As you read just above here, I firmly believe that Pokemon Scarlet & Violet are the worst Pokemon games ever made. I’m talking main series here, not eShop shovelware or whatever the h*ck Pokemon Cafe Remix is. Can you think of a worse pair? X & Y are often maligned (and up for some hefty revisionism when their remakes roll around), and I agree that they started the trend of making Pokemon games easier.
But I like the design of Kalos itself; it had some interesting routes and fantastic Pokemon designs. Goomy is an all-timer. Compare that to Scarlet & Violet, and the latter comes up short. Its world is bland. Its characters are boring. How many of the new monster designs will be revered in years to come? It’s got a lot of memeable monsters, the likes of Klawf and Clodsire, but the actual good designs? Annihilape. Kingambit. Great Tusk. All based on existing Pokemon. None on the same level as the humble Goomy.
I do have a soft spot for Wo-Chien. No, I’m not sure why either.
What Went Wrong For Pokemon Scarlet & Violet?
In an attempt to stop this article from derailing into a 1,000-word Goomy glomp, let’s talk about what went wrong in Pokemon Scarlet & Violet. We’ve established that the monster designs were lacking. A flamingo? Innovative. A fast fish? Daring. But what else makes these games so bad?
Performance. There’s no excuse for a game with stylised art like this to run so poorly on a Nintendo Switch. While the Switch is no PS5, it can handle Tears of the Kingdom’s obscene physics and Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s impressive vistas. It should be able to run a Pokemon game of this calibre just fine.
Alas, that is not the case. The frame rate is one of the worst I’ve seen for a triple-A game this century. The monsters that roam the world pop in about halfway from the horizon. The windmill’s sails stutter round as if the wind is blowing in one-second bursts. The textures are repeated and pasted without any attempt to look like real cliffs or fields.
The Switch 2 might be able to fix this. It’s more powerful than its predecessor and this alone could aid these games. Pokemon Scarlet & Violet isn’t in line for an upgrade pack – although that may be a blessing in disguise – but the tech improvements alone may help the game to run better. It’s also getting a free upgrade to boost performance. The only problem is, that won’t be able to fix Scarlet & Violet’s biggest problems.
99 Problems But A Switch Ain’t One
While the Switch 2 may boost framerates or pop-in thanks to its beefier hardware under the hood, there is a lot in this game that no console upgrade could fix. The textures, for instance, will remain rubbish no matter how quickly the console renders them.
There’s also issues with the gameplay. Paldea is insufferably boring. You’re never given any good reason to explore. The various biomes are generic and dull. Even if this game was rendered in hyper-realistic 4K, roaming through its landscapes would be a turgid experience.
The battles are fine, they’re a tried-and-tested Pokemon formula. I personally think the Gym leaders should have stuck to monotype teams and terastalized into a counter rather than the other way around, but that’s a tiny speck of a problem in the footnotes of my list of issues with the game.
For example, Katy’s ace would be a Bug-type Pokemon that terastalizes into a Water-type to stop you from soloing the whole battle with Fuecoco.
The story is mediocre. There’s still no voice acting. The towns are generic. Even the soundtrack, usually a highlight of Pokemon games, falls flat. I can’t immediately recall any tune while writing, which I can for every other game. The Legendaries are rubbish, the time-travel plot is underbaked. Why can’t we travel to the past and future Paldea in the endgame? The DLC doesn’t add anything to the base game, other than a couple of extra monsters and the opportunity to play as a Pokemon for some reason.
The Switch 2 cannot fix these issues. That’s down to Game Freak. It’s high time the developer took a look at the state of the games it’s releasing and took a step back. While I understand that Pokemon can’t just take five years to develop the next game like the Zelda devs can – there’s anime, TCG, and plushies to take into account for the biggest brand on the planet – it can scale back its ideas. Let’s go back to basics.
I’m beyond hoping that we’ll ever see another 2D Pokemon game by this point, but Pokemon needs to do something radical if it wants to make a game as memorable, as replayable, as Pokemon Emerald ever again. We don’t need an open world if you can’t make it interesting. We don’t need 3D graphics if the results look like this.
Pokemon needs a chance to reset, to try something new. There’s a reason that many fans believe Pokemon Legends: Arceus to be the best Pokemon offering on the Switch: it tried new things. Not everything worked, and it had the same technical hitches as Scarlet & Violet, but it was fun, which is the bare minimum a game should be.
The real best Pokemon game on the Switch is New Pokemon Snap, but you’re not ready for that conversation.
Pokemon Legends: Arceus could be fixed by the Switch 2. Its only pitfalls are technical limitations. Similarly, the Switch 2 edition of Pokemon Legends: Z-A is very exciting because it’s changing things up again. But these innovative ideas shouldn’t be relegated to spin-off titles while the main series trudges on through a swamp of mediocrity. The Nintendo Switch 2 won’t fix Pokemon Scarlet & Violet, only Game Freak can do that. I’m just not sure it wants to.
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