REVIEW: ‘Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’ Lacks Personality But Exceeds In Playability (Switch)

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet constitutes the ninth generation of the familiar catching, trading, and battling franchise that has consumed popular culture worldwide for over 25 years. Expanding off its most recent iterations, Scarlet and Violet offers the franchise’s first main-line fully open world for players to navigate uninhibited and proceed through in whatever direction they please as they strive to complete three story paths or, simply, to catch ’em all.

It’s been a long while since I’ve attempted to be the very best. Sun and Moon were my most recent main-line forays, and they were short-lived compared to my halcyon Gen II-III days. Pokemon has changed a lot over the years, and for players who haven’t been here for a while, it’s important to calibrate expectations towards the numerous quality-of-life improvements and mechanical tweaks that Scarlet and Violet make to the tried and true formula. At its heart, Gen IX is what Pokemon has always been. An adventure through a vast world filled with amazing creatures to befriend, quirky characters to encounter, and a sense of a world bigger than your own at your fingertips.

All three of those factors continue to ring true. With an open world environment comes a world where 100s of diverse Pokemon actually roam the wild, visible at all times and a part of the environment in ways you’d expect icing beings to be. The gym leaders and various schoolmates and faculty from the school your character joins at the beginning add personality to every turn. And altogether, you cannot help but feel completely sucked into the Paldea region and the world of Pokemon.

Of course, assuming you can get past the graphical challenges. While I personally experienced virtually no game-breaking or bizarre graphical moments (as well-documented in the But Why Tho Discord and beyond), it is quite obvious that Scarlet and Violet’s graphics are underbaked on the whole. The fidelity is low, textures and models load slowly and shift around awkwardly, movement looks ridiculous from a distance, and frame rate is often dropped drastically. It’s frankly unacceptable for the game to have shipped with such glaring and unfinished graphics and memory leakage.

While I do not absolve the game of this sin, I am able to look past it on account of how simply fun and satisfying it is to play nonetheless. Living in an age of over 1000 Pokemon means endless options of companions to choose from as you decide whether to take on the Pokemon League and its gym leaders, the villainous Team Star, or uncover the secrets of the Titan Pokemon on the game’s three plot lines. I appreciate that, truly, there is no set order.

Level scaling early in the game is dull, allowing you to overcome the first half of the game’s challenge with absolute ease, but it’s a necessary fixture to allow exploration and experimentation with different Pokemon teams. The new auto-battling mechanic mixed with the return of automatic experience sharing among your whole team means you can more quickly than ever train up new Pokemon and feel less of a burden experimenting with different types of coverage and move sets. That doesn’t mean you won’t get attached to your starting team as I did and proceed to train an Everstoned Mareep all the way to glory, but once the second half of your adventure commences, the leveling does hit a sharper incline. Although, random trainers rarely follow suit. Most, disappointingly, only have one Pokemon to fight and rarely offer a challenge, especially considering they are all completely optional.

Other quality-of-life updates like navigation via your Koraidon or Miraidon and fast travel are a double-edged sword. On one hand, it’s wonderful never to have to waste a party slot on a Pokemon who is purely for navigation or to waste one of your four moves on a navigation move you don’t care to actually use. But, on the other, it has created somewhat of an oversimplification of the game’s navigation. Perhaps I’m a bit nostalgia-bound on this front, but there was, for me, an enjoyment to the sense of progression that continuously achieving moves like Strength and the gym badge requisite for using it outside of combat. Not because that mechanic itself was fun. But because you felt progression. In Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, there is rarely, if ever, that level of a sense of progression, no matter how fun it is leveling up your Pokemon and collecting badges.

Which is an antecedent to my overall challenge with the game. For as full of life as the world is with its wild Pokemon and myriad characters, it still feels totally void of personality. The wild environments you traverse are just vast, largely empty spaces composing the most typical elements: grassy fields, snowy mountains, dark caves, deserts, and so forth. One muddy area feels kind of unique, but on the whole, it just feels like a blank world that any game could inhabit. The towns have some charm to them, with flower festivals and open-air markets, but your incentive to stay in them for longer than it takes to beat their gym is nearly non-existent.

There are pre-gym challenges that have to be completed before you can take on a gym leader—essentially mini-games that break up the game’s pace and are mostly innocuous—so you do get a splash of time in the towns. But when you’re done? I feel no reason to return to most of them besides to shop, maybe. There’s no real side-questing with random denizens you have to fetch lemonade for,  strange houses off the side of the road, or roadblocks you have to navigate around outside of the pre-gym tests and the Star bases, sometimes fencing roads off until you beat them. The music doesn’t even offer anything especially memorable and earwormy besides the jam that blasts when you reach a gym leader’s final Pokemon, and they terastallize. That is a bop.

The new gimmick of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, terastallization, is a pretty interesting one. Every Pokemon now has a tera type completely separate from their actual type, which, when activated, changes the Pokemon to that type and buffs them up until defeated or the battle ends. It can’t be reused until it recharges and can be a total game-changer in a match. While I firmly believe that this may be a really interesting mechanic comparatively, in the single-player game, it’s still a bit mundane for me. In gym battles, you always know what tera type the final Pokemon will have, so preparing accordingly isn’t that much of a hassle, especially given the wide availability of hundreds of Pokemon to choose from from the second the game begins. But certainly, it can be a way to provide defensive coverage to your own team or boost you offensively through these changes, so it’s a mechanic worthy of further consideration.

The ways by which you can catch Pokemon with diverse tera types are either by encountering them in the wild in set locations or through four-person tera raids. The former can get quite difficult, as the levels of these Pokemon are far higher than everything else in the area, and moreover, they’re buffed up. The latter is a mixed bag. You can play these solo or online with friends (a whole separate world of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet content to be covered separately), and the battles rank by stars. In all my hours playing, though, I never was able to encounter a raid higher than two star-difficulty, so they became exceedingly easy after my team was able to dispatch them in one hit every time.

The lack of personality to the world and sense of progress are a shame, but they still don’t completely mute the joy of playing Pokemon Scarlet and Violet at its core. Battling is smooth as ever, with an endless array of moves to test out. The fact that you can now forget and relearn moves at will, build TMs from material gathered by defeating Pokemon and even rename your crew on the spot all make some of the simplest things that much more enjoyable to navigate since they’re not blocked off behind the fourth gym, or the like.

As a whole, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet is the most fun I’ve had on a Pokemon adventure in a long, long time. But this is completely in spite of itself. There are unforgivable graphical issues, and despite endless charming creatures and characters, the open world itself lacks nearly completely in personality or a sense of progression. Nonetheless, it has never felt better being a Pokemon trainer than it does in Gen IX, thanks to the smoothest mechanics yet and quality-of-life improvements.

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet is available now on Nintendo Switch.