POKEMON SCARLET AND VIOLET by Urizon

 

   I have been reluctantly holding off for a bit on writing a review on anything. Haven’t seen a whole lot recently, and what I have seen, I don’t think I could really say anything about that hasn’t been said already. So here we are today, with something that has been quite divisive, and something I do have opinions on, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet.

   Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are the newest installments in the long running video game series devolved by Game Freak. Taking place in the region of Paldea, the story has our character enrolled in either Naranja or Uva Academy. The school is starting out its annual Treasure Hunt, where students are sent out to find their treasure. Armed with a starter Pokémon and the box legendary as your ride, you are thrust into the open world to do the three-story paths and find your treasure.

   As a whole, the story for this game has sounded pretty bare bones since day one. It seemed like an excuse to get you to just explore the open world. Truthfully though, Scarlet and Violet may have one of the best stories in any Pokémon game thus far. The three paths it gives you are The Path of Legends, Starfall Street and Victory Road.

   I think it goes without saying that Victory Road is the standard Pokémon affair. Go and defeat the various gym leaders of the region, beat the elite four and gain the rank of Champion. Nothing super new or exciting there. I’d even argue that these gym leaders and elite four are some of the easier ones we have had. That being said, the personalities and interactions they all have make them so memorable and great. It became pretty hard to pick a favorite, and even the ones I didn’t originally care for, I grew to love after finding out a bit more about them. They no longer just feel like an obstacle to get through to progress the story, but full-fledged characters.

   If I had to say any downside about this path, it would probably just have to be an issue that most have with the game in general. Being open world, you are encouraged to do any of these paths in whatever order you want and explore the world however you wish. This being said, there is no level scaling. You can go and do the gyms in whatever order you want, but you might be facing level 40s with level 16 Pokémon. So, while it is presented as there being no correct order, that is essentially false.

   The next path, Starfall Street, has you get recruited by a mysterious person named Cassiopeia to defeat a group of students named Team Star. There are five bosses spread throughout Paldea, each with their own base, and it is your job to go and take them down to try and force them to disband.

   I was iffy on this, but honestly it turned out to be a lot of fun. The Path takes advantage of a new feature called auto battling where you send out your Pokémon and they will fight any in the area without you having to go through the battling process. Usually for each base you have to defeat about 30 Pokémon within ten minutes and then the leader will come out. You defeat them in a normal battle, and the base is cleared. My only real complaint here is that it can get a bit repetitive. The amount of Pokémon needing to be defeated doesn’t change and the bosses final Pokémon will always be a car with a Pokémon attached. Otherwise, it was fun and a nice change of pace.

   Where this path really shines has to be the story and characters. Before defeating any of these guys, you only know them as these sort of bully punks. That quickly changes with each defeat though as you are given a glimpse of who they were at the beginning of all of this. You grow to really feel for this group of characters. All in all, the whole thing is rather wholesome and nice.

   Finally, we get to the Path of Legends. This one I started out not caring about at all, but then it quickly jumped up my list. With this path you are selected by another student, Arven to defeat the various Titan Pokémon that have appeared across the land. Each one you defeat gives you an herb mystica, which ends up slowly unlocking more powers for your legendary Pokémon. There isn’t much else to say for this without giving away spoilers, but the whole thing helped cement Arven as one of my favorite characters. On top of that, the concept of the Titan Pokémon was really cool and gave for a more unique experience.

   Now truthfully, the story really begins after you defeat all three paths. From there you are asked by the professor of the series to go to a crater in the center of Paldea known as Area Zero. I unfortunately can’t get into much of this part without spoilers, but all I can say is that everything in this final bit of the story is what truly makes the game. It has some insane and rather dark, creepy moments for a Pokémon game, and I absolutely love it. On top of that the layout and design for the Area Zero world is top notch. This segment alone elevates this game for me.

   While briefly touched upon, another thing good with this game has to be the characters. The director of the academy seems to so genuinely care about his students. The teachers all have great personalities that makes them all unique. You have one who gave up being a gym leader because she loved teaching, another who is seen by his students as being the strong, tough guy, but really likes sweets and doesn’t want to ruin the image they have of him. Then you have, for me at least, one of the best rivals in a Pokémon game in a long time, Nemona.

   For a while, Pokémon rivals fell into two categories, absolute jerks or overly friendly. It got to the point where we missed the jerk characters, because there was just more to them. Getting to Sword and Shield, things got a little better with Hop. He was really friendly and had a full arc, yet you watched his confidence waver more and more as he was beat. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it is part of his arc, but you still ended up just feeling bad about winning against him. With Nemona, it ends up being different. From the first time we meet her, it is made clear that her one love is Pokémon battles. She pushes you to succeed because she wants to battle you. It is what puts you down the Victory Road path, as she is already champion rank. What is good about her though, is the fact that she does want you to succeed. She says multiple times how losing is just as good for her, because she got to enjoy a good battle. Throughout this whole thing, even as you win over and over again, she is proud of you and I’d just happy to see your success. I love that and hope this is what they give us more of in the future.

   Now let’s get to the new Pokémon of this generation. Not much to say really. They are pretty much all amazing. I’ve seen some arguments about a lack of creativity, as one is called Flamigo, a pun of Flamingo and Amigo as this region is based on Spain, and it is pretty much just a pink flamingo. Yet I think this happens quite often and people tend to always forget that this series has never been that creative. Yes, some designs and names are more unique than others, but this is also the game series that gave us a pile of grime and sludge called Grimer. Or Pidgey, which is just a plain ol bird.

   What I’m getting at is, the designs and names have mostly always been simple or cheesy, and it works. People need to let go of the nostalgia for a bit and embrace these new generations, as they are missing out on some truly great designs and Pokémon.

   Last really positive thing that I have to comment on is the music. I was stupid. I played this whole game with my sound off. I just usually do that for games I play handheld, as I am usually doing other things at the time. Having gone back and watched a few people play some of this game though, my God am I disappointed in myself. They do such an unnecessarily good job on every bit of music for this game. You get quite a variety of styles, depending on whether you are battling or roaming the open world, and it is all excellent. My favorite has to probably be the music of the champion battle as it is a combination of music from the previous generations, and I love that sort of thing. I will impatiently be waiting for this soundtrack to release.

   Now on to the more middle ground stuff. As with most generations of Pokémon lately, instead of expanding on what came before, we are given a new battle mechanic in the form of terastallizing. What a word. With it, each Pokémon has a different tera type. Sometimes it may be the type of the Pokémon already, other times it will be a whole different type. Mid battle you can activate the Terastal Phenomenon, terastallizing your Pokémon. This gives it a crystalline appearance as well as a crystalline hat of sorts that corresponds to its tera type. Along with that, it changes the Pokémon type to that tera type as long as the effect is active. The only catch is, you can only use it once before your tera orb needs to be recharged at a Pokémon center.

   From a competitive stand point, I could see this being rather interesting. It would allow you to have a dragon type Pokémon with a fairy or ice tera type, thus nullifying a weakness It would have. So I can get where they were going with this. Unfortunately, as a whole, I find the concept to be just okay. I rarely used it unless I was doing a tera raid, which is where you can catch other tera Pokémon in a raid battle format, or a major battle. My biggest gripe was probably just how it looked. The whole thing was just a bit ugly and goofy looking. Coming off from Mega Evolutions and Gigantamaxing, this just felt like a major downgrade. Again, this may just be from an appearance standpoint as I could probably see the practical use as being decent.

   Next has to be the open world aspect of the game. I think that for the series’ first real attempt at an open world, it was pretty decent. I liked the different environments and getting to explore them on my ride Pokémon in various ways. It is a pretty decent sized map too, so there is quite a bit to explore. Honestly for a while I thought there was a lack of variety of Pokémon spawning, only to realize I just hadn’t gone nearly as far out as I thought I had.

    It was also nice having the Pokémon out roaming the world as they did in Legends Arceus from earlier this year. If anything, this did some things even better by giving the Pokémon various sizes and having them act in unique ways depending on what species they were. For example, some Pokémon would wander up and not attack you, or you would have Voltorb who would self-destruct if you got too close.  Was a nice touch.

   Unfortunately, still, this world felt like it was lacking something. Despite seeing plenty of Pokémon, I would have liked a bit more variety in areas at times. Along with that, the catching mechanic from Arceus would have been a nice touch. One of the biggest crimes for me might just be the map though. The zoom isn’t the best, with you usually ending up zooming too far out. On top of that, it would rotate randomly when you opened it, so you constantly had to fix it so you could get a better understanding of where you are. Main issue though probably has to be when it shows what Pokémon are in the area.  Not sure if I just don't know how to use it or what, but I could almost never find what it said was there.  Became very frustrating.

 

   Ok, with already entirely too much written, let’s get to the bad.

   The towns in this game are pretty awful. I only remember one of them vaguely and that is just because I kept having to go there over and over again to go to an auction to hope an evolution item I needed would pop up.  There is very little life to any of them and that’s only hindered by my other main issue with the game. I do think the potential is there though. Like the main town you start in is mostly okay and has a lot of shops, but in the end, that’s really it. Not all NPCs are intractable. You can’t go into buildings. Even the shops, you are shown stepping inside, but then it just pulls up a menu. It wouldn’t be such an awful thing, but it takes a lot of life out of these towns. With that, even though there are all of these shops, the customization options are lacking. I get that you are a student, but minus accessories, you are given no clothing options besides the uniform. This feels like a major step backwards.

   Now, obviously the main one and the one being talked about most, the performance. I’m going to say that I went through the whole game and barely encountered any sort of bugs. A couple visual things briefly, but that was it. Currently I am having my Pawmot randomly spawn in front of the enemy Pokémon in Tera raids, but honestly, I find it more funny than anything. With that being said, my personal experience does not change the fact that many, many others are encountering these bugs. These are things that shouldn’t have happened, but ultimately they do. Most games have some sort of issue upon release, what matters is how quickly, if at all, they get fixed. Hopefully Gamefreak comes through, but in the meantime, this is holding it back.

   Bugs aren’t the only thing though as the other major issue plaguing this game is that performance. It is garbage at times. I can have zero issues myself going through the game, but then you look in the background and see NPCs or windmills moving as if they are stop motion. It goes without saying that this is something that should not have happened. Once again, my issues are still nothing compared to some of the ones others have had. I don’t know if it was an issue of the whole Mao being preloaded, or even just an issue of the Switch's hardware not being able to handle what this game is trying to do. Either way, it is something that is once again drastically holding this game back that needs to either be patched or taken into serious consideration when designing the next games.

   As a whole, despite these issues that the games have, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet still rank up there as some of my favorite Pokémon games. These and Legends Arceus are the first ones in a long time that I have actively made sure to binge and complete in full. Unfortunately, there has been something with the Pokémon games where for a while, I have just had a hard time completing them. Before I think it used to be my attention span, now if other stuff comes out, I usually put them aside and just can’t bring myself to get back to them. These have been different though. In fact, I have actively put aside like four other games I have really wanted to play, just so I can fully complete these. And it has been nice. There is a feeling of nostalgia with this new style as if I’m picking up this series for the first time again, and I really hope they are able to keep this up for future releases.

   A lot of what is truly carrying Scarlet and Violet is the story. While the gameplay has been fun, and the new Pokémon are just top notch, the story is one of the best we have gotten from a main series Pokémon game in a while. On top of that, the characters were really easy to get invested in. It will be nice if they can keep up this tone and level of storytelling for the future generations that will be coming out.

   Given the performance issues, I can understand why Pokémon Scarlet and Violent aren’t getting amazing reviews. Yet there is still something there that is truly great. Great enough to look past these issues and still hold the game in such high regard. I think if anything, it says a lot that reviews aren’t lower. If a lot of other games came out with the bugs and issues that Pokémon has, they would probably be getting torn apart even more. Yet, because the gameplay is so fun, and because the story is so great, it has allowed it to be doing as good as it is. If Gamefreak can come out with another patch or so to fix these issues, I think this would end up as one of the highest rated Pokémon games we have had. I just hope they don’t see the criticism and scrap all of the good they have rather than fixing the issues that are really plaguing the game.

   So, do I recommend Pokémon Scarlet and Violet? Obviously. If you have the experience that I did with performance and bugs, then you will most likely just get a laugh out of how bad that aspect is. Even if it ends up being worse, the game is still strong enough to be enjoyable. It is crazy to say that a Pokémon game is carried by its story, as that is always one of the weakest points, but it really has turned around to be one of its strongest.

   Personally, I say pick it up, sit back and enjoy the music while trying to catch them all. You might just find the true treasure hidden in this game.