Pokémon Scarlet & Violet Reviews
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are an ambitious attempt to take the Pokemon franchise open world, but they fail to live up to expectations.
The open-world gameplay of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is a brilliant direction for the future of the franchise, but this promising shift is sabotaged by the numerous ways in which Scarlet and Violet feel deeply unfinished.
An interesting reworking of the traditional Pokémon gameplay for an open-world setting brought low by its lifeless environments and graphics
Unfortunately, the performance is so abruptly bad that it completely ruins, to an infuriating extent, what otherwise could have been the best Pokemon game to date.
"The open world inherently changes so much for the series that it needed a total ground-up rethink of the mechanics"
Despite technical shortcomings and some filler content, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are chock-full of meaningful additions to one of gaming’s most popular franchises. At worst, these games are steps towards the Pokémon games for which players have clamored, but more often, they serve as effective thesis statements for where the series goes from here. Either way, I can’t wait to see where Game Freak evolves the experience from this point.
Pokemon Scarlet & Violet's open-world approach reinvigorates the long-running series.
Despite my frustrations with its structure, mechanics, and the fact that it looks and runs like a middling GameCube game most of the time (there were several instances, even outside of the open-world areas, where character animations would drop to near stop-motion levels of movement), I still left Scarlet and Violet enamored by its character relationships and neatly tied-up themes of finding one’s own joy in the big, wild Pokémon world.
I know, I know, I’ve had my fun mocking the visual glitches and performance issues in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. But I really hope that the performance issues don’t ultimately define how we talk about this generation of games. This isn’t just a game that needed more time in production—Paldea is fundamentally not designed to be pleasant to explore. The open-world mechanics might have felt more novel if I hadn’t also fallen off Pokémon Legends: Arceus earlier this year for similar issues with samey world design and unremarkable graphics. Scarlet needed to clear that low bar, and it did not. Maybe by the time the next generation comes along, the series will be able to recapture what makes Pokémon so thrilling in the first place.
Pokemon Scarlet & Violet is more than the sum of its parts. Those parts include the woeful performance and optimization problems, which are a real drag – but much of the rest of the title soars so high that it does go a long way to make one ignore them, after a fashion.
While Pokémon Scarlet and Violet may not be a perfect experience, it's still an absolute delight in almost every way.
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet adds a number of changes to the classic Pokémon formula, and most of them pay off, particularly the auto-battles, vast open world, and the three distinct storylines. The games do suffer from performance and stability issues, as well as some troubles with scaling the open world difficulty. Those problems are far from game-breaking, leaving them an overall enjoyable experience.
It's a smaller step than many may have hoped for, especially considering what Pokémon Legends: Arceus did, but it's definitely one in the right direction.
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are great games mired by a host of technical issues.
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet take the long-awaited step into a fully open-world, but one poorly implemented and marred by frustration. A compelling story and characters are a saving grace in what is ultimately a fun game, but Pokemon's attempts at modernising continue to fall disappointingly short.
Ultimately, these games were the result of Game Freak and Nintendo taking a risk and giving the fans something they've been begging for over a long while. It tries to mix Legends: Arceus with the main series, and it half-succeeds. Some things brought innovative and fun changes, while we learned others were better off they way they were before. If Pokémon fans can look past the obvious flaws and limitations, there's so much to appreciate here.
Scarlet and Violet offer some great new ideas for the Pokémon franchise, ruined by a world that seems very rushed and unfinished.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Slightly above average or simply inoffensive. Fans of the genre should enjoy them a bit, but a fair few will be left unfulfilled.
Slightly above average or simply inoffensive. Fans of the genre should enjoy them a bit, but a fair few will be left unfulfilled.
Unfortunately, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet didn’t get the development time they deserved. It’s hard to see a franchise that means so much to me finally start heading in the right direction only to come up short. I sincerely hope that Game Freak and Nintendo will start listening to fans and critics and turn things around.