I am insanely impressed, Game Freak have seemingly done the impossible; as after playing this game I somehow look back at Sword and Shield realising that actually, YES, it CAN get worse than this.

Scarlet and Violet are probably the worst Mainline Pokemon games ever made, and that is a tremendous shame. The Paldea region is the most bland uninspired location for a game I’ve ever seen; I hope you enjoy walking through generic drab endless fields of quite literally nothing. The towns are a complete joke, no interesting landmarks, no unique architecture, nothing. There are about 2 interiors in this game and they are all pointless empty rooms with nothing of note. Towns are simply full of the same copy-paste shops that are in every single town over and over. There is no level design in this game at all, there are just planes of dirt and grass with the occasional pokemon centre that you walk around, even the trainers are just placed about seemingly at random and don’t even do anything unless you go out of your way to interact with them.

The only thing resembling a signature or standout feature of this region is its obsession with making sandwiches. Every town, 50 sandwich shops that sell worthless powerups that you can make at any time anywhere for cheaper. And the design of the sandwich-making is just asinine. Not only is the mini-game laborious and boring, but the entire mechanic is also broken. Its either entirely useless OR incredibly overpowered. The benefits are so specific that in usual gameplay, they don't help you, but if you’re trying to do one specific task, i.e catching/grinding a certain pokemon they are just overpowered as all hell. And the fact they're overpowered takes away any charm this had as you constantly just make the most disgusting-looking sandwiches with the needed ingredients over and over and over, I sure hope MC loves eating a pickle and cucumber sandwiches overloaded with onions on loop.

The story is alright, as much as I would expect from a Pokemon game. The characters are endearing enough and I particularly liked the Titan questline, a simple but effective plotline that had me engaged. It's pretty cool fighting the Titans, but I found it a bit dumb that you basically fight the same boss twice in a row. Fighting the powered-up form would've been just fine if you ask me but whatever it's not that bad. The Team star plotline isn't as great, you basically just have to watch the same cutscene 5 times as each and everyone cries about how they were BULLIED, keyword that they made sure to repeat 100 times in every line of dialogue for some reason and the gameplay loop for these are probably the worst, raiding the bases is just the most boring thing ever, I struggle to imagine how anybody thought this would be a good idea, you just walk around spamming R until its over, its painfully easy but thank god, because I cant imagine how frustrating it would be having to actually put effort into this crap. The final and main storyline, Victory Road, also has an embarrassingly bad gameplay loop. The gym challenges are pathetic, the best example I can give is the Fighting gym which makes you do a “”””rhythm game””””” mini-game, but it's a complete joke, it goes so agonizingly slowly you would have to TRY to hit the wrong button, and as a matter of fact, YOU CAN; nothing happens when you hit the wrong button, so you can just sit and spam buttons until its over, it sucks. And all the other gym challenges are just as bland and stupid.

The gameplay is practically unchanged from every other Pokemon game, status effects and battle text are still painfully slow but the solid foundation of it being “Pokemon” makes the battle mechanics as good as theyve ever been just with no real improvements. But that's not to say you’ll actually be able to engage with the mechanics properly as the difficulty of this game is totally out of wack, for the first half of the game I was tackling foes 20 levels above me, and for the latter half I was fighting enemies 20 levels below. But I honestly didn't mind the first half, the little bit of extra challenge was a welcome addition and forced me to actually plan things out a bit more, but that downward slope to the end was monotonous and boring, simply walk over to a gym, one tap every single one of their pokemon as they shout about how powerful they are. One thing I must credit this game for is how in the post-game its clearly made an attempt to make competitive team building much more viable and easier to access, it feels like an actual tangible goal for any player now rather than something you have to poor 100s if not 1,000s of hours into, the streamlining of mechanics and ease of access to competitive items is nice and I'm also a fan of the fact that you can actually transform a pre-existing pokemon into a fully viable comp champ, making it possible to alter IVs and EVs, obtain egg moves and grant hidden abilities to pre-existing Pokemon. I never understood the design of forcing you to ditch Pokemon you've come attached to and forcing players to breed on mass to obtain some slavemon to destroy competitors with, and while it's “easier” to obtain these primed-up Pokemon, it still takes a lot of work.

But HOW? Well, the “newly” introduced Tera Raids. I say newly in quotations as it's more or less a copy-paste of Dynamax raids from Sword and Shield but this time a lot more bulked up with much greater rewards. These Raids are what the game becomes once you complete the campaign, they serve every purpose. Want money? Do raids. Want IVs? Do Raids. Want EXP? Do raids. Want a fun game? Do r- actually, maybe look somewhere else. Once you've done one 6-star raid you’ve done them all. Spam the same attack until you win, and you either win in 2 hits or slowly and painfully have to wait 4 minutes praying to god your teammates don't die over and over making the whole thing a waste of time. They are boring, but I suppose its nice to have something to endless dump time into to help work towards that perfect team, it just would’ve been good to actually have more than just one option, if raids were one big side mode accompanying many others, doing the odd raid now and then wouldn't be so bad, but its quite literally the only thing you can do.

But, after hours and hours of grinding you’ve finally made that perfect team, and what is there to do with it? Well. Nothing. There is 0 inbuilt post-game. You can rematch (Insta Kill) all the gyms again, but that's about it. No battle frontier equivalent or anything at all worth waiting for. The only thing worth doing is exploring the map (Which is a barren wasteland) to catch all the Pokemon. It is true that the design of Pokemon leads to the post-game being the real-world interactions, the trading the battling, but that framework was made and designed in 1996, this is the 9th generation of the franchise, if you want to lean on that design philosophy that worked so well back then, expand upon it: Add more online player interactions, ranked matches, tournaments, trade economy, anything. But no, the game ends, and that's it, go make your own fun, or better yet, wait awhile and pay some more money for some half-baked DLC campaign coming later down the line presumably.

Hopefully, this far in you can see why I am so disappointed in this game, but funnily enough, I am yet to get to the worst part of the game! The optimization. I am sure you’ve already heard the horror stories, and I had to, and I struggled to believe it, but no, it is amazingly terrible. The game chugs at below 20 fps practically 247. Visual bugs are everywhere and even when they aren't bugged the game looks atrocious, they clearly cut a few million or so corners to TRY and make this game run better, but what we end up with is a game that looks like crap, yet still runs like crap. The models of everything switch to be lower poly if you’re so much as 1ft away from them, if anything is ever meant to be an actual sphere 99% of the time it's just a rigid blocky mess. It was a cool feature to be able to jump straight into a battle with a pokemon anywhere in the world but to compensate for this, the Pokemon you are literally stood in front of battling will often switch to its lower poly version, and the camera often has no clue what to do in these scenarios. And then as the battle ends if you choose to catch the Pokemon, the Pokeball lands on the ground as the camera zooms in to demonstrate to you how embarrassingly low resolution all the textures are in the game. The method of lowering the framerate of animations is dialed up to a ridiculous degree, and the pop-in is just on another level. I’ve already gone on enough, so I’ll just say that, imagine literally any issue you can imagine regarding to optimization and I can guarantee you this game has it in droves. The game CRASHED on me 4 times when I was just walking around for crying out loud. It's embarrassing.

The crux of this game's issues are that is has no STYLE, no IDENTITY. It's simply another product Game Freak has shat out with the copypaste Pokemon mechanics we all love. Yes, walking around a terribly designed world with no artistic value and bumping into Pokemon can be fun, but no that does not make the game good. It does the BARE MINIMUM a Pokemon game can do, which is having Pokemon to battle and catch, and the gimmick of it being “Open world” seems to be mindblowing to people, its practically identical to the audience reactions to Sonic Frontiers. Once again I’m left struggling to see how they could ever make a Pokemon game any worse, but as I learned last generation; never say never.

When people say that a game is completely broken or unplayable, I usually take it with a huge grain of salt. It's not as if I'm blind to the problems or in denial about them, but that I tend to have a higher tolerance for these issues than most, especially if the game underneath it is great. When I saw Jedi Survivor being panned, I decided to hedge my bets and play it anyways, as I saw promise in the first game that it couldn't quite fulfill and I was itching to see it if they had made good on it. And I was fairly impressed with what I played! It seems as though they cleaned up a reasonable amount of the first game's jank and that everything comes together much more nicely. I love the story and writing, all the visual customization, the more open levels, and it generally feels like a better execution of the concept so far.

Unfortunately the technical state of this game is simply unforgivable at the time of posting. I'm shocked that console is supposed to be the more tolerable option here, because I experienced the full gamut of problems on PS5, from unplayable sickness-inducing framerate fluctuations to outright crashes at random points. I swapped between performance and resolution modes, looking for something that might alleviate things, and both had unacceptable amounts of issues. I dunno if I just got unlucky or what, but past a point I got completely exhausted of it. I may suck it up and continue the game, but more than likely I'll set it down and wait a couple months til its in a better state (and I would ultimately advise most people to do the same).