I’ve been playing Pokemon for as long as I can remember. Starting with Yellow in days gone by, I’ve been with the series for all its highs and lows, and I’ve always found something to enjoy. Since the 3DS games in particular, I’ve sunk thousands of hours into catching them all several times, breeding competitive Pokemon and battling with them, as well as exploring the non-official fun that can come from randomizers and an assortment of self-imposed challenges. It’s a series that means a lot to me, and one I continue to look forward to playing as each new release is announced. Do Scarlet and Violet meet the expectations that come with such excitement though?

Starting out in the Paldea region, you’re given the chance to customise your character before being shown a presentation about your new school: Naranja (Orange) Academy in Scarlet and Uva (Grape) Academy in Violet. Though nothing necessarily revolutionary, the customisation options on offer are the best we’ve seen to date in the series. Outside of the hair styles, which are largely reminiscent of what was on offer in Sword and Shield, you can now customise your character’s facial features. It’s no Mii Maker, but I do appreciate the individuality you’re able to inject from the outset. The presentation that follows your initial setup is a little dull but it does do well in its aim to get the majority of the exposition out of the way before you actually start playing, and ends somewhat strongly by introducing you to your game’s legendary Pokemon and the mysteries surrounding it. And with that, you’re free to start your adventure. Or at least the brief introductory portion of it anyway.

Unlike other Pokemon games where you’re tasked with becoming the champion right out of the gate and get distracted by evil organisation or football hoodlums on the way, Scarlet and Violet offer you a degree of freedom by laying out exactly what it has in store for you from the start. You can think of the games as five sections: an introduction, three central storylines, and a conclusion.

The introduction serves its purpose well in giving you time to meet the central figures to each of the game’s paths, as well as getting you started with your legendary Pokemon of choice: Koraidon in Scarlet and Miraidon in Violet. Meeting a legendary Pokemon at the start of the game isn’t necessarily anything new, with Pokemon like Tapu Koko being shown in the first hour of Pokemon Sun and Moon. What is new however is that Pokemon joining you from the start and becoming a character that grows as you progress. While at the start of the game you find it weakened and somewhat feeble, it has a personality beyond being a sprite you can interact with at the end of the game to catch. It’s refreshing, even if I still do find it a bit strange that you ride it like a motorbike instead of using it in battle. For your playthrough of the game, the bulk of your time will be spent jumping between the central plots, each offering a different style of gameplay to accompany its narrative.

By far the most traditional of the questlines is Victory Road. Here you face off against eight gym leaders scattered through the region, before challenging the Elite Four for the rank of Champion. Before being able to challenge a gym leader, you have to complete a short gym challenge. I quite like how these challenges have evolved from generation to generation, moving away from just having to fight a given number of trainers before the head honcho steps up. While some of the pre-leader challenges do feel a little lacking, I had a good time with the majority. Your reward for beating each gym is, as you might have guessed, a badge. Like usual, the more badges you have, the more high-levelled Pokemon will obey you. Unlike previous games though, this does include Pokemon you’ve caught yourself. The wording used by the game suggests badge count only impacts the obedience of Pokemon based on the level they were caught. For example, if you have one badge, Pokemon caught up to Level 25 will listen to you. If you catch a Pokemon that’s Level 25 and train it beyond that, it does still listen to you. To put it to an extreme, I trained a Pokemon to Level 100 and it remained disobedient for the remainder of the game, so there are some unseen limits in play. I do like this adjustment as a whole though. With you able to access some high levelled encounters from the start of the game with a wrong turn or three, it does a good job of disincentivising catching and using these in oppose to training your own party.

Next up on the block is Path of Legends. This is a somewhat new aspect to the series where you team up with a companion to challenge larger than life Titan Pokemon for the legendary Herba Mystica spice they just so happen to be guarding. It’s here you connect with Koraidon and Miraidon and see some of their power return as you fell each of the five titans. As you progress, you’re given further movement options while riding them, making the world easier to navigate and unlocking areas you couldn’t access before.

Finally we have Starfall Street, the route where you systematically dismantle the enemy organisation of the games: Team Star. On offer here are five encampments. To take down one of the five leaders, you have to first enter their camp and beat up 30 Pokemon using the new Let’s Go mechanic within a set timeframe. The Let’s Go mechanic lets you send out your Pokemon to fight with others in the overworld without triggering a standard fight. It’s much faster and really useful for some quick training when you’re not in the mood for constant battle transitions.

In isolation these three plots are fine, but where I think they really excel is in encouraging you to move between them in oppose to just focusing on one route over the others. While the stories don’t really intertwine in any meaningful way, the rewards you get for progressing do. At least if you ignore Starfall Street. With the other two, you find yourself either completing gyms to enable you to catch higher level Pokemon, or defeating Titans to enable you to get to new places to then encounter those higher level Pokemon. It’s a simple relationship but it does work well. I just wish Starfall Street really had a place in it. You don’t really get anything meaningful out of this oddball third route, and I struggle to justify its inclusion outside of it being an obligation of the series to have some bad organisation that needs to be stomped out. To its credit, it’s one of the more down to earth teams we’ve seen from the series, and the story behind it was enjoyable. It just didn’t fit into the larger game well in my eyes.

Unfortunately this encouragement to move between plotlines in the open world is somewhat sullied by the lack of Pokemon level scaling throughout your adventure. Now I can understand certain aspects of the game not scaling to your progression if you’re wanting to have an in-game universe that makes sense. The Titan Pokemon might have their own strengths, and Team Star really has no obligation to use weaker or stronger Pokemon to suit your needs. Where I find flaw is in the fact the gyms don’t scale to your level, more so when the leaders themselves talk about how they have stronger and weaker teams on hand. Not to mention your rival continually picks a new team out for however many gym badges you have. It’s a wasted opportunity to make an open world feel more open. While you can somewhat guess what level things will be by their relative position on the map from where you start your adventure, it just feels like it’s missing that added spice of freedom that really makes an open world thrive. I can applaud the effort of letting you challenge any gym, camp, or Titan Pokemon in whatever order you want, but with a lack of level scaling and little in the way of level indication before going in, you can find yourself frustratedly entering areas too early or accidentally skipping over content that should be to your level. It’s as though an odd middle ground was chosen between a linear path and freedom of choice where the strengths of neither are fully realised.

One of my favourite new features for Scarlet and Violet quite surprisingly comes from the multiplayer components. For the first time in series history, you’re able to open your world in its entirety to up to three friends locally or online. Through the Union Circle you can invite people using a code to just hang out and go about their day with no real restrictions on what they can do. You can progress your story, beat up gyms, and have quick and easy access to trading with those present. Where things get a little weird is in how Pokemon are spawned in for those playing on different versions. When I first went online, I had assumed that if a Violet player was hosting, every person in the Union Circle would only see Violet Pokemon spawn. This wasn’t the case though, with my primary Scarlet save seeing the standard Scarlet spawns. It happened by coincidence when hunting for a shiny Pokemon with a friend that I started to see their Violet Pokemon spawn in. It turns out that no matter who the host is, Pokemon will spawn for each player appropriate to their game, with everybody able to interact with the Pokemon once they’re spawned in. It’s an incredibly odd system but it did end up leading to some fun as we travelled across the region together in search of spots to spawn each other the Pokemon we were missing to complete our Pokedex. This is about as close we’ve seen to an official Pokemon MMO, and while it might be fairly small in scope, we really did have a blast. The in-game camera also let us pull poses and customise our profiles to commemorate the good times.

The smallest things turn out to be the most fun with online multiplayer.

You can also share picnics with friends, this feature expanding and streamlining the camps from Sword and Shield, as well as integrating a few other features commonly seen elsewhere. When you go for a picnic, you’ll set down a picnic table and send out all the Pokemon in your party to play. You can throw a ball for them to chase around and give them a wash, but the most impactful features come from sandwich making and the new breeding mechanics. The breeding is simple to explain. There’s a basket at the foot of the table, and if you have Pokemon that can breed in your party, you might just find an egg there waiting for you. It’s incredibly convenient to have a traveling daycare with you, and really easy to get what you want by just clearing out your party and leaving in the two Pokemon you want to breed. Instead of eggs being generated after a number of steps, they’re now generated using real time. Without any bonuses, this can take up to a few minutes for just one egg. It sounds worse than the daycare couples of old, but there is a saving grace: sandwiches.

Sandwiches do everything. With the right combination of ingredients you can boost encounter rates for one type of Pokemon, make it easier to catch Pokemon, get more experience, find eggs quicker, and even find more shiny Pokemon. The bonuses you get from eating a sandwich last for 30 minutes, which is often more than enough time to accomplish what you set out to. With Sparkling Power 3, the power that boosts your chances of finding shiny Pokemon, I come away with up to three Pokemon at a time. Going back to breeding, Egg Power 2 boosts the rate eggs appear drastically, with me usually coming out with 60 or so eggs from 30 minutes of periodic checking. It’s a flexible and relatively fun system that can be explored with friends. Assembling a sandwich with four pairs of hands is hectic in all the right ways, with everybody able to contribute ingredients and walk away with the same bonuses; it’s really handy for those recipes that might rely on rarer ingredients.

I think this counts as a sandwich.

Picnics aren’t the only evolution we’ve seen since Sword and Shield though, with Tera Raids improving on the raid battles that were introduced in Galar. Much is the same here. You have a team of four people against one large Pokemon with an inflated health bar. What’s different this time is that the raid Pokemon is terastalised, this being the new battle twist for Scarlet and Violet. Though it has its intricacies, the important part is that it changes a Pokemon’s defensive typing, and adds an additional type to its offensive typing. What this means for raiding is a certain level of intricacy in planning what’s best to take down a threat in finding what can hit its new defensive type hard without being taken out by the Pokemon’s standard moveset. The raids feel much more dynamic with there being no set turn order, and the additional options in being able to cheer are definitely appreciated in helping keep team members alive. I was also positively surprised at how much a challenge the hardest difficulty can be, and I’m looking forward to future events with even harder opponents.

When all is said and done and the plots have converged and reached their conclusion, you might wonder what’s left for you in the great region of Paldea. In previous titles we’ve seen battle facilities, additional storylines, and even whole regions in the case of Gold and Silver. Paldea is much less fortunate, with less to do than even Sword and Shield’s base game. Once the curtain has fallen you have the region to explore as you wish, but there isn’t really anything new to do with it. To my resounding disappointment there isn’t even an iteration of the Battle Tower on show, which is to my knowledge a first since its introduction in Pokemon Crystal. In its place you have a reskinned gym leader rebattle rotation in the form of a four-battle tournament that can be replayed. There’s no real competitive aspect here and very little in the way of farmable replayability. I recently went back to Pokemon Omega Ruby and spent hours in Battle Maison customising a competitive team to account for as many of its hijinks as possible. It was a great time that I was hoping to replicate in these new games, but all I’m left with in terms of content is catching Pokemon and participating in online raids to farm for rare items. I enjoy it now, with a chunk of my time being spent shiny hunting, but I just can’t see the longevity here without Game Freak announcing a significant update sooner rather than later.

The last major positive aspect I wanted to mention is the game’s soundtrack. As something I often overlook in reviews, I feel a lot of games fall into the category of having background music that just sits in the background. It’s there, but you don’t really notice it. And that’s not a bad thing. It adds flavour and doesn’t need to stand out, but that isn’t the music of Scarlet and Violet. This music is an absolute series-high, and I encourage you to give it a listen if you haven’t already. From the overworld to the battle themes, everything feels so alive and fitting. I don’t know how much more I can really say on the subject, but I did at least want to give it a mention for how much of a positive impact it had on my overall experience.

And then we have the elephant in the room. Or the Donphan I guess. Performance and visuals. I feel like I barely need to address this point since it’s perhaps what the games are most well known for at this point, but it is definitely not good. The framerate shifts between 30fps at its best and around 20fps at its worst. This part isn’t ideal, but it’s not as bad as games like Arc of Alchemist that actually made me feel nauseous. If it were just this performance as a negative point, I don’t think there’d be half the uproar there currently is. But that isn’t where it ends. The games look bland, the textures are low quality and clearly tiled in many areas, animations run as low as 2fps for NPCs and environmental features. Perhaps the worst offender is the aggressive pop-in of both scenery and NPCs, including the interactable Pokemon in the open world. While the shiny hunter in me can appreciate a quick way to spawn and despawn Pokemon, it doesn’t make for a good experience, especially with Pokemon appropriately scaled in the overworld. I can’t count the times I’ve run into a tiny Floette seconds after it appeared as a speck on my screen. On top of this you have a slurry of bugs that can range from amusing graphical glitch to performance slow-downs and ultimately game crashes. I do want to stress that as a fan of the series, these aspects haven’t been enough to put me off playing. In the week I’ve been playing I have completed the Pokedex, spending around 90 hours playing Scarlet and a further 10 on Violet. My own tolerance to this kind of thing should be no excuse however, and a company like Game Freak should be held to higher standards. Pokemon Scarlet and Violet as a whole are another step in the right direction, but at this point I find myself saying that for every new entry we see. It is a step in the right direction but by no stretch is this the quality of game we should be seeing for a series like Pokemon.

With some luck we’ll see patches in the coming weeks and months to correct the bugs and smooth over the performance, but whether you’ll enjoy this game will in my opinion come down to your tolerance to such things. I can genuinely say this is the most fun I’ve had with Pokemon in recent years, but whether you’re as willing to accept its flaws as I can is a matter entirely unto itself.