Well, there’s a new Pokemon! I tend to not really review Pokemon unless something new is done. I mean, you’ve reviewed one Gen 7 or lower Pokemon game, you’ve reviewed all of them. That’s why I didn’t really review the Diamond and Pearl remakes in my post about them, but I did review Legends Arceus, because that was a more unique spin-off.

And in this case, it’s different enough to be worth reviewing… so yeah. I played the story and did some post-game shit, I’m about done with it myself though. I will do things a bit different than usual reviews because the usual format doesn’t work for this.

Let’s talk about it!

Developer: Game Freak
Publisher: Nintendo
Release date: November 18th, 2022
Platforms: Switch
Genre: RPG

Review

The good

The overall concept is good. I mean, it’s what people have wanted from Pokemon since forever. Open world, you can do stuff in any order, you have as much freedom as you want to explore… It’s functional. The game is split up in 3 stories to follow, that very vaguely come together for a finale that is actually one of the best ones in the series. You have the regular gym/elite 4 thing going on, with a rival helping you out. You have Team Star being the… villains? You have to raid their bases and fight their leaders, to find the big leader in the end. And there’s Arven who wants to find special herbs, but it turns out they’re all being defended by giant pokemon  (but it’s not dynamax). I will talk about one problem with this later on, but as a general setup, it works quite well. The one thing they could’ve gotten rid of is the school concept, it’s basically not really relevant except for the Team Star story, which ends up being a bit dumb anyways.

The regular Pokemon stuff is still here as you remember it, with some improvements. Namely, no more move relearner, you just do that straight from the move summary for each pokemon now, and you can more easily get a listing of compatible TMs. This game has Hyper Training but it’s better, because your pokemon don’t need to be level 100 to do it anymore so you can improve IVs easily, and once you have 6 gyms beaten you can buy bottle caps at the Delibird store, so as long as you find the NPC that does it in the snow village, you can do it so no screwing around with breeding required for a perfect IV pokemon and less need to grind. (though you can still do that… FYI there’s no daycare anymore, you do breeding when you do picnics).  Mints are back from the last game so you can get your desired nature easily, and of course there’s ways to reduce EVs so all good. Otherwise, this is the Pokemon gameplay you know and love. Throw balls are animals to catch them, have them fight, there’s a chart of what moves are good or bad against what type of animals that I’ll never fully remember, and it all works great.

Shinies are more common. This is a result of the change of wild pokemon spawns, namely that there’s no more tall grass random Pokemon, so they all appear just in front of you. So you have chances of just seeing shinies walking around now. The odds are the same (like 1/4096 I think?), but you see more Pokemon, so that results in more possibility of seeing shinies since you don’t see pokemon once at a time. The increased possibility of finding shinies means I FOUND MY FIRST SHINY, EVER (not counting the red gyarados, that doesn’t count). I played all the pokeymanz except for gen 3 (and some of the remakes), and this is the first time I found a shiny. It was a Gabite. I killed it. Oops.

Tera types! Of all the battle gimmicks (megas, z-moves, dynamax) Pokemon has introduced, this seems to be the first one to actually have thought put behind it. Like, Megas look good cool but functionally are dumb. Very limited since only a few mons can even do it making it unbalanced and it wastes a held item slot. Z-moves also waste a held item slot and the effect is just one move and that’s it, no extra strategy introduced. Dynamax is the most balanced but it’s… kinda boring effect-wise (and g-max moves being limited to only a few pokemon is, once again, unbalanced). So to put it simply: megas is a stupid mechanic, z-moves are boring, and dynamax is balanced but boring. Terastalizing though, is pretty damn cool. You don’t get stat boosts, every Pokemon can do it, it’s limited to once per battle so it requires lot’s of thought before you do it, and its effect is really interesting and changes the whole battle meta.

Every pokemon has a “Tera Type”, which is one of the types Pokemon usually have, but it’s inactive generally. Once per battle (and then you also have to recover that charge at a pokemon center which is DUMB) you can transform one of your pokemon to that Tera Type. This makes the Pokemon into some crystal form with a crown that represents their tera type. Defensively they become a mono-type Pokemon of their Tera Type. A Tera Type can be any type, so if, say, your Charizard (not sure if he’s in the game) has a Dragon Tera Type, Terastalizing turns him from Fire/Flying to pure Dragon type. This of course gives STAB (same type attack bonus) of that type, maintains STAB for the Pokemon’s original types (so the Charizard in my example would retain the boost to flamethrower’s damage), and changes the weaknesses to the Tera Type’s. So if you have a Flying/Water pokemon and activate their Ground Tera Type, they become immune to lightning attacks despite their primary type being 4x weak. Also your Tera Type CAN be one of your main types. What that does is still make you monotype (so dual-type pokemon lose one of the types), but it actually gives you more STAB on top of your basic STAB, which of course is extremely strong (STAB is x1.5 damage, I think Tera boosts that to x2). That’s such an interesting concept as far as team-building, since you have a way to either compensate for weaknesses, or to create an unexpected moveset. There’s a lot of potential for cool stuff using the mechanic, as any Pokemon in your team can do it so it’s very adaptable. Oh and if you grind raids (and do a few different side things) you can change a pokemon’s Tera Type to whatever you want, so yay!

The raids are fun. You basically fight a “dynamax” pokemon, but this time it’s a random pokemon that has the tera type of the raid den, then when you beat it you can catch it. They’re way stronger than normal pokemon, so you go in as a team of 4. If you’re playing online that’s good because you’ll always get teammates that use correct Pokemon. If you don’t pay for Nintendo online scam, you’re given CPUs with random teammates with random shitty pokemon. This means 5 star and 6 star raids are pretty tough unless you max out your own pokemon (and 6 star raids might not be possible alone). But you get good shit from them, and overall it’s a fun mechanic.

There’s a fun little feature called “Let’s Go“. Basically you can throw a pokeball to the ground and the pokemon will come out and follow you around (as long as you don’t go too far). But you can also order the pokemon in your first spot to attack wild mons. This doesn’t work exactly like battles, as stats are less important than weaknesses and levels (as far as I’ve seen), but doing this lets you get kills without stopping for EXP and materials. Materials are used to build TMs at pokemon centers which is nice. The EXP you get from this is less than battles, but it’s much faster than battles, so a nice way to get a bit of EXP on the side. I think it’s a cool feature.

I like plenty of the new Pokemons. The grass and fire starters are pretty cool mostly (the water one is super extra cringe), with Skeledirge being the coolest of the starter designs (and also Torch Song is a fairly broken move, as far as the single player goes, they went hard). Lechonk is great. Lokix is pretty cool. The Pawmis are fine. Clodsire is good. The Tandemaus are fucking great. Fidough and his evo are fantastic. The Charcadets are cool as fuck. Klawf is cool but I wish it evolved. Rellor is cool. I like Revavroom. Cyclizar’s cool. Orthworm is a good boy and I’m really sad it doesn’t evolve, might be my favorite new Pokemon. Palafin Hero Form is cool (and also holy shit those stats). Kingambit is fucking cool. Baxcalibur is great. The paradox Pokemon in Scarlet are awesome especially my boy Roaring Moon. There’s a few I think are pretty nice other than those, and not a lot that I actively dislike entirely except, like, Cetitan.

I actually like some of the characters in this game. This is weird, because Pokemon has kinda shitty characters normally, or barely any characters at all. If I “liked” a Pokemon character before, it was generally because they had cute/cool character designs. Here… there’s a bit of that, but in the end of the game, I actually really liked Arven, genuinely (with a bit of weird writing at the start making him weirdly rude the first time you meet him for no reason). Nemona’s pretty fun. Penny has her moments. Iono is just great fun. And, most importantly, my boy, Larry. Larry is fucking awesome and anyone who says otherwise is objectively wrong. He’s just like me fr fr.

The okay/meh

One thing that requires discussion is the progression. This is one of the biggest… things with this game. Basically, you have 18 spots all over the map to go to and do the challenges for. There’s 5 titans, 5 Team Star bases and 8 gyms. Then each has a “finale” when you finish them. So for the gym there’s the Elite 4 and champion. The Titan has a battle tougher than the Elite 4 and champions. The Team Star thing has a pretty cute fight as well. Then you get the ending, which I’ll talk about later. The “problem” is how this all balances out. Because the world is open, and you can do things in any order, you may, by mistake, leave some of the easier things for later and end up rolling it later. There’s one place that actually “gates” you from going further… but it’s an open world, just go from the other side of the island if you want. Also there’s one titan you can’t do until you can traverse water.

I like some of the balancing, namely if you come into a challenge much weaker than you should be, because that gives you a chance to actually get pretty satisfying gameplay from beating something you’re way underleveled for. But also… well, the way things are set up, you’re likely to just do things in the “wrong” order. Literally the natural order you’ll do things don’t mesh with where some of these points are placed on the map, the gym you’re intended to do last you’ll definitely do before the second-to-last, the same for Team Star bases, and you’ll probably end up doing the “last” titan, like, third.

I don’t know if it’s a problem that the game doesn’t really tell you the level of the different challenges outright, since you can infer them based on the level of wild pokemon around, but to me it’s more that if you end up doing one thing early, and then get back to the “correct” order means you’ll wreck everything without effort. Very quickly I did a few things to maintain challenge for the endgame, namely fight none of the non-important trainers (trainers in the open world will not challenge you to fights unless you talk to them, they’re all optional), don’t spend too long fighting, and only use EXP candies to level up a low-level pokemon I’m adding to the team (to get it up to par). This meant I wrecked most of the gyms, Team Star Bases and Titans (with 2 gyms, 2 bases and 1 titan that were actually really hard but beatable because I got to them early), but once I got to the pre-finale stuff (Elite 4, Arven, Team Star Boss), those were actually pretty rough. I did it all first try, but a lot of these battles were really close. And I actually did lose a fight in the finale chapter, that shit’s rough if you didn’t over-level… then the post game was too easy lol.

So I think the game CAN be pretty well balanced, but kinda only if you do a bit of self-limiting. There’s PROBABLY a solution to this in a sequel. And that solution cannot be level scaling because level scaling is stupid trash that just removes difficulty because everything needs to be only barely above your level, while this current system actually allows for challenge. I think they’re not far off from something that’s good, but there’s too much unbalance in the mix.

So anyways, on to the not-progression/balance related stuff…

The gym minigames are kinda dumb. There’s some that are just battles, that’s fine, the rest feel like time-wasting. Like the “rhythm game” one that gives you like 5 seconds to press the corresponding button… why is that even in the game?

The Team Star bases feel like a bit of a waste of time, since you get no EXP from the 30 “Let’s Go” kills you have to get and those aren’t a challenge to get anyways unless you’re way underlevel, then it’s just a normal battle with a powered-up specific tera type revavroom, in the form of a big car. That battle is fine, but the “invasion” of the base before it is dumb.

One thing I’d like, when you’re switching Pokemon, is to see the stats right there on that screen instead of having to check summaries.  There’s no reason not to.

So the ending part… After doing the 3 story paths, the titans, the Team Star bases and the gyms/elite 4/top champion/rival part, you do the final part of the story and… it’s not BAD. The problem is that it goes against how the rest of the game plays (except the framerate, it’s worse in this section somehow), by being what is basically a straight line you walk through, where you can’t ride your Pokemon and the game has conversations while you’re walking and… it’s just… eh? It feels like a big waste of time. Like, it’s fine story-wise, but it’s a slog to go through. But the final parts of that is one of the best ending battles in the series so I’m not gonna complain too much. Also, the post-game is pretty good.

The classes you can take in school feel mostly useless. They mostly just give EXP candies which you can get from raids. They also unlock conversation with teachers to get extra rewards, most of which are useless or easily grindable. The only classes that have anything actually meaningful as rewards are Languages (a pokemon) and History (gives locations for a small part of the legendary pokemon sidequest). I think Home Ec might be something possibly-useful too based on a list I’m reading right now, but I’m not about to waste my time trying it. I dunno, this is just a stupid waste of time.

The paradox Pokemon in Violet are honestly pretty meh compared to the Scarlet ones. They all have “Iron” in their name, and why the fuck are they robots, it actually makes no sense, pokemon are animals, coming from the future shouldn’t make them completely robotic. The designs are bad, the concept just makes no sense.

Also the legendaries are pretty lamely-designed, other than the ones on the game’s box.

Other trainers no longer use items. That’s weird.

The bad

The framerate! Yeah, it’s bad. Real bad. In battle it’s mostly fine though that can depend on how the game’s feeling, but exploring the world, it fucks out constantly. I don’t think there’s ever a moment where the game is even running at even 30fps, which is what it’s aiming for. To try and maintain the 30fps, which it doesn’t, it does this thing a lot of console games have been doing, of making things further from the camera move at a lower framerate than things that are closer… The problem being that it does that to things that are quite close to the camera. If they’re right at the edge of draw distance (which is also piss poor), animation for certain things literally becomes 0 fps. If that actually helped the base framerate, that would be fine. It doesn’t, you actually get drops to the base framerate when this happens. It’s really bad. It SOUNDS like, based on what I read, that this is the result of memory leaks in the code. Yeah that shouldn’t happen. I didn’t experience some of the more extreme examples I saw online where it goes to sub-1fps during pokeball throws though. I will note though, framerate problems aren’t a “glitch”, and I do see very stupid people lumping those together.

I’d say the worst part of the framerate though, is that, it seems like, tech-wise, this game at least SEEMS similar to Pokemon Legends Arceus, with the problem then being that PLA actually did run at a mostly-stable 30fps, and mostly it did that with dynamic resolution (which I think S/V does, too, making the problem more baffling). I’m not sure how that game works fine, but then Scarlet/Violet, the new mainline games in the series, is performing so much worse. This should obviously not happen, making it questionable why they let it come out this way. Oh, and, semi-related, the pop-in is pretty bad. Textures and models fuck out a bunch from a distance and pop-in from not very far from you. PLA had that same pop-in issue, I think it’s worse here though.

So then there’s the glitches. So I have this in “the bad”, because, yes, glitches bad. But also I think people are freaking out over what amounts to basically nothing. My contention with the whole thing is fourfold.  First off, people are blowing this shit WAY out of proportion. Seems most of the people “complaining” aren’t actually people playing the game, but people sharing a small handful of tweets over and over making the problem seem worse than it is. Second, it seems most of the “glitches” are weird ass graphical issues, rather than anything that might actually impact gameplay. If it’s only graphical, and doesn’t prevent gameplay, it’s kinda whatever. Third, in all examples I’m seeing of models fucking out, it’s while the game is in online mode. Still bad that it happens, but that explains why I couldn’t replicate any of them, and why most people aren’t seeing them. Fourth, things that aren’t glitches are lumped into it, such as the open world elements still being active when you’re taking pictures or fighting… so yeah, a dude walking through your pokemon fight looks weird, but it’s not something that affects anything and isn’t a glitch.

The glitches are bad, but the framerate is an actual problem, while models moving weird is just models moving weird, it’s not important. The one glitch that I found to even be worth mentioning as far as effect on gameplay, and it’s the weird instances of passing through the floor. However this seems random, I tried to replicate a few of these, going to the same spots, walking through them the same way, I couldn’t do it. Not sure if it’s random, or very precise, but I just couldn’t do it. So yeah, glitches bad, but it’s not nearly as much of a problem as the awful framerate, and people freaking out over glitches on the twitters, they’re idiots.

One glitch that I can note because I think most people get it, is the fact that the Elite 4 music is stuck in a loop of the first 5 seconds… which makes that part a bit anti-climactic. The actual theme for the Elite 4 is actually really good, but you don’t get to hear it because it’s glitched. And it’s not the only one, I think the top champion one is broken too. I have no idea how this happens… like, just play the audio file normally? Resetting your game fixes this issue (so it’s actually probably related to the memory leak mentioned in the framerate section), but that really shouldn’t happen.

OH. I almost forgot about this. People were whining that Set Mode wasn’t in the option. Those people are being babies, just press B. But there is one option that is sorely missing, and that’s the ability to skip attack animations. That’s been a normal and beneficial thing since the first game. Also a bit more minor, but nothing for camera speed either. And no way to skip cutscenes (there IS a “skip cutscenes” option, but it doesn’t actually skip all cutscenes).

Switching Pokemon is too slow. I don’t know why but there’s this pause while you’re switching, for kinda no reason at all.

I will talk about one thing I think was a pretty baffling gameplay design choice. There’s a few legendary Pokemon you can find here. They’re a bit meh design-wise, but that’s not important. What’s important is how you unlock them. Namely, doing the history class in school gives you the location of shrines that contain legendaries, and it explains how to unlock those shrines, which are these stakes in the ground scattered all over the world that you need to remove. My problem with this, of course, is that the game, as far as I can find, has no indication as to where these are. You just have to walk around and… hope to find them. The world is a decent size, and there’s 32 of these things that are small, hard to see, not well indicated things, with not-great draw distance… Yeah, finding these on your own is a massive chore. You can kinda guess a lot of them just by looking at the map because “hey I wonder if this high-up spot might have something”, but that’s not consistent. If there was a way to get hints for the position of some of these stakes, that would be okay. But I searched the game, I asked around on forums, seems there’s nothing. So… google it is, I guess. Unless you want to walk around to find these easily-missable things. On a positive note, killing the legendaries just re-seals them so you can try again, so you can’t actually miss them. I thought getting them all would do something, but it mostly didn’t.

I don’t like Lechonk’s evolution. Goes from great Pokemon to one of the shittiest in the game.

The method to evolve Gimmighoul is bullshit… though he does seem like a fairly strong pokemon at least, but that’s not gonna make me want to find 999 coins in the world.

Flamigo is just a fucking flamingo.

Last Respects is a bit ridiculous, especially if you remember to set up a sandstorm. Not uncounterable, but require

Sometimes it can rain. That actually activates the rain effect in battle, based on nothing actually done in battle. It’s dumb and annoying, especially if you lead with a fire pokemon who is now massively debuffed for no reason.

Some pokemon are too fucking small, you literally won’t see them on the field sometimes, especially when on your motorcycle pokemon.

Overall

Alright so I think I covered most things I needed to… It’s possible I missed something, but whatever. This post is long and stupid enough.

I mean… if you like Pokemon, you’ll like this. You already knew, even before it was announced, that you’d be buying this game.

This is ALMOST the game people have been asking for from Pokemon. I say almost, because I think there’s some balancing that needs to be done with the open world concept. I’m not exactly sure HOW you do that, of course, since level scaling would be fucking stupid, but you can certainly do it better than here. It’s really close, but not quite where it could be. It still has plenty of good in it, including the first actually good battle gimmick in the series.

The performance is shit and needs to be fixed. The visual glitches, whatever, keep ’em (they only happen when playing online anyways), just fix the falling through floors, fix the looping music glitch, and get that patch out ASAP. But, in the end, even if the framerate is bad, the underlying gameplay is good, so in the end that’s what matters. Especially once the framerate is… hopefully fixed.

I’m recommending it. It’s good. Maybe wait for the framerate to get fixed before you grab it, but otherwise, it’s Pokemon, it’s good stuff. I recommend it more than TemTem. I’m not really sure yet which I thought was better gameplay-wise between this and Legends Arceus, since they’re pretty different games.

Guess you can’t argue with results though. In 3 days it became the BIGGEST NINTENDO LAUNCH EVER (above Smash Ultimate, Smash Brawl and Animal Crossing New Horizons), and in Japan it sold about twice what Sword and Shield sold in their first 3 days, which is actually insane.