I’ve been out of the poké fandom for a while. There was a time when my nerdy self could name every pokémon from every generation, but there were only four generations then. And now there’s nine. I’ve placed Legends Arceus and enjoyed it, but I hadn’t played any game since gen 5 before then. To echo the sentiments of Grandpa Simpson, I used to be with it, but then they changed what with it was.
Anyway, Violet is pretty similar to Arceus in its free world roaming play, although it’s important to stress that it’s not world roaming in the sense of Breath of the Wild. There are barriers in the new region of Paldea, and if you reach them, like Animal Crossing’s Lyle, you ain’t goin’ nowhere. But the general lack of a prescribed structure is still nice. Like previous main series games, you’ve got those eight gym badges, but you don’t have to do that straight away. You can try and take down Team Star (no, they’re not as good as Team Rocket, but then who is?) in their various hideouts, or you can take on the mysterious titan pokémon (a similar concept to Arceus’ totem pokémon). Or you can roam around Paldea and fill that pokédex with as many ‘mons as you can catch. You could take the bold option of not doing any gyms and trying to catch pokemon that are far, far more over levelled than your pokémon then have fun watching them refuse all your commands in battle situations. Or, like my good self, you could catch a team from scratch, spend a while battling other Pokémon and adding to your dex, and then have a full team of pokémon that you’ve trained/jacked up on experience candies (the poké friendly equivalent of steroids), then go pulverise all the gym leaders and the pokémon league with a team that always obeys you. You do you.
You’ve also got the new challenge of tera Pokémon (again, similar to Arceus’ totem Pokémon), and you’ll also gain the ability to use terra powers during battles, and encounter tera raids (a similar concept to dynamax raids in Sword and Shield). This makes for some nice animations as well as some powerful ‘mons. And there’s some decent post-game content to enjoy too, with some particularly stunning visuals when you reach the fabled Area Zero.
While the gameplay is decent and the visuals are generally impressive, what’s less impressive is the ultimate fact that Violet and Scarlett simply aren’t finished products. Environments like Area Zero look great, but the frame rate is beyond atrocious, not to mention the cell design. In this Area Zero bit, for example, you’re journeying with a few other characters through some hulking mountains. However, I turned my character around at one point and one of the following NPCs was literally…in the mountain. As in, they could still move forward when my character moved forward, but at that specific point in time, they were just blending in with surfaces they had no reason to be blending in with. This was a major problem with Arceus too, and the fact that these games have been released in the same year is concerning. Sure, it’s nice to get multiple games in the same year, but this should never be at the expense of competent debugging. The frame rate is beyond shocking at multiple points, and it’s clear that, in the game’s current condition, the Switch just can’t handle it. My console even logged me out of the system a few times due to ‘errors’, presumably because it just couldn’t function.
Some of the movements on screen are beyond laughable. There’s are town with a windmill, and this windmill is supposed to moving like regular windmills. Is it? No. It’s a moving like a fractured cacophony of bullshit (easy now, Nancy, it’s just a children’s game). And there’s a girl running with her pokémon in a stadium. Are they actually running? No. They’re just a series of fractured, delayed graphical failures. I was reminded of that meme from Arthur where that character has a mushroom badge and they declare they’re a failure. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, that’s cool. Nintendo did a patch update recently to apparently sort out numerous glitches like those mentioned above. Did it patch things up? Did it fu – (whoa there Nancy, calm it down now). If you’ve happened to watch the fourth YouTube episode of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared where Red Guy gets annoyed at the computer, touches it and then everything turns into a delirious hellscape, that’s what this game feels like a lot of the time. Even if Nintendo had fixed these visual incongruities, that’s not the point. You shouldn’t send put a £50 game to the public when it’s clearly not finished. Even looking at the pathetically small debug team during the end credits, it wouldn’t have broken Nintendo’s bank to hire ten times the number to spruce things up a bit. At the end of the day, Nintendo should’ve spent at least six more months tightening shiz up, and this could have been a great game. As it is, it’s just a fairly enjoyable game that could’ve been so much more.
(Also, Dachsbun is a certified good boi, and I definitely didn’t name one of these dudes after my dog)