I was 10 years old when Pokémon Stadium was released in the year 2000. This was a big deal at the time. Just two years prior we were hunched over our Game Boy Colors playing Pokémon Red and Blue version in all its 2d sprite-based glory. Having Pokémon make the transition to 3d on the N64 felt like the gap between the games and the anime was quickly closing.
We’d crowd around the biggest tube tv at our friend’s house, holding up our Game Boys to the screen to see the night and day difference between a 2d Blastoise and the 3d one. While being a spin-off, Pokémon Stadium was just a vertical slice of the 1998 smash hit that we knew and loved. An open-world 3d Pokémon game couldn’t have been too far away…right?
*Fast forward 22 years*
Quantity over Quality
Gamefreak, Creatures Inc, The Pokémon Company, and Nintendo have been developing Pokémon games in a cyclical and sustained cadence for far too long, and something had to give. After 22 mainline releases, Pokémon Violet is the first open-world game the franchise has seen, and it’s a technical disaster.
We live in a world where releasing unfinished games is completely acceptable. With Pokémon Scarlet and Violet boasting 10 million units sold after just three days on the market, it’s no wonder companies don’t bother finishing their games anymore. Following the footsteps of Fallout 76 and Cyberpunk 2077, Pokémon Violet is at times offensively incomplete. The absurd part of all this is that Nintendo’s first-party developers have arguably the best reputation in the industry when it comes to high-quality games that are both polished and finished. While Pokémon isn’t entirely under Nintendo’s control, it’s shocking to see the Pokémon series’ quality on the Switch quickly spiral out of control.
Even Nintendo had to speak up about the issues at hand, which is historically very uncharacteristic.
It’s rare when you can boot up a game and the menu screen alone can tell you how low the bar has been set. Strange background sound effects accompany a picture of a classroom. You press start. You’re then greeted by low-quality still images with introductory text at the bottom of the screen that plays out like a visual novel. Then some brief in-game animated sequences make the still images look even worse. Finally, a prerendered video of Miraidon’s first-person perspective flying through Paldea. The opening few minutes are so disjointed and duct-taped together that it must have been the very last thing that Gamefreak worked on before shipping the game.
Pokémon Violet’s Performance
After playing Pokémon Violet for over 50 hours on both the 1.0.1 and 1.1.0 patches, a myriad of performance issues continue to persist and have not been addressed. Framerates are all over the place alongside wild frame time inconsistencies. Generally, this isn’t too big of a problem, especially for a Pokémon game. However, when the framerate is directly tied to the game speed, your experience will regularly feel like whiplash induced by a rubber band. If the game is running at 30fps and then dips to 20fps you’ll immediately notice the game running at 2/3 speed, which is jarring every time that it happens- and it happens constantly.
There are also what I presume to be memory leaks happening anytime you play the game long enough, forcing you to restart your game every hour or two, assuming the game didn’t crash on its own before then.
Any animations at 20+ ft away from the player character will be updated at 2-10 fps and it makes the world look like a stop-motion movie. Entering towns and cities is particularly egregious where there are lots of NPC’s stuttering about. If it wasn’t bad enough, NPC’s also will walk around and then get stuck in a walking animation, then disappear only to reappear and do it all over again. It sometimes feels like you’re on an old Disneyland ride where the animatronics are broken.
As you travel through the world of Paldea the environment will literally morph right before your eyes just 10ft in front of you. I think this is some sort of weird LOD transition that happens way too late but I’m not certain and seems to primarily happen outside of towns. Environmental textures can range anywhere from good to hideous, often being copied and pasted all over mountainsides making vistas look like something from the PS2 era. Pokémon will spawn inside the environment or flicker and strobe wildly. When traversing at speed, pop-in can be so intense that you must regularly dodge wild Pokémon that spawn out of thin air right in front of you.
To finish off the laundry list, the most frustrating issues occur during Pokémon battles. The camera will clip under the environment during wild encounters or trainer battles anytime that there is an aggressive enough slope, leaving you with the bottom half of the screen in shambles. Switching Pokémon in battle will result in a massive 4-7 second pause and using items will also delay gameplay by 2-3 seconds.
Wild Pokémon will gather around the player character during battles and shout out their audible Pokémon cry.’ In the worst scenario, I had over eight Pokémon that were chirping and making noise, creating a symphony of audio garbage. Then after the battle ends, you’ll sometimes immediately bump into those loud spectating Pokémon and start another battle. On one occasion I was ‘ambushed’ by the more aggressive wild Pokémon four times in a row after leaving a single battle with another trainer.
One universal rule for nearly every previous Pokémon game in the series has been this: talk to every NPC and you’ll eventually be rewarded, usually with an item. However, in Violet, there’s rarely any point in talking to non-trainer NPCs at all. Every person without the “>” in their speech bubble is completely cookie cutter, personality barren, on the rails set dressing to fill out the towns of Paldea. I didn’t realize how much I’d miss the little quips of each individual until I felt the drone-like presence of over 50% of the world’s inhabitants. There might have been two occasions throughout my entire playthrough where a random NPC gave me an item following a conversation.
While the world’s inhabitants can be disappointing, separating them from items with an open-world design standpoint in mind makes complete sense. Instead of scouring the land to find people to give you items and say quick and interesting things, players explore the world to find these items instead. Lots, and lots, of items. You could make a meme about how sacred item finding used to be compared to how it is now.
Now that we have all the ugliness out of the way, I will confusingly proclaim that Pokémon Violet is in fact one of the best Pokémon games ever made. Hold on, hear me out, there’s a yin and yang to all of this. An incredible experience is to be had here, even if it’s buried and one must plow their way to it.
Pokémon Violet is the best Pokémon game in years
In the past, Pokémon games being formulaic could be considered an understatement. However, with the release of Sword and Shield, Arceus, and now Scarlet and Violet, we’ve seen a consistent trend of evolution within the series.
All the grindy aspects of older Pokémon generations have finally been ironed out in Violet and it’s for the best. There’s a certain level of fluidity and flexibility that needs to be achieved for an open-world Pokémon game to work and having major game mechanics streamlined is a must. HMs are gone so that the players themselves get to fly, surf, and climb. Experience share compliments the entire party and allows for experimentation with more Pokémon than you’d ever normally be able to afford. Tired of trying to get the right Nature for your Pokémon? Just buy the nature you want for it. Want to breed or hatch specific Pokémon efficiently? Make an egg-boosting sandwich. Find crafting materials to build the TMs you want. Change a Pokémon’s typing with terastallization. There’s an answer for every problem in Pokémon Violet and the answer isn’t just to grind, it’s fantastic.
Quality of life improvements make their way to the UI in many ways. The game world persists in real time whenever you have your menu open, and that menu is a nice overlay to keep you engaged. It’s a huge improvement from diving into menus and being detached from the overworld, even entering and exiting Pokémon battles are seamless without a load screen. Being able to just press ‘Y’ to send a specific Pokémon to the top of the party, flying anytime you want, having all your poke balls accessible in battle, the list of improvements goes on and on. Withholding the camera speed that is slower than a Snorlax and the big downgrade that is clothing customization, QoL takes another big step in the right direction for the series.
Pokémon battles, the Pokémon themselves, and the trainers all have a nice makeover that look miles better than any environment in the game. I suppose it’s good that it’s not the contrary. Battles finally have both a free camera that you can move during a fight and a combat camera that you can initiate with a click of the right analog stick. Pokémon models look sharp with nice textures showcasing everything from fur to metallic surfaces on each different mon. Some Pokémon will live and react in their environments; swimming, grazing, and picking on each other in mean-spirited or playful manners. Trainer models look great too and have new animations that were sorely needed. When all these things are coupled together with a day/night and dynamic weather system it really feels like you’re on your first real 3d Pokémon adventure.
Freedom of exploration and how you tackle objectives is easily one of the most welcomed additions to Pokémon. Go with or against the grain, never in fear that a rival character like Hop is going to stop you on your linear path every five seconds to hold your hand. It feels like Gamefreak tried catering to its older audiences just a little, and it’s refreshing.
Being able to go where you want and create your own fun in Paldea is amplified by the fact that it’s not just about winning eight gym badges and defeating team “whoever” anymore either. You’re a student trainer, so now you can go to classes and live campus life in your dorm. You have Titan Pokémon that you can seek out and battle to gain power-ups for your mount Miraidon. There are bases planted all over Paldea where you can battle Team Star leaders. Most surprisingly, each of these paths that you can engage in has legitimate stories to go along with them, with endearing characters to boot.
Does Pokémon Violet actually have a story? Now I’m getting emotional? What is going on here? Why is the music so darn good? Ahhh!
It’s shocking to say this, but I like every character in this game and that includes your fantastic rival Nemona. The last handful of Pokémon entries has had some of the most obnoxious one-note personalities engraved into its cast. It’s incredibly foreign having characters that you genuinely care about and can relate to in these games and I’m still blindsided by it. If Gamefreak doesn’t add VO for the next Pokémon game, I’ll be devastated. Now I need to hear these characters’ voices, not just read them. The closer we get to the anime, the better.
Final Thoughts
Pokémon Violet’s technical performance will without a doubt, collapse in on itself like a dying star when you play it. Unless future patches arrive to fix the plethora of issues at hand, this is just how things will be.
Unfortunately, the developers at Gamefreak have been pushed to their absolute breaking point. With a small team and a brutal release schedule, it makes one wonder if they even have time to fix Pokémon Scarlet and Violet before moving on to the next game. For crying out loud they launched two games this year! It’s a miracle that these games even run at all.
I would imagine there is a high amount of crunch that the developers must face, and given the circumstances, I feel bad criticizing them at all. At the end of the day, Pokémon is the highest-grossing media franchise of all time. It’s just sad that the fans and developers are treated the same, with nothing but profitability in mind.
On the flip side, Gamefreak has really put forth a huge effort with what resources and time it had to create a fresh experience to push Pokémon as a whole forward. While it may be true that Pokémon Violet belly-flopped into the pool, the giant leap off the high dive was more than worth it.
