The Switch has seen various stabs at the \u201copen world:\u201d Sword and Shield had their Wild Area and added a couple of smaller zones via DLC, while Legends: Arceus featured unlockable zones of open exploration. Scarlet and Violet\u2019s world is essentially what happens when the Isle of Armor and Crown Tundra become the base game; you can explore 95% of the continent as soon as you\u2019re turned loose on the school (or in the case of one NWR staffer, before). This has thrown a curveball into a classic Pokemon mechanic, however. Previously, Pokemon obtained in a trade would tend to disobey commands so you couldn\u2019t borrow a level 100 Garchomp from a friend to wreck a game. Both of the open predecessors (Sword\/Shield, Arceus) had a form of level capping whereby a Pokemon could not be caught above a certain level which increased by game progress. Scarlet and Violet combine this; it is possible to catch a Pokemon above your cap, but it\u2019s markedly harder AND it will disobey if it is CAUGHT above the level cap until you get Gym badges. What wasn’t clear and was a point of contention for me was that this doesn\u2019t apply to Pokemon that are caught below the cap and leveled up – something to keep in mind if you want to try Professor Oak\u2019s Challenge in the game, I guess.<\/p>\n

Scarlet and Violet\u2019s main new mechanics are the Terastal battle modification and the Let\u2019s Go encounter. Terastal, which is unlocked just after being set out from the school, changes a Pokemon\u2019s type until it\u2019s knocked out or the battle ends; this can be used to inflict additional damage with a main type, or for defensive purposes to dodge existing weaknesses. This differs from previous mechanics as it is tied to an item that has to be restored at a Pokemon Center before it can be used again; it\u2019s not spammable in every fight the way prior techs worked, nor is it tied to the game\u2019s \u201cRaid\u201d battles and gym fights. As the type can be changed via collecting enough of an item, it\u2019s got a good balance of being strong and strategically useful but not game breaking. The \u201cLet\u2019s Go\u201d mechanic has the player\u2019s first Pokemon sent out to battle wild Pokemon. It\u2019s essentially an auto battle, and it\u2019s nice that it doesn\u2019t remove special Pokemon from the map, but it\u2019s not really essential outside of one of the story modes and a few new evolutions that require walking a certain distance. A minor mechanical change is that although TMs return to being single-use items, they can be crafted by a combination of Pokemon materials and a currency earned each time a Pokemon is defeated. If we must have a quality set of moves available to teach on demand, at least there\u2019s a reasonable way to make them available.<\/p>\n

The Victory Road story path maintains the traditional eight gyms and an Elite 4 that are part of most mainline Pokemon games. Each gym has a challenge that has to be completed and to be blunt, they\u2019re mostly lame minigames. The first two I did – Bug and Grass – can be completed without a single battle, and I do have to wonder why rolling a giant olive into a wall or playing hide-and-seek qualifies me for a match with a gym leader. After playing Simon \/ Where\u2019s Waldo \/ Slalom, the gym leaders themselves are a decent challenge even if they are a little obsessed with Terastalizing a Pokemon outside of their type into their trademark type to get one shot. Each gym has three or four Pokemon to battle as well and does a decent job of playing around the type\u2019s weaknesses – until the main Pokemon comes out, of course. Notably, the sixth gym I did had double battles used instead of the standard 1v1 battles; coincidentally, this was the hardest of the bunch.<\/p>\n

Path of Legends is one that is easy to stumble into; the titans are big enough that they\u2019re noticeable even with the game\u2019s low draw distance in handheld mode. The fights are modified versions of the Totem battles in the Sun and Moon generation; one of your Pokemon battles the titan alone to get it to a certain health level, whereupon it retreats to a cave where you and another character double-team the titan. The titans unlock new navigation methods for the mount Pokemon: they eventually pick up a dash, swimming abilities, a high jump, a glide, and mountain scaling. (The fact that \u201cHerba Mystica\u201d, the items that are used to unlock the abilities, shares initials with \u201cHidden Machine,\u201d which was an old navigation tech, is probably intentional.)<\/p>\n

Starfall Street requires three wins to clear; a win against a trainer outside the gym which serves as a level check, then the Let\u2019s Go function has to be used with the first three Pokemon on the team to take out 30 Pokemon. I found here that the battles were made harder than they needed to be by fat-fingering; sending out a Pokemon is mapped to R, but recalling is set to ZR by default and I thought I was calling something out when it wasn\u2019t called back yet. After 30 KOs ensues a standard Pokemon battle even if one of the Pokemon has been modified into a freaking CAR, and that\u2019s it. It\u2019s a simple mode, but it does feature a lot of story and really bad disguises.<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t swing a dead Litten around the internet without hitting a Scarlet or Violet glitch video now. I had one of the better experiences among those of us who played Pokemon, and even then I still had one soft crash that might have just been an extremely long load, a lot of slowdown, and one incident involving a fight with a Floatzel stuck in a bridge.<\/p>\n

“When I said to use Leaf Blade, I didn’t expect you to DECAPITATE the poor thing.”<\/strong><\/small><\/center><\/div>\n

The lighting of the game also made me think a Snom I found was shiny when it wasn\u2019t\u2026 of course, that didn\u2019t become obvious until I started the battle. I\u2019ve seen reports from other staffers that have had double-digit crash to desktop errors in a week, so there\u2019s definitely something wrong – especially when I checked the \u201cDebug Team\u201d in the credits and they had FIVE PEOPLE listed. Most of my play was based on a downloaded version that went to my SD card by default, so when the \u201cmove it to system memory\u201d idea propagated, I tried it and found a minor improvement. Testing a retail copy of Violet also didn\u2019t have issues, but that was played entirely on a Switch Lite. The online play was a big question for me; I had memories of enabling the online in Sword and Shield and dropping down to a framerate of roughly \u201clol, no.\u201d Even with a full party, it was fine as they don\u2019t drop every NPC onto the map to take up processing time. Some issues came up with Terastal raid battles since everyone\u2019s attacking simultaneously; I had a few raids with moves being used after the enemy\u2019s health hit 0.<\/p>\n

As someone who\u2019s a Pokemon collector, I always look forward to seeing what the new Pokemon bring to the table. I ended up with more than a box\u2019s worth of new Pokemon that I wanted to use during the story before finally shifting to one team for the conclusions of the stories; though I did notice a lack of new Ground types outside of Paldean Wooper and what is clearly \u201cwhat if Tentacool was a Grass\/Ground type.\u201d I was ride or die with Sprigatito as a cat fan, and considering their trademark move in their final form never misses AND always gets critical hits, I chose *wisely*. I do have to shake my head at some of the new evolution methods; one Pokemon evolves at random after a certain level, another requires leveling in a multiplayer instance, and then\u2026 remember Gimmighoul? It evolves, but only after you find 999 of its unique items – coins – in the environment. The only things that stop this from being Korok Seeds 2: This Time It\u2019s Personal is that they can respawn, you get more than one at a time, and there\u2019s a functional reward. A decent number of new Pokemon are held to the very end of the game; this made for a fun final pre-credits fight when I had to face an entire team where I\u2019d seen only one of them before.<\/p>\n

The soundtrack for Scarlet and Violet has a ton of bangers, with special dispensation to Toby Fox who composed a lot of the battle themes. The Team Star battle and gym match battle themes especially stand out. There\u2019s been a lot of fury over the licensing of a tune by Ed Sheeran seemingly at random – I will admit to actually liking \u201cCelestial\u201d, and its use in the game is appropriate given the context of it.<\/p>\n

Despite the score, I\u2019m going to spend a stupid amount of time in the world of Paldea. The technical issues with the game will eventually be fixed, and what will be left is a great Pokemon experience. If you\u2019re still on the fence at this point, it\u2019s certainly fair to wait for patches to smooth things out, but at some point I hope everyone can come along for the ride. And based on the opening weekend sales, I might\u2019ve gotten my wish already.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If the QA and testing teams were set to Magnitude 10 instead of Magnitude 4, we\u2019d have an all-timer on our hands. By now, judgment has largely been rendered on Pokemon Scarlet and Violet – either you\u2019re bouncing all over the Paldea region on your motorcycle-like dragon or you\u2019re laughing at the glitch videos getting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":40887,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"http:\/\/www.nintendoworldreport.com\/media\/59779\/4\/10.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[576],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nintendo"],"yoast_head":"\n