Pokemon Scarlet / Violet - What happened here?

 

Pokemon Scarlet & Violet looked promising from the fist announcements from a few months ago. But this new game in the series could've had a month longer in development. 

Promising to be the very first open world Pokemon game, which has to say sounds impressive on paper. The early pictures we had looked very promising and sharp. But upon release...what the heck happened?! How did we get from Pokemon Arceus (released back in January '22) to this ... mess. 

This is the Sonic 06 of Pokemon games, ladies and gentlemen. However, it's not ALL Bad. While  the game hits hard with its performance issues it's unfortunate as the story and overall setting is REALLY GOOD. I do enjoy the fact that you can also now have a really good customizable character option instead of making your characters look like Generic Guy A and Generic Girl B. 

I did get Scarlet & Violet , unaware of the performance issues. I only noticed today that there are so many people talking about how wacky this game runs on the Switch. And they're right. Holy crap, 

Photo taken on my Nintendo Switch console, I got a barrier glitch upon starting the game. 

There are camera glitches. But what's worse is the frame rate drops. It looks like this game is too  big for itself on the Switch or someone messed up the rendering process bigtime. There are points where the game renders in 20 to 15 FPS. It's ridiculous.

This is the Sonic 06 of Pokemon games, ladies and gentlemen.

It's unfortuante because although I haven't gotten very far on Violet, I have been enjoying the big open worlds of how big this game is. So much stuff happens before the game actually begins, it's certainly bigger than the last few Pokemon games i've played before. Maybe a bit too big.

Photo of my Nintendo Switch console, I got stuck behind these doors at the first part of the game and it didn't open for me for a bit. I had to go out and in again, everyone was really confused as  to why I was there inside. Maybe I wasn't supposed to get here yet?

Shadows go to blurry to downright weird and the amount of popins is probably enough to give people a seizure if you're epileptic. How did any of these performance bugs not get noticed during quality control?

I do however, like a few other things about Pokemon Scarlet & Violet. I haven't tried Scarlet yet but the two games are set in two different time zones. One game is set in the past and the other is set in the future. That's pretty cool. Not only that but there are diffreent Pokemon and Characters that help you in both games apparently, which is cool. 

Sadly, they're using the Sword/Shield approach and it's not really a topdown Pokemon game like Let's Go Pikachu or Diamond & Pearl Remasters.

Alright, calm down, buddy.

One game is set in the past and the other is set in the future. That's pretty cool.

I also really like the new city/university area of the map you get into after you finish up at the lighthouse at the beginning. But then I started realizing something. It looked like to me the game was running on N64 type graphics. It looks like a N64 game! 

I do like the new battling system which is slightly updated from Sword/Shield & Arceus. There are no  transitions this time which is really nice.

I enjoyed Arceus a lot and I really want to enjoy Scarlet & Violet. It's just a shame that there are too many performance issues and bugs affecting the QOL of this game. I still want to continue on with my adventures. I really hope Nintendo eventually do end up patching these games. I feel like they were just rushed out a bit too fast before the holiday season. I honestly thought these two were going to come out in December, not November and was surprised that I did see they are coming out in November.

While the main part of the exploration and narritive is really well done, I think it's a bit too early to call this game a hit. But I want it to be good. Please, Nintendo. Patch this game!

Pokemon Scarlet & Violet are out now on Nintendo Switch.

Score - 6 / 10 

Pros

• Great story and new area settings are huge
• I like the soundtrack
• New Pokemon in this game are actually pretty cool

Cons

• Overloaded with Performance Issues & Bugs affecting the game on Switch hardware which makes enjoying the full base game difficult. It's in need of much needed updates & patching.