Pokemon Violet

Pokemon Scarlet/Violet art (Source: Pokemon Scarlet/Violet website)

Pokemon Violet (and Scarlet) was one of the most anticipated games to come out in 2022. The game promised open-world, non-linear exploration — a follow-up from Pokemon Legends: Arceus semi open-world — which excites Pokemon fans, including me. “We can actually do the Gyms in any order”, I thought to myself. Here we are, in November, and the launch of Pokemon Violet (and Scarlet) — even though managed to smash records as the fastest-selling Nintendo Switch game — are definitely rough, as players reported a multitude of issues with the games. Let’s jump right in.

To start, I do enjoy playing this game. I had a great time playing through Pokemon Violet (which is the edition I’m buying). I do enjoy the overall theme & story of this game. I do enjoy having to be able to play with my brothers together, hunting down shiny Pokemon in swarms, or tackling down 5/6-star Tera Raid battles. I enjoy exploring the open-ness of Paldea and catch lots of Pokemon to (try to) complete the Pokedex.

For me, that enjoyment is largely helped by the amazing music that accompanies me throughout the game. Many (newer) Pokemon games may fall flat in a lot of categories, but they always deliver some banger music, and this game definitely has some great tracks to listen to. When they (Pokemon Company) announced that Toby Fox were to collaborate with their team to compose musics for this game, I am excited. Toby Fox has delivered amazing musics through their own game Undertale and Deltarune, and has composed a music for the past Pokemon Sword/Shield. Alongside Junichi Masuda and his team, we definitely hear the great results in this game. There are a lot of themes/musics in this game that instantly joined to my favourite list of video game musics. Check out two of my favourite tracks from Pokemon Violet, the new Trainer Battle theme and the Team Star Grunt Battle theme.

They also did well on constructing the story & lore about this game. After the basically-non-existent story of Pokemon Sword/Shield, the story is definitely a huge improvement for Pokemon Violet. In my opinion, Pokemon Violet’s story are only beaten by the Gen 5 games, Pokemon Black/White, which also has a superb lore around it. Pokemon Violet finally has main rivals like Nemona and Arven ([SPOILER ALERT] and Penny ), that are actually likeable has interesting personality. You learn about them as you progress through the activities in the game (whether that beating the Gyms, beating the Titans, or raiding Team Star bases). There are also more characters in the school-portion of the game — the teachers & other school members — each with it’s own mini-story for you to unfold.

Pokemon Scarlet/Violet also comes with several improvements & features that helps to make the game more enjoyable. These, for me, are the notable improvements from the game.

• Auto-Heal

You can just select your Pokemon in the party that you want to heal, press one button, and the game will instantly heals that Pokemon. The game will consume the smaller healing items first (Potion), then uses the next-bigger healing items next if the first one has run out.

Healing a Pokemon using Auto-Heal is only one button away.

• Overworld Encounters & Trainer Battles

This game, like the previous Pokemon Sword/Shield game, employs overworld encounters, meaning that you can see the wild Pokemon on the overworld, so you can pick which Pokemon to battle/catch easily. In Pokemon Sword/Shield, though, the battle itself are then carried out onto a different “scene” (with a scene transition). Now, all will encounters happen on the overworld itself; no “scene transition” was played. This also happens with Trainer Battles, including Gym battles and other stuff. I like this very much, as it makes the actual battle more immersive & feels more “connected” to the world (compared to the old ones).

Wild Pokemon battles are carried out in the overworld (like Pokemon Legends: Arceus).

• Overworld Items

Item pickups when roaming the overworld are faster now. In older games, at least two textboxes will shown in the screen and you have to clear them in order to move on with the game. Now, you just pick it up and carry on with the game; a pop-up will appear saying what item is picked up.

Overworld item pickup.

To re-iterate, I love this game so much. In my opinion, they have definitely nailed about how to make Pokemon games fun and enjoyable. Catch ‘em all & turn-based battle were the roots of what makes Pokemon games, …well…, Pokemon, and they just add some new ideas on top of it. But this time, it is way more complicated. There are just a lot of problems with this game right now that just ruins the experience.

The most notable issues of Pokemon Scarlet/Violet are the mountain of bugs, glitches, and performance issues currently present in the game. Even after the ~5GB Day 1 patch of the game, the game still suffers from heavy frame-drops, random crashes, and numerous other issues. The performance issues got even worse when you host/join a Union Room, the new multiplayer feature in Pokemon Scarlet/Violet that allows you and your friends to roam Paldea together. The game targets 30FPS, but in most outdoor places — the majority of the game — the game struggles to maintain 30 FPS and has occasional frame spikes. The animation of characters & objects also slows down when the framerate dips below 30FPS, suggesting the game’s speed is tied to the framerate. The game will degrade even further when it has been running for a while, sparking theories from several Pokemon community members that the game may have memory-leak issues.

Aside from the piss-poor performance, the game also “gives” us a lot of bugs, glitches, and other issues. Here are some that I have encountered myself and some notable issues from other Pokemon players.

• Because of the poor performance, the game will pop in entities throughout the world. The way they handled it, however, are very poorly. Entities will be despawn-ed aggressively, but their state are not saved, so you will find despawned wild Pokemon not pop back in.

Wild Pokemon will not come back after despawned. Notice the pack of Tauros in that area not appear again in that same area after being despawned.

• The Pokemon participating in Auto-Battle sometimes does not want to attack the target/intended Pokemon. No, it’s not because the Pokemon are exhausted or the target is a Shiny Pokemon, it sometimes just does not want to attack the wild Pokemon.

• Some Wild Pokemon may spawn out-of-bounds (behind walls/under the floors). In tight spaces, the game may position the player & our Pokemon out-of-bounds as well.

Wild Pokemon spawning under the floor.

Initiating a battle in a small space.

• Some players already found a way to duplicate items & Pokemon.

• Someone has also pointed out the problem with set-seed RNG in Stadium’s Double Battle. This means that we can do the exact same thing and the battle will have the same outcome — down to the misses & critical hits.

Tera Raid battles — re-worked Dynamax Raid battles from Pokemon Sword/Shield — also has a fair share of issues as well. The most notable issue is the synchronization issue when doing multiplayer Tera Raid battles. I found sometimes that the Tera Pokemon’s HP bar not update properly. Actions taken by other people & the Tera Pokemon are updated properly, but oftentimes they block the user input, so we have to wait for all updates to finish. Throughout the update, however, the timer kept going, so we lose critical time that can be used to fight/do other actions, making the game seems unfair. I also found very frequently that when Terastallizing, the camera sometimes will not be positioned properly, making the Terastallization animation looks “janky”.

Terastallizing in a Tera Raid battle is sometimes broken.

Back when Pokemon Legends: Arceus comes out, most people thought that that game looks bad. Now, Pokemon Legends: Arceus looks miles better compared to Pokemon Scarlet/Violet. The overall terrain/grass textures in Pokemon Scarlet/Violet looks bland compared to Legends: Arceus. Even though Legends: Arceus textures also appears to be low-resolution, it looks way nicer compared to Scarlet/Violet’s terrain textures.

Comparison between Pokemon Legends: Arceus (top) and Pokemon Violet (bottom).

I also noticed some LOD issue when the game tries to load objects that are previously far to near and terrain texture flickers when roaming the wild Area. Some terrain will change drastically when we go near the terrain, making it looked jarring.

The rock formation changes when we go near it.

When triggering a wild Pokemon battle near a NPC (another Pokemon Trainer, for example), the NPC will become invisible, but objects that are held by the NPC are not invisible.

Wooo, PokeBall levitating on their own...

The game also handles lighting poorly, mostly notable when transitioning from outdoor into caves. When looking into a cave from the outside, you won’t be able to see anything inside the cave, which is not how it should be handled. This also happens the other way around, looking out from inside a cave. Transitioning in and out of the cave will change the lighting drastically.

Moving from inside a cave to outside, and vice versa.

I also noticed a lighting-related issue during a Wild Battle in the last area of the game, where shadows appear & disappear during battle.

Shadow issue in the last area of the game. Look at the shadows on the background appear & disappear when selecting the 'Battle' menu.

These graphics issues exacerbates the performance issue. Some people have pointed out that Pokemon Scarlet/Violet may be “too big” for the Nintendo Switch. While that claim has some validity in it — the Switch at this point is 5 years (almost 6 years) old — it still is not a good excuse to make. There are lots of similar-or-bigger scale games on the Nintendo Switch, that performs way better & looks way nicer than Pokemon Scarlet/Violet, notably Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and the launch-title Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Last time I write about Pokemon Sword, I complained about the lack of voiced cutscene in the game, and I would like GameFreak/Pokemon Company to hire some voice actors to fill for the cutscenes. Well, I’m happy to report that Pokemon Scarlet/Violet, …, also does not have voiced cutscene! Again, the same with Pokemon Sword and Pokemon Legends: Arceus, the cinematic cutscene just feels hollow & weird without voice, just some moving lips with some text below it. I just don’t understand what the rationale behind this. Do they want to keep the same non-voiced aesthetics from the old games? But the new games are different & will benefit greatly from voiced characters (plus, as I said before, looks & feels way better). Do they not want to pay for voice-actors? Well, that’s an even weirder decision, considering that Pokemon Company managed to collab with Ed Sheeran & put his song into the credits of the game (!!!).

Moving on to non-technical issues, there are some ideas in Pokemon Scarlet/Violet that can be implemented better. The Tera mechanics, for example, can be utilized better by the Gym Leaders to increase the level of difficulty. They now only utilizes the same Tera type of their signature typing (if the Gym Leader is a Water-type specialist, then the last Pokemon will Tera into Water), regardless of what the Pokemon is. This makes the fight very easy as we can easily dealt with it. I think that if the Gym Leaders can utilize a different Tera typing that can counter the original type weaknesses, it would have been a more challenging fight.

Other ideas that can be implemented better in this game is the open-world-ness of this game. While you can explore most of the game from the start, the wild Pokemon levels do not scale with the current Pokemon levels in your party. The “activities” that you have to pursue throughout the game can also be tackled in any order, but the Pokemon levels involved in those “activities” are also static. This lead to some cases where I have finished a higher-level “activity”, then stumbling to a lower-level “activity” and completely decimate it. This is definitely can be fixed by employing level-scaling to check the overall level of the Pokemon in our possession, so that true open-world can be achieved.

While I did mention some QoL improvements in this game, there are also some QoL regressions in this game as well. One notable missing QoL thing is the Shiny Pokemon “chime”, present in Pokemon Legends: Arceus, but is missing here. The “chime” is very helpful in Legends: Arceus, since you can do something else/keep moving, and do not need to keep checking on every Pokemon. Now, you have to look closely at each Pokemon to check whether it is a Shiny Pokemon or not, which you can easily miss for some Pokemon that has a very similar Shiny colors.

Pokemon Scarlet/Violet is no doubt a hot mess. Even though I had an enjoyable experience playing it, the mountain of technical & other issues this game currently has definitely reduces that enjoyment. Even if I ignore the technical issues, I still find some issues with how some of the new ideas are implemented. It is not acceptable for GameFreak/Pokemon Company to launch the game at this state now, and they should fix this. This makes me hesitant to recommended this game to other people, especially to people who are not big fans of Pokemon. Even if they fix most of the issues, I would still not recommend this game at the full asking price ($59.99), and you should probably hunt for a physical second-hand copy/wait for a discount, if you are planning to try this game out.

Writer’s Notes : Hello! It’s been more than 2 years since my last post here! I am finally able to clear up some time to be able to work on this blog now. Boy, oh boy, my first post for the re-launch of my blog is for the Pokemon Scarlet/Violet.

Expect more posts in the near-future, as I will write more of my thoughts on newer games coming out this year & the next year. I will also write a more technical posts as well (like the previous post about computer displays), so expect that as well!

Next up, expect a post of my long-overdue thoughts on Splatoon 3! (I love Splatoon 3).