Pokémon Scarlet And Violet Are Tragic
[Opinion Piece] Scarlet and Violet come so close to perfection it hurts
It’s been a few months since I really discussed Nintendo here on the Journal. I got the Switch 2 the day it came out and I’ve been enjoying my time with the device but there is a sense of it all being business as usual just with better specs and most of the stuff I’ve been waiting for: namely Metroid Prime 4, a new generation of Pokémon and Age of Imprisonment, aren’t quite out yet. It’s been laying pretty neglected since late-August, but this week, that all changed when I spotted Pokémon Violet on sale at a nice discount on Amazon and quickly scooped it up.
I realise for some of you, this might be a surprise: I’ve openly stated in Notes that I have very little interest in Legends Z-A and I have vague recollections of bad-mouthing the Pokémon series in a previous article but the truth is… it’s out of disappointment, not hatred. Pokémon Sapphire was the first video game I ever played, I rewatched my Pokémon: The Movie VHS so much as a kid it started skipping, I was a rabid Pokémon fan until I was 14 years old and me and my brother’s shared experience of Gens 1, 2 and 3 as kids is a point of nostalgic discussion between us.
So what changed? Well, Pokémon changed and not for the better, in my opinion.
Pokémon Black and White released in 2010 when I was 10 years old and it was the first sign that my then lifelong love for the series was running out of steam. Black and White today are regarded as the peak of the franchise by many but at the time, they were actually quite disliked; for my part, I thought the new Pokémon designs lacked the charm and quality of the previous generations, the darker tone and storytelling felt a little out of place and the new Fairy type was pretty blatantly overpowered. I definitely liked Black and White, but nowhere near as much as Diamond and Pearl and especially not as much as my favourite Pokémon: Emerald.
My interest in Pokémon was dulled even further when, instead of continuing the traditional generational cycle, Game Freak opted to make a Pokémon Black and White 2, to this day I’ve not played the sequels because as a 12 year old, I just didn’t see what another romp through the same region had to offer… I still don’t at 25. Please, if you love Black and White 2, tell me why in the comments, what’s the appeal? Is it much different? Should I grab a copy?
2013 now and this is when shit really hit the fan: Pokémon X and Y, what a load of crap.
X and Y introduced the unlimited XP Share between equipped Pokémon which combined with the bottom-of-the-barrel difficulty made this the first, and only, game in the series I’ve actively been bored of while playing; a game made for kids doesn’t have to be easy or treat the audience like idiots, if you grew up with Cynthia’s Garchomp and Trainer Red atop Mt Silver like I did, then I know you want the future youth to experience that kind of generational trauma as well.
To bring this very long introduction to an end, the Hoenn remakes weren’t enough to rekindle my love for Pokémon and until the early 2020’s I wrote the series off as something I’d grown out of.
Returning To Pokémon
In late-2022, after a few years away, I decided to rebuy a Nintendo Switch now that the library had been bulked out with exclusives and completely unaware of the controversy (or really, anything Pokémon post-2014) I enthusiastically threw Sword in my kart after seeing screenshots. No Dexit drama, no online reviews, no whining, I purposely went in blind and… I really enjoyed it.
Back when I was playing Pokémon, it mostly looked like this:
Or this:
So the technical enhancements, while still lagging behind most games, were a huge positive change from my perspective, as was the abandonment of 2D sprites which is something I’d dreamed of from a ‘real’ Pokémon game since growing up: since loving games like Pokémon Colosseum and Stadium. It helped that Sword and Shield were directly pandering to a British audience with the Galar region being based on England and Wales, I ate it up, it was really charming to see a vision of England that had been hit with the Japanification beam; Postwick is the most real sounding fake English town ever.
Something I also really enjoyed is the balance: Dragon types are easier to counter in modern Pokémon, Fairy types are less potent and Ice types are less abysmal.
My liking of the relatively hated Sword and Shield shattered my idea of what I thought I knew and enjoyed about Pokémon. For years, I’d complained to people I ran into who still played the series that I didn’t enjoy Pokémon anymore because the games had gotten too easy, the new Pokémon designs were crap and that I’d grown out of the IP… but here I was enjoying what other fans like me thought was literal sewage. I had to go back to where it started: to my childhood Gameboy cartridges.
Using a combination of Virtual Console, the SNES Super Gameboy and original hardware I embarked on a huge binge of classic Pokémon to refresh my opinion on these games and get to the bottom of what exactly it was that I liked and disliked about them. I didn’t just play the generations in order but several different versions. Across 3 months, I finished Blue, Yellow, Silver, Crystal and most of Emerald and I also grabbed Legends Arceus around this time and put in more than 20 hours. In Spring 2024, I was all-in on Pokémon.
In my opinion, these are the elements that make up a good Pokémon game:
Great Pokémon: The most crucial ingredient in the Pokémon game recipe is the roster of Pokémon itself: if the designs aren’t likeable, the monsters are weak and there aren’t enough interesting options for each type then it drags the whole experience down. Sapphire, Emerald and Ruby famously had barely any Fire or Electric types on offer but those you could get had great designs and high utility, so it was passable.
Great Characters: The plot of Pokémon always plays second-fiddle to the player’s own journey, therefore, it’s better to have strong characters: characters you can hate, characters you can understand, characters that make great rivals or characters that build intrigue. Part of why Pokémon Red, Blue and Yellow are so great is because of that ending. After a whole game of Gary taunting you, flaunting his skills and being one step ahead of you, at the peak of his arrogance, after he’s been crowned the Champion minutes before your arrival, you take his crown and destroy his ego. This is the kind of satisfying pay-off that comes with building a convincing dickhead across 20+ hours.
Great Worldbuilding: The best Pokémon games are set in regions with distinct lore, geographic and cultural characteristics. Johto is traditional and spiritual, lined with ancient ruins and centuries old towers with dozens of local myths while Hoenn possesses thriving ports and sandy beaches, Unova is distinctly metropolitan and the original Kanto region has a very small-town feel. A good Pokémon region should almost feel like a separate country entirely from the rest and immerse the player in a new culture, history and relationship with the creatures.
Great Gameplay: For many, Pokémon was a gateway drug into turn-based JRPG’s and while I never really made that jump, I credit my tolerance of this kind of gameplay to the Pokémon series. A good Pokémon game needs to have interesting moves, type counters that make sense and enable interesting builds. There has also been a long-standing effort to introduce an extra ‘gimmick’ or pillar to the Pokémon system and this can really enhance the experience too; I can’t stand X and Y but the Mega Evolutions are probably the best example.
A Future That Never Was
I chose the title of this article carefully. I don’t mean that Scarlet and Violet are tragic in that mocking, exasperated way that we often do in British English when we want to say something is incredibly shoddy, rather Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are tragic because they reach within spitting distance of the idealised perfect Pokémon game, at least by my criteria.
There have been some reeking Pokémon designs in every generation (Slowbro and Magneton, there’s 2 from the first) but the quality seemed to decline rapidly from Black and White onwards before hitting rock bottom in X and Y and then slowly improving. At last, I think the rough times are over because for the first time since 2010, I can say that I liked more new designs than I disliked in my time with Scarlet and Violet so far. I own several pet birds in real life and make it a tradition to catch the first flying type I see in every generation, so imagine my delight when the thing gained a fire typing upon its first evolution. Awesome.
Ignoring the fact that characters throw Spanish words into their speech in a universe where Spain doesn’t exist (reminds me of the infamous Italian bistro line from Ace Combat) Scarlet and Violet’s Paldea is incredibly distinct and fun to explore. Artsy little towns, sleepy beach villages and colourful urban centres all mix with the austere and the ancient to create a fun, Japanified Iberian atmosphere.
I think gameplay might be the best it’s ever been in Scarlet and Violet. For years I’ve found these games too easy, too repetitive and too safe but Game Freak did a lot to remedy these issues. The Starfall Camps provide a significantly more challenging encounter than your average gym, the titans sprinkled across the map make for a tough occasional boss fight (with a great reward in granting you more movement tech) and the new mechanics: being able to send your Pokémon out to auto-battle, the inclusion of campaign online CO-OP… this is the first game I’ve played in forever that’s made me wish I had people to enjoy it with.
And yet… despite all this, Scarlet and Violet fall way short of what they should be. There’s no getting around it, these games are absolutely hideous, even removed from the original Switch and with many of the launch bugs fixed.
The game is just full of these hideously amateurish quirks of presentation. The map has zero options beyond placing waypoints meaning you have to resort to a guide to follow the 3 main quests in the proper order, move animations still don’t look much better than they did in Pokémon Colosseum on the Gamecube, interiors are still a kind of 2D diorama; if this game did have the much-requested voice acting (which I’m glad it doesn’t, the voice acting in modern Nintendo games is hideously grating) then I have to imagine it would’ve been recorded with Xbox 360 headsets to fit in with the rest of the presentation.
Another area SCAR/VI fall short is in the character department, we’ve fallen far from the menacing presence of Red, mute upon his mountain, or Gary Oak being the biggest bellend this side of Johto, now we only get simple caricatures and tropes. Perhaps things get better later but I’ve been disappointed considering the breath of fresh air that Marnie was in Sword and Shield.
A Way Forward
As per usual, everything I write ends up taking twice the time and being twice as long as I want it to, so much so that I was undercut by the great Harrison Polites (who you should definitely be reading) Harrison’s article that released very recently touches upon a lot of these same points in regards to Legends Z-A; the last few Pokémon games have come agonisingly close to perfection, we’re so close to the greatest game in this series being made, I can almost taste it.
If you weren’t aware then a pretty giant leak came out recently essentially detailing Game Freak’s upcoming plans and according to that leak, next year will see the release of the next generation: Pokémons Wind and Waves, with the power of the Switch 2 and all the lessons of the past half decade of Pokémon, I hope this is the moment we’ve all been waiting for: the proverbial level 36 where the franchise evolves into its final form.
Thank you very much for reading to the end, I hope you enjoyed today’s post, as always I’ll be happy to chat in the comments below and please like and subscribe to the Journal for more.
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I played Pokémon Y after skipping a few generations and it was genuinely the worst game I’ve ever played. Just insultingly easy and the creature designs were so dumb. I think I eventually beat most of the battles using only my starter because that was the most time efficient thing to do.
Great article on Pokemon S/V. Once you get over the muddy graphics it's a genuinely fantastic game, and it's a shame most reviews focus on just that fact.
As a B/W fan, if you didn't like B/W, you probably won't like B2/W2. Part of what made it so special to me was the "where are they now" element as the game takes place a couple of years after the main game. Seeing a character you liked turned into a Gym leader was genuinely fun. Though, I still enjoy the original B/W over the sequels.