Pokémon Scarlet and Violet Aren’t as Bad as You’ve Heard
By Luke Condon
Over Christmas break I’ve been neglecting sleep, college work and many other important aspects of my life in favour of playing through Pokémon Violet, and it’s the most conflicted I’ve felt about a game in a long time. Most reviews and articles written about the game (and its counterpart Pokémon Scarlet) focus on its most obvious problem: the performance issues. They’re right to do so; these games run terribly, even for Nintendo Switch titles, and combined with bugs and poor graphics it can be hard to see what the new Pokémon games have going for them. As divisive as they are, do Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet deserve a second chance?
Since Pokémon X and Pokémon Y, the sixth generation of games that were released in 2013, the series has been in stagnation. Mainline games have seen a drop in Pokémon design quality, as well as a lack of innovation and unnecessary simplification of major game mechanics, while remakes have suffered from lazy design choices and the removal of important features from the original games they’re based on. Long-time fans of the series have clamoured for change, but GameFreak, developers and part-owners of the Pokémon franchise, have traditionally preferred to do things their own way, leaving feedback by the wayside. Many players consider the last generation of Pokémon, heralded by the release of Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield, to be an all-time low for the series. These were the first games to omit Pokémon from previous generations, a controversial change that turned many away. Pokémon Sword and Shield also saw a steep decline in the quality of writing and characters in the series, and featured yet another poorly-received gimmick in the ‘Gigantamax’ mechanic.
It’s easy to see why members of the Pokémon fanbase are wary and weary, at this point, and the new games don’t do much to assuage fears at first glance. Lag is a huge problem, with frames-per-second dropping severely in certain areas of the game. The games struggle with the limitations of their hardware, and the switchover to a more performance intensive open-world format doesn’t help matters on this front. Even after their first venture into the open-world genre earlier this year with Pokémon Legends: Arceus, GameFreak still have little experience developing (and optimising) these types of worlds, and it shows. These performance issues could be somewhat justified if Pokémon Scarlet and Violet were graphically stunning games, but they’re not; low-quality textures are frequently reused and the games’ animations and models leave a lot to be desired.
Sounds like a whole lot of negatives, right? Critics and fans alike have expressed their disdain for the state Pokémon Scarlet and Violet have launched in, with the games receiving lower review scores than ever before. Still, I went ahead and purchased a copy of Pokémon Violet, despite warnings from said reviews, and I was pleasantly surprised. I soon found that the performance issues, while an annoyance, are just that: an annoyance, not an insurmountable roadblock. After I learnt to ignore the unimpressive graphics and frame drops in order to focus on the gameplay itself, I was quickly hooked.
Scarlet and Violets’ open-world maps are what every child has ever dreamed of in a Pokémon game, and the freedom they afford players gives rise to the best Pokémon experience in years. Exploration is unrestricted, and the games’ three sprawling storylines can be experienced in any order. This means that players looking for a challenge (which has long been absent from the series) can opt to take on more difficult areas early on, but those seeking a more traditional Pokémon experience can follow the beaten path and take things slow. The Pokémon designs themselves are much improved on previous generations, apart from a few outliers; I immediately found a favourite in Nacli, a cuboid salt-based creature that I encountered early on (get it? NACL-i? Salt?). Most of all, I was delighted to find that the games’ writing team seems to have rediscovered their spark, with Scarlet and Violet featuring an engaging plot and well-written characters. Pokémon games have been known to broach some surprisingly dark topics (for a kid’s game) in the past, but I was still taken aback by some of the games’ plot beats this time around.
I don’t mean to make excuses for the abysmal technical state of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet; the world’s highest-grossing franchise has no business putting out half-finished games, and the Nintendo Switch’s hardware can’t be used as an excuse when other titles like the Zelda series’ Breath of the Wild have fared so much better with the same limitations. However, if (and that’s a big if) GameFreak and Nintendo can resolve these issues, we might be left with the best Pokémon game in years, and a ray of hope for the future of the series.