Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is a Mess
Spoiler free video. Buenas noches, fellow jerry cans. You’ve all probably been waiting for this video. What do I think about the new generation 9 games, Pokemon A Study in Pink and Ultra Violet I mean Pokemon Scarlet and Violet? Well, do I even need to tell my opinion on this game, just look at any Twitter post with the hashtag on the game. Dear Pokemon fans, what did you expect? The indie game developer company Game Freak, oh I’m sorry, not many Pokemon fans get this is me being sarcastic, the multi-million dollar company with less technical skill than
an indie game developer company Game Freak, literally released 2 games in a span of 1 year. Let me repeat that. A developer company with questionable technical skills made 2, 60 dollar triple-A games on an HD console in a year, and literally one of the games is an open world. What did you expect will be the result? Well this is the result, my children. At this point, I’m waiting for Crowbcat to make a video about this game like how he did for Cyberpunk 2077. I don’t get it. Why is this game released in November 2022? We
already had a Pokemon game released early this year, Legends Arceus. I think no one would have been mad if they skipped this holiday season. Arlo made a really good point with this
why this game came out the way it is because of the pure greed of the Pokemon Company, they wanted to capitalize on the financial benefits of releasing a game in a holiday season. Pokemon fucking Company never allows delays unlike other Nintendo franchises. That’s why I really cannot blame this game’s shortcomings on the director Shigeru Ohmori or any of the developers at Game Freak, they were assigned with an impossible task with an unreasonable deadline. I’m 99% sure the developers were crunched. Shame on you Tsunekazu Ishihara and the heads of TPC, I’m blaming you fucking business hacks.
The game, the developers, the consumers, and the fans are all just suffering because of your goddamn greed. Okay for real though, what do I think of the game. This is my first impressions review, not a full review so my thoughts may change when I do a full review of this in the coming future. I’ve played about 10 hours of the game, I haven’t beaten it yet, so keep that in mind. Anyways, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet in one word, it’s a mess. It’s a very buggy, kinda horrible looking mess. But, you might be surprised to hear
this from me, it’s not all bad. The problem with this game is, just like other mid Pokemon games except USUM and BDSP, it’s a mixed bag of mess. There are good things and bad things, it’s not just a completely bad experience, and that almost makes it infuriating more because the game had potential to be greater. What do I mean by that? Let’s talk about this game’s visuals first because that’s the hottest issue. And again, it’s not just terrible bugginess like some viral Tweets might want to make you believe, it’s a mix of bad and good.
First, shockingly, they put in a lot of work into the character and Pokemon models. Like all the Pokemon got new upgraded textures, and some even got updated animations so the game looks better than gen 8 in terms of that. Just look at the detail of the fabric of the clothes of characters, or when characters get wet in the rain, it’s honestly well done. I like how my Pokemon, which is a bread, actually has bread-like textures. Most Pokemon look like they have real fur now instead of plastic figures. I will give kudos and my personal thanks
to the Pokemon creatures modeling department. However, the world these characters roam in, is a completely different story. And I’ll just say it, this game is awful visually. The textures of the world somehow feels worse than the gen 8 games, the pop-ins of character models is the worst I’ve ever seen in a Nintendo Switch game. The worst part is the framerate, my god. First of all, models that are like 2 meters away from the character drop to like 5 frames per second, it’s honestly embarrassing. Walking around a city in this game is just a bait for
laughing stock. Like, is that supposed to be a windmill, or a fucking clock tower? Oh, it is a windmill. The overall framerate of the game, Jesus Christ, it’s about as bad as the original Diamond and Pearl on the DS. It stutters constantly, I’ve had people asking me on stream if this was a problem with the stream video or the capture card, but trust me, this game stutters like crazy and I’m worried my Switch will explode from playing this game This is the most unoptimized game I’ve ever played from a Nintendo franchise. Seriously, it should be
a crime to release a game that runs like this, what happened to fucking standards? This visual clash of excellently textured Pokemon characters and the terrible looking and running Paldea region basically sums up the game. The first 3 hours of the game is just straight-up fucking terrible. It’s a game directed by Shigeru Ohmori so I kinda expected this, but still. Can we like, have less fucking tutorials and hand-holding that goes on for hours? This game is about as bad as Sun and Moon’s first island when it comes to the tutorials, you’ll be spamming the A-button and
just skipping all the dialogue because it’s explaining things you already know. It’s not like Pokemon is a 25 year old franchise or there have been 3 fucking installments in the past 2 years right? Also, I want to ask you viewers, please help me understand, what’s the purpose of a school setting in this game? Why is there a school, why does the main plot revolve around a school, why are you a school student, why are the main villains school bullies, what is the purpose of the school in a gameplay sense It’s an open-world game, you’re not
gonna go to class or return to school at any point of the story what the hell is the purpose of the school? Did they just want to rip off Harry Potter or Fire Emblem Three Houses? Now to talk about something positive about the game, the game does pick-up and get a lot better when the tutorials are over. And it’s truly an open-world Pokemon unlike Legends Arceus where it felt more like an open-sandbox game, you can go anywhere and do anything you want, and almost no barriers. I do find this game much better than SWSH and
Legends Arceus frankly. And it’s because the world is much more fun to explore than fucking linear Galar and empty Hisui. Compared to Hisui, Paldea is more engaging to me because there are actual cities, NPCs, and items to discover while exploring. Most of the cities I’ve visited all have nice architecture and are memorable and unique. It’s just a shame it’s ruined by the horrendous graphics and performance plus glitches, and I smell a lot of cutting corners because you can’t enter most of these buildings. Anyways, the overall structure. The game gives you 3 quests. 1 quest is
the classic Pokemon story of beating 8 gym leaders, 1 quest is going around fighting the villains Team Star and beating each of their admins, and 1 quest is trying to beat giant strong Pokemon sort of like Alola’s Totem Pokemon and Hisui’s Alpha Pokemon. All of them add-up to the 18 Pokemon types, so there are really 18 unique gym leader-esque challenges throughout the whole region for each type, and you’re free to choose the order of how you want to beat the game. I think this is a really solid design for an open-world game, and a nice
transition from traditional Pokemon formula to open-world format. Buuuuut, they had to ruin it with 1 big critical mistake, and that there is no level scaling! All the NPCs, wild Pokemon, and bosses have the same level no matter how many badges you got in the game. Meaning, despite being an open world game, you’re forced to follow a linear path, and that’s the level curve. To demonstrate this, I tried going to a hard area on purpose to see if I could beat it somehow. However, it’s near impossible to do this because a level 20’s Pokemon can’t beat
a level 40’s Pokemon no matter how good at the game you are. And even if you somehow beat the harder areas, or at least skip easy areas and come back to it cause you missed it, the easy areas will still be the same. The NPCs and bosses will be super weak, so you will cheese the game and it will not be fun at all! Worse, let’s say you caught a high level Pokemon with a lucky Great Ball or something. You try to use it to tackle a hard area, but you can’t do that either because
obedience is a thing in the game! High-leveled Pokemon don’t obey you unless you have the correct number of gym badges, making them useless so you have to use weak Pokemon, which again, forces linearity! Goes completely against the basic sense of what an open world game is supposed to be. I feel like they should have put in an algorithm that determines the level of NPCs and wild Pokemon depending on how many badges you have. Was that too hard for Game Freak, did they have no knowledge on how to do it, or worse but likely, they didn’t
have time to implement an algorithm? Back to positives. Just like SWSH, the gym leader fights were the highlight for me, I really like the characters and some of their teams. I had most fun in the gym leader battles, and even when you follow the path the game wants you to do so, the gym leader Pokemon are pretty hard to beat, tha AI is quite smart, so for people who were disappointed with Sword and Shield’s easy difficulty, you will be satisfied here. Also making a middle-age wage slave you would see on the Tokyo metro into a
gym leader was hilarious, the guy named Larry is my favorite gym leader in the game by far so far. The overall character design of the important NPCs are great too as always. I was super disappointed by the main character’s design from the trailers, but all the important characters like leaders and rivals are done well. I also really like the two rivals I’ve met, the feisty battle-hungry girl, and the dorky long-haired due is much more likable than fucking Hop or Marnie. However, my opinion on character design might change though when I meet fucking Iona, she can
burn in hell. Oh yeah I should talk about this too. I think you can sum up this game’s problem with customization. I like how diverse you are with hair choices, eye shape, makeup and stuff, you can change them almost any time easily. Also you can dress up male characters with female stuff, so I had my character try on a typical k-pop star look, non jerrycan version Gireum look, and femboy version of the Wendy’s mascot look. Problem is, why are there no clothes options? You can buy plenty of socks, hats, glasses, and gloves, you can only
dress in school uniform clothes. Again, it’s another moment of this game being rushed and incomplete, it feels like they didn’t have time to make the main-body clothes and just stopped after making the socks, just like the rest of this bloody game. This game is a mess, but I will admit I had the most fun out of any Switch Pokemon game so far, and would call it the best Switch Pokemon game. But then again remember that I think Sword and Shield, BDSP, Legends Arceus are shit fucking games and Let’s Go was just, mid, it’s a very
low bar to pass. I would take any gen 3-6 game except DP over this any day. But, hey, at least they achieved something. But, that makes me more angry, because all these shortcomings could have been ironed out if it was just given one more year. Imagine if Pokemon Company actually let Game Freak invest some time to make an engine suited for an open world so it’s not a glitchy mess, and put in some level-scaling algorithm into the game. But that will never happen. Another world, another time, another universe. Oh and hoping for a patch that
fixes everything? “You’re living in a dream world!” I think this game’s engine is fundamentally broken. I don’t have much faith that Game Freak has the skills to patch this game into a more playable state. Also daddy Ishihara is probably forcing the team to work on the next gen 10 game already, aiming for a 2025 release, so they won’t have time to patch it except have some interns make some crappy DLC. So in the end, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet is just another chapter of the “What Could Have Been” book that Ishihara is writing. If the game
had good visuals and proper level scaling, I would actually have called this game great. All of this lost potential was all because, they were, say it with me: LAZY. RUSHING. AND CUTTING CORNERS!
