Pokémon Scarlet & Violet is an incredible entry into the mainline series that still falls just short of its potential. Developed by erstwhile series studio Game Freak and published by Nintendo and The Pokémon Company, Pokémon Scarlet & Violet is the franchise's first attempt to offer a more open-ended RPG experience that features branching paths and multiple avenues with which to take the main character's journey. While its best moments will undoubtedly be in contention for the most compelling in the series' history, its clunkiness and uneven technical performance makes for a beautiful but flawed Pokémon adventure.
Pokémon Scarlet & Violet follows the protagonist, a lightly customizable student freshly enrolled in Uva or Naranja Academy, a version-specific trainer school in the Paldea region. Balancing schoolwork and the familiar path from choosing a starter to League Champion is part of the story, but not all of it. Pokémon Scarlet & Violet also offers up two other roads to travel down in the form of chasing Titan Pokémon and unraveling the origins and goals of the mysterious Team Star, a group of Uva delinquents. Those interested in the end game will still need to complete all three paths to advance, but it's the flexibility in how a player gets there that's refreshing for a series long defined by linearity.
Pokémon Scarlet & Violet's different stories are compelling, especially the Team Star narrative, which almost functions like several origin stories for future gym leaders, not to mention weaving in some of the game's more intriguing presences. The chase for the Titans starts with a bit of promise but shows its hand way too early, becoming a fairly predictable adventure that eventually regains its footing to stick the landing. Finally, the tried-and-true Gym Leader battles remain a highlight of Pokémon Scarlet & Violet, though the challenges to unlock them are often tedious rather than interesting.
If there's one main takeaway from the multi-faceted journey of Pokémon Scarlet & Violet, it's this: as the series continues to expand its scope and incorporate larger, spiralling narratives, it is in desperate need of even more compelling characters. Too many characters remain shallow in their representation, though character designs should be rightly praised for how diverse the looks of everyone in Paldea are. In of personality, there's still too many one-beat characters, and the many that are exciting need more screen time and dialogue. Pokémon has been chasing the shadow of N since Pokémon Black & White, and Scarlet & Violet provides the best iteration of story since then. Many of its best ideas come late, and a more engaging early narrative would serve future open-world games well.
That said, there is the foundation here for that kind of colorful, compelling cast of trainers in future games. Pokémon Scarlet & Violet has light social-sim elements in Uva Academy, with the player able to develop a friendship with many teachers, take exams, and generally interact with the Paldea region in a way that feels unique to this location. These relationships matter and the stories that do get told are either serviceable or genuinely interesting. It would be especially brilliant if some of these characters carry over into further instalments, allowing their narrative arcs to expand and become interesting side stories, as what's here begs for more exploration.
Paldea itself offers a similar diversity in aesthetics, though its biomes feel less teeming with life than perhaps would be expected from a game with such a great open-world pitch. Exploration is done using Koraidon or Miradon depending on the version being played, with upgrades gradually unlocked that will open up each area even more and reveal some hidden secrets. Open world exploration is still one of the best features of Pokémon Scarlet & Violet in spite of some areas feeling somewhat empty, and the little moments of discovery that come with backtracking feel refreshing and fun.
Unfortunately, Pokémon Scarlet & Violet's exploration also reveals one of its difficulties - the game simply struggles to keep up with itself in spots. There's a lot of pop-in loading and some framerate drops in hectic moments, and we experienced a few crashes during play, though these were very rare. Pokémon Scarlet & Violet's auto-save functionality is very good and made sure to make those rare crashes much less frustrating, but it's worth keeping an eye out.
As far as battles are concerned, Pokémon Scarlet & Violet is, as with much of its systems, something of a mixed bag. Open-world battles are great and make targeting specific Pokémon for capture much easier, and the broad range of available Pokémon makes team building in Pokémon Scarlet & Violet some of the series' best. Early areas feature plenty of types and early evolutions with big payoffs down the road, which makes for some tantalizing compositional strategies that can be implemented fast without much swapping.
A lot of the complaints about Pokémon Scarlet & Violet battles are more about quality-of-life. An option to speed things up would be greatly appreciated since grinding is much more fun as a concept in an open-world Paldea, and the camera gets pretty wonky in spots, with clip-in on the ground revealing the empty underneath of the region on occasion.
The biggest problem with battling, and with the other Pokémon Scarlet & Violet systems that are at least somewhat gated by team level, is scaling. Because players can pick and choose where they're going on their adventure without much restriction, certain paths will inevitably lead the player to regions that are either too strong or too weak for their team.
While it's a bit of challenging fun to run into an over-leveled region and try a trainer's luck on a catch before fleeing, the weak areas make for a very dull slog, especially when it's a Gym or a Team Star hideout. The Pokémon Center offers helpful pointers about where to go if a player feels lost, but following these still resulted in being over-leveled for other areas, so it's unclear what the priority system looks at for when these suggestions are made. This only came up a few times, so the general sense of where to put which level of content is spot-on from Game Freak, but can result in the odd one-sided beatdown that takes away from the severity of a key story moment.
In spite of its flaws, however, Pokémon Scarlet & Violet is incredibly hard to put down. The franchise's core concept is intact and as good as it's ever been, and the additional journeys are fun enough that their failings fall by the wayside in practice. New Pokémon Scarlet & Violet designs for the actual Pokémon themselves are either cool or goofy in the best ways, and the type combinations combined with Terastallizing makes for some interesting possibilities. Terastallized Pokémon gain bonuses to their damage based on their Tera type, but some Tera types are totally different from the Pokémon's base type, which opens up a huge range of team compositions and makes up for some of the weaknesses of usually fragile Pokémon. An astounding soundtrack filled with some of the series' best musical compilations helps make battles and moments noteworthy, and late-game environments and skirmishes take on a weighty, dynamic feel.
Where does this leave Pokémon Scarlet & Violet in the context of the series at large? It's both the best iteration of the franchise and one of its most technically uneven entries. The highs are undoubtedly compelling and noteworthy, while the lows - especially performance ones - feel like they shouldn't be present in a AAA release from a studio and franchise with this much experience. All things considered, Pokémon Scarlet & Violet is a must-play adventure for everyone, even for those who have yet to take the first step on their own Pokémon journey. Time will tell how many of its ideas remain in the following iterations, but Pokémon Scarlet & Violet is a great proof of concept for how the games can evolve, and the future is exceptionally bright for the long-tenured creature collector.
Pokémon Scarlet & Violet releases on November 18, 2022 for Nintendo Switch. Screen Rant was provided with a Nintendo Switch code for the purpose of this review.
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet
- Released
- November 18, 2022
- ESRB
- E For Everyone Due To Mild Fantasy Violence
- Developer(s)
- Game Freak
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