Diamonds in the rough are, by definition, ugly gems. While they may have incredible qualities, they are just not pretty to look at. This centuries-old saying perfectly captures the essence of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. At their core, Pokémon’s ninth-generation games have incredible gameplay, lovable new Pokémon, and improved writing. However, all of this gets smothered in eye-gougingly bad visuals and rage-inducing bugs.
Seek Out Your Treasure
After picking your starter Pokémon, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet enroll you in Pokémon school. In Scarlet, you go to Naranja Academy, and in Violet, Uva Academy. Each school gives players their “Treasure Hunt”. This treasure varies by student. However, the treasures represent something special that students are trying to find throughout the year. You also meet other students, like Nemona, your overly competitive neighbor, Arven, a standoff-ish foodie, and Penny, a shy transfer student. Each friend serves as your main partner for each of the main questlines. These characters anchor the surprisingly poignant stories contained within the package.
Prior to enrollment, the story kicks off with you finding the game’s main Legendary Pokémon on the shore near your house. In Scarlet, you find Koraidon, while in Violet, it’s Miraidon. As you progress through these various stories, you learn where these Pokémon came from and why they currently have trouble fighting for themselves. Frankly, the Legendary Pokémon only serves as a literal vehicle until the end of the game. After completing the game, the Legendary Pokémon can then be used in battle like any other Pokémon.
Despite the game’s long, plodding introduction, it’s mostly worth it to get through.
Scarlet and Violet Can Be as Difficult as the Player Wants
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet contain three main stories. There’s the traditional Victory Road, an eight Pokémon Gym challenge that leads to the Elite Four gauntlet, the Path of Legends, where you fight Titan Pokémon for a garnish called Herba Mystica, and Operation Starfall, where you take down the school bullies, Team Star.
Outside of Victory Road’s traditional setup, the games do make one major change. Players can try these challenges in whatever order they choose.
This flexibility opens up many options for players. If they want to figure out the expected level order for all challenges, they can. You can start with the hardest, but expect a bigger challenge since Gym Badges still dictate how strong of Pokémon you can tame.
Any Pokémon you catch on your own will listen to you with no problem, but you can only catch Pokémon lower than a certain level. Any Pokémon you get in trades also has a threshold up to where they’ll stop listening to you. While not new to the series thanks to Sword and Shield, keeping this system meshes very well with the expanded flexibility
Letting players choose their order of challenges and keeping the newer leveling limits shows good execution of an open-world design. That design is a great step forward for Pokémon.
To learn more about the Paldea Region’s history, take her class
The Stories Go Beyond Traditional Pokémon Standards
Meanwhile, Operation Starfall and Path of Legends each tell heartfelt stories. Path of Legends develops Arven for a solid character arc, while Starfall explains how Team Star came to be. Moreover, these two remaining stories ensure all Pokémon types get a spotlight. All types that don’t have a gym based on them get used as Titan Pokémon and Team Star base themes. That immediately adds an efficient usage of all Pokémon types, despite the stark similarities between the Titans and Star Bases.
Operation Starfall stands out for incorporating new mechanics, namely Auto-Battles, the most. With Auto-Battles, players can let their lead Pokémon walk around outside of their Poké-Ball and fight other Pokémon. Team Star Bases build their entire design around that mechanic. Directly using these mechanics makes for a fast-paced, unusual, but most importantly, fun experience. Auto-Battles already work as a great way to work through dozens of Wild Pokémon, using them as a trainer gauntlet lands gracefully too.
Terastal Soars as the Hot New Mechanic
Ever since Pokémon X and Y, the series has toyed with different ideas to give Pokémon an additional boost in battles. Mega Evolutions, Z-Moves, and Gigantamaxing all appeared in past entries. Now, Terastalization steps up to the plate.
Terastalization lets Pokémon temporarily change their type in battle thanks to the key item, Tera Orb. Most Pokémon’s Tera Type is their original type, but glowing Pokémon in the Paldea region have an entirely different type. You can also catch these Tera Pokémon with different types in Tera Raids, or grind your way to manually change any Pokémon’s type. Pokémon who keep their main type when Terastalized do more damage with that type, so at least there’s still something for everybody.
Tera Raids let you catch Tera Pokémon with friends. You three other players approach a glass-like structure that contains a Terastalized Pokémon. It’s a four-on-one game mode where Pokémon can attack simultaneously and players can give their allies stat and health boosts. Conversely, Tera Pokémon can dispel status ailments and stat decreases, shield itself, and even steal a Terastalized Pokémon’s Tera-power.
Unfortunately, Tera Raids are Terastalization’s one major flaw. The challenge wildly fluctuates across the five difficulties. Lower levels pose little challenge while the highest is nigh impossible. Even entering harder raids with a perfect team, supporting them flawlessly, and Terastalizing them appropriately still requires a prayer to win.
Terastalization stands above the past ideas like Mega-Evolution. Where only a few Pokémon have Mega Evolutions, all Pokémon can Terastalize. Z-Moves only get one in an entire battle, but Terastalized Pokémon stay Terastalized until they lose. You do need to recharge the Tera Orb at a Poké Center after every use, but that’s negligible for online competitive play. Finally, Gigantamaxing was only temporary, while Terastalized Pokémon keep their buff until knocked out.
Terastalization adds a new layer of gameplay that forces players to have a backup plan ready while also answering major flaws with past powering ideas. This is one of the best ideas Pokémon Scarlet and Violet introduced.
Paldea is Your Oyster
It’s not the prettiest, but it is fun to explore
As referenced above, this is the first truly open-world Pokémon game. While Arceus featured many more open areas, it was more zone-based than open-world-based since you had to turn in your progress and go back to base to explore another area.
Many of these areas feature notably strong Pokémon, and none of the games’ bosses scale to your level, making for a general path the games consider optimal. However, optimal doesn’t mean mandatory. If the player wants to go east before they go west, there’s nothing stopping them.
As players run around, they also get to see wild Pokémon running around. This feature has been included since Pokémon Let’s Go Pickachu and Eevee, but Scarlet and Violet take a big step forward with them.
Now, Pokémon travel in herds, although you still only fight them one at a time, even when Auto-Battling. Pokémon in this overworld exhibit more naturalistic behavior than just walking around, making them feel more like animals than computer-controlled creatures.
Different Pokémon spawn at different times of day, so it’s good that Game Freak changed their day and night cycle. Instead of following the real-world clock, days pass on an in-game cycle. These comprise one of many small but nice quality-of-life updates.
Picnics are the Next Progression from Camps
Whenever you and your team want a break out in the field, have a Picnic. Picnics consolidate Camps from Sword and Shield with the series’ long-running Day Care. While you are picnicking, your Pokémon will run around and play with each other. You can manually check in on them and even wash them which heals them and builds up their happiness with you.
Food-wise, you can make sandwiches for everyone. These sandwiches give you Meal Powers, an hour-long buff that varies depending on the meal. Meal Powers make for an interesting open-world mechanic. Instead of healing your Pokémon and improving your relationship with them, you now get added exploration bonuses. Furthermore, this is how you get Pokémon Eggs. Games past made you leave two Pokémon of similar Egg Groups (or Ditto) with the Day Care in hopes of an Egg. Now, anyone at a Picnic who belongs to the same Egg Group as another Party member can leave an Egg together in the Picnic basket.
For Pokémon the series, this is revolutionary. Players don’t need to spend money and pick two Pokémon to get together for an egg anymore. Instead, just bring them to the party and let them play during picnics. It is an excellent streamlining of a previously clunky process.
These Games Lack Synergy and Understanding
To SpongeBob fans, this may remind them of a certain Alaskan creature.
While the game makes many small improvements, the game deserves significant criticism for neither fully understanding or utilizing its own Terastalization mechanics. Something notably apparent in the Victory Road story is that the Leaders stay too close to their typing. All of their Ace Pokémon are non-Paldean Pokémon that Terastalize into the gym’s typing. It is a real missed opportunity to force challengers to think on their feet and rework their strategy in real time. Instead, challengers can do what they have always done and steamroll the Gym with the correct type to prey on the Gym’s pre-established weakness.
Gym Leaders, Team Star Bosses, or even Elite Four members also, still refuse to use a single healing item. Healing Pokémon mid-battle is a major component of Pokémon fighting. Preventing bosses from doing it waters down the difficulty for the player unnecessarily. The missed opportunities don’t end here, but the point still stands that the game still errs on the side of predictability rather than utilizing the systems that are in place to be challenging.
Litany of Bugs and Glitches in an Ugly World
Circling back to the diamond in the rough metaphor, there’s no sugarcoating this: Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are the ugliest and buggiest games I have ever played on the Switch.
We already did a write-up on these issues, but they are well worth rehashing here because of how bad it is. Sometimes, Pokémon clip through the world, and other times moving objects turn into ugly frames despite being right next to you. The battle camera occasionally starts by clipping through the ground. These issues extend effortlessly to multiplayer. In addition to the above framerate issues, communication issues crop up. Tera Raids started without me, Surprise Trades collapsed, and that’s just a test of the glitches. As of writing, the biggest known multiplayer bug guarantees attacks of all accuracies, including the low-accuracy instant knock-out moves.
This list is endless, and it is not at all helped by the world’s palate and design. Paldea looks more like a level in Super Mario 64 than it does the newest big game on the same console that launched with Breath of the Wild. Nature looks wildly outdated for a game that’s only been out for over ten days, especially plant life.
When the direct visuals aren’t the issue, the background is. When you are in a Pokémon battle outside of controlled areas (like Gym Battles), the overworld is still running, so wild Pokémon and human bystanders will walk into the middle of the battlefield. This has no effect on the ongoing battle. Yet it is jarring when they quite literally walk right through you and your Pokémon.
Final Thoughts: A Heavy Asterisk, but Overall Enjoyable
At this point in time, the bugs feel like a dealbreaker. They dramatically hinder the overall enjoyment of the game. Hopefully, it gets patched sooner rather than later, but as of right now, it is crippling. Further, no amount of patches are going to make this a pretty game. If you can look past the rough technical state, there is a lot to like between the new species, the open-world gameplay, or the three different quests. Three quests are surprisingly well-written and character driven for a Pokémon game. Giving the players free reign over their path throughout the game made me truly explore the Paldean region, and let me see the best of what the game had to offer.
I will absolutely replay these games at some point. Hopefully, by then, the worst of the issues won’t plague my playthrough.
