Let's Talk About Pokemon!

Did Scarlet & Violet meet my expectations?

I've been getting this question quite a bit lately in my real life friend group and here on Wattpad.

Did Scarlet & Violet meet my expectations?

As much as I enjoyed the game, heck I have 100+ hours put into the game since it's release back in November of 2022, this duo of games did not meet my expectations. Thing is, I walked into this game with surprisingly low expectations, most of my expectations were me hoping Pokemon would bring over gaming elements that made Legends Arceus as great of a game as it was yet surprisingly few things carried over on top of a disappointing launch...

After Pokemon released Legends Arceus, a near perfect masterpiece, I went into Scarlet & Violet with the mindset that these two games would be as good as Legends Arceus if not Better and I was disappointed heavily especially with just how much the promotional material hyped up the game.

I was hoping the Stadium Gym Battles Format in Sword & Shield would carry over but it didn't. Yes, this was a personal wish of mine and the Gym format of Sword & Shield is most likely never going to come back & remain unique/exclusive to the Sword Shield games. Still though, the Gym format of said games are one of the driving factors behind why I love Sword & Shield so much.

The high stakes gameplay of Legends Arceus where the player took fall damage & could faint if attacked too many times was interesting and gave the Pokemon games the much needed depth, risk & realism it was long missing and yet it wasn't carried over into Scarlet & Violet. Scarlet & Violet feel WEIRD without Player damage. Realistically, we the players should take fall damage. Like it feels weird how Koraidon/Miraidon could fall off a mountain and take no damage at all. I found it off how the player couldn't take damage from weather conditions as Scarlet & Violet had whipping Sandstorms & Frigid blizzards.

The Violet Paradox forms were heavily hyped yet didn't meet ANYONES expectations.

Bare minimum, I was hoping the game would run better than it currently does. Half of the time, the game runs very clunky as it's hard to play the game without it buffering/struggling to maintain a playable speed. The game crashed ALOT upon launch & it wasn't fixed till months later.
The games were very buggy too but not as buggy as it was on launch day thankfully.

With the inclusion of Sawsbuck in the game trailers, I thought Pokemon was bringing Seasons back into the games and we were all horribly mistaken. While yes, sort of like Legends Arceus, the game did have 'biomes' of sorts where one area could have a winter environment while another area had a fall environment. Even then, the game didn't bring back seasons which upset me pretty badly.

The Pokemon Company HEAVILY hyped up the games claiming Scarlet & Violet would be so different, they're virtually completely different games. Um... No... They're the same exact game with minor differences such as school colors and each game had their own set of Paradox Pokemon. It is actually painfully obvious in Scarlet that the cutscenes were better tailored for Miraidon/Miraidon & Koraidon had the same model despite their bodily & proportional differences. Therefore, It cheapened my experience with Scarlet pretty badly especially when it came to cutscenes.

The game often struggled to maintain an identity as it had, in my opinion, too many characters and plotlines going on. Nemona felt ridiculously underdeveloped. Penny was hyped up as the leader of Team Star yet she had a disappointing final battle. In fact, you could argue that Pokemon put all their attention & development on Arven as he's the only character that feels complete in any way. Bare minimum, I expected the leader of Team Star to be a wicked smart and skilled trainer when in reality she was a disappointment of an Eevee Trainer that we get in literally every game...

I 100% thought Alpha Pokemon were coming back. Alpha Pokemon are oversized and ridiculously strong Pokemon that were introduced in Legends Arceus. When Scarlet & Violet introduced the Titan Pokemon in the promotional trailers, I thought these Titan Pokemon were gonna be scattered across the region and available to fight and capture much like how Alphas behaved in Legends Arceus. Instead, Titans were surprisingly easy to defeat oversized Pokemon you fight once and never again. Removing Alphas not only disappointed me but took away a challenge I highly enjoyed in the previous game.

The ENTIRE fanbase expected better player Customization than we got in the end product. The game only has 4 (now 8 come the DLC) uniform changes for the player and they're not even good uniforms... At this point, don't even give us the option to customize if there's nothing to customize.

Now there is a reason for most of my own as well as the fanbases issues with this duo of games. The games were released too early. Nintendo had a VERY strict deadline for when they wanted the next generation of Pokemon games to come out and Pokemon COULD NOT meet this deadline and was left with no other choice but to release an unfinished game against their wishes. By releasing the game unfinished, the game struggled to run properly, crashed every few minutes and was filled with bugs galore. The inital release of Scarlet & Violet was SO BAD that Nintendo wrote an apology letter to the fanbase talking about how Pokemon was released too soon & its launch was a disappointing failure. THAT should tell you just how badly the release of Scarlet & Violet was and thankfully the game is now playable after countless patch updates over the last 6+ months. And yes, this early release effected my inital opinion on the game for the worse.

Yeah... I just ripped up the games pretty badly and I apologize for so. However, despite everything, yes, I did enjoy my experience with the game and theres reasons why im still actively playing the duo of games despite being long done with the main story. The game is fun & they pump out new content biweekly which is something i highly appreciate. Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, the games did not meet my expectations which is saying something cause I didn't have high expectations at all. Alot of my critiques are surprisingly easy fixes for the Pokemon Company OR it's gameplay functions that'll remain unique to Legends Arceus. Who knows? In the end, I had fun with Scarlet & Violet even if it didn't check off every box for me.

Tomorrow, I will upload my Top 10 Fixes and Wishes for Scarlet & Violet.