Before I started playing Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, I didn’t believe it would actually let me stray in the old direction as claimed by developer Game Freak. Despite the increasingly open nature of recent Pokemon games like Sword, Shield, and Arceus, this is still a very linear RPG series, with a series of challenges and plot his points in neat order. I’m in. But when I went to the Pardea region with Huecoco in hand, my mistrust was completely shattered. After several years of experimenting on Switch, Game Freak is an open-world adventure that successfully reinvents the way Pokémon is played while staying true to a nostalgic childhood vision of exploration, adventure, and collecting cute monsters. Officially finally encountered. It’s the transformation I’ve been waiting for, in almost every respect. But the woefully poor performance that comes with it severely undermines an otherwise exciting design evolution.
After a fairly muscular opening route and an explanation of how to go to school and become good at Pokémon, you’re given three main story paths. Each has several objectives and can be tackled in any order. Just like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it’s structured to open four Divine Beasts at once, and it’s like going straight to Hyrule Castle to fight Ganon, leaving school (as far as I know). Then go straight to the hardest gym and challenge yourself, but I don’t really recommend it.
Pokemon Scarlet and Sumire don’t include level scaling, so they’ll be destroyed quickly unless they follow their “intended” path a little more closely. However, trying to reach the goal in the exact order of difficulty requires a lot of inconvenient zigzagging across the giant Paldea map. What I enjoyed so much about them had been spectacularly lost. The first half or so of my adventure was incredibly difficult and rewarding as a result. When I went to tackle an area I had missed, I steamrolled several times in a row before catching up again with more level-appropriate challenges.
I’m not a big fan of challenging a level 35 team and a gym full of level 15 Pokemon, but the inconsistent difficulty not only leveled out by the end of the game, but it made my enjoyment No damage was done. Part of the reason is that Scarlet and Violet’s three story paths are all fairly complex and interesting in their own right (especially compared to Sword, Shield and Arceus’ strangely truncated stories), but Partly because it was a pleasure to explore such a huge world. Game Freak has taken a big step in the right direction with Scarlet and Violet.Even if you reach an overlevel area, you can hunt for items or use Auto Battler’s Let’s Go mode to train weaker monsters. We had a great time, gunning down hordes of Mud Brays.
Additionally, Pokémon wild behavior and animations have also been improved. Magikarps swim up to the shoreline, waving useless on the beach, and swarms of siducks mysteriously congregate to watch your battle. Sword and Shield’s Wild Area looked like someone had spilled bags of random Pokémon all over the place, but in Scarlet and Violet, the monsters moved in incredible swarms and clustered around the water’s edge. Or hide in a tree that resembles a real animal. I couldn’t stop spending hours traversing Pardea’s huge ‘areas’ (a much more open evolution of past games’ ‘routes’) looking for all the monsters hiding there, so this I was able to finish the review.
Aside from the incredible transition to a truly open world, there was one more important takeaway from the previous use of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. It cannot be ignored. Those are technical messes. In fact, there is no moment in these games where you can say it works.
Framerates are all over the place and horribly low, even when only minor effects such as flowing water or weather are on screen. A character model just a few feet away will sometimes pop out very quickly, or move at the speed of a stop-motion animation. Everything has a strange, shimmering blur, with shadows frequently disappearing and suddenly reappearing illogically. Pokemon will dig into walls and floors at odd angles, or get stuck on walls and floors completely. I spent an entire gym battle with one Pokémon half-buried on the floor. The camera sometimes pokes through the mountainside, providing a panoramic view of the video game void and ruining some cool moments (like my Wooper evolution). Everything from combat to menus to cutscenes is constantly lagging behind. Two of his writers have had their crashes on the hard game. This is by far the worst Pokemon game I’ve ever played and he’s one of the worst AAA games I’ve ever played on the Switch.And yes this is When First day patch.
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The saddest thing is that these issues often detract from what would otherwise be Scarlet and Violet’s most glorious standout moments. It’s incredible to be able to see the dazzling light show of a glistening lake in another place, a towering red mesa in another. You know you can travel to all three locations. A seamless, open world of Pokémon that you can explore as you please is a dream come true for Pokémon lovers. I thought you could enjoy a lot of great design choices.
But the problem is constant, interrupting just about every moment meant to be spectacular, emotional, or fun. The city is one of the most technically clumsy areas of all. Heck, just running around a particular grass field for a minute or two, it’s impossible to be caught off guard by Pokemon models coming and going, or everything suddenly and dramatically lagging behind. . Going online with her three friends on launch day, what would happen in an already laggy region?
I really hope some early patches can clean up this mess and (can’t believe I’m saying this) more in line with Arceus and Sword and Shield – these The game had technical issues, but the comparison.Because Scarlet and Violet that is It’s fun to play, and aside from some doubts about how exactly certain systems work, Game Freak seems to have a large understanding of what kind of open-world design works in the series. It’s a true realization of Pokemon fantasies while embracing a more modern RPG style. I enjoyed Scarlett and Violet’s wonderful story, characters, monsters, and world, even though I was tired of watching NPCs weirdly slide down giant stairs and disappear in the middle. I want more Pokemon games that play like this.
I look forward to spending more time with Paldea next week before finalizing and scoring my review. I hope this area is the beautiful, sprawling, Pokemon-filled Pardea that artists and designers clearly envisioned and tried to present to me. last week.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. you can find her on her twitter @duck valentine.
