Alongside numerous features from previous games, Violet embraces the open world gameplay that Legends: Arceus dabbled in, letting you explore Paldea in its entirety. Unlocking all of Miraidon’s abilities makes it so that you can go anywhere, with plenty of fast travel points to use. It felt really cool to have the box legendary be my method of travel with its cycle form.

As well, this generation’s battle gimmick is known as Terastelization. Using a device called a Tera Orb, you can empower your Pokémon by infusing them with Terastel energy, altering their typing based on their Tera Type to open up new strategies. For example, take Skeledirge, the final evolution of Fuecoco, becoming Fire/Ghost. It has severe weaknesses to Water, Ground, Dark, and Ghost-types already, but if its Tera Type is something like Dragon, Skeledirge’s resistances and weaknesses change drastically. Now as a pure Dragon-type, Skeledirge becomes resistant to almost everything except Ice (ironically), Fairy, and Dragon-type damage. And if it uses Outrage, a powerful Dragon-type move, that move’s attack power is boosted obscenely due to the intrinsic power boost Terastelization gives, as well as STAB (Same-Type Attack Bonus).

I feel like Terastelization is the end result of learning from the bad and good points of Mega Evolutions from X/Y, Z-Moves from Sun/Moon, and Dynamax from Sword/Shield. Every Pokémon can Terastelize, with different Tera Types offering countless strategies based on the species. The only requirement for Terastelization is needing your Tera Orb to be charged, and though you can only use it once per battle, the game is fairly lenient with such a thing. You can recharge it easily at any Pokémon Center, and if you face a Pokémon that’s Terastelized in the wild or in a Tera Raid, the charge won’t be consumed, so you can use it freely.

Outside of battling, you can return to the academy to take lessons from every teacher, learning important details about other mechanics that are intrinsic to Pokémon alongside other subjects like the history of Paldea. From the basics like leveling up, evolving, and type match-ups to neat worldbuilding tidbits like how Terastelization came to be, there’s plenty to learn. There’s also good incentive as well, as every lesson completed rewards you with EXP candies to quickly level up your Pokémon. It feels nice to come back and learn something new, and also get something good out of it.

This generation takes a page from Sword/Shield’s camping with picnics, combining caring for your Pokémon with the mechanics for food and breeding for eggs. While on a picnic, you can play with your Pokémon, talk to them to check their friendship levels with you, and make sandwiches to buff you and your team in various ways. Different sandwiches give different buffs, from boosting certain types in encounters to making it more likely to find Shiny Pokémon out in the world. As well, if you have Pokémon of compatible genders and egg groups, you will eventually find eggs stashed in the picnic basket that will eventually hatch after traveling for long enough.

I will admit, it’s quite lovely to make impromptu pit stops and get cozy with my team. Sometimes you just have to stop and admire the scenery. It does get slightly irritating to do it constantly to max friendship levels with certain Pokémon, though.

After completing the full story, there is an additional post-game challenge. Four mysterious Pokémon, the Treasures of Ruin, are found sealed inside vaults around Paldea, and you can only free them by removing stakes scattered around these vaults to break their bonds. These Pokémon are fairly unique — all of them are partially Dark-type, with their unique move, Ruination, splitting the opponent’s health in half instantly if it connects. They’re also all various objects given life by human emotion and named with Chinese names, like Chien-Pao being a weasel/cat that’s part Ice and has cursed swords as its fangs, and Ting-Lu being part Ground and looking like a large bull or deer with a huge metallic bowl serving as its “antlers”. They’re very difficult to catch, though in the event you accidentally make them faint, you can try again later on, so it’s all a matter of patience and luck.

This generation has its variant on raid battles established by Sword/Shield, known as Tera Raids. You and three others join forces to battle a Terastelized Pokémon, who retaliates by using multiple moves in a turn and regularly messing with stat changes and Abilities, forcing you to plan accordingly. It gets especially difficult at max star rating, as some battles can get oppressively hard. While there is a timer instead of a hard turn limit, that timer can get lowered if anyone faints. If your chosen Pokémon isn’t up to snuff, expect battles to end with losses fast. But winning reaps a bunch of rewards, including Tera Crystals to change Tera Types, EXP candies, materials for TMs, and other goodies.

I feel like I’ve covered all the important bits related to gameplay, so let’s move to another area: the graphics.

Graphics

Woof. This part of the game is what many people take issue with, and I don’t blame them. Unfortunately, Scarlet/Violet has fallen victim to not being optimized properly for the Switch’s hardware, despite other open world games running perfectly and clearly showing it can handle such a thing. For one thing, there’s a good deal of pop-in (elements of the game suddenly poofing into view once you get close enough), and some areas of the game will experience major slowdown.

The most blatant offenders are Tagtree Thicket and Casseroya Lake, especially the latter, since it doesn’t even have a whole bunch of trees scattered around, it’s just mostly water. Yet, the game WILL slow down noticeably, hampering the experience.

And despite being a late 2022 title, the game’s detail is… unfortunately flat. The textures of terrain and such look low quality, even when the Switch is docked. Wild Pokémon will also sometimes sport lower-quality models when you bump into them, due to the game taking a bit to recognize you’re close and not loading the higher quality model right away.

That’s not to say it completely fails, though. There are tons of gorgeous vistas to be found all over, especially at sunset or sunrise. My favorite places are Glaseado Mountain, being a huge, snowy mountain full of interesting Ice-types, and Area Zero, for reasons previously mentioned. I also fell in love with the design aesthetic of Terastel crystals, especially in Tera Raids, with the crystal cavern and sparkly effects making for wonderful eye candy.

The Pokémon designs vary in terms of quality, though some of my favorites are Skeledirge for its opera singer aesthetic, and Iron Valiant, being a fusion of Gallade and Gardevoir as a robot. I’m also quite partial to Espathra, I found its Cleopatra-style hair and jacket-like wings to be very striking. Tinkaton also had my eye, because it had a charming gremlin appearance, especially with its gigantic hammer.

Now, for the pros, cons, and my final verdict.

Pros

A lot of people slam this game for its most egregious issues, yet they forget what it did get right.

For one thing, the open world environment, though possibly overdone by this point, is a shot in the arm that the franchise has been needing. Now it feels like a proper world I can journey through and explore, instead of just tons of linear routes. It was immensely fun to hop on Miraidon and cruise around, especially with all its upgrades unlocked.

Terastelization, as mentioned, feels like the developers learned from the previous generations’ battle gimmicks. It offers interesting strategies without being clunky or limited to specific Pokémon, and it’s definitely fun to surprise an opponent with a sudden type-change and demolish them while their tactics are completely shut down.

I did approve of the more cinematic presentation of the story, as the characters feel a lot more lively and full of personality with their movements. And the story itself is a major step up from Sword/Shield, being far more engaging and having a memorable cast. Penny and Arven are my favorites, and I really want to see them return for the DLC.

This generation’s take on Raids is a step up. While still brutally hard, especially at 7-stars, it feels somewhat more lenient. Using a timer instead of a hard turn limit gives you leeway to set up buffs or try to negate the boss’ attempts to buff itself or attack you, so you’re not forced to constantly attack very round. It does give room for actual strategy instead of just constantly being on offense.

Cons

That’s not to say this generation lacks flaws. Far from it. As mentioned, the game’s performance, while mostly stable, really makes you question if Nintendo should give Game Freak much more time to develop this franchise. All the graphical issues have no excuse, especially compared to other games that manage to look good on a system that is underpowered compared to its competitors.

The story, while wonderful, suffers from a glaring issue — no voice acting. The drama and excitement can fall flat as the characters only get text boxes for their dialogue, forcing you to look down at the bottom of the screen to read, taking attention off of whatever they’re doing. The worst example is during the journey down to Area Zero, where Nemona, Penny, and Arven talk amongst themselves. Their dialogue auto-plays while you travel, meaning it can be easily missed unless you stop and stand there. At this point, with how much money Pokémon rakes in, not even having an English track is just inexcusable. The fact that there’s an Ed Sheeran song with full lyrics in the credits makes it all the more glaring.

While you can theoretically pursue the game’s objectives in any order, in practice this is impossible. If you try to tackle Grusha right out the gate, for instance, you WILL get stonewalled by the higher level Pokémon up there. Conversely, completing one route and going through the others can be hilariously easy, as the game doesn’t scale the difficulty to match your party’s levels. The dissonance is extremely apparent.

While Tera Raids are great, like almost all of Nintendo’s multiplayer games, it falters from their very inconsistent network quality. Even if you have extremely high speed internet, you’re still at the mercy of whether the game lets you actually connect with others, or just spits out a generic “You couldn’t join” error, while never once informing you why. And you have to wait an eternity for it to actually do what you want, and occasionally refreshing the available raids to see if you can try those.

Final Verdict

In spite of its flaws, I know that Pokemon Scarlet/Violet is a good game at heart. The potential and love is there, I can definitely see it. And in a vacuum, I can tolerate some of its blatant slipups to appreciate all the things it stuck the landing on.

It deserves criticism on the things it tripped and ate dirt on, no doubt about that. But it’s important to remember that it’s not all bad.

In the end, I give it a 6.5/10. Decently good, but marred by severe flaws. I hope that this is a wakeup call for both Game Freak and Nintendo that they need to change the way they develop Pokémon. Even with how profitable it is, something needs to change. They can’t keep this up forever.