Pokémon Scarlet/Violet review: An Unfinished Masterpiece

12 Oct, 2024

Note: this is an archived post orginally posted on cohost

With the dust settling on Scarlet and Violet's release, there exist, broadly, two camps of players: those for who the rampant technical issues and lack of polish irreparably damaged their experience with the game, and those who enjoyed it despite them. I fall firmly into the latter camp. Pokémon Scarlet is the most fun I've had with a Pokémon game since I was fifteen and blasting through Platinum's battle frontier. I played the game on release and was hooked all the way through to the credits, something which I find rarely happens these days, as I find myself distracted and leaving games unfinished.

Yet, even as the credits rolled on a fantastically enjoyable experience, I couldn't help but notice the wasted potential of the title. The core gameplay ideas work so, so well, yet at times the game appears to actively fight against you enjoying it. So let's dive in and take a look at Pokémon Scarlet and Violet and figure out what went right, and what went wrong.

By now, even people who have never played Pokémon game know how the formula goes. Get your starter, defeat the eight Gym Leaders and your rival, put a stop to the evil team and defeat the Elite Four and become champion. It's a formula that they've put spins on over the years, but every mainline Pokémon game has more or less the same structure, right? Nope, not in Scarlet and Violet. Sure, there are eight Gym Leaders and an "evil" team, but the way you experience them has changed greatly, and in my view, for the better. Cribbing from January's spinoff, Legends Arceus, the focus is instead on free roaming exploration as you expand your team, find items, and then, in your own time, visit the locations that advance each of the three stories.

One of the most surprising things is that, unlike every other Pokémon game I've played, I actually found myself engaged with these story snippets. The "Victory Road" storyline is the most straightforward and familiar, but Nemona is undoubtedly my favourite rival in the series. The game cleverly sets her up as a Champion right from the start, so it actually makes sense that she picks the starter weak to your own, as she helps to train you to become a worthy opponent. It's something you see in real life with competitive communities helping newer players to become good at a game because ultimately, a thriving community is what makes a hobby fun, and Nemona plays fantastically into the enthusiastic and supportive mentor role. The Team Star and Arven storylines have equally fun characters to interact with, with surprising amounts of depth for what we've come to expect from a Pokémon game.

Now, I will qualify this by saying that the stories do not match up to what is normally expected from a typical RPG, with the "twists" being extremely unsurprising and amount of narrative content sparse. The bar for Pokémon stories was somewhere in the Mariana Trench, but nevertheless looking forward to advancing a story beat was a welcome change. There are also some absolutely adorable bits, including Iono's on-point streamer persona, and these cute postcards you get whenever you finish a section. It's clear that some passionate devs worked on this stuff.

In between these sections you'll be roaming around Paldea in the exploring bit of the game. The core gameplay here is really good, but the technical issues really do come to the fore. There is no getting around it: these games look like ass. The developers have done their best to make do, and I did still find exploring very fun, but it was not due to the environmental details that are the star of the best exploration-heavy games. Instead, I was focused on picking up items and looking for new Pokémon to fill my Dex. The very best exploration games (looking at you, Outer Wilds and Breath of the Wild) make exploring for the sake of exploring fun. The environments in Scarlet are serviceable at best, and though they are fun to traverse on your Koraidon or Miraidon-bike, in the main game I never had a moment where I stopped and was in awe of what I was seeing.

And that's really the biggest flaw about the gameplay loop. Sometimes, I close my eyes and imagine what could have been fulfilled had the game been given the time it deserved. Perhaps there could have been an event where, at certain times, Finizen would leap above the waters, lighting the sky with water droplets. There are limitless opportunities for Pokémon interacting with the environment that go begging.

Similarly, the towns and cities are a sea of wasted potential. I actually quite like the towns themselves - they are varied and exciting in their architecture. But there's just nothing to do in any of them. The most you can do is talk to a few NPCs or visit the shops, the vast majority of which are simply portals to a menu rather than explorable environments. There are no sidequests, and precious little storytelling within these towns, which simply act as pit stops on your journey. One of the parts I liked in the Gym storyline is the Normal-type Gym's test, which involves going around the city and gathering clues to solve a riddle. It's a little thing, but it adds some life to the city and we never see anything like it again. What a waste.

The last part of the gameplay is, of course, the battles themselves. Let's quickly cover the designs of the new 'mons: in short, they are excellent. I've never subscribed to the idea that Pokémon designs have been going downhill since Generation 1 and it's the one area where I truly have no complaints. Many of the new creatures are hits, with remarkably few misses. I used a team with five out of six of them being Gen 9 Pokémon and found myself particularly endeared to Clodsire, Tinkaton and Meowscarada, but there's something here for everyone.

The battles themselves are also some of the most challenging in the series, particularly the Team Star fights and the endgame story bosses. It's really good stuff that encourages you to fully enjoy the battle system. Unfortunately, the game offers no guidance on what order to tackle its content, and there is no level scaling. This means that unless you use a guide you will almost certainly experience a point where you have done something out of order and are either wildly over or under leveled. It's just another part of the game that needed a little more care and attention to point the player in the right direction, or to implement level scaling for bosses.

Speaking of lack of polish, let's go down the list of little annoyances that cropped up over the course of my playthrough:

• My game bugged during the Elite Four so the first 10 seconds of the music on a loop were all that played
• All of the Elite Four battles take place in the same, bland, room.
• If you have flying Pokémon out, the camera has trouble focusing on it. If both sides have a flying Pokémon out, then you're looking at an empty space on the ground unless you zoom way out
• Sometimes if you try to jump over a Pokémon, Koraidon will bounce off them instead
• Animations + text always play in sequence instead of at the same time, making the battles more sluggish than they should be. Why not have the leftovers animation, text, and health bar all move at the same time?
• The process of making sandwiches to give the effects you want, is, in general, a chore
• You have to restart your game or go back to the Academy every couple of hours otherwise a memory leak will cause huge lag
• I had one instance of a softlock after a Tera raid battle
• Set mode has been removed. I like to play using it so I need to press B every time I defeat a trainer's Pokémon

Are any of these gamebreaking? No. Are they game-ruining? Also no. But they do add up to paint a picture of a game that was clearly rushed through development and, ultimately, is not the experience it should have been.

And that about wraps up the main part of the storyline and its corresponding gameplay loop. But the eagle-eyed reader may have noticed that in most of my criticism was talked about in terms of the "main gameplay loop". And that's because after you're done with the three main stories, one final section of the game opens up. A section that gave me my favourite mainline Pokémon experience in the history of the series. And a section that made me truly wish this game had had 2-3 years more in development.

Huge endgame spoilers after the break! I'm going to be talking about and spoiling the final section of the game so I highly recommend playing it for yourself first if you have any plans to at all!

Once you're a Pokémon champion and have wrapped up all three main stories, you'll enter the big crater that's been in the centre of your map, taunting you throughout your adventure through Paldea. And when you enter this section, the game morphs into something else entirely. Gone is the fully open world with its expansive but uninteresting environments. It's replaced with a journey on foot to the bottom of the Paldean crater, through a pretty linear path that's got just enough nooks and crannies to make you want to venture off the beaten path. But I wasn't adventuring to try and find items this time. I was adventuring to explore.

The atmosphere in the crater is nothing short of stellar. The music is nothing like what you hear in the rest of the game, evoking echoes of mystery and ancient secrets. The regular battle theme is replaced with a similarly haunting melody. And because you are restricted to be on foot, you can't leap and bound your way down. Instead you are encouraged to soak in the mystery as you advance through abandoned research stations, with logs of a lost research team fleshing out the world. As you advance down you'll start to encounter variations of familiar Pokémon. I was playing Scarlet so I came across Scream Tail, a more primal version of Jigglypuff. And you'll start asking yourself questions like - how did these monsters come to inhabit the crater? The mystery deepens.

And you're not experiencing this alone, either. The three characters that you've formed bonds with over the course of the rest of the game are now acting as your party members, following you and offering commentary and banter as you run and explore—something which hasn't happened throughout any of the previous story. It's a shame there is no voice acting here as it would add a lot to this section, as the interactions between the three of them are extremely charming and do an excellent job of fleshing them out as characters.

Then, as you advance deeper, you'll start to see more unfamiliar Pokémon with unfamiliar names like "Flutter Mane" or "Iron Treads". Descending, deeper, deeper, into the caves below the crater, your professor companion unravels the story and in a sequence which frankly feels out of place with how spectacular it is, the final battle of the game takes place. And it's good! Your opponent is using all paradox Pokémon with extremely high BSTs and you actually have to work for the win (assuming you're not extremely overleveled).

After this, there's a cool scripted battle where you face off against your cover legendary and then... another surprise—as your AI professor companion shuts themselves down. I have to admit, I was expecting some kind of deus ex machina to allow them to live on, given their connection to one of your three companions, but no—we have actual stakes and consequences in a Pokémon game! And with that, the story wraps up and the credits roll (complete with Ed Sheeran).

It struck me when I was playing this section that this was the Pokémon game I had always wanted. It's abundantly clear that a lot of the dev time went into this section, and it shows what the devs can do when they have the time and budget to truly realize this game's potential. It should say something that I've spent almost as much time talking about this section as I have the rest of the game and it's only a couple of hours long.

So here's my plea to Game Freak and the Pokémon Company for the next game. Give your developers two, three, heck even four years more than your standard cycle. They can make something truly great. They can make a Pokémon game that's talked about for years to come in the same way Breath of the Wild is for Zelda. This final section proves there is no shortage of ideas or vision on your development team. If you give them what they need, we won't have Scarlet and Violet all over again: a great game that I enjoyed a huge amount, but hidden beneath, a masterpiece that could have been.