RPG Jamboree: Pokémon Violet (Switch)

With the release of Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet, there are now over 1000 unique species of creatures to collect and battle in the Pokémon series. This celebration is unfortunately a little marred by the fact that only 400 of them are available in the base game for Scarlet and Violet, but the term “marred celebration” feels apt in a few other elements of the game’s design. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet both embrace an incredibly open new region called Paldea to explore where you can find Pokémon walking out in the open with no barriers to spotting them or random battles to worry about, but at the same time, technical restrictions in realizing this vision repeatedly rear their head to rob some of the wonder this exploratory game design was meant to allow. There is ambition and artistry to be found throughout though, but even more than Pokémon Sword and Shield, it does feel like the cracks in developer Game Freak’s approach to game creation are becoming harder to overlook.

Pokémon Violet (and its mostly similar alternate version Pokémon Scarlet) certainly did not stumble when it comes to expanding the game’s story and scope beyond just a quest to go out and capture special creatures for the purpose of battle. Your customizable player avatar has just been enrolled in the Uva Academy in the Paldea Region, a fictional land that takes some inspiration from Spain with certain architectural choices and many people seemingly being bilingual Spanish speakers. Rather than Uva Academy being fully devoted to Pokémon though, it actually appears to be a well-rounded institution offering education in things like math and home economics to help prepare people for the world, although it just so happens that things like those math lessons turn out to provide useful information on Pokémon collecting and battling. While the game is fairly quick to move from your enrollment to setting you out in the world to explore as you please, returning to Uva Academy can actually be a rewarding experience, the classes explaining game mechanics in a more digestible manner than most entries in the series ever had and you can engage in small subplots involving the colorful characters that make up the faculty that can be quite fruitful. This turn-based role-playing game is not overall a school story though, the game mostly focusing on a broader concept called the Treasure Hunt where students are set out to explore the Paldea region to learn from new lands and find out what they treasure most in life.

The open-ended exploration emerges from here, the game not dictating how far you can progress based on arbitrary limitations very often. If there is a place out in the world you want to explore, you can usually head towards it, and while the creatures and Pokémon trainers there may be far stronger than you can handle, your ability to oblige your curiosity can lead to you tackling what you find most interesting first or stumbling into situations that can provide a thrilling challenge since you’re punching above your weight class. For the most standard of adventures, the gym challenge found in most mainline Pokémon titles return, the player needing to clear 8 gyms in cities around the region to get a shot at competing against the Elite Four and becoming a Champion trainer. The gym leaders all specialize in a certain type of Pokémon, every trainable creature you encounter able to exhibit two types that determine their elemental weaknesses and resistances to such a degree it is vital to strategize around them. The specialization does mean gym battles can be fairly simple if you bring Pokémon with the right moves to the fight, but to make these more than quick bits of combat to sweep up, each gym leader has a challenge you must overcome first, and these play heavily into the game’s new focus on open exploration. Cities in Pokémon Violet have few interior areas, but their exterior spaces are put to good use by the gym challenges as a good deal of them involving traversing the town to complete objectives. Tracking down the sunflower Pokémon Sunflora as they hide about a flowery town filled with artsy sculptures and trying to learn a secret order at a restaurant by talking to people on the street get you moving all around the locations, and while some gym leaders instead test you with something closer to a minigame or a special series of trainer battles, this aspect of the game becomes far more memorable because you’ll end up anticipating the creative tests that help show off the gym leader’s personality or their town’s specific character.

During the gym leader challenge you frequently bump into a girl named Nemona who quickly identifies you as a promising battler that could one day rival her. Supportive and a bit too excited for opportunities to battle, she’s an amusing and cheerful consistent companion that plays into the fact the game’s three main stories end up building towards a finale that is effective both in its unusually ethereal presentation and in paying off character building done in the previous stories. The second main story quest you can pursue as you please involves Arven, the young man a bit more of a prickly and begrudging ally at first only for his tale to become one of the most heart-wrenching as you learn more about his quest for special sandwich ingredients called Herba Mystica. Sandwiches are given perhaps an absurd level of attention in Pokémon Violet despite it being a rather ho-hum minigame, every city having more buildings devoted to ingredients and consumable meals than other functions, and important factors like breeding Pokémon or gaining specific boosts have ties to sandwich crafting as well. The more interesting element of seeking the Herba Mystica ends up being the Titans who each guard some of it, these oversized Pokémon much stronger than a typical member of their species and again involving a bit of a test of exploration first as you need to do thinks like dodge rolling rocks dropped by one or chase another through a mining site. Having some true boss battle Pokémon rather than just tough trainers can lead to some compelling battles where you try to balance the use of your team of up to six creatures to wear it down despite its advantages, although like any of the plots in the game, there is some likelihood a few of these will be a cakewalk since you can easily gain experience and strengthen your team elsewhere. On the other hand, the non-linear design also means that you will likely face a few that put up impressive fights, and while the Pokémon franchise has always had moves with special effects beyond just dealing damage, it did feel like I more often had to whip out special strategies like using Light Screen to build up my team’s defense or lowering the defenses and attack power of these large characters since the battle was to be with one large, persistent, and durable foe rather than a small team.

The final major plot to follow can also have these moments where you suddenly encounter a formidable foe that pushes you to use some real battle strategy to succeed, although getting to those fights is sometimes almost mindless. A group of students have banded together to form Team Star, an eccentric group of delinquents whose numbers have taken them from a gang of bullies to a potential problem. Recruited to assist with dismantling their hideouts, the player must first wipe out the riffraff before they get a chance to go after the hideout’s boss in a true battle. While this story line does end up having some heart to it as you learn more about Team Star’s eccentric members and why they formed the group to begin with, the action during their segments leans primarily on this game’s new Auto-Battle system. When you aren’t looking to get involved in a turn-based battle with wild Pokémon out in the world, you can instead throw one of your monsters out of its Poké Ball and it will charge towards nearby creatures to take them out. This is good for idle leveling as you explore and there are even a few creatures like the dung beetle Pokémon Rellor that only evolve into the fairly creative psychic scarab Rabsca if you walk around with them this way, but it is a fairly simple interaction best done on the side rather than repeatedly like you find yourself doing in a Team Star base. Unless you wandered into an area you’re way too weak for, clearing the base barely involves any thought, and the game slows things down as it waits to load in more Pokémon for you to easily trounce. When the Team Star leader comes forward on their ostentatious Starmobile though, not only do they have a decent team of Pokémon to fight you with, they cap off their battles by fighting you with the Starmobile that is much stronger than their other Pokémon. While the auto-battles up to this fight are bland, the team leader battle and story tied to them make these feel like they’re in good company alongside the two better handled storylines.

Pokémon Violet’s world gets perhaps even more focus than those stories though as you’ll often spend a good deal of time crossing terrain and encountering new Pokémon to get to the destinations of your choice. Here is where we start to get some of our first technical problems that are hard to overlook. It can be captivating to go out and explore the wide open region of Paldea, the game even giving you a strange dragon creature named Miraidon to ride around on that also has a bit of a personality so it’s not just a glorified vehicle. However, move too fast, and sometimes Pokémon Violet can’t really load in new Pokémon to help populate the world, making an expanse feel more empty than it is meant to be. Take it slow though and you’ll find Pokémon appear out in the open, but their size seems to be a little too accurate to the numbers given in the Pokédex. The Pokédex itself is beautiful this time around, showing a nice scene of the creatures you document as you collect them, but with so many monsters being only a foot tall, it’s very easy for certain creatures to be barely noticeable or almost indistinguishable based on their environment or coloration. It makes some sense for the grey grasshopper Nymble to easily hide in grass, but it also becomes fairly easy to bump into them while exploring, and if you are actively looking around for new creatures, squinting at grass and wondering if that tiny lump is something new can take a bit of fun out of the hunt. Paldea does still feel quite expansive with many creatures to find, and some of them even travel in groups or can be hidden in the environment in special ways like how some might cling to a tree. Water Pokémon can unfortunately go a bit too deep below the water’s surface so again visibility is an issue, but sometimes letting the player see too much is also a problem. Pokémon Violet has animation issues, with objects or characters too far from the player having reduced movement speed to try and save on processor power. This means that beautiful windmills move in choppy patterns, but even in something like a classroom, the kids kicking their feet can look very rough. Slowdown that actually reduces how fast the game runs can arise too in certain areas, but thankfully these issues in presentation won’t actually harm your ability to explore, catch creatures, or battle. They can be a little nauseating at times though, sometimes the camera will clip through the environment to show you the void, and one time my Miraidon even turned invisible so it looked like I was riding thin air, but while it definitely hampers the game’s ability to aesthetically impress, it feels disingenuous to say it ruins the gameplay.

When it comes to the creatures introduced to help Pokémon hit 1000 monsters plus those who returned, Pokémon Violet does have a strong range of creatures that cater to different player sensibilities while also ensuring a diverse range of battle options. The visual trend started in Pokémon Sword and Shield continues, creatures like the round green electric frog Bellibolt looking tailor made for merchandising as a bath toy, and while Pokémon has had many plain birds before, Flamigo having such a normal name and looking just like a flamingo save for the knot in its neck feels a little uninspired. There are plenty of unique ideas meant to appeal to all sorts of players though, a wide range of design concepts does mean you might fall for the adorable land whale Cetoddle or be wowed by the slick haunted armor knight known as Ceruledge. There are a few creative reimaginings of old Pokémon too like Toadscool that reinterpretated the jellyfish Pokémon Tentacool by using its shape for a mushroom creature instead. Pokémon can evolve into new forms when they achieve certain conditions like reaching certain levels or being exposed to certain items, and in battle, they can exhibit an ability that can grant them a special edge like the koala creature Komala being completely resistant to status effects like paralysis and burns thanks to always being asleep.

You can give Pokémon items to hold in battle, the game even refreshing any used or spent items beyond berries after a fight so you can experiment with different battle gear, but your Pokémon can only know four moves to fight with at once. Luckily, outside of battle you can have them remember any they knew before to better customize their attack options, and you can teach them TMs. TMs contain certain moves but are used up when they’re taught, but you are allowed to craft more of them. There are plenty of useful items laying around Paldea, and as your Miraidon recovers more abilities through the Herba Mystica quest, you can even start scaling walls and crossing water to find more. These items can be useful things like healing items and Poké Balls, the player needing to weaken wild creatures through battle to have a better chance of capturing them to join their team, and the game’s quick and simple pause menu even makes it easy to autoheal your own team members now so you can explore for longer periods. Crafting TMs feels like a bit of a pain though since they often require materials from defeating wild creatures, and while autobattling can lead to you acquiring them more quickly, its an unengaging task that serves as a barrier to the customization. Multiplayer is already a huge element of the Pokémon series that can redeem even its weakest entries and you can still battle and trade with other players, the game even allowing you to now explore the same world at the same time together as well. Barriers to customizing your team for combat with other player teams have always existed, but TM creation feels a bit more like an accessible but unexciting chore rather than some work meant for truly committed players.

A new mechanic also arises from time to time in Pokémon Violet called Terastalizing. Normally a Pokémon only exhibits one or two types that increase the power of moves of that type, but if you Terastalize, your Pokémon will gain a crystalline appearance and an ornate crown that signals the type they shifted to. A Pokémon can only have one Tera Type, but it changes their weaknesses and resistances and which attacks are boosted, leading to a new strategic wrinkle to spice up a fight with other players. On the other hand, gym leaders actually seem to use it to limit their options, transforming creatures into the same type as the rest of their team rather than taking the chance to pull off a trick, but there are also Tera Raids where you can join up with other players online to fight boss creatures. Not only do these raids have a strong rock backing track to pump you up in a game with already excellent and memorable music, but these battles happen in real time rather than having people take turns picking their moves. Their online nature does mean that sometimes it’s not exactly smooth so you might not know if your three allies are contributing until suddenly the game catches up and executes their moves all at once. Some of these randomized Tera Raids are really easy and are more a nice way to get a Pokémon earlier than you otherwise could have, others let you sometimes snag a Pokémon that was otherwise only available in Pokémon Scarlet, and after you complete the story you can even find very strong Pokémon that could be difficult to find naturally otherwise. The post-game actually has a few good things to attempt, and thanks to Paldea’s size, there are likely going to be places you never even encountered before the credits roll where new discoveries await. It is quite easy to see the creativity and care put into the planning and concepts of Pokémon Violet as a truly incredible experience was attempted, but the implementation didn’t always follow though enough to realize all of those ambitions.

THE VERDICT: Pokémon Violet has wonderful ideas on how it can provide a world filled with appealing creatures to find and fight but its follow-through is sometimes flawed. The battle system is as sharp as ever with a layered system brimming with strategic potential and thanks to powerful boss characters and competent trainers you can even encounter this some across the game’s surprisingly effective stories. Some balancing can be a bit off thanks to the open-ended exploration, but Paldea has a lot to uncover even if its beauty might be marred by graphical problems. The three main adventures all at least feel distinct and deliver on interesting scenarios and entertaining characters, so while you can see the seams that hold this world together, it is still captivating to head out into it on the back of your Miraidon.

And so, I give Pokémon Violet for Nintendo Switch…

A GREAT rating. On a more granular rating scale, I would place Pokémon Violet above Pokémon Shield but perhaps not quite on the level of Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Pokémon Legends: Arceus was much smarter in how it approached having creatures out in the world, their size, and camera positioning while mall things like how creatures were presented when in water feeling just where Pokémon needed to be in order for hunting them down to be a compelling collection quest. Pokémon Violet is weaker in that department but there is still some excitement every time you enter a new area and realize there are new creatures to meet to build up your heavily customizable battle team. Trainer battles would definitely benefit from some sort of strength scaling based on how much progress you made in the world, many of them easy to accidentally miss out in the world and there’s barely any reason to challenge them if you missed them before. However, the more important battles do great work in providing challenges to the player beyond having a team with strong enough moves. The Starmobiles and Titan Pokémon are a great step in making players consider more than winning a damage race for success, and while some balancing system to ensure not too much of the game becomes easy would help, it is thrilling to end up in a battle against something much stronger than you and then make it out by the skin of your teeth. The three stories and characters tied to them plus the creative final section are well handled in terms of writing no matter the order you do things in and really add some cohesion to a game that otherwise happily lets you set out and discover the world as you please. The technical problems may not hinder your ability to battle Pokémon and the collection aspect is more hampered by Pokémon sizes than the bouts of slow loading, but it is usually good for a game not to show its compromises and development problems so openly and it’s a bit hard to keep overlooking them when slowdowns and choppy animations are quite frequent.

Pokémon Violet is still overall an incredible Pokémon adventure but one that can’t help but remind you it could have been so much more. If the talented artists and battle designers were paired with a development team that could properly hone the world into something with sufficient polish, it would be much easier to embrace the excellent ideas that still ensure this Pokémon game has a lot to offer. Pokémon Violet can’t cleanly convey its incredible concept for a new open Pokémon adventure, but once you’ve come to accept the warts, there is still plenty of mechanical excellence and story-telling charm present that the actual activities keep you coming back for more.