Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are Open World RPGs developed by Game Freak and published by Nintendo. The base games were released in November 2022, and the last DLC was released in December 2023. They are Nintendo Switch exclusives. MSRB is $60. I played Pokémon Violet patch version 3.0.1 released in February 2024.
In 2022 I lost my job, so I couldn’t afford Pokémon Violet when it was released. I didn’t expect for the game to come out in such an unfinished state, though. Countless reviewers, fans, and the gaming community as a whole started to dogpile this unfortunate pair of games. Based on the footage I saw, the dogpiling seemed deserved. Guess I dodged a bullet? Yet I know that the video game industry is full of redemption stories such as No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk 2077, and Nintendo themselves released an apology saying they’d address the game’s issues. So I waited. Now, 18 months after launch, Game Freak has released multiple patches and finished the DLC. I feel like a high school teacher that’s grading a struggling student. I want them to succeed. This is as much grace time as I could possibly provide.
But in the end, I’m still left with a bag of mixed feelings.
Qué Lindo! Qué Feo!
Would it be weird to say that Pokémon Violet looks… pretty? Of course, I’m not talking about the performance (we’ll get to that later). What I mean is, the art direction is magnificent. The Paldea region is based on Spain and Portugal, aka the Iberian Peninsula. As someone who took several Spanish History, Literature, and Art classes in college, I adore this part of the world. It’s one of the countries I want to visit the most (after Japan). So I was delighted to see Game Freak’s focused vision for Paldea’s towns, cities, and environments. Uva Academy, with its array of spires, is clearly taken from La Sagrada Familia, one of Spain’s noteworthy cathedrals. Altazon’s windmill is a clear nod to Don Quijote de la Mancha, Spain’s most famous fictional character, who imagined the windmills of La Mancha to be an army of terrible giants and tried to charge them. Alfornada with its geometric tiles seems to combine the cities of Sagres, Portugal and Granada, Spain. And finally, Glaseado Mountain is refers to the Pyrenees Mountains that divide Spain from its Northern neighbor, France (does this mean Paldea is a neighbor to Kalos?). Exploring Paldea is almost as fun as seeing the real Spain.
The new Pokémon designs are equally delightful. My starter, Sprigatito, is the cutest cat yet rendered into polygons. Dozens of others caught my heart, too. Nacli and its evolutions are clever designs taken from salt crystals. Bramblin takes inspiration from tumbleweeds. And Finizen is the dolphin Pokémon that we’ve been craving for since 1998. I was also surprised to see new evolutions to Pokémon I already loved like Wooper and Girafarig. Discovering new Pokémon is always my favorite part of these games, and the Pokédex is the one area that I have nothing but praise for.
It’s such a shame. Everything — from the region’s art direction to the Pokémon designs — are held back by the game’s performance. I can’t help but sigh and giggle whenever the game tries to give me a panoramic view of the region, because the landscape is so blocky and rough. The rock and building textures are atrociously blurry. I might not have noticed the rocks if the game didn’t try to impress me with its massive mountains and cliff walls. Pokémon and people struggle to render unless they are within arm’s reach, causing a lot of “pop in” effects where they just appear out of nowhere. I didn’t experience any game crashes, but the game is still littered with distracting bugs. The frame rate chugs in certain areas like Tagtree Thicket and Casseroya Lake, making me feel like I’m walking through molasses. The first 3 times I did a picnic with my Pokémon, the table didn’t render. I never knew I could make sandwiches until it magically appeared on my 4th picnic. The camera occasionally clips into the ground during battles, and NPCs sometimes flicker in different directions. Not a single session goes by where something weird happens that probably shouldn’t.
I understand that I’m playing on the Switch. I expect compromises. But I also expect a stable game with a stable frame rate. It’s strange — Pokémon Legends Arceus, warts and all, runs better than this. Pokémon Violet came out almost a year later, had over 14 months of post-launch support, and it still barely runs at all. I don’t think we’re getting any more substantial patches, either. Game Freak has probably shifted its resources to complete the upcoming Pokémon Legends Z-A, as well as work on the next mainline Generation (which may come out as early as 2025). For decades, I felt proud knowing that Nintendo games were never as broken or rushed as other AAA titles. But Pokémon Violet has hit me in the face with some humble pie.
Ambitious and Confused Design
So much discussion has centered around the glitches that players have let the other problems off the hook. That’s right, Pokémon Violet‘s troubles don’t end with its performance.
As you noticed from the poorly-textured landscape, Game Freak presents you with a 100% open world. It’s by far the most compelling part of Pokémon Violet. Once you finish your introduction to Uva Academy, you’re free to roam wherever you like. I was worried that Paldea would feel flat and uninteresting, but Game Freak surprised me. There were plenty of nooks and crannies to explore, new Pokémon to discover, caves with branching paths, and cliffs to climb. The view isn’t exactly impressive, but I still loved to explore and use mountains as vantage points to find interesting landmarks.
To see the most of Paldea, you’ll need to rely on the box art Pokémon, which in Violet is the futuristic-looking Miraidon. Miraidon is a motorcycle, glider, and canoe all rolled into one. But Miraidon doesn’t start out that way. You’ll need to find and defeat the Titan Pokémon, who are like Sun and Moon‘s Totem Pokémon, to unlock more movement options. At first I was excited to see a return to Pokémon “boss battles,” but in Violet, these Titan Pokémon are rather flimsy compared to Sun and Moon. I didn’t need any real strategy to beat them beyond picking the right type advantage. But the reward was worth it. I loved the seamless and dynamic exploration that Miraidon offers. Like Pokémon Legends Arceus, I dived into every cave and climbed every peak to discover useful trinkets and rare Pokémon.
Unfortunately, by exploring the open world so thoroughly, I trivialized other parts of the game. While you can tackle the Gym Leaders in any order you want, Pokémon Violet does not scale the leaders to match you. This makes some leaders satisfying to fight, like Ryme and Tulip, while the rest end up complete cakewalks. I didn’t try to level grind, but my party was naturally over level 70 by the time I fought the Elite Four. For me, it was easier than Pokémon X and Y, and those games are notorious for their cushy “push A to win” difficulty. My rival wasn’t much better. I like Nemona as a person, she’s nice, but she didn’t inspire me to get better at Pokémon battles.
Thankfully the “bad guys” of this game, Team Star, offer a fresh battling experience. Team Star has various bases scattered around the region, with a boss hiding in each one. You first must defeat the base’s entire troops en-masse to lure out the boss. I appreciate that the game knows the grunts are cannon fodder, letting you skip straight to the good stuff. The Team Star bosses gave me what the Titan Pokémon and Gym Leaders lacked — a genuine challenge. They have well-made teams with a superpowered final Pokémon that felt satisfying to figure out.
A Story to… Treasure?
It can be difficult for any open world game to deliver a compelling start-to-finish story. Giving the player that much freedom creates gaps where they have to piece the story together themselves. It takes careful design to make attaching separate story pieces feel compelling; otherwise, the story feels disjointed. Unfortunately, Pokémon Violet falls for many of these trappings. Most Gym Leaders and Team Star Bosses come and go without much of an impact on the world and with few meaningful interactions with the player. You experience isolated threads of a story with loose ties to each other. Only after you defeat the Elite Four and journey to Area Zero do you finally start to see the threads pull together. These final hours of the main campaign had genuine mystery and high stakes. I loved this part of the game — it almost made up for the prior 40 hours of paint-by-the-numbers open world narrative spiced with paint-by-the-numbers Pokémon tropes.
Pokémon Violet tasks you with an endearing assignment: go out into the world and find your treasure. This theme is conceptually adorable with lots of potential. But in execution, Game Freak failed to develop this theme fully. You can see other students out and about Paldea, but you don’t learn anything about their journey or how they’re finding their “treasure.” You get a bit more development from key NPCs. For example: your rival, Nemona, loves battling, and Arven is searching for medicine for an important someone, and the Academy Director cares for his students. But these people never clash or have their “treasure” questioned. Without that friction, it’s hard to truly see their conviction.
Game Freak does incorporate the theme into the gameplay, though. The Terastal battle gimmick literally turns your Pokémon into a sparkling gem. Strategically, it adds hundreds of options; but sadly, the campaign didn’t use Terastal to its fullest extent. And for such a flashy mechanic, the game does little to develop Terastal as a narrative device, either. No one asks questions about the mechanic, and no one reacts to seeing large Terastal crystals scattered around the world. Again, I enjoy the Raid Battles that they offer, but they don’t have a real impact on the people of Paldea. I understand that people don’t want video games to hold their hand, but Pokémon Violet needs to check in more with the player if it wants its story to have an impact. There are some bright spots with this theme — particularly with the Tear Star ending and with Area Zero — but it’s all too scattered to make me ponder the theme at length.
In Conclusion
There are so many things I love about Pokémon Violet. I love discovering the new Pokémon. I love Paldea’s Spanish inspiration. I love exploring the open world. I love the Terastal gimmick. I love the idea for its story. I love the ending. It’s just a shame that it falls short in so many other ways. The game barely runs at all, even after a year of updates. The campaign fails to fully utilize the combat’s strategic possibilities. The world feels like a collage of disjointed pieces that never create a cohesive whole.
I don’t regret buying Pokémon Violet. In fact, I’m happy I played it, even after experiencing all of its problems. Thankfully the game ends on a high note. The short romp through Area Zero had story, environment, and gameplay come together beautifully. It gave me a glimpse of how brilliant Game Freak could’ve made this game. If only it were that way from the beginning.
