A Rant About Pokemon Scarlet and Violet

With the release of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet (SV), the ninth generation of Pokemon is upon us. I’ve been spending more time than I probably should be playing these games, and I have thoughts on them. Many thoughts. These games are somehow the best and worse games that have been published in this series since 2012. Sadly, 10 years of mistakes and missteps wasn’t enough to make something to dethrone any of the actually good titles.

NOTE: Most of my playtime was played on version 1.0.0 of Pokemon Violet. Additionally, full game spoilers are present.

Gameplay

SV are the first true open world Pokemon games. We did see an attempt earlier this year with Pokemon Legends Arceus (PLA), but that wasn’t true open world. Instead of being bound to limited areas, SV gives the player complete freedom to explore the world and tackle its challenges in whatever order they please, after a tutorial that overstays its welcome by 2 hours. Seriously, the open hours of the game is just mashing the A button while sitting through text that really doesn’t matter too much. It only has to be done once, but I still don’t understand why it was so lengthy. Not a whole ton happens aside from a few character introductions, but those can really be ignored because the open world segment sees you interacting with them enough to figure it out.

Speaking of, the open world. It really is an open world. You can just go anywhere without restriction. I spent a good chunk of time just running around, catching Pokemon, and building up a team I wanted to use. Except for a handful of Pokemon locked behind story progression, you can catch and obtain a large majority of the Pokedex without a single badge. This is nice, the only thing between you and the Pokemon you want to use is the run there and the skill to capture it. However, there is a slight caveat, the lack of level scaling. Some may like this, as it should reward players who go out of their way to capture powerful Pokemon, some may not like this as they don’t want to wonder somewhere they shouldn’t be and get curb stomped. Personally, its fine having each area have Pokemon at a fixed level that doesn’t change in proportionally to your progress in the game. I don’t want to constantly be dealing with level 60-70 Pokemon while I’m in the post game. But where they went wrong was with obedience. How its always worked is that Pokemon you caught would obey you irrespective of level. It was not tied to the amount of gym badges you have. It only used to matter for traded Pokemon. They changed that in SV. So now gym badges determine if wild Pokemon will obey you or not. This means you can’t “cheese” the game by going and catching a wild Pokemon from one of the later areas, which I think is just insane. The player should be rewarded for going out of their way and attempting to do something like that, not left wasting their time. This sucks especially because some Pokemon are only found in the later areas, so if you wanted to grab them for your play though, your best option is to breed an egg and raise it from scratch (which is kinda a pain, especially with the reworked breeding mechanics).

But the level scaling issue doesn’t end there. After the tutorial the game lets you run free and gives you the location of 18 different things to do in order to see the conclusion to the story. Each one effectively acts as some sort of difficult battle, I’ll just refer to them generically as gyms despite there being distinctions between them being parts of different storylines, but thats neither here nor there. These gyms also do not scale with game progression. So each gym has a fixed level regardless of progression. If your a purist and insist on following level order, your going to be running all around the map. If you tackle them in some generally intended order, you’ll have a decently paced experience. If you were like me and tackled them in an almost backwards order, you’ll have a few incredibly hard fights, and way too many easy fights. While I do think having it like this allows for some really interesting and challenging battles, going out of order just leaves a lot of uninteresting gyms that feel more like a chore to complete. Having level scaling would ensure a more engaging level of difficulty throughout the adventure.

Aside from the Pokemon and the gyms, what else does the open world have to offer? Not much. The main reward for exploration is just random items. Not even exaggerating. Maybe it will save you a few bucks at the shops, but after a certain point is just becomes worthless to go out of your way to pick up items. The world itself is a bit, lacking too. Between towns, its just Pokemon and more random items. I get that this is a Pokemon game, the focus should be on the Pokemon, but I feel like there isn’t any reason to stray too far off the main paths. Except for one thing, the raid dens. Somewhat returning from Sword and Shield are the raid battles, except they’re played out a bit differently. Its a 4 v 1 against a buffed tera Pokemon. They drop some nice rewards, especially at the higher levels, and offer a nice chance to get some Pokemon with an unusual tera type. They’re fun enough, except for trying to solo the more difficult ones as they become a gamble if you’re AI partners behave or not. But for a majority of the game, they can be pretty much ignored.

But the terastallization gimmick, how is it? For the average player, a bit underwhelming, but it has a ton of complexity and strategy behind it. To put it simply, every Pokemon has an additional tera type. Once during battle, a Pokemon can terastallize and switch its typing to its tera type. In doing so, its new typing will be used when receiving damage, however, when attacking both the base typing and the tera typing are used. What this means is for defense, the typing changes completely. For offense, moves can get a x2 same type attack bonus instead of x1.5 if the tera type is the same as one of the normal typing and the move’s type. What this comes down to is that Pokemon can either get a big offensive bonus, or they can switch typing to cover for a weakness they traditionally have. Its a really interesting mechanic when used properly, however the appearance of “funny hat” and it generally not being well used during the game makes it incredibly underwhelming. Its basic yet incredibly complex at the same time, making it interesting for online play but worthless for solo.

Sandwiches are also a big thing in SV. In the game you can make sandwiches that give various buffs in game. Higher encounter rates, more drops from raids, quicker egg hatching, and even higher shiny rates. My favorite part of it is that you can put meat in them, many types in fact. Where is this meat coming from? What really happened to that Lechonk I caught and “released”? It just feels weird after Pokemon as a whole has avoided meat (and food to an extent) for a long time. The sandwich making is quite an interesting mechanic, and even then building processes of making the sandwich itself is interesting. Its just a shame that the the mechanic is poorly explained. The most the game tells you is that you can make sandwiches and gives you some recipes, most of which aren’t exactly useful. Its up to the player to figure things out, but the game doesn’t explain how ingredients interact with each other so unless you look things up online, your not going to make anything of use.

The thing is, despite all of these changes, SV fails to improve or even iterate upon the groundwork PLA set up. In fact, it even lacks some features that PLA “established”. And the thing is, a lot of it lies in the little things. Most apparent is the visuals. SV runs terribly and looks horrible. It’s hard to express in a written form these visual aspects, but while PLA has believable terrain and detailed environments, SV has obvious tiled textures, major pop in, and animations slowing to a crawl if they take place over a foot away from the player. There is this one town with a “windmill” in SV, except 99% of the time the windmill lacks any sort of smooth animation and just visibly jumps between parts of its animations. Maybe this would be tolerable at best if the game kept a consistent frame rate, but no, SV can’t even manage that in the best of scenarios. Most of the time the game cannot even keep 30 fps, and in some areas you’ll approach the single digits in fps. PLA rarely had these fps issues, so what happened between then and now to get this?

There is a ton more minor downgrades from PLA. Pokemon are back to only evolving at level up, the lock on feature in SV is useless, the only indication of shiny Pokemon is the change in color (no audio cue or animation is present in the over world), the game just lags after most actions you preform in game, the complete lack of interiors to buildings, removal of most player customization, and probably a few more things I’m forgetting about. It just bizarre that these good and well received features are introduced, and then get taken away in the next game. I cannot wrap my mind around how they got so much right with PLA, and then fail to reuse that in SV.

But I think the worst removal wasn’t something that was a downgrade from PLA, it was something that was core to main series Pokemon games. Something that has been in the games since 2000. The Battle Tower. While not the beloved Battle Frontier, nearly every Pokemon game has had some sort of endless battle challenge accessible in some form or another. SV finally killed it off. The post game has three things to do: shiny hunt, tera raids, and online battles. Now while shiny hunting and online battles have immense longevity, its still disappointing to see the tower go. This is the way I see it: shiny odds in this game are a joke, combine that with the questionable choices when displaying shiny Pokemon in the over world makes it a whole lot less exciting to do in this game than any other. Online battles are locked behind a reoccurring monthly paywall, and tera raids are boring, repetitive, and fail to provide interesting or compelling rewards in the postgame. I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing previous Pokemon games, and yet SV fails to give many compelling reasons to continue playing past completion of the main story. Sure, theres a quick side quest to do post game, and you can complete the Pokedex along side the other things I mentioned, but thats it. For an open world game, it sure is empty.

Story

Story has really never been the primary reason behind playing a Pokemon game. Its not something I really expect to be explicitly good anymore. But that doesn’t give it a free pass to be bad. And honestly, not all of it is bad, but that doesn’t stop most of it from being bad. The game starts out with you and your mom moving into the Paldea region, only for her to turn around and ship you off to a boarding school. A bit weird considering your mom just seems to sit at home and do nothing and your dad seemingly doesn’t exist, so moving to a new country just to send your kid to a boarding school there seems a bit extra, but there are a variety of reasons a person could want to move and its not like the parents ever get characterization in Pokemon games, so whatever. Right, you meet the director, get a Pokemon, and meet your neighbor who is already considered to be a champion of the region. Thats right, Nemona, one of the first people you meet, one of your rivals, has already collected all the badges and beat the elite four and champion. Good for her, but she still picks the starter that is weak to yours. She ends up helping you find your way to school, and along the way you stumble across a never before seen Pokemon that you quickly become the owner of because another student, Arven, didn’t want to deal with it anymore. But its fine, this Pokemon that no one has ever seen before and has been shown to easily fight with groups of Pokemon is suddenly too weak to do anything other than be your personal bicycle. You meet the last important classmate, Penny, right outside school where she is being harassed by some Team Star members. A few days into the semester, the director comes back out and decides the school is done being a proper school and just tells the students to go run free across the country and find some sort of personal treasure. Why? Who knows! Its not his problem.

This is where the game opens up and becomes open world. A questionable school program has 12 year olds running all across the country doing who knows what while magical animals actively run up and attack them. Hope they have a Pokemon that can defend them. Aside from the questionable ethics of this school, the player is presented with three story lines to pursue: Victory Road, Path of Legends, and Starfall Street. Victory Road is the simplest of the three, its your typical collect 8 badges and defeat the Pokemon league. There really isn’t anything special to comment on here, except for Nemona popping in every now and then. Sometimes she’ll battle you, and other times its just a short exchange of words. Nemona is a very one dimensional character. All she cares about is battling. She wants to see you become a worthy rival, and she makes sure to challenge you with a team that (should) match your skill level. As I said previously, level scaling doesn’t exist in these games, so her team just depends on how many gym badges you have at that point. But throughout this path and even beyond, this is who she is. She doesn’t change at all. The gyms themselves don’t have many interesting challenges before them. At best a few battles, at worst you get whatever the psychic gym was. Seriously, that gym challenge was horrible. The league isn’t anything abnormal either. 4 strong trainers in order then the champion. You meet all of them along the way, but most of them don’t really stand out too much. They also somehow employ a literal toddler in the Pokemon League, so I guess child labor laws don’t exist in this world.

Nemona provides a, sadly typical, experience as a rival. She’s one dimensional, bland, and disposable. However, there are still two other paths to explore that focus on more, interesting, characters. Meet Starfall Street, the path where you are faced with taking on Team Star. Initially prompted by a mysterious Cassiopeia hacking into your phone, you are tasked with taking down the various Team Star bases around the region. Joined by Clive, a “student” who definitely isn’t the director, you take down these bases. These bases involve an auto battle gauntlet that you almost have to intentionally fail that leads into a battle with the boss for the base. The “final” boss Eri actually puts up a really difficult fight, mostly because her ace Pokemon has stamina which made my pure physical team fall flat, but poor team building aside, after the defeat of each boss, you get a bit of exposition on the Team Star lore. Basically, there was a pivotal moment 18 months ago where the founding members of Team Star got together to try to stop stop their bullies, a noble cause. There wasn’t any conflict as all the bullies ended up dropping out first, but the entire school staff ended up quitting because they failed to protect the students from these bullies. A wild decision, but not as wild as deciding to completely destroy the records of the bullies that dropped out, which also included any mention of other students who got bullied. So Team Star accomplished their mission of stopping bullies and has no reason to continue existing, right? No, why would they? The five bosses of Team Star weren’t the mastermind, it was actually Cassiopeia, who they never had even met, but they couldn’t just disband Team Star, that would go against their code of honor, despite Team Star not having any reason to exist. So Team Star continued to exist, and the people in it were so committed to the bit they decided it was more important to stay holed up in their bases that truancy was completely OK. There are just so many things wrong with their decision making process, but things only get worse once you realize that it wasn’t over after beating the five bases, as now Cassiopeia wants to fight. After Clive, who now reveals himself to be the director, fights you to make sure your ready to face Cassiopeia, you fight Cassiopeia who reveals herself to be Penny, the girl who was probably being bullied by Team Star, an anti-bulling organization, at the start of the game. Once you beat her, there is this reunion with all the Team Star bosses and its this somewhat heartfelt moment where Penny finally has some friends or something, its not terribly interesting. But the important bit is that the school director has all these trouble makers rounded up and in one spot. Remember, these kids haven’t been attending classes for 18 months and have effectively been running a group of delinquents. The director thinks about it and decides that they’re actually doing a net good for the school and should continue doing what they’re doing because its enriching to the students that challenge them, or something like that. But the uniform modifications are unforgivable and demand only a few hours of community service. These students have been acknowledged by both students and staff as troublemakers, but the director just misjudged them and decided that they should just keep on keeping on. Penny basically gets in no trouble, except something has been weighing on her. You see, after each base, you get some reward, which typically was in the form of LP, which is some new electronic currency that can be used in place of the normal one for most purchases. But Penny got this LP by hacking the Pokemon League. She didn’t break school rules no, she stole from one of the biggest organizations in the country. Her punishment? Nothing, she doesn’t get punished for her cybercrimes. She gets rewarded. The Pokemon League hires her for her technical skills. I could see that maybe if she responsibly disclosed whatever exploit she used to the organization, but no, she used and abused that exploit and would have gotten away with it as well, and its a good thing she didn’t because it got her a full time job.

That leaves the final path, the Path of Legends. This one sees you off with Arven on his quest to make the best sandwich possible. Or at least, that what it seems. While the story line has you running around defeating the guardians of herba mystica, a sought after rare herb, we quickly come to find out why Arven wanted them so badly. Arven wanted to feed them to his beloved Pokemon because it had sustained grave injuries and had become unable to walk, speak, or even open its eyes. The herba do end up helping as his Pokemon ends up making a full recovery. I think its really touching that Arven opened up about himself, especially considering what hes been though. You learn that hes so protective of this Pokemon because it was a gift from his father (I played Violet, if its Scalet its mother). Its wild to see a character with such complex familal relations and complex emotions on the subject. His father, Professor Turo, cared more about his research and Miraidon, than his own son. It makes sense why Arven would give it away, as he doesn’t want the Pokemon that replaced him in his father’s eyes. He wants to spend time with his father, not the thing that replaced him. He grew close to his Pokemon when his parents weren’t there for him, so he takes great length to save them from any danger possible. However, Miraidon also gets to enjoy the benefits from the herba and gain new powers for traversal. This pleases the professor who is keeping track of Miraidon’s recovery, and eventually he desires to see the fully recovered Miraidon in his lab in the forbidden Area Zero. Arven insists on bringing another strong trainer and someone whos good with technology along before leaving. Nemona and Penny fit the bill, so once you complete their paths you can move onto the last part of the story, The Way Home.

The last part of the story is probably the best part. It answers questions about the origins of Miraidon, we get to see Arven reunite with his father and how that impacts him, the player finally gets to explore the forbidden Area Zero, and three unlike characters finally get some interaction with eachother. The group decends into Area Zero, and Miraidon is too scared to continue outside of its Pokeball. The group is left to explore on foot as they explore a fantastical landscape. Seriously, Area Zero is a stand out portion of the game for its environment and music. Its a massive leap in quality over the rest of the game (despite remaining just as empty feeling, but thats less prevalent while running though it the first time). As the group makes their way to the lab at the bottom of the crater, they encounter various mechanical Pokemon. These only serve to add intrigue as to whats happening in the lab at the bottom of the crater. Along the way are some smaller buildings the player is forced to stop in, and they each have jorunals detailing the professor’s thoughts on their research. You find out that the professor has built a time machine and these bizzare Pokemon, including Miraidon, are from the future. You end up entering the lab on your own as the rest of the group fights off some Paradox Pokemon. In short, you find out that the professor you have been talking to is a robot with an AI based of the memories of the “living” professor. Dead professor is more accurate because he died in an accident with one of the Pokemon brought back using the time machine. He desired you, the player, to come here to assist him with disabling the time machine, as some of the future Pokemon have been escaping Area Zero and causing damage to the ecosystem of Paldea. He needed assistance it was against his programming to shut down the time machine. So battle commences and you win, the rest of the gang comes to witness the end of the robot. Arven confronts the robot, and the AI? (The game actually has a ? at the end of the name during this segment) appologizes to Arven for being absent in his childhood. Perhaps its a bit of the real professor reaching through to ammend his relationship with his son. What a nice ending.

However, this is where things go downhill. Crap hits the fan in terms what whatever they were doing with the character development because we still need some final moment with Miraidon. So some failsafe activates, the professor challenges the group with a Miraidon of his own, and he also used some technology to disable every Pokeball that wasn’t his. This time machine clearly was of great importance to the dead professor. Luckily, the Mariadon you’ve been riding on the whole game is also the professor’s and in a scripted battle you bust it out and save the day. AI professor returns to normal to give one final speech. He explicitly tells Arven “I inherited all the thoughts and wishes of the professor, and so I understand better than anyone… [that] your father truly loved you.” However, this directly contradicts a previous statement said by the same AI professor where he questions “Was keeping the time machine running truly all the professor cared about?!”. These two lines conflict with each other. The desire to have this spectacular ending with the Pokemon from the box ruins this moment between Arven and his father. And instead of having anything to do with this AI that is basically his father, he ends up using the time machine one last time to send himself into the future because its what he would have wanted. It just also happened to help in shutting down the time machine. Its just insanse that this built up moment between Arven and his father just gets completely glossed over in favor of putting the player in this heroic spot. Sure, the lore presented in this part of the story is interesting to think about, but Arven as a character gets completely screwed over. This big moment of him reuniting with his absent father and finally being able to confront him about it is supposed to be something pivotal. Instead we get something half assed that puts the player at the center of it all. Because the entire story has to revolve around the player being a special little child that saves the world. No character can get in the way of them doing that.

Finally, we get to see the end of the game. A group of friends, each with questionable growth, if any. Theres this one scene at the end where everyone explains what they end up doing. I honestly forget what Nemona ends up doing because shes such a boring and one dimensional character. Penny ends up doing something with the Pokemon Leauge to make up for her hacking, and Arven, oh boy. He ends up telling the group “Guess my role’s so obvious it goes without saying?”. He doesn’t even really get a proper ending. He has this super awkard and rushed bit with his father, and then doesn’t even get some solid resolution that the other characters have with their stories. He had so much potential to build up this interesting and engaging character arc never really seen before in a Pokemon game, but instead he was basically only used as a connection to the professor to have some excuse to drag the player into this spetacular set piece at the end of the game. I just can’t get behind how they managed to create such a high octane and engaging ending to adds almost nothing to an incredibly disapointing story. I don’t expect a masterpiece of a story from a Pokemon game, but character’s actions have zero impacts on relations and everything ends up all happy and peaceful despite what has happened between any of the characters, both explicitly and implicitly. The story is a massive blunder.

The Release

The story isn’t the only massive blunder. If you’ve read any other review, no, seen anything about the game, you know the horrible state it was released in. To say this game was shipped out unfinished would be an understatement. I touched on it a bit before, but this game has several issues. It does not hit its target frame rate, the camera clips through almost everything, pop in is a serious issue, animations hardly qualify as animations, the game lags after almost every actions, misplaced assets, and multiplayer being completely broken. This doesn’t even scratch the surface of whats wrong with this game. You wanna know what they fixed in the patches since release? Pokemon no longer sleep with their eyes open, the first 10 seconds or so of the elite four music no longer loops, and online battles no longer have the same fixed RNG seed for every battle. The rest of the game is just as terrible as day 1. The game still has a memory leak that causes it to just continue to get laggier and laggier until it just crashes. And despite this horrible, terrible, awful state, the game still sold over 10 million copies opening weekend. 10 million copies sold in 3 days. They made their money, and they’re going to make even more from merch, the TCG, and the anime. What reason do they have to fix this buggy mess? Their reputation isn’t on the line because most fans clearly don’t care about the state of the game.

Clearly this game needed more time in the oven, but why is it so much worse than PLA? Game Freak keeps things under wraps about the development process, but we know that it started sometime around after Sword and Shield’s release in 2019. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past two years or so, a pandemic happened in 2020 and basically shut everything down. This would have greatly impacted development. This isn’t the best, especially considering Pokemon likes to release new generations on a 3-4 (really 3) year cycle. Presumably, PLA was developed in a similar time span, so why did it turn out so much better? Its impossible to say anything for certain, but theres a theory floating around that PLA was suposted to have a holiday 2021 release but got pushed back due to bugs. It being a mid generation title made it easier to push back, and the gen 4 remakes where hastily put together to replace that holiday slot. Convincing theory, but who knows how much of it is true? There was overlap between the staff, especially with the leads in various groups. If these people could make a good game, why would the next game they release be significantly worse? The only reasonable excuse is a lack of time and a forced release. There clearly is passion put into these games, but the team didn’t get the time they needed to produce a finished product. The mismanagement of this project lead to the embarassing release of SV.

Conclusion

In short, the new Pokemon games fail to innovate, fail to tell an interesting story, and fail to run properly. Yet, I can’t bring myself to call these games a (complete) failure. There is something charming about this series that keeps me coming back. I know that each time I come back I’ll get burned by another bad entry to the series, yet I still enjoy the time I spend with each game. I like going on a silly little adventure, making silly little friends with the creatures that are in it, and becoming the silly little hero of the story. The game just has such a solid foundation. The gameplay, the music, the moment to moment, its all pretty fantastic, ignoring all the glitches present. I just hope that Pokemon can finally get out of this slump and make something that I actually great again, not just the next entry in a series of disapointments.

Actually wait no I change my mind this game is a failure it has an Ed Sheeran song in it.