Review: POKEMON LEGENDS ARCEUS Crawled So POKEMON SCARLET and POKEMON VIOLET Could Hobble

In the middle of November, Game Freak, Nintendo, and The Pokémon Company released Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet for the Nintendo Switch. The games take place in the Paldea region which is based on Spain which is exciting and introduces a lot of changes to the core Pokémon games which I’ll get into.

They also mark the start of the ninth generation of games. The team was kind enough to supply me a code for Pokémon Violet and I also went out and bought a physical copy of Pokémon Scarlet myself. I let our own Daniel Black have the code for Violet to help test multiplayer functions, but the review below will be based on my experience playing the copy of Scarlet that I purchased.

If you follow any geeky news site or social media at all, you’ve probably seen a ton of posts and items that point to the launch of Scarlet and Violet (SV from hereon out) being a huge mess. We will discuss this, but first we’ll focus on the positives. Game Freak really decided to shake up the Pokémon formula in a lot of ways with SV. At the beginning of the year, Pokémon Legends Arceus was released which featured a pseudo open world for players to explore with Pokémon walking around that you have to interact with in a way that was a step up from the Wild Area in Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield (SS). One of my big complaints with Legends Arceus was that it felt empty though and you’re really just in instances of the world similar to in a Monster Hunter game. SV gives us what I would say is a true open world to explore and it feels a lot more populous and alive. This is huge!

Going with the open world design, you can now use the Let’s Go feature which lets you send a Pokémon out to just do some auto-battles and even pick up items for you. The feature isn’t perfect in my opinion. You can’t stray to far from your Pokémon or they come back into their Poke Ball and you have to kind of aim as you tell them to go out and do their thing which doesn’t always feel very accurate. However, it helps cut out some of the grinding even though it seems that you get less experience for doing it than actually doing a full battle.

Another positive is that the Pokémon look so much better in this game. They have better textures to help it actually look like they have fur, are made of metal, have a hard shell, etc. They feel more like actual creatures and not just drawings. I love that aspect of SV. It feels a bit like when you go and get a new pair of glasses and all of a sudden the world feels like it’s in HD. It’s just more details that help give it some love.

Also, SV features three different stories that you can follow however you see fit. You can either just go for the gym badges, try to find Titan Pokémon, or defeat the leaders of Team Star, or you can interweave all three stories throughout. The last approach is more of what I’m doing and seems like the smart play as it keeps your Pokémon levels at about the right pace more or less without too much overleveling or underleveling for any given part. All three storylines have their merit and their own charm. I will say that the Titan Pokémon storyline is important for unlocking new features for your legendary Pokémon/mount, Koraidon in Scarlet and Miraidon in Violet. A quick note about the Gyms in SV is that I really appreciate how each one has a non-battle challenge that you have to complete before fighting the Gym Leader. It’s something I’ve wanted to see since the Orange Island episodes of the anime and to see it realized here is just really nice. It gives the game a bit more dimensionality. The way that Star Raids work is also a bit of fresh air as you use the Let’s Go feature to first fight a bunch of the lackeys before getting to the boss.

In addition, the way that Pokémon Centers and Pokémon Marts are just kiosks outside is a great improvement in my book as it just makes it faster and easier to access since you don’t’ have to enter a building. It’s a small thing, but noticeable. Other small improvements include a mini-map, the Pokedex feels much cleaner, and there’s an auto-heal button which will automatically use healing items on the selected Pokémon starting with the lowest tier items and moving up. I don’t use it a lot, but when I do it’s convenient.

Tera Raids are another improvement in my opinion. They feel more streamlined than the Dynamax Raids from SS and I enjoy jumping into them. I still don’t quite understand the best uses for Terastalization, but I’m sure that it’s going to be a huge part of the competitive scene. It feels a lot more strategic than previous gimmicks like Mega Evolutions (sorry, but I did not like these), Z-Moves, and Dynamaxing since you can only use it once between Pokémon Center visits and it changes your Pokémon’s weaknesses.

SV has ended up being a lot of fun to play. Getting your mount early on ended up being handled much better than I had worried. You can’t use them in battle for a while and so it doesn’t give you an unfair advantage in any way, but it makes traversing the open world so much nicer. I enjoy just exploring the Paldea region and just seeing what Pokémon I come across in a way I haven’t felt in a Pokémon game for a long time. That being said, there are some serious flaws that need to be talked about for the game.

I have no doubt you have seen and/or read about a million different glitches that happen in SV. There are so many on the internet, and many of them are hilarious. Some people fall off a cliff and just slide through the world. Sometimes, a Jigglypuff will just start floating away backwards. Other times, Wiglett is placed in a precarious position. That’s not even scratching the surface. In the same category I’ll include inconsistent texture quality and performance issues in general. Some of the textures in SV are fantastic and help bring the Pokémon, people, and world to life. However, there are a lot of textures that are clearly very low resolution and it’s off putting. One instance that stands out is in the player character’s (PC’s) home the floor paneling looked okay, but then the welcome mat had such a low quality texture, it felt extremely out of place. I’ve noticed it in many other places and it’s just as disappointing. Performance issues refer to things like poor frame rates that just make things look robotic and/or choppy in a lot of instances. I remember in one of the trailers shown off, we saw the gym test where the player had to find Sunflora and the frame rate was really bad. I was worried. I then saw a version where the frame rate was better and my fear subsided. Apparently, the former was a more accurate representation of what to expect. I hope that the team is able to go through and release patches to fix these problems. It genuinely feels unfinished, but rushed out for the holiday sales (and it worked!). If the team had been given a few extra months, I’m sure this game would look and feel so much better.

Another problem I have with SV is that the mini-map is nice and helpful, but it doesn’t feel accurate when telling me what Pokémon are around. As you move around, it will sometimes display icons of Pokémon to say they’re in the area. I will then search the area high and low around where the icons are and will not be able to find the Pokémon indicated. This is another area that just feels like it wasn’t quite finished when it shipped out.

Also, I wish that the trainers had dynamic levels. As it is, my understanding is that all trainers including Star Bosses and Gym Leaders have static Pokémon that are always the same level no matter what level your Pokémon are. Because of the freer open world design that encourages you to just go out and explore, I wish that the trainers were dynamically leveled to meet you where you are at when you get to them. That way you’re not going to a city and challenging the Gym Leader with Pokémon too weak, just because that’s where you happened to wander in your adventure.

SV has introduced my least favorite leveling mechanic ever and it needs to be done away with. There are Pokémon that evolve only after taking X number of steps in a single point of being outside of their Poke Ball. If they go back in their Poke Ball, the count starts over. There’s no way to know how many steps the Pokémon has taken either. Then, you have to level it up via battle/candies. I abhor this evolution method. I think it’s great that they wanted to branch out and utilize some of the new features in SV to make evolution a bit more interesting, but this was not the way to do it. If you accidentally go too fast, your Pokémon gets sucked back in its ball and you have to start over. You never know how many steps you’re at, so it’s a complete guessing game. At least with happiness, you could go to an NPC to get it checked.

Here are some more nitpicky things I have against SV. First, Why does Koraidon not use its wheels to move? It just runs! Why does it have the wheels then!? It drives me insane. I know Miraidon uses its wheels, so why not Koraidon? Is it because Koraidon is supposed to be connected to the ancient past instead of the future? That’s a dumb reason in my opinion. Another nitpick is that the food and sandwich mechanics in the game seem to have more depth involved that’s not explained very well in-game (or I haven’t gotten to the explanation). Third, there is character customization, but it’s pretty lacking overall and the inability to change your core clothes (shirt and pants) in any meaningful way is a bummer. You’re stuck wearing one of four different school uniforms and you can add hats, glasses, gloves, etc. to make it a bit more unique. I’m not a fan. In addition, please make the final evolutions of the starters cooler and less humanoid. Up until the game released and I saw the final forms, I was team Quaxly, but after seeing the final forms, the one I disliked the least was Fuecoco’s so that’s what I went with. I’m over humanoid starters. Finally, stop having the rival pick the starter weak to you! I don’t know when they made this change from the originals, but I’m tired of it. I understand that the games are trying to have a friendlier rivalry and they want to make the game easier for children, but one of the best things about the early games was the constant challenge of trying to overcome your rival and that’s been stripped away. At the very least, give us two rivals, one for each of the starters that you don’t choose.

I do want to take a moment to discuss multiplayer options. There are options you’d expect from past games to battle and trade online using Link Codes (sadly no GTS). This method isn’t my favorite personally, but it is what it is. You can also use the Union Circle to connect with up to three friends and have them teleported to your game. I did this with Daniel and it was fun. I wish it was a bit more interactive but we had a blast just running around Paldea being chased by Flamigos. When a person enters a battle, it should be noted that you can keep moving along, get into your own battle, or just sit and watch assuming that the battle appears on your end (it doesn’t always). You can battle and trade with the people you’re connected with, but sadly, you have to go through the normal online menus although it seems to automatically connect you (or at least make it a lot easier to connect). I think it would be better if you could just go up to their character and talk to them to start up a battle or trade.

At the end of the day, I feel like SV is a huge step up for the Pokémon franchise. A lot of the new gameplay elements are fantastic. The open world is a huge step up, the Pokémon look phenomenal, and having multiple storylines is a great way to change things up and keep players engaged. I really like these games and if it weren’t for the glaring problems that point to a rushed release, they would definitely be some of my favorite entries. If patches are released to address the problems then the game can become great, but as it is at writing, I cannot ignore the multitude of problems.