co-op in the sense you battle against enemies together, but more MMO-esque in that you all simultaneously exist together while the story goes by. I recall the first few hours of the game; me and 3 friends immediately came together to make absolutely no story progress, and just spelunk around looking for some of the new weirdos this game added. Pokémon’s social nature has always linked me up with people to have casual conversations suddenly interrupted by a “DUDE IS THAT PHANPY”, but this time, we were all screaming. Stumbling onto cool Pokémon spots feels particularly special when I’m bugging my friends to follow me so we can catch that Flamingo Pokémon.
One story that stuck out to me the most is one much further in. I bugged my friend to check out this giant cave I found, and they say they’ll search for the new rock Pokémon Glimmet in it before logging off. We spend like, literally an hour running around, trying to find this thing, and we just can’t. I came up with this plan on the spot: dude…what if we just make a bunch of sandwiches until one of them gives us a rock encounter buff. And I scroll through the unchanged 2000s interfacing of Serebii, and find out that the combination of bacon, watercress, mustard, jalapeno, and egg might do the trick. This game forced my hand into making bizarro sandwiches, and I obliged faithfully; not too long after succeeding, we found a little crevice in the corner of the cave where a bunch of them spawned. It’s kinda silly, but that moment felt special - Pokémon Scarlet had forced my hand to try strange tricks to find an equally strange obscure new Pokémon in its corners. Simulacrum of Pikablu-flavoured playground rumours waft through this game endlessly, and unraveling even the most incidental of secrets feels like a revelation. At this moment I had to equate Scarlet and Violet to a dungeon master, casually weaving scenarios for my friends to lightly problem solve together. But of course, in a game as big as this, superficiality isn’t absent.
So here we enter the “oh god oh fuck they messed up” section of this: this game launched like it needed at least another year of polish. I continuously thought while playing “how do i even like…talk about this game”. Rather than outrage or laughter, I’m in this middle of the road perspective where all I’m thinking is…I hope the people who developed this game are okay, it looks like a crunch nightmare. Seeing a composer of all people apologize publicly for a music related glitch broke my heart. I just tried to ask myself as honestly as I could: how much does this game’s launch state actually affect my enjoyment? And the answer is like, yeah, it hurts the game a lot. Where it hits the game the hardest is its pacing - you can really feel how vestigial Pokémon is of 80s game design. As my game sputtered and paused in battles, I really felt the slowness of the game reporting the weather, every individual stat’s increase, every little attack in a multi-hit move, and so on. It didn’t help that this game is lacking the ability to turn off attack animations or “would you like to switch your Pokémon” prompt, unlike previous entries. But anyone who has ever loved a low budget PS2 game like it was family knows that sometimes you don’t just love the game barring the jank, you roll with the jank.
When Nintendo announced this game would have no level scaling, fans took it as something worth controversy, but I saw opportunity. I inject difficult scenarios into these games more every time I replay them: just earlier this year, I did a Pokémon Yellow playthrough where I did the second half of the gyms backwards to fight the hardest ones early. I was ready to be my own dungeon master once again, and I kept my rules simple: no using items from my bag during battle, rely only on held items only, and no use of the new gimmick. I’ll be honest, it didn’t start out all great: I went through the first 2 gyms overleveled from all the catching I was doing, so I had to break out the heavy artillery. I started using 2 teams instead of one, so one could ferment in my box and be underleveled for any challenges I needed. The third gym I fought was the first serious challenge the game had thrown at me; its leader uses the game's gimmick to create a Pokémon with no weaknesses, and it was pretty tight with my team of trashy level twenties. This game has eighteen badges split across its three storylines, and I had challenged one of the Titans already - a boss fight against a giant solo Pokémon. I realized my team was perfectly fit to disable them with ease, having lots of attack and special attack dropping moves, so a thought came to my mind…what if I beat them all right now?
And well, I did it! My entire team was dead besides my Dachsbun, who managed to deal the killing blow to this level 56 Titan. Every titan gives you a new mode of overworld control, and so I had beaten the Metroidvania out of Scarlet to make the rest of my story progress breezy. It definitely felt like the biggest achievement I ever made in this game. Every Team Star boss fight except one took me multiple tries as well, they use special boss Pokémon designed around inflicting specific status effects on you. But I’ll admit, I felt like I would never have a Gym fight harder than that electric gym for the rest of the game after that. I just kept getting to them later than the game expected me to! Worst of all, my best ally had turned against me; the sandwiches I made gave all my Pokémon magic Power of Friendship dodges during story fights.
All things considered, I think this first run I did had decent success, but the amount of times I got to a gym overleveled only to be underwhelmed was a bit frustrating; there’s no indication of a badge’s challenge until you start the fight. Weirdo RPG difficulty obsessives definitely have a lot to chew on here, though - I can only imagine a more thoroughly planned run would be able to turn this game inside out. Especially with how none of the basic overworld trainers are mandatory fights, this game is basically a challenge runner’s dream: a Pokémon boss rush game where you can challenge level 40 bosses with level 10s without large amounts of prep.
The most interesting thing about Scarlet and Violet’s approach to open world is how fermented it feels. Only a few traces exist here of the tried-and-trash Ubisoft tower design, and this certainly isn’t Grand Theft Auto: Like a Dragon - the reality is that this game is basically an 8th Gen AAA NES RPG. Dying ligaments of game design ripped out of Miyamoto’s attic seem to cake both this game’s biggest strengths and flaws. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are the 2nd best Dragon Quest 1 remake, and they are a D&D session with all of your gay friends. While I see a lot of its core game design as inelegant, this game is all I could ask for when it comes to naturally conducting spontaneous storytelling. Pretty fun ostensible corporate trash to recommend your friends with eighteen asterisks.