Pokémon Scarlet and Violet

(available for Nintendo Switch only)

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is now the ninth generation of Pokémon and has come out less than a year after the real change of pace that Pokémon Legends Arceus brought to the formula. I thought Legends Arceus was a good idea for a future spinoff series, but I wasn’t entirely on board with it. For one thing, I missed the PvP aspects of the trainer battles, but I felt that it was an excellent space to build on!

Pokémon’s 9th generation offers something that hasn’t been brought up until now: an entirely interconnected open world, where you can go anywhere and do anything.

For the purposes of this review, I played Pokémon Scarlet and picked Sprigatito as my starter. I haven’t done any other playthroughs, though I do own a copy of Violet, where I intend to start a challenge playthrough in Springtime once Pokémon Bank support is provided.

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet have come with some controversy following the release, which was very apparent when the Metacritic score came out. I will be addressing the complaints in this review, however, I feel that I should say how this game differs first.

You will be setting off from your hometown after picking one of the three starter Pokémon. You enrol in a special private school which has an event known as the ‘Treasure Hunt’ (don’t worry, there’s not much to this, it’s just an excuse for the game to set you off on your journey). The game then sends you off on one of three storylines, which you can do in any order. There’s the usual job where you battle all 8 gym leaders to challenge the Pokémon league, but there are also two more that have been added. You fight the enemy Team Star (a group of school delinquents) and you’re tasked with defeating them by a mysterious voice on the phone who remains unidentified for most of the game despite it being incredibly obvious, as well as taking on the Titan Pokémon- which does resemble something similar to some of the gameplay we got in Legends Arceus. If you liked that gameplay, this is the closest you’ll get to it.

Where the storylines go for two of these is certainly interesting, it feels like a lot of effort has gone into them. You can, of course, tackle them in whichever order you like- most people are going for the Titan Pokémon storyline first, which you might want to do because of how it helps you out with the open world. The Titan Pokémon each reward you with the ability to have the legendary Pokémon (that you ride in the game, in my case it was the dragon Koraidon)  go in the water, climb hills, run faster, jump higher, etc. Each of the challenges represents each type of Pokémon, so if there’s not a gym leader with that type, be assured that one of the enemies has that type.

That’s the basic grasp of the game, and while it does offer a bunch of new ideas, if you’ve been very familiar with Pokémon over the years, this one isn’t that much different.

PROS

• Open World Gameplay

The open world in this game is actually really good! The only complaint I have with it is that it doesn’t add a suggested level to each of the challenges. For example, the game encourages you early on to head east, with the map markers highlighting where the first gym challenge, Titan Pokémon, and Team Star base is. I felt that I had to take on each challenge in a specific order- but the Team Star challenge is of a much higher level than the gym battle. When I decided to go west for a brief period, I suddenly found that the area was much lower levelled and I was able to take on the area easily because I was way over levelled, including the first gym leader. If you don’t want to be over or under levelled, you might want to look up a guide for what order to do each gym and base. As for the Titan Pokémon, they don’t provide much of a challenge- there’s only one that I failed and came back to later. That part isn’t that challenging but it’s very worth doing.

This is seriously one of my favourite regions to explore, they did a great job of giving the region a personality! I really enjoyed the fact that the game’s day and night cycle wasn’t tied to the in-built clock on the Switch, it goes through its own in-game cycle, which helps you catch certain Pokémon at night and allowed me to catch an Umbreon.

The only complaint I have about the open world is that I don’t feel like the towns had as much personality as I would like. There are some good ones in here, don’t get me wrong., but I kind of felt that more effort was put into the towns in Sword and Shield. I certainly remember quite a few of them, particularly the icy town at the top of the hills, that’s become one of my favourite places in any Pokémon game!

I think my favourite part of the game was the gym leaders. They did a great job creating unique personalities for all of these gym leaders, my favourite probably being the Electric gym leader who is basically a Twitch streamer.

The ‘go anywhere attitude actually works pretty well. I do wish that they level scaled a little bit if they weren’t going to provide recommended levels for each area. The game does a pretty good job of making you realise what areas you shouldn’t be in but it’s not impossible to catch Pokémon that are of a much higher level. I managed to catch a really good Dragonair that was about 15 levels ahead of my strongest Pokémon at the time! Believe me, that came in handy much later!

The environments seamlessly blend into one another. It doesn’t seem like a sudden shift between each of the environments- though obviously, there are other aspects of the game which aren’t so seamless, which I’ll be discussing later.

• Selection of Pokémon

The selection of Pokémon is actually really good in this game. It’s a decent blend of previous generations as well as new Pokémon. I didn’t take too many Pokémon from this generation, though I did catch a few of them. One of my earlier favourites was Flamigo, a flying and fighting type Pokémon. I kind of stuck to what I knew so I could better navigate the world. I was trying to experiment with the new Tera-type mechanic, which you’ll get some of these through the new Tera raid battles, which are significantly improved. You can spot a bunch of them in the wild, you just have to look out for the very obvious glowing Pokémon. One of the ones I managed to find early was a Jigglypuff that can turn into a Water type which appeared in the trailer.

Because this was such a different game, I tried to stick with what I knew for my first playthrough, so I got myself a Raichu as well as all 8 of the Eeveelutions- which was made a lot easier because of the event that was held during the making of this review. That being said, the designs for this generation are some of the best they’ve had in recent memory. I really think there’s been some real thought put into them. My only complaint is that they still don’t have a National Dex at launch, which I wish was there considering it’s basically already in Sword and Shield, but I understand it will come with future DLC or an update. I think that there are too many Bug and generally small Pokémon in the game. If you’re trying to avoid Pokémon battles, it’s very easy to bump into them.

• Tera Types

This is a new mechanic introduced for these games. It’s essentially turning your Pokémon into crystallised versions of themselves, which in turn will impact the power of the types that are connected with the Tera type. It’s usually the type that the Pokémon already has- for example, if you have a Jolteon, the Tera type is usually Electric. However, if you do some of the Tera raid battles of catch one in the wild, you can get Pokémon that are different to their usual types! I took part in the Eevee raid event that was going on, and as a result, I had a Jolteon that could become a Ground-type Pokémon. The downside is that you can’t teach the Pokémon any moves of that type, but you will eventually get access to a move called Tera Blast which automatically becomes that type of move when the Pokémon is Terastilised.

Another downside is that you have to craft the T.M. to make it, and T.Ms are still one-use in this game, which is annoying.

I think that this new mechanic is great! It really benefits the game greatly for online play and will be particularly fun to see competitively. It really comes in handy if you have Dragon or Ghost-type Pokémon, since now you can take advantage of the fact that Dragon and Ghost type moves without having the weakness. I did this with my Electric-type Dragonair on a few occasions.

• The Lets Go Feature

This is a small thing but you can send out Pokémon to do auto battles in an area and greatly improves grinding. It saves a lot of time with battling. Bring this feature back and put it in the next Legends game!

MIXED

• Visuals

Okay, this game does not look amazing- but I don’t think it looks as bad as some people have made it out to be. The world and character designs have an interesting look to them, but it’s not pushing the Switch in many ways. That being said, it’s difficult to do a brilliant-looking Pokémon game because the art style can restrict what you can do. I know people will point to the game Pokémon Snap, but that game has loads of scripted events. You now have an open world with multiple things going on simultaneously, and so I think given all of the circumstances, that the visuals look fine. I’ll be interested to see where the team takes this on future hardware considering this will definitely be the last mainline Pokémon game on the current Switch model.

• Multiplayer

I didn’t do too much multiplayer, but I did manage to get a few examples of it. I did try the online multiplayer, though some of it was restricted. Ranked battles weren’t in the game at the time of review, so I couldn’t face anyone I would usually casually battle without them being ranked to my level. Hopefully ranked battles come in soon because I lost pretty much every fight I did online. I only currently have 3 victories to my name and I would have appreciated it if there was a ranking system for pairings.

I didn’t get a chance to try the online co-op, though I have heard that it does affect the framerate even further. I played with a couple of my friends using the wireless connection between Switches, and while there was a lag in between them for raid battles (something that I also noticed in online multiplayer) it actually functioned really well! The framerate actually wasn’t affected any worse from what we could tell playing in the overworld compared to playing single-player. Obviously, it still had some performance issues but they weren’t made worse by multiplayer.

As for the actual content of the multiplayer, you can’t do much other than play in the same area and link up for raid battles. But as a whole, I thought that it was really good fun. I just wish that there was a little more to it. Hopefully, the upcoming DLC will find some more use for this function.

• Camping

This feature returns from the previous game, but this time it’s called Picnics, where you make sandwiches instead of Curries. I have heard people say they preferred the curry minigame, but I personally prefer this one for many reasons. For one, I think the sandwich minigame is a little easier and provides more rewards and it rewards experimentation a little bit better. I thought it was better that in order to get the best features out of it that you don’t have to play it in multiplayer. I certainly don’t think it was much better than the curry game in many other ways, particularly the fact that it did feel like there wasn’t too much challenge, especially when you’re making one of the preselected recipes.

I did however prefer the interactions with your Pokémon whilst having the picnic, most notably the washing and playing with the ball.

CONS

• Performance

There’s no easy way to say it, the performance in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is not good. The framerate fluctuates quite a bit, especially in large towns, and the popping is horrendous (way worse than even Sonic Frontiers). That being said, once I got used to it, the framerate didn’t bother me too much. If you’re good at counting framerates and you don’t notice it as much as some people do online, it might not bother you as much. That being said, I don’t think that the game has been released in a great state and it definitely needs to be patched down the line, which I suspect will happen in January- but don’t quote me on that one if we go through January with no patch, I’m just basing that on what others who have more knowledge in the field have said as well as the timing of Sword and Shield’s patches.

There are a lot of glitches that have made the rounds online, but I personally didn’t get anything that bad, and my game only crashed a couple of times, the most persistent was when I was using a certain team for online battles. For some reason, it didn’t like me taking that combination of 6 battles onto an online game. For the most part, none of the glitches that made the rounds online appeared in my game. A lot of these clips swerve taken out of context in terms of what model of Switch was being used, how they were playing the game, and whether the Switch was docked or handheld.

For the record, I found that the framerate issues were much more prevalent when playing docked on television, I found that playing handheld was better, but I’ve heard people having opposite issues to myself.

The bottom line, the state of the game isn’t good. I still find it annoying that people are saying this is the next Cyberpunk 2077 when the game is nowhere near as broken as that one was at release.

• Lack of Customisation and Outfits

Don’t get me wrong, the customisation options for your character in terms of hairstyle, eyes, and every other feature is great. But in terms of the outfit, you must wear one of 4 school uniforms throughout the entire game. I know this is designed around the theme of going to school and being part of this prestigious academy, but man is it annoying! I just wish there were more options. I would have preferred that if for school assignments we wear uniforms but when we go into the real world we can wear whatever we wanted. I really hope that this is fixed with the DLC.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet do most of what I’ve wanted a Pokémon game to do for the longest time. The open world is great and I had a ton of fun, the selection of Pokémon is excellent, and while the visuals aren’t great, I don’t find them as terrible as some other people do and I think that it has its own charm. The performance issues hold this game back significantly and stop me from putting it in the upper echelon of scores.

I did enjoy the game’s content more than Sword and Shield, but that game performed better. If there’s one thing I think that this one performed compared to the previous games, it’s the post-game content. It’s not incredibly good, but it is improved.

This isn’t like the other ‘broken’ games in recent memory that had loads of glitches and performance issues. Most of the Twitter conversations that I found stopped talking about the performance issues after a certain point and started to concentrate on just having fun with the game, which I had a ton of fun playing it also. When you get down to it, the performance issues in other games are covering up bad to middle games, but in this game, once the performance issues get sorted, we have a real winner on our hands.

If you can’t wait to play it, you absolutely should- you can have fun with this game despite the performance issues. If you can wait, maybe wait until February to play it. The only reason I say that is because I believe at that point we’ll have a Pokémon Direct that tells us about patches and DLC.

In relation to the score I’m going to give, while this was an improvement on Sword and Shield, I think that the performance issues held it back. So because of that, I decided to give it the exact same score I would have given base Sword and Shield.

Final Score: 8.5/10

Next up is Reece’s Review

My experience with Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is that I have finished everything in my copy of Violet with the exception of finishing the Pokédex as the final side quest.

I played through the game on my Switch OLED using a combination of both docked and handheld mode to test the game and it’s performance across both modes. Pokémon Scarlet & Violet are the latest games in the Pokémon franchise with this new entry being classed as Generation 9 and the total amount of Pokémon now going over the 1,000 mark with 400 Pokémon of which to catch in this region’s Pokédex. The core of the story remains the same to pass games where you play as a customisable protagonist and set out into the new Spanish themed region of Paldea as you tackle each of the 3 new storylines and try your best to catch them all.

Pro:

Story.

Scarlet & Violet features the best story in any Pokémon game to date. While the school setting can be skipped during the entire game it is worth it to go back to and take part in the storylines there, since each of the classes features a Persona style social link with a member of staff on each course. Then after you finish your final exams and max out your relationship with the member of staff you hear more about their backstory and their relationship with the region, and you are also given a reward that makes it all worthwhile if the player glossed over the story.

During the course of the story the player is tasked with completing each of the 3 separate storylines with Victory Road, Path of Legends or Starfall Street. The player is free to tackles these stories in any order but all 3 must be completed for the ending of the story to take place.

I would recommend the Path of Legends to start with, since you unlock new abilities for your rise legendary that help makes map traversal faster and much easier. It also features my favourite storyline in the game with Arven and for the first time in a Pokémon game I got emotionally invested in the plot of this storyline and wanted to see it resolve.

This game features my favourite plot out of any Pokémon game and the final section of the game does a fantastic job in tying together of the lingering plot threads that are spread across the storylines. So it feels very rewarding to have a great payoff and it all culminates in one of my favourite final bosses in Pokémon that is accompanied by the best song in the soundtrack.

Characters.

This game has some of my favourite characters in the franchise now, with each character having much more depth than in previous games with longer storylines. This game features my favourite rival with Nemona, she easily outclasses any of the newer rivals since N from Black & White in generation 5. As not only does she have a friendly personality like the newer rivals but she isn’t annoying and dragging down the story with constant fights with bad teams.

The character design is also some of the best in the franchise with all the prominent characters in the game all having memorable designs to complement their roles in the story.

The characters range from more typical designs with the Normal type Gym Leader and Ground type Elite 4 member all the way up to the more bizarre and flamboyant outfits of the villain Team Star in this game that looks like they were all inspired by 80’s Glam Rock bands or Metal bands. This leads to the characters staying in the players minds long after the story is do e, and since you can rematch the Team Star bosses and Gym Leaders in the postgame it is great to revisit them and their inventive character designs.

Exploration.

For the first time in the franchise history, the region of Paldea is completely open world with the only loading screen being into certain buildings or leaving the main gates at the hub city of Mesagoza.

Due to the game being non linear in its new design allowing the player to go to any place on the map at any time it leads to a completely different journey for each new player, as each boss can be challenged in any order. Along the way by following the Path of Legend storyline will see the players box art legendary get more traversal options being seen as a merger of all the ride Pokémon from Legends Arceus merged into one Pokémon without having to swap them all the time.

Players can use these new abilities to reach secret locations to find rare Pokémon or rare items in real time, as there are no caves locked behind loading screens so if a player can see a location then 9/10 times they can reach said location by using their ride Pokémon.

This new freedom is used to its best effect in a new sidequest that persists throughout the story where players locate mysterious chained stakes driven into the ground across the map. Then without spoilers I would recommend players seeking out as many of these stakes as the reward is definitely worth it.

New game mechanic.

The Terastal phenomenon is the new mechanic introduced in this game, it sees a Pokémon becoming Terastallized through the use of the new Tera system. This is easily my new favourite gameplay mechanic introduced since Mega Evolution back in Generation 6, as it breathed new life into the competitive scene and made a lot of older and weaker Pokémon suddenly more viable which is always great.

Since the original games a Pokémon has always had a certain typing for it e.g. Pikachu being an Electric type Pokémon, this system dictated what enemy moves would deal either zero damage, half damage, normal damage or double damage to a Pokémon.

The only way these weaknesses for a Pokémon could of been subverted was with abilities or certain items. Since Electric types are only weak to Ground type attacks then if the Electric Pokémon had the ability “Levitate” then it would become immune to Ground type attacks eliminating that types sole weakness e.g. Eelektross. So now a Pikachu could have a Tera type of Flying, and then lose its Electric type and instead have the strengths and weaknesses of the Flying type. So it would lose a weakness of Ground instead turning it into an immunity but instead take double damage ironically from other Electric type attacks.

Now online battles are so much more strategic since any enemy Pokémon could potentially turn into any other type and said type would be completely unknown to the user as any Pokémon can have any other Tera type.

The mechanic is balanced in a fair way as only 1 Pokémon can terastallize per battle and only once per battle, so if an enemy Pokémon does Tera then you can be safe in the knowledge that no other enemy Pokémon can in that battle.

New Pokémon.

With a regional Pokédex of 400 I was apprehensive about the amount of new Pokémon for the region, since past games have been introducing less new Pokémon per region and recycling the past ones to speed up development of the games.

This fear was laid to rest since Scarlet & Violet introduced over 100 new Pokémon in this generation alone, and while some are more filler (See the Pawmi line that could of been a 2 stage line or the overabundance of birds in the region) for the most part the new designs are solid.

The biggest surprise for me was the new evolutions for returning Pokémon as this game introduced several and I would highly recommend new players try out some of the older Pokémon they see as some will be more rewarding with brand new evolutions. Multiplayer.

New to the series is being able to have 3 other players join your world for real time multiplayer, so now you can go on your journey through the game with 3 friends, and performance also wasn’t restricted in this mode as the game performed the same as when in single player.

Joining another player who was the opposite game version to the version the player has(A player on Violet joins the world of a Scarlet player) allows the player to catch the other version exclusive Pokémon to help complete the Pokédex with the exception of the final legendary that still needs to be traded for.

Story progression isn’t restricted as both players can continue the Gym challenge at the same time as other players but the battles are still single player only, so when playing with friends a player can still make progress and not have to worry about doing nothing while in multiplayer.

Music.

While the music isn’t as strong as it was with Sword & Shield it is still a fantastic soundtrack that suits the game well.

One glitch I encountered during my playthrough that was fixed in the first patch was an issue the game had with the looping of the music during an endgame boss fight, but that was resolved and now all the music in the game plays correctly and is very enjoyable and suits each situation on the 3 story paths superbly.

Con:

Performance.

The biggest issue I had with the game is just how poorly it performs on the Switch.

The game is supposed to run at 30fps but more often then not with the slowdown the game barely chugs at 20fps and above, and I have had instances where the game runs even lower and this mostly happened in the cities around the map even though most of the buildings cannot be entered so the buildings are just hollow textures.

Due to the low performance of the game it leads to massive amounts of pop-in while you’re in the field with Pokémon sometimes performing jumpscares on the player due to the randomly popping in right in front of the player while riding and cannot be avoided. Even with the latest patch (At the time of writing) that GameFreak released in some case the game performs worse in certain environments with more dropped frames.

This is a classic example of a game being rushed out to meet a deadline as even Legends Arceus released earlier in the year did not have these issues at launch both performance and graphical wise. The new open world mechanic is also not an excuse for this titles or is the specs of the Nintendo Switch itself, because the Switch has seen the release of other fantastic open world games such as Breath of the Wild, Skyrim, The Witcher 3 and my personal favourite of the bunch Xenoblade Chronicles 3. All of these titles perform much better than Scarlet &Violet with open worlds with much higher fidelity and with a higher frame rate with most hitting a near constant 30fps or above.

Another example of this is with the NPC character models in that their animation cycle is way too short and reduced to 5fps when more than 1 meter away from the player leading to very choppy animation cycles that look like they are in slow motion. This is most noticeable in a large scale when the player is in their classroom for the first time and all the non talking NPC all have these horrendously bad animation cycles that take the player right out of the experience since it’s so noticeable.

Glitches.

This is without a doubt the most glitch ridden and buggy a Pokémon game has released in the franchise.

Apart from the minor glitches that do not impact the gameplay much, with the near frequent camera clipping issues as the camera is not restricted to the terrain and will often go under the terrain and show the void under the terrain with the textures of the environment bleeding through. There are also the animation model glitches that grew like wildfire across the internet within hours of the game releasing, and these stem from character models becoming deformed and stretching to almost horror monster levels or random NPCs walking through the middle of battlefields before randomly disappearing.

The worst of the glitches that happen are when the game completely breaks and require restarting the game, I had these more often that any other Pokémon game and these included falling through the map into the void into the water that is at the bottom of the map. Then there were also the times I had hard crashes where the game closed on its own after an error, and these happened either in Terms raid battles online or occasionally in single player trainer battles.

Graphics.

Aside from the performance of the game the most obvious problem that Scarlet & Violet is the subpar graphics for this game and in a lot of aspects is a downgrade from even Sword & Shield.

The texture work for most of the natural environments (Hills and grassland) and constructed (Cities and buildings) all features low resolution, blurry textures that look similarly or slightly worse than Sword & Shield, but the big standout is how much worse the natural environment look in comparison to Legends Arceus. As we can see the repetitive texture mapping on the sides of cliffs and mountains being a small square texture that was copy and pasted repeatedly making them look hastily made and in a rush compared to Legends Arceus where the texture mapping uses much larger sections so it is harder for the player to see the reused texture mappings.

The shadow work in this game is also much reduced in comparison to both previous games as now a lot of environments do not feature shadows and if they do then they are mismatched and do not match the current day and night cycle with the Sun in the sky.

No level scaling.

Due to this being the first true open world game, the design philosophy was to let the player take on any of the various Gym Leader, Titans or Team Star Bosses in any order they wanted.

Unlike previous games that forced the player upon a more linear path where the player’s levels for their team were kept in mind for the next gym challenge to keep the fights a relative challenge. Scarlet & Violet has now removed that linearity to give the player more freedom, but this freedom is mostly an illusion as the player can take on the higher levelled gyms out of order causing their levels to be much higher than they were intended to be.

I myself did this, as I cleared the entire right side of Paldea first as it had fewer gyms and Team Star bosses on that side. Unfortunately by the time I had finished that entire side my team was way too overlevelled so when I started the left side my team was all in their 40’s and I swept through the first gym I came to which was the Bug gym and the leader has the lowest levelled team in the game and I one shot each of her team.

This is fun in concept to give the player a powertrip but it quickly made the rest of the game dull as I was too overlevelled for anything to pose a challenge, as after the Bug Gym I travelled south to fight the gym there and it was the Psychic Gym. This Gym was supposed to be the 2nd to last the plate takes on level wise but with no knowledge of a set order to give myself I challenge I rolled through her team too.

An easy solution for this would have been to have the Gym leaders team scale with the amount of badges the player has, as this would have avoided the problem of steamrolling through a Gym that was meant to be an early one that the player didn’t visit by mistake due to the lack of guidance.

Easiest Champion.

Geeta was too overly hyped and built up during the main campaign as the game promotes her as the “Top Champion” of the region but she has one of the most poorly constructed teams in the region so much so that other Gym Leaders and Elite 4 members outclass her.

Geeta has a great character design and it was a good change of pace to have her show up a lot in the story to build up her personality and how other people in the region admire her. Unfortunately due to her team composition it lead to the fight being the easiest Champion fight in the series since Lance back in Generation 2 or Alder in Generation 5 and really dampers the mood of the game after all the build up before the final arc of the game.

Her team needs a rework to be more challenging and to be more memorable as without spoilers her team is even ordered incorrectly with her final Pokémon that should really be her lead and another new Pokémon in this game that should of been her ace while having it be shiny to match her outfit. She even uses Pokémon that were used by the Gym Leaders from both this region and Kalos in Generation 6. She only has 2 unique Pokémon to her and that isn’t enough to make her stand out in this region and even on those Pokémon they all have movesets that don’t take advantage of the Pokémon with most of them having type overlap with Fairy and Psychic moves.

If this is the final Pokémon game on Switch then we will have seen 3 Champions with that being Leon (Sword & Shield), Cynthia (Generation 4 remakes) and now Geeta, but her team just does not stack up to the other Champions on this console generation. I hope if there is a DLC or enhanced edition (Generation 7 with Sun to Ultra Sun) down the line that GameFreak will give Geeta a team that is worthy of being used by a Champion like her that isn’t bad and worse forgettable.

Online stability.

The postgame of Scarlet & Violet is mostly made up of 6* and 7* Tera Raids, and while fun for a majority of the time I have had other players constantly disconnect or my turn being skipped for several turns in a row.

The game needs the option to perform Tera Raids with people from your own region rather than everyone everywhere at once, as the majority of disconnects I have is when I (As an EU player) connect with Asian players.

Reduced clothing customisation.

Compared to Sword & Shield and Legends Arceus, the player character cannot be customised as much as it is limited by the fact that the player must wear a school uniform at all times.

Removed quality of life features.

Scarlet & Violet removed a lot of the quality of life updates that Legends Arceus removed that really feel missed in this game. As now players can no longer catch Pokémon without engaging in battle with it, and along side that now the Pokédex has been greatly simplified as it has returned to a basic entry page compared to the older generations. I wish GameFreak kept in the more detailed Pokédex entries that expanded upon completing task with each Pokémon (Catch X number of them or use X move a certain number of times) as that felt more engaging in the gameplay as you study these Pokémon and form closer bonds with them.

Now you are also limited to only evolving your Pokémon when you gain a level instead of the better

system or evolving at any time the condition is met with said Pokémon. As it has reverted to the old system of having to mash the B button to stop the Pokémon evolving if you want to learn a later move at an earlier level.

The biggest quality of life reduction is the removal of the noise and visual effect that plays when a Shiny Pokémon spawns near you. In older games with static encounters you always knew if you found a Shiny due to the on-screen star effect when you started a random battle.

Then when Legends Arceus came out and gameplay moved into an open world with none static encounters a player would hear a jingle and see the star effect in the overworld so it was harder to miss. Whereas now for unknown reasons GameFreak has now taken out both the audio and visual cues that a Shiny Pokémon has spawned. This means that if a player is colour-blind or not looking at that specific Pokémon when it spawns, then they will have missed out on an extremely rare (1/4096) Pokémon for no reason that would have been found in older games.

No battle facility.

For the first time since Generation 1 (Red & Blue) the game lacks a post game battle facility for players to test their teams by facing a certain number of trainers in a row in exchange for points to purchase rare items.

Sword & Shield had one in the post game of the base game with the Battle Tower, and even

introduced another one in the DLC with the Isle of Armour and the variant facility with Master Dojo and it’s form of “Restricted Sparring”. This leads to the post game being very repetitive and a focus on multiplayer with other players for a challenge, so if the player does not have reliable internet access then they will struggle for any sort of post game challenge in single player.

Conclusion:

A good game that is held back by the poor performance of the game itself, as it feels like this game was rushed out of development too early and doesn’t live up to the quality of previous games like Legends Arceus and could of done with another 6 months of development or a larger staff working on the game.

Mechanically this is my favourite Pokémon game released for the mainline games, but it cannot be my favourite game overall until it is patched to remove the performance problems and glitches as other open world games do not have these issues that Scarlet & Violet suffered from.

Score: 7.9

And finally, Elliot’s review

Final Team: Quaquaval, Jolteon, Meowscarada, Pyroar, Gardevoir & Garchomp

As I mentioned in my Pokémon Legends Arceus review, the mainline Pokémon series has fallen into a somewhat tiresome series. While every game since the sixth generation has added something new to try and mix up the formula (with its biggest success being the Max Raid Battles in Sword and Shield) each game still doesn’t feel like it’s changed that significantly, and so like a Disney Princess tired of her current situation, we’ve been wanting something more. So when we learned that Pokémon Scarlet and Violet would be the first ever truly open world game in the series, needless to say me and likely most Pokémon fans got excited and thought that this would be the game that would finally bring this series out of the rut it’s put itself into. The question is, did it succeed?

While the story isn’t exactly at the forefront of a Pokémon game, in Scarlet and Violet they do things a little different. In the game you’re a transfer student at Naranja (Scarlet)/Uva (Violet) Academy where you befriend Nemona, the previous years champion who has a crippling addiction to Pokémon battles, and Arven, son of the highly praised Professor Sada (Scarlet)/Turo (Violet). On the way to the Academy you and Nemona run into a badly injured Pokémon called Koraidon (Scarlet)/Miraidon (Violet) who’s lost its ability to battle and decides to travel alongside you. After a time skip we arrive at an annual event called the Treasure Hunt, where students are encouraged to explore the region and find something they treasure. After this point you’re given free reign to explore the world, to catch Pokémon, aid your friends and find whatever it is that you treasure (which knowing this game will likely be “The friends we made along the way”). While the story is a bit more prominent in this game, it is still mostly in the background and doesn’t really become a factor until the end portion. Though what is there isn’t too bad.

Okay, let’s get this out of the way as I’m certain you’ve already heard the horror stories and seen the clips, this game runs like absolute trash. While I didn’t experience it as bad as other people did, I still found an abundance of frame rate and pop in issues, models move like a slideshow if you’re more than five feet away from them or just disappear into nothingness like they got Thanos snapped and numerous other issues that majorly bring the game down. You could argue that this is a very ambitious game and use the excuse that other Pokémon games haven’t had this much happen on it at once, but Pokémon Legends Arceus came out earlier this year and that runs extremely well, so I can’t see any good reason as to why this game runs as abysmally as it does. As for looks, the game looks fine. I do much prefer how Legends Arceus looks, but I will acknowledge that this game at least looks better than Sword and Shield, overall, it just looks fine. Sadly this game carries the same sin as Sword and Shield does however, and that’s that this game really needed voice acting. There are numerous cutscenes, like in Sword and Shield, where a character will be speaking as if there was voiced dialog, but there just isn’t any. If they’re gonna make those kinds of cutscenes a regular thing then I wish they would just bring in some voice actors to do a few lines, even Zelda did it for god’s sake. Easily the best part of the presentation is the music, just as you’d expect the songs are very upbeat and a lot of fun to listen to, the battle music especially is, for lack of better words, loud and action heavy. 

As said, this is the first true open world Pokémon game. From when the Treasure Hunt starts you’re given free reign to go wherever you want, however… you probably shouldn’t. Unlike with the wild areas in Sword and Shield there’s no level scaling, so every section will have wild Pokémon and Gym Leaders with a set level throughout the entire game. I wouldn’t mind it as much (it would be weird for your first Gym Battle to be against a lvl 14 Dragonite and your final one to be against a lvl 54 Lechonk for example) if they actually told you a minimum level recommendation for that section, but they don’t meaning that – unless you use a guide – you’ll likely be going into battles severely over or under levelled. Having one or the other would be fine, but having neither is just disappointing. 

Just like in Pokémon Legends Arceus  when you enter a Pokémon battle you don’t enter a battle area, you instead go straight into the battle from where you stand. While this is kind of cool, it does also lead to its own number of problems. While scripted battles are fine and work well, battles in the wild have a number of issues. Your biggest enemy in these battles will be the camera, it often feels too close to the action and will sometimes display the battle at an odd angle or just clip into the floor if you’re fighting on a slope. Just like the rest of the game, the frame rate at times tanks, which will of course slow battles to a crawl. In fact battles seem to be slow in general, with battle animations taking their time before damage is dealt and you having to go through the lengthy process of watching another Pokémon’s stats go up or down one stat at a time. As said these don’t occur in scripted battles as they’re set in stable and flat environments, but in the wild be prepared for some frustration. Another option is a bit like what you did in Pokémon Legends Arceus, where you can just throw the Pokéball and your Pokémon will autobattle whatever you point it in the direction of, though you do get less EXP than you would if you just battled normally. While I do like this, I didn’t really use it very often. Directing your Pokémon on who you want it to fight is very frustrating as you need to be facing it to be able to battle it, and the pitiful amount of EXP you got from doing so just wasn’t worth it. 

Another significant change is that wild trainer battles aren’t mandatory, instead you now have to actively talk to them to initiate a battle. I originally thought that I would like this, but now I wish they would just battle you when you walked in front of them. I found myself forgetting that constantly and it just drew me away from wanting to fight them when I could just battle wild Pokémon instead. Therefore the number of trainer battles I fought were significantly less than they would have been otherwise. 

The big new addition to this game is Terastallizing. Terastallizing is this game’s replacement for Dynamaxing, where not only does your Pokémon obtain a new crystalized  body, they can also change types as well. For example a Pikachu’s base Types is Electric, but by Terastallizing it you can make it a Ground or Fighting Type, not only will its strengths and weaknesses be swapped out for its Tera Type’s, it will gain bonus to damage if it uses an attack of that type as well. After using it you have to wait until your next rest at a Pokémon Centre before using it again and you can change a Pokémon’s Tera Type at one of the later points (at least what should be one of the later points anyway) of the game. In my opinion this is one of the best new mechanics that Pokémon has added by far, it really makes you think about what Tera Type you want to go with, whether you want an offensive or defensive advantage or you just wanna be silly with it and make Eevee a Dragon Type or something.

Taking the place of Max Raid Battles from Pokémon Sword and Shield are the Tera Raids Battles. These are accessed by crystals spread throughout the world. In these you and three other trainers (either NPC’s or actual players) take part in a battle against a Terastallized Pokémon. The Tera Type of these Pokémon will not be consistent and likely will not match the Type of the Pokémon you’ll encounter. Just like Max Raid Battles, these Pokémon’s moves will be more powerful and they will have more health. The differences include the fact that you lose by running out of time rather than having a certain number of Pokémon faint by the end. If you beat the Pokémon you can capture it – and it has a 100% catch rate – or you can leave it and can just collect the rewards for taking it down. You can also access Tera Raid Battles from the Poké Portal via the pause menu. There are numerous things I like about these battles, for starters they require more strategy than a Max Raid Battle does, as you’ll have to consider the Pokémon’s Tera Type as well as the Pokémon you’re battling, I also like that the penalty for fainting isn’t as severe as you’ll just have to wait a few seconds to be revived and you lose a bit to time from the timer. However there are a number of problems that I have with this as well, and it’s more to do with the game than the battles themselves. For starters there doesn’t seem to be any kind of turn structure, with it mostly acting as a free for all when it comes to attacking. While I can see what they were going for, the execution really didn’t work. For some reason it would lead to numerous times where I have to wait excruciatingly long to be able to attack again or even just to see my attack go through, and I always have to wait until our opponent finishes its animation before I can do anything. And then there’s the Poké Portal, I’m not kidding when I say that I’ve been told that I can’t access a Tera Raid more times than I’ve actually taken part in a Tera Raid, whether it’s because of communication issues or because that battle’s already started, it just won’t let me join. And to make matters worse, it takes a frustratingly long time for the game to even tell me that, as it’ll keep trying to connect me to that raid for unnecessarily long, I’ve actually timed it on numerous occasions and I every time I have it has exceeded 40 seconds (in other words it the time it takes for the game to tell me that I can’t join a Tera Raid Battle is about the same length of a Sonic 06 load screen). 

In this game you have three separate objectives to have completed by the end of the game. The more obvious one is the Pokémon League, which I’m sure we all know at this point, complete eight gyms and collect their badges to fight the Elite Four and become the Pokémon Champion, it’s the same old song and dance. Though this time the Gym challenges are quite different and, I must admit, are just bad. They offer no challenge at all and don’t even take place inside of the Gym, I beg for the old days where all you had to do is have a few battles and go through a series of puzzles to get to the Gym Leader.

The second is battling the Titan Pokémon. These are five giant versions of Pokémon that you can find in the wild that have been supercharged by consuming something called a Herba Mystica. You’ll have to fight these Pokémon twice in a row, once by yourself and once again with Arven. By beating these you unlock a new ability that Koraidon/Miraidon can use in the overworld; like climbing up walls or gliding. This is by a good margin the easiest of your main objectives, as they just require you to fight a slightly stronger than usual Pokémon, as long as you know their weaknesses you should be able to do these with little issue. 

Finally is the Team Star Bases. At the start of the game you’re given the task of defeating each of the Team Star Leaders and taking the team down by a mysterious being called Cassiopeia. When you enter the base you’re given the task of defeating thirty Pokémon within ten minutes by using the autobattle mechanic, afterwards you fight the Leader of that base. I do like these, it at least gives you a reason to use the autobattle feature (by forcing you to use it, but still), and the battles at the end are a lot of fun and can be quite a challenge, but I find the build up to be too easy. Ten minutes to just way too much time as I find it only takes me a couple of minutes to defeat thirty Pokémon. If it was in normal battles then I could somewhat understand it – though then it would probably not be enough time for some – but using autobattles only, it’s not even a challenge. 

TMs are done a little differently than they were with the previous games. Rather than being able to just buy them, you can now craft them by using Pokémon materials that you obtain in fights and can find out in the wild. Yes, a Pokémon game has added a crafting system and yes it is very tedious. I would much rather be able to just buy the TMs rather than having to go through the annoying grind of finding materials just so I can teach my Hypno Psybeam. Though one thing that I do really like returning from Pokémon Legends Arceus is the ability for Pokémon to remember moves they’ve already forgotten from the menu. It’s really cool that this is back as it means that I don’t have to find a specific NPC just to be able to relearn a move.

Outside of everything mentioned, the only thing I can really say about the complaints is that… it’s a Pokémon game. It’s still very easy (though this one is a bit more challenging than the last few), grinding can get monotonous at times, then there’s the usual complaint of Pokémon Home accessibility not being available until a few months from now. That’s all I can really say on that front… it’s a Pokémon game. 

Of all the Pokémon games I’ve played over the last few years, this is the one I’m probably the most upset about. Not because I think the game’s bad, because that’s absolutely not the case, but because it’s so close to being amazing. This is easily the best mainline Pokémon game I’ve played since Black and White. I think that the things it brings with it really work and I had a lot of fun playing it. The one thing really holding it back is the technical and performance issues, this is sadly the worst a Pokémon game’s ever launched, and I really hope Nintendo fixes it. Either way, if you can get past the frame rate issues and the myriad of problems that I’ve mentioned then I do highly recommend this game. I can easily see myself playing this one for a long time. 

8.5/10