Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are the newest additions to the main line Pokémon games, introducing the 9th generation of Pokémon. As an avid fan, I have been playing Scarlet pretty much daily since its release on the 18th November, 2022. Since it's now two months after the release, I wanted to write a blog about my opinions on the game.
There will be some minor spoilers in this blog, so be aware of that before continuing.
Firstly, I did actually do a liveblog of my playthrough of the game on my Tumblr, so feel free to see what my experience was as I played through the game!
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STORYLINE AND CHARACTERS
Firstly, I want to say that GameFreak has really upped their game in the story department recently. The main stories of a lot of the previous generations haven't felt like anything special and I will admit the storyline for Sword and Shield didn't exactly blow me away, but the stories for both Legends Arceus and Scarlet/Violet have felt like incredibly vast improvements on how they do story telling.
For Scarlet and Violet, You play the role as a new student at an Academy in the Paldea region. You have three main storylines you can follow, each one focusing on one of the rival characters;
- Victory Road focuses on the usual Pokémon Gym format. You are encouraged by your battle obsessed friend, and rival, Nemona, to take on the gym challenge and work your way up to being champion rank like she is. As usual, there are eight gyms scattered throughout the region and you collect badges for each one you defeat, working your way up to Paldea's Elite Four and Top Champion.
- Path of Legends focuses on you helping out an upperclassman, named Arven, who is searching for rare ingredients to make healthy recipes for Pokémon. These ingredients are called 'Herba Mystica' and are said to hold a lot of amazing health benefits. Each Herba Mystica appears to be guarded by giant Pokémon, known as Titan Pokémon, which you need to help Arven deal with. Through this story, you learn a lot about Arven and why he's seeking the Herba Mystica.
- ★ Starfall Street ★ focuses on you being recruited by a mysterious person, only known as Cassiopeia, to help take down Team Star, a group of rebellious Academy students. There are five main 'bosses' of Team Star, each with their own base. You have to storm the bases in order to reach the boss at the head of the base. Through this story, you learn a lot about the reasons behind Team Star and how they came to be.
Each story allows you to get to know each of the rival characters and go through something with them, which is especially potent when you reach the fourth and final story in the game, where you work together with all three of the characters together. I won't spoil anything about the final storyline, but I will say that it really surprised me! It did not go in the direction I thought it would and it felt really impactful.
I will say that at the end of everything, I really felt like I'd made three new best friends out of Nemona, Penny and Arven.
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| I hope the game lets me have more adventures with them. |
I also found I enjoyed a lot of the other characters through the game. I especially liked how you could actually get to know a little bit about each of the teachers at the Academy after completing their classes. I didn't do the classes until I finished the main part of the game, but it was nice to get to know a little bit more about them. Even the gym leaders seem to have a little more character to them. Each of them generally has another job outside of their role of gym leader and some even have small backstories. Grusha and Brassius both come to mind as gym leaders who have small backstories.
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TRAINER CUSTOMIZATION
Trainer customization in this game has taken both a big step forward... and a big step back.
At the very beginning of the game, you have access to an amazing array of custom features. You can change your hairstyle, hair colour, eye colour and even eye shape right from the beginning when first creating your character. Although you do begin the base choosing from the 'male' or 'female' player character, both genders have exactly the same options for customization, so thankfully, nothing is locked behind a specific gender.
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| The Trainer customization screen at the beginning of the game. |
Clothing is also not locked behind gender, but the clothing options is where the customization falls a little flat.
It's always been fun to be able to come up with an outfit from what's available, but in Scarlet and Violet, you are actually forced to wear the school uniform of the school you attend. There are four different versions, based on season, but overall, you have to wear the uniform and can only change specific things, such as hats, bags, shoes, glasses and socks/tights. This makes customising your character's clothing more restricted than usual.
I'm not a huge fan of the Academy uniforms, and would prefer to be able to change all my clothing, but I feel I made it work and came up with a fairly cute style for my trainer regardless.
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| "If the game's gonna force me to wear this dorky uniform, then I'll use the accessories to make it as cute as possible." - Me. |
OPEN WORLD
Scarlet and Violet are considered the first truly open world Pokémon games in the series. It's something that they've been playing with the idea of and building up to for some time, what with the vast wild areas in Sword/Shield, and the massive map areas you could explore in Legends Arceus, but Scarlet/Violet is the first where the entire map is accessible.
Well, sort of, anyway.
There are SOME restrictions in that your ride Pokémon, Koraidon/Miradon, needs to acquire power-ups through the Path of Legends storyline in order for it to be able to cover more terrain, like swimming, gliding and climbing, but it never really felt TOO restrictive as the areas you can cover are quite vast. That said, I'm sure I wasn't the only one who found myself wandering into areas where I felt I shouldn't be yet due to the level jump in wild Pokémon.
Levels are another restriction. Despite the theme of the game being exploration, where you're encouraged to go where you want and do what you want, the games do not have any kind of level scaling, meaning that the gyms, Team Star Bases and Titans, as well as wild Pokémon, all have set levels and in fact, there is a 'recommended' order in which you should do things based on level.
In my playthrough, I did the Stony Cliff Titan, Artazon Gym, the Team Star Fire Crew base and the Levincia gym in that order, but when I went to do the gym in Cortondo, I found I was quite over-levelled for it. I didn't know that technically, the gym in Cortondo should be the first thing you do. I also somehow managed to wander into the town of Alfornada, after navigating a cave system which was difficult without the climbing ability, to find that the Pokémon in that area were about ten or so levels above my own.
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| An easy win AND free cupcakes?? I'm living the dream! |
I feel like to really give a sense of being free to go anywhere, the levels of these Pokémon and areas scaling with your own team would have been beneficial and would avoid the issue of being over, or under-levelled.
Overall though, there are a lot of areas to explore on the vast map and I also felt the choice of Pokémon available was really good. Not only did we have the new Pokémon to discover, but there is a vast amount of returning Pokémon to come across too, so I found I was quite excited even finding those, as I hadn't looked into exactly what Pokémon were available.
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GRAPHICS AND GLITCHES
Playing through my copy of Scarlet, I will say that nothing took anything away from my game experience and I did thoroughly enjoy the game itself, but Scarlet and Violet are plagued with a number of issues.
There are a lot of graphical glitches in the game. Pokémon can sometimes clip through the floor, or spawn in things like rocks, things such as that. I find what's more scary for me is that the game experiences a lot of slow down and momentary freezing sometimes and there are times where it freezes for a moment and I wonder if the game has crashed. Most of the time it doesn't, but I have had the game crash on me about four times now in the space of the last two months, which is way more than Shield did in the entire three years of it's run. I will always recommend keeping autosave on most of the time with this game and even with that, I recommend saving often.
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| Florges in mass outbreaks tend to have a glitch where they spawn on top of each other. |
Also worth mentioning are the Tera Raid Battles, which also feel they're plagued by numerous issues. The move 'Play Rough' for some reason, has a graphical glitch where it registers more damage than it actually does. It rights itself quickly, but it does get annoying thinking you've done big damage when you really haven't done as much as you first thought.
There have also been times where, during online play, my menu has completely frozen and doesn't let me choose or select anything for several turns. There are also times where the raid boss doesn't seem to do anything, yet Pokémon seem to get knocked out anyway.
The fast pace idea of the Tera Battles not having a turn order seems good on paper and I'm all for things being a bit faster, but it does feel a bit chaotic and all over the place, especially with these glitches. It also feels like the menu lags at little times, because there's so much going on, and I feel I miss getting an attack in because of it.
My only other gripe, in terms of the graphics, isn't a glitch, but I do feel that some Pokémon are a bit too small to see and would benefit from being scaled up a bit more. I find myself constantly running into Pokémon that I didn't see and, as a shiny hunter, it is incredibly difficult seeing colour differences on these tiny Pokémon models. I feel like the Pokémon in Sword/Shield and in Legends Arceus, where there are also overworld Pokémon, were never this tiny.
Here's hoping they never put Joltik in these games. We'd never see it at all!
I will say though, the cut scenes that play in some of the storylines are really nice and seem quite clean and well animated. I really enjoyed seeing those.
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| I absolutely loved this cut scene! |
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BREEDING MECHANICS
I've seen quite a few people say they aren't keen on the new breeding mechanic, but honestly, I absolutely love it!
Breeding in this gen isn't done through daycares, but through the picnic system. You can have a picnic with two compatible Pokémon and you can find eggs in the picnic basket. You can increase the number of eggs you get by making sandwiches that give you egg power and the best thing is that you don't have to move around for the eggs to show up. They actually just collect in the basket (up to a total of 10 at a time), so you can actually just leave the game running while you do something else and just check in now and then to collect the eggs. No more riding a bike up and down just to make eggs show up.
I also love that giving Pokémon egg moves in this gen is amazingly easy. Breeding on egg moves was one of the more tedious parts of breeding, but not anymore. If you have a Pokémon you want an egg move on, all you need to do is make sure it has an empty move slot and give it the 'Mirror Herb' item. Then all you need to do is get a Pokémon with the move you want to pass on and then go into a picnic with both Pokémon. Once you come out of the picnic, the move will have passed over as easy as that. The Pokémon don't even need to be compatible!
I wanted the move 'Belly Drum' on my Azumarill, which is an egg move for that line, so all I had to do was delete one move from the Azumarill, place the Mirror Herb on it, then put it in a picnic with my Iron Hands which knew the move and the move passed over!
Hatching eggs goes pretty fast too. Egg Powers from sandwiches can make eggs hatch faster, but even without that, just running around on Koraidon/Miraidon seems to hatch them pretty fast. You can also, as usual, have a Pokémon in your party that helps to hatch eggs, such as a Pokémon with the 'Flame Body' ability.
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| I'm currently trying to hatch for a shiny Sprigatito. |
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MUSIC
Honestly, one of my favourite parts of Pokémon games is the music. I absolutely enjoy seeing what new tracks we get with each game and the OST for Scarlet/Violet doesn't disappoint! I love a lot of the music for Team Star, as well as the music through the Area Zero final storyline. My favourites are definitely the Area Zero theme, which has a very haunting feel to it, as well as the battle music for one of the final storyline battles which is named 'Battle! Zero Lab'. Cassiopeia's battle theme is also amazing, as is the Team Star boss battle theme.
I also really liked the music that played during emotional storyline scenes.
Of course, an addition to Pokémon's amazing composers this time around has been Undertale's Toby Fox, who got to work on some of the tracks in the game. He previously did a theme for Sword/Shield for the Battle Tower, but he confirmed that he made the tracks: 'Tera Raid Battles', 'Academy Ace Tournament' and 'Battle! Zero Lab' for Scarlet/Violet. He composed the 'Area Zero' theme too, which was then re-arranged by Go Ichinose. I really do hope he gets to work on more tracks for Pokémon in the future.
But overall, I'm very impressed with the soundtrack to this game and all the composers involved did an amazing job.
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POST GAME, EVENTS AND DLC HOPES
After the main story, there is a little bit of post game stuff, such as re-challenging the gym leaders, taking part in the Academy Ace Tournament, unlocking 6 star Tera Raid Battles, as well as getting to learn a little bit more about Nemona, Penny and Arven. For some reason you can't re-challenge the Elite Four and top Champion like you could in other games and instead, you can get the Paldea champion ribbon for your Pokémon by doing the Academy tournament.
After all this, I've been spending a lot of my time actually building Pokémon to use in Tera Raid battles, as well as farming Tera Raids for items, mainly for Herba Mystica and items I can sell.
I've stockpiled a lot of Herba Mystica actually, which you can use in sandwiches for shiny hunting, so I've been doing a bit of that too, as well as breeding Pokémon with good natures and in rare Pokéballs.
I've really enjoyed a lot of the events and mystery gifts they've done since the game's release. I love that the 7 star Tera Raids they have done so far have been for Pokémon that aren't part of the Paldea Pokédex (Charizard, Cinderace and the up-coming Greninja) which has been really welcome while we don't have Pokémon HOME connectivity. These raids are also quite difficult and actually require some strategy.
I'm also really thankful of the frequent mystery gifts they have been doing for items, such as sandwich items, tera shards and other helpful stuff.
I'm really looking forward to seeing what DLC updates the game will get, as there are some unanswered questions about the Paradox Pokémon, Area Zero and the references to a being that is the base cause of the terastallizing phenomenon. There is also a chunk of land at the top-right of the map of Paldea that is currently inaccessible which is obviously going to be a DLC area at some point.
I do hope that the DLC also introduces some more Paldean forms of Pokémon. So far we only have Wooper and Tauros that have Paldean forms and I've always loved the idea of the regional forms, though the convergent species, such as Wiglett and Todescool have been interesting too.
I also have my eye on the history teacher, Ms. Raifort. After doing her classes and her request afterwards about the four sealed legendries, I kind of feel a little suspicious of her.
ESPECIALLY after she gave me the TM for 'Nasty Plot'.
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| I honestly feel like she's planning something. |
It has been announced that in late February (more than likely for Pokémon Day), the game will be getting an update to fix bugs in the game, and also 'added functionality'. What that means is anyone's guess, but it would be nice to get a small little free update like Legends Arceus did with the Daybreak update, which gave an additional small story and unlocked 'massive mass outbreaks'.
I imagine that any other DLC planned for the game will be announced during Pokémon Day as well, so it'll be fun to see what's planned for Scarlet and Violet in the near future. Overall, I hope there are some more fun storylines to come in the Paldea Region, as well as more fun events in the future too!
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| Taking selfies with the Titan Pokémon was definitely a thing in my playthrough. |