During the latest Pokémon Presents broadcast, it was reiterated that Pokémon Scarlet and Violet would be fully open world; a first for the mainline series after the franchise dipped its toes in the water with Pokémon Legends: Arceus.
To hit this home, it was confirmed that players will be tasked with challenging eight gym leaders, much like previous games. What's different this time, however, is you're completely free to choose which gym you want to tackle first, opening up a world of possibilities for players to weave their own story within the region of Paldea. One Gym Leader has already been confirmed, too: Grusha, the leader of Glaseado Gym, an ice-type specialist.
Not only that, but the traditional gym challenge is confirmed to be just one of three main stories featured in the games. What the other two consist of has not yet been confirmed and it's likely we'll be finding out for ourselves when the games launch on November 18th.
To assist with navigating the land and locating the Pokémon Gyms, you'll be able to utilise the Legendary Pokémon (Koraidon and Miraidon) in unique ways, including riding around atop them in a kind of "bike" form, scaling up mountains with ease, and even gliding around with total freedom.
What do you make of the open-world nature of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Comments 47
But is there level scaling?
Wait, Legendary Pokemons since from beginning??
three main stories is a good idea. I liked that you could take a break from the Galar Gym Challenge to go gallivanting around the Isle of Armor or the Crown Tundra whenever you wanted, but I didn't like that this wasn't baked into the main game, and was only an option with DLC...
Having multiple stories right there from the start is a much much better situation.
@Radbot42 imagine if all gyms are lvl 8 with 2 mons lol.
100% sure the teams you encounter will depent on your progress.
I wonder if there will be a quest system like in Legends Arceus. That was a super underrated feature of that game and really enhanced the experience
@Radbot42
According to leaks the answer thankfully is no.
So we finally can have as much challenge as we want moving forward.
The fact that you can tackle gyms in any order is a dream come true. I wonder how having the cover legendary with you throughout will affect the game, though. I assume you'll only use them as ride Pokémon for most of the adventure, and then you'll be able to battle and catch them to officially join your party towards the end of the game. Being able to use a legendary in battle early on would break the games.
My prediction based on what I saw from the website: gym challenge, evil team (the fire bus) and something to do with Terastals. That's literally just going off of singular images but that's what I think at least. Open ended-ness in how you explore the region is the biggest thing I'm excited about personally since it kind of eliminates the problem of having a Pokemon you really want to use locked behind a late game area. There'll probably still be a bit of that here and there but it'll definitely be toned down compared to previous games.
To summarise: this game can't come out soon enough.
@Screen
I want level scaling though. I want to be able to do gyms in any order, and for the gym leaders to be hard because of improved team design, not because they’re 30 levels higher. Taking on the strong gyms first will just mean you steamroll the low level ones afterwards too. IMO, a better solution is to have level scaling, and a way to level down your Pokémon (presumably resetting EVs in the process).
@Munchlax
You can’t “make it harder” if you understand the basic mechanics of the game. The only hard Pokémon game is you’re first one.
Being able to tackle gyms in any order doesn't matter if the Pokemon in them have fixed levels. Completely useless feature if the leak is accurate.
@Ralizah I was just thinking the same thing.
If the levels don't scale, then you can't truly tackle the gyms in any order. There would be a soft 'preferred order' based on what level the gym leaders' Pokemon are set to. Maybe they use a tiered system where the first 2 gyms are leveled around 5-10, then the next two 15-25, and so on for all 8.
Scaling though, would allow any order. It would be cool to see the gym leaders' Pokemon teams change based on how many badges collected. There are many ways this could work, and I'm happy to see the formula changing.
Hope that rumor about the levels not being flexible isn't true, though given Gamefreak's usual lack of foresight it probably is.
@Screen
Of course you can- build enemy teams more like competitive, and improve the AI. Not necessarily hard, but absolutely harder.
@Ralizah Based on this excerpt from the website:
'There is no set path to the Gyms. You can purposefully seek out a stronger Gym Leader, or you can simply stop by a Gym that happens to be located in a town you came across on your journey. This time, you get to plot your very own path along Victory Road.'
....I get the feeling whatever leak you're on about may be pretty damn close to the truth
sorry to be repetitive, but Arceus's secondary quests were amazing IMO... so many funny and cool stories.. I hope scarlet and violet can have something close..
@Axecon some of those quests were awesome!
First, Grusha translates to "pear" in Russian.
And it was a common name in Russia like two hundred years ago, short form of Agrathena / Agrippina.
I wonder if there will be anything Russian about her.
@Munchlax You'd also have to account for the game's difficulty scaling. The early trainer battles and early gym leaders can't all have well crafted, perfectly balanced teams.
@Zverik She's also the Ice type gym leader, and Russia is stereotypically icy/winter-y, so you may be onto something there
@Ralizah I agree. If you grind up to lvl 50 and destroy the 8th gym first, the rest won't have anywhere near any challenge or even a point. Unless I'm missing something?
I do hope they reconsidered at least a slight amount of level-scaling, although there's only 3 months to launch, so there's not much they can change.
I like the scene in the Kanto reboot series where the gym leader swaps out a weaker team for a different team with ultra balls instead of great balls when he realizes how many gym badges you have.
It isn't a dealbreaker for me though. I'm too excited about this game to let it ruin my hype!
If there's no level-scaling for the gyms, the game gives freedom of choice to challenge the hard stuff first...just like Zelda BotW giving us the choice to run straight to Hyrule Castle to fight Ganon after leaving the plateau. It's all about choice and doing what you want to do with it being open world.
@ChandlerKeith19
There’s a competitive meta game called “little cup” that uses similar builds and strategies, but with unevolved Pokémon only. Also, I’m not seeing the teams need to be optimised, just that they should have some kind of synergy or a unique strategy to make bosses more challenging and interesting.
@Ulysses @Zverik He’s a man.
@Munchlax
Is "super easy" really better than "Legends Arceus easy"?
@Screen
I’m afraid I don’t understand the question.
@Munchlax
I meant does it matter if it's really easy or a little easy?
Wouldn't it be better to have the choice to make it hard?
Level-scaling gyms, and I'm guessing a legendary that acts as the HM replacement and will only be catchable some time later in the story. Good ideas so far, if true.
@Fizza Yeeeeah, the leaker named the region Paldea weeks ago. Sad but true, no level scaling.
@Screen Problem is, it only makes it hard at the beginning. So if you decide to go for the hardest gym in the beginning and have the mindset of, "Ha! I can challenge the hardest gym first? I love it!" And you decide to grind and grind and grind, do other side quests, catch stronger mon, etc just to beat the hardest gym first, then that retroactively makes all gyms/the rest of the game prior to that one really easy. That's the problem with not level scaling
@Munchlax "some kind of synergy or a unique strategy" doesn't necessarily equate to "more challenging and interesting" bosses. It would be cool if instead of types gyms were built around certain strategies (stall, entry hazards, etc). But if it's all built on the foundations of Pokemon's single player campaign, it's still gonna be brain dead easy. Just a different flavor of easy.
@Brydontk
If you have level scaling then they'd all be equally easy, so IMO the choice is between partial challenge or no challenge at all.
I get the gripe if there really is no level-scaling for gyms. I think that would have been the more 'obvious' approach to having the open-world.
The traditional way of playing a Pokemon game is to build a party as you go, leveling up your party, maybe swapping in one or two different Pokemon as needed for type matchups at gyms.
But with this 'go anywhere' approach, you could use it as an excuse to develop a new team with each gym. Say you do want to grind a party of 6 right off to challenge the strongest gym. What do you do when you wind up back at one of the easier gyms? Go choose another party of lower-leveled or non-evolved Pokemon that you like. Each gym could be more of a holistic test of you as a trainer as opposed to 'have you netted the total required amount of experience points to beat this next gym leader?'
I'm always looking for ways to organically train lots of different Pokemon in a game instead of getting locked into the 10 most powerful ones I find on the gym journey.
This sounds exciting but it's a mystery how they will execute it. Will there be level scaling? What about the wild Pokémon levels? It's all about the challenge the games should offer.
In world lore (at least in early anime) implies THERE IS a scaling system in the gym challenges. Ash's very first challenge against Brock sees the latter tailoring his team based on Ash's experience as a trainer. He isn't the punching bag joke of a gym leader with two level 12 pokemon the internet makes of him
Main issue I have with this is that if there is no scaling and you do the preferred order, the experience will likely be lessened in terms of narrative because it's all set up to be done in any order.
So in the end you might end up with a worst of both worlds situation
@Bobb This also appears in the Pokémon Origins anime, which is a neat nod to that concept.
On a side note I really like the design of Grusha, she actually has proper winter clothing compared to Candace who was wearing a mini skirt in an ice cold gym.
Haven't there always been at least two stories in the game? There's always the antagonist organization (Team Rocket, Magma, etc) that you're battling alongside the Pokemon League Challenge. I hope they mean more than that kind of thing when they say three storylines.
I like this idea adds challenge my problem is i promised myself all the way back at blue after catching them all id never get a splite pokemon again im content with alot of spin offs anyway
Before anyone asks i simply don't agree with it
And no i will not delete my previous post containing a typo e out of shear principal, deal with it
Is Snorlax Ez to get in new game?
I have no idea what they are, but I’m thinking that I might tackle the other two stories first. After 25 years, I’m a little burned out from the gyms and league motif to the point that I just caught Pokémon in the wild areas for 45 hours after opening it up all the way in Sw/Sh.
This person gets it
Why are doing this they need to do DLC for PLA i dont half of them
This. This has convinced me to get it. I love Pokémon Crystal Clear for this reason alone, so THANK YOU, Game Freak, for making it canon
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