Somebody once told me that Pokémon Scarlet and Violet would be the best game in the series if it wasn’t for the Nintendo Switch. I was dubious and downright rude about it. Where’s the heart? Where’s the charm? One bread-shaped dog isn’t enough to get me back in, not with those trees. But god, I was wrong. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been this wrong about a Pokémon game.
I’d fallen out of love with the series at Sword and Shield. The performance, the sparse world, the web of ideas that felt threadbare and incomplete; it felt like a personal wound. I know it’s nostalgia talking but I entered the series as a kid with Red and Blue, and going from those to Yellow, to Gold and Silver, then Crystal – the best one – felt like I was a frontiersman leading scouts into the new world. The world of Pokémon kept expanding and we felt like pioneers discovering new areas, creatures, and ways of interfacing with the world.
From GameBoy to GameBoy Advance to DS, this world got wider and deeper. Whether it was Hoenn or Sinnoh or Unova, we sank our feet into the loamy earth of new countries and continents and started to dust off the mysteries of this near-real fantasy world. For me, it was the ship to France (sorry, Kalos) where I first started to sense turbulence: the 3DS games felt shallow, somehow, and under-baked, like Game Freak had bitten off more than it could chew. The sense of depth and lived-in-ness of its world was the first victim to a stuttering development pipeline.
By Hawaii (sorry, Alola), I was ready to abandon ship. The storytelling had gotten too infantile to me; I am in Pokémon for the sense of world-building and the battling. The narrative elements are fine as set-dressing, but if I want Pokémon stories, I’ll stick to the anime (or the incredible YouTube shorts Origins and Generations), thank you. Sun and Moon dialled the cartoon nonsense up, diluted the combat to trivial levels, and kept interrupting my game with its inane chatter.
By Sword and Shield, the lenses in my rose-tinted glasses were starting to crack. The end-game was basically non-existent and it felt like I filled the Pokédex without having to try. Was this it? Is this what Pokémon had become? Despite the extra dimension from the sprite-based games of the decades past, it had lost so much of its depth and felt shallow, awkward, and exhausted.
Maybe the problem was me? I loved Pokémon as a kid, I obsessed over it as a teen, and I played competitively in championships in my 20s. Maybe I’m just over it now that I’m in my 30s. Maybe it’s not Game Freak’s struggles with sophisticated tech, maybe it’s not the dodgy loading times, maybe it’s not the increasingly weird and entitled fanbase that’s putting me off. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m just getting too old for Pokémon.
A friend showed me Scarlet and Violet on their Switch during the review period for the game, and I swore off it. Why was it taking 15 seconds to load the box from the menu? Why did battle transitions drop the framerate down to a chug? Why is the 2D art so low-resolution? What the hell is going on with the draw distance? Why the hell is one of Nintendo’s flagship games so ugly and cheap?
“They’d be the best game in the series if the performance was better,” this friend insisted, as the game struggled to load into a Gym Leader battle. “Seriously, there’s so much good stuff in here.” I wasn’t convinced. How could Game Freak marr so many good ideas with incompetent implementation? Why would it hide so many good ideas behind a litany of bugs (and I’m not talking Heracross or Scythers).
Fast-forward to the Nintendo Switch 2 and I read Alex Donaldson, a fellow VG247-to-Eurogamer transplant, talking about Pokémon Scarlet and Violet on our sister site. “With technical improvements, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is utterly transformed on Nintendo Switch 2,” he insisted. Fine, I thought. I’ll bite. I’m having a stressful time of it right now – a house move and a new job will do that – and I feel like I need something to connect me back to a time when things seemed more simple. I think, medically, I need some Pokémon in my life.
The game sprang to life in under 10 minutes, too – a rarity in modern Pokémon – and I feel emboldened that Game Freak trusts me with its systems so soon. No toddler-level hand-holding here, thank god (or is that, ‘thank Arceus?’) At the time of writing, I am 22 hours in and having an absolute blast. Paldea is alive in HDR, its Spanish-inspired setting popping with colour, and the draw-distance is drastically improved. I can even see the (in)famous windmills from across the way properly, and something inside me has the urge to try and fight them.
I don’t quite feel as enamoured as I did when I played Gold and Silver for the first time, but then I think that spark of child-like wonder in me is dead forever, buried under 20 years of student loan debt and letters about getting emergency taxed on my paychecks. But I do feel like I did when I played Black and White, and that is a big complement. Those games – stuffed with an America-inspired map and all-new Pokédex – were the biggest invigoration the series has seen in its 27-year-old life. And now Scarlet and Violet is giving me the same feeling as the veneer of ugliness and cheapness peels away.
Don’t get me wrong, the games still have their woes. It feels like Game Freak spent so much time on that open world it forgot to make interiors for anything. Despite the number of NPCs wandering around, none of them really have much to say. I’m told there isn’t really any post-game to speak of, and it feels like the game was built around multiplayer functionality, which is fine. But it comes at the cost of all the stuff that made Pokémon feel like a ‘forever game’ when I was younger: gym rematches (best implemented in HeartGold/SoulSilver), secret superbosses (Cynthia remains a series highlight), and sniffing out hidden Legendary ‘mon.
But those missteps aren’t as egregious now that the technical side of it is fixed, at least. I am so pleased I held off buying these games at launch, because I think the initial release of them would have hammered that final nail into the coffin of my Pokémon love forever. As it stands, my enforced, deferred gratification might have just saved one of the most important game series in my life.
