Topic: Pokémon Scarlet & Pokémon Violet

Dude I’m sure the glitches and issues are bad, but come on rant people going s little, too far? I mean almost everyone I have seen has said they have enjoyed it regardless, and they still point out the apparent issues!

I’m going to get the game anyway, I love the music I have heard in yotube, and the new Pokémon I have seen look amazing, it looks like fun, and seems pretty new for Pokémon, I’m sure when I get it I will enjoy just like I have enjoyed every Pokémon game I have played before, the adventure is always fun, in memorable.

Ikr? If I buy a game knowing the bugs in it, you best be knowing that I plan to play it regardless or don’t find it that much of a problem, the fps drops suck but from what I have seen doesn’t happen nearly as often.

I just hope they patch it soon.

I know you're trying to downplay it with this comment but this is pretty much the same situation as Cyberpunk 2077. A hard deadline for release and higher ups refusing to shift the release to accommodate the inevitabilities of software delay. And the end result of it is a buggy game that has serious performance issues.... and the game shifts 10s of millions of units regardless

There should be pushback for this sort of thing and people are certainly right to be vocal about it. But these games will still move 20mill+ units, Cyberpunk still moved 20mill units. You think these issues will be patched? You think they won't churn out another release next year and push it out the door in the same manner? I mean, why? Why bother when we'll buy it regardless?

I skipped it and, frankly, I think anyone who cares about software quality should do the same. But I think I'm in the minority. It seems most people who are fans of the series have seen the performance issues and brought it regardless, then complained. Good job. I'd say we deserve better than this but apparently "it boots" is the bar to clear. So I think we're getting the quality we demand here

@skywake Yep, people can't complain about the quilaty of the game when they buy it regardless everytime there's a Pokemon in the name. This isn't an one off, the games have been consistently flawed for at least a decade now

I fully expect them to be poor games yet still buy them so I rush through the main story and get to the battling but after Legends which was in touching distance of being something great again I luckily I stopped myself from expecting something good with these ones..

@jump They started to put more effort in reveal Pokemon videos than on the game itself

I said something on it in the Unpopular opinions thread, but I guess I'll say it here too. I'm probably one of the only few people who actually genuinely enjoys the game and thinks that it's like the best the series has been for years. I get the technical issues, but the gameplay and story really outshines that for me. The new pokemon designs are really great, and the pokedex is really addicting to fill out this gen. I really like how the gyms function, and the puzzles are neat this time around as well. Koraidon and Miraidon are basically just the return of HM's, and the region managed to bring back the more "metroidvania" style of backtracking that previous gens had, while also bringing back the proper feeling of exploration.

I get there's technical issues, and I will say those are slightly annoying, but it isn't as bad as I keep seeing people make it out to be, or at least it hasn't been nearly as bad. The worst glitches I've had were like a singular crash at the electric gym during it's puzzle, and then two instances of the world loading out of existence at the beginning of the game. There's other smaller glitches like the battle camera clipping through the ground, or boxes taking a few minutes to properly load up, but it isn't game breaking to me really, and I don't mind it. So many places make it sound like the game is extremely unplayable, and so many game breaking bugs exist everywhere you look, but I haven't had anything that ruined my experience like people claimed..

The thing with these games is that, yes, performance is arse, visuals aren't exactly great.

But it's neither as broken as people make it out to be nor actually bad. I enjoyed the last two Gens a lot, they and Gen 5 are EASILY my top 3 altho Scarlet is probably gonna take over Sword's spot the way it's going because I don't think I've been this much into Pokémon games since White. If you can look past the tech side of it these might end up being the best games in the series by a landslide.

I guess we reached the "it's broken but it doesn't matter stage".
Like, I know some people that enjoy the game are probably genuine and not try to bootlick GameFreak but... We had like 5 mainline Pokemon games and each one (with exception of Arceus honestly) it felt that it was worse in some ways.
I mean, before games like BDSP and now SV, you couldn't really say in any way that Pokemon games had a lot of bugs so that's another new issue to worry about. We had cutting of post game content until basically having none of it (not even the Battle Tower at this point apperantly), not National Dex (despite them having a subscription service for that purpose alone), meh textures with questionable animations and now bugs gallore. And SV has all of those issues too since those seem to stack. And there isn't any sign those issues could be fixed.

At this point I wonder what the next Pokemon game will have to do to outshine this and what excuse people will use. Probably along the lines of "yeah, the texture of the game are only visible 50% of the time on screen but I'm having fun so there".

And I say this kinda sad in a way. I was a big Pokemon fan before the Switch. But this gen they are finding new ways to disspoint me every time. Kinda impressive at this point.

Sorry if this comment is kinda mean. But I had to say it. The game may be fun but the issues shouldn't be ignored.

@Kermit1Pineapple I hate this excuse that apperantly people can't critize a game they haven't play. Why? There are plenty of gameplay footage online to make some opinions about it. It seems you are just stalling. To have an opinion you have to buy the game and then play it to 100% or you can't speak you mind about anything it seems.
Also, now revewers can't complain about the game they got for review since "they got it for free"? What's the point of revews then?

@jowe_gw
I felt disappointed with this Pokemon game too.
Before that I want to get Pokemon Violet day one but after keep founding a lot of issues from this game, I changed my mind and I will consider other games which worthier to play.
I cannot defend the flaws from this Pokemon game.

Anyone know where I can find Paldean Tentacool (or whatever it's called)? I remember seeing it's icon on the map but I can't for the life of me remember where.

@Fizza its called Toedscool, Serebii should have all the locations up now if you google it.

They have gotten lazy with these, a few games ago a new colour scheme and different type wasn't enough to warrant these pokes being called new but they have now been given their own national dex entry seperate to their original poke.

@jump Firstly, I found him. Secondly, how could you call Toedscool lazy when it has THIS run cycle:

....I may have just failed a shiny Pawmo about 5 hours in without ever realising it.

Whoops.

My son desperately wanted to try this game, so I give in and bought it digitally from the eShop.
Even he, at 11 years old, was utterly shocked in how terrible this game looks, compared to Pokemon Sword and Legend Arceus which he also played.

I created a guest user on his Switch, so I could give it a go myself and I am just shocked how this game was allowed to release in this state?! I have watched many reviews, so was prepared, but now experiencing it myself. Wow!

The textures are absolutely all over the place. Especially a lot of the terrain textures are even worse than the latest Pokemon games on the 3DS. What in earth happened here? Place holders they had no time to replace?
What is even more shocking! What the hell happened with a lot of the excellent new Pokemon battle move animations they added to Pokemon Sword/Shield?
I catched and tried to fight with lot of different pokemon and most of them haven't even any animations for their moves? Even if they existed in Pokemon Sword/Shield, while that game got critique for lot of animations being basic or absent.
But it's far worse in this game! I thought Scarlet/Violet was built on the same engine as Sword/Shield and they would reuse a lot of the assets/animations for this game. Since all that work has been done already? Makes no sense?!

The overall performance is really bad. So reviewers are right! The game just feels really sluggish, like your character is often walking through the mud. Especially when you are riding around on your Pokemon. Lot of texture pop-in or not appearing at all.
The game world just feels really empty and barren. Boring and bland. Really minimum effort work. Completely soulless.

Next to this, a lot of the quality of life features in from Pokemon Sword/Shield are completely absent in this game?!
You cannot enter any house, hardly any of the NPC's talk to you. The shops are barebones, with no interior (except for the barber), just a pop-up screen with product list. All very low, minimum effort! Place holders again?
Same with the Pokemon centers! Very basic minimum effort design with those. Gass-station design without the shop.

Pokemon Gyms. Tried two of them. Again! Most boring, low effort gyms to date!

Same with Tera lair RAID's. More simplistic lower quality effort, compared to the MAX lair RAD's from Sword/Shield.
This is just a recurring theme with everything in this game. Everything feels minimal effort, basic implementation everywhere. Just all rushed, no polish, no excellence whatsoever.

All in all, it's like they started from complete scratch again, ran out of time and only delivered a very barebones game, with lot of placeholders still in place. Unfinished, buggy, glitchy, worst graphics to date, poor performance, lack of Pokemon battle move animations, etc, etc.

This is the first game I am now sending a refund request to Nintendo Europe (in EU law you have 14 days for full refund).
I immediately got a response that it will take a while to get back to me, as they have an extremely high number of requests right now. Lol! Guess I am not the only one requesting a refund for this unfinished crap!

The performace is pants aye, but it's by no means unplayable. I'm really enjoying it, its the first time I've genuinely had no idea what to expect from a pokemon game. But I get that if you can't look past the tech issues and have faith they'll patch them out eventually, it's not for some people

I've been avoiding this thread for fear of spoilers, but I'm far enough along that I wanted to share some thoughts (I am about 10ish hours in, got a couple of gyms and titans down, done my first base raid and some school classes).

I can kinda see why the reviews may be a little on the high side, I think for people of a certain age, a truly open world Pokemon game is something we have dreamed about for most of our lives and now it is finally here and in our hands. I personally didn't like Arceus, and to me this addresses a lot of the stuff that Arceus "got wrong", there is way more variety to the Pokemon out in the world and now you actually have a structure for your exploring that isn't just catch X Pokemon 80 billion times.

I am convinced, although not officially diagnosed, that I am somewhere on the spectrum and this game really hits that part of me. Activities are bite sized enough, and spread out in such a way, that the game becomes very addictive to me. I just wanna check off one more activity, then I'll come off and do some chores.... ooops my whole day has gone by.

It is kind of a shame that the game takes some pretty big steps backwards in terms of customisation and interactivity over previous games. To me this does feel quite unfinished, especially on the technical side of things, but I also wonder how much better they could have gotten this even if they were given more time, given the limitations of the Switch hardware and the miracles people have to create to get things to run even just okay. It certainly feels more complete than Arceus did, which felt like a template waiting for someone to populate with something, but it's hard to go from something like God of War Ragnarok straight to this.

The reviews are still far too high for how poor this game is technically though as far as I am concerned. There is no way a game deserves even a 7 if it is borderline unplayable docked. The experience of playing it in handheld is better, but this is meant to be a hybrid console, it should work in both forms.

I have seen some of the reports of hardcrashes and more serious bugs and glitches, I don't want to jinx myself but I've not seen anything that bad yet but it just generally runs bad and all the time. Even in handheld you still have to deal with a lot of slowdown and micro stuttering, but it does either hide, or generally address, the FPS and resolution issues somewhat.

But man, playing this docked? So unbelievably rough. Literally the moment I loaded in, I stood still in my bedroom, turned the camera and the game chugged so bad I thought it was going to crash. You then step outside and watch as everything further out than like 5 cms turns into a watercolour painting of jagged, indistinguishable, shapes. Somehow this even affects cutscenes, which I've never seen before. Like those shots of you in class where all the students are like Power Point slides. What on Earth is going on here.

And it is so odd given that the game can have really good textures in places, clothing, Pokeballs, some parts of the Pokemon themselves like fur etc can all look surprisingly good but it sorta becomes a negative rather than a positive, because that one good texture magnifies how truly woeful everything looks around it.

I mean Game Freak must have known that scene early on on the lighthouse would become a meme. You look out at a horizon of indistinguishable brown mush as the Pokemon centre's sign below twirls around at literally 1fps.

One other criticism I will raise, and even for me Nintendo Life's worst gamer, is this game is easy to the point of making the experience risk the chance of becoming boring. I beat one titan with a level four Pokemon I found on the way to that titan. And maybe that wouldn't have mattered if there was any spectacle here, but it was just a bigger version of a regular Pokemon, it didn't seem to do anything unique at all if I could tell. Just like a watered-down Alpha from Arceus.

Picking the fire starter allowed me to absolutely cream the first two gyms I went to (bug and grass). I know that type match ups have always been very strong in Pokemon but I dunno, in other games I just remember the Pokemon being generally tougher in gyms, and they would usually have like a curveball Pokemon they would toss up to mess you up. But in those two gyms at least, they had the same types all the way through - including a Crystal form that didn't change their typing - so I just used the same move over and over again and cleared it in a matter of minutes.

I was under levelled for the base raid thing, but even that posed no challenge at all. I still cleared the guard, did the let's go stage in under two minutes and the beat the final boss with ease.

I get that kinda like Elden Ring, you sorta make your own challenge here, but traversal unlocks block you from being able to truly just go anywhere right out the gate and so based on what I can access, nothing has even been more than 5 levels ahead of my strongest Pokemon and 5 levels makes a surprisingly little amount of difference as long as the type matching is in your favour.

@skywake Really? Cyberpunk was broken to kingdom come and Pokemon just has some lag and animation problems.

Been playing Scarlet for around an hour at this point and outside the normal frame drops I've already gotten a few temporary freezes as well as a softlock interacting with a Pelipper.

Very early impressions but it feels pretty much like the reviews were saying in which you've got a fun game that is brought down by bugs. I wouldn't go as far saying it's equivalent to Cyberpunk in terms of bugs, Skyrim is a much more fitting comparison.

I dont think I can finish this game. First time I am saying this about Pokemon, but I neither can nor want to. Its just awful and terrible. Suddenly everyones level 60 and knows Earthquake. I hate you Game Freak.