I wanted to like Pokémon Scarlet and Violet when I reviewed it and while they are being ambitious certain aspects of the game make it hard to play.
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet was reviewed by Joel Franey on Nintendo Switch.
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet was reviewed by Joel Franey on Nintendo Switch.
Category
🎮️
GamingTranscript
00:00 Hello, my name is Mahin Kasor and I'm sitting opposite Joel Franey who has played and reviewed
00:07 Pokemon Scarlet and Violet.
00:09 I've heard things here and there, let's get the worst out of the way.
00:13 Tell me about the overall look and the graphics of the game.
00:17 Well I'm not allowed to swear so that's going to make this difficult.
00:21 I don't care about graphics most of the time and these are pretty hostile.
00:25 It's lag, it's pop-in, it's cut frames of animation, it crashed a couple of times.
00:30 It is pretty ropey.
00:32 Maybe this gets sorted by a later patch?
00:34 Oh no, because I was speaking to Sam during the preview and she also said very similar
00:39 things and I was hoping they would fix it.
00:40 But yeah, let's hope for a patch.
00:42 You know it's good that I'm hearing all the bad stuff because I can put this to the back
00:45 of my mind and enjoy the good parts.
00:47 Arguably the biggest part of the game, what was the open world experience like?
00:51 So it's interesting, it pretty much lives up to the boast conceptually.
00:56 The moment it goes "Right, you can go anywhere" I went "Okay" and I put a pin in the northernmost
00:59 point and I thought "I'm going there".
01:01 And aside from one bottleneck bit where you kind of have to fight someone to get through,
01:05 you can get to the top.
01:07 And I was encountering level 50 wild Pokemon while my team was still level 20 and I didn't
01:13 have any gym badges under my belt yet.
01:16 It's not an empty boast, they are doing what they say.
01:18 Yeah I imagine also that you can't catch the level 50 Pokemon straight away right?
01:23 You can, this is kind of the problem, you can catch them, they won't obey you so there's
01:29 no reason to because you don't have badges.
01:32 So then you would think "Ah okay, I could go to the highest level gym" because the gyms
01:36 don't scale.
01:39 The toughest ones are always tough, the easy ones are always easy no matter what point
01:42 you are in the game.
01:43 So you think "Ah I got it, I'll just go to the highest level gym, grab the badge and
01:46 everything will do what I tell you" except they don't because Pokemon obedience is based
01:51 on the number of badges you have, not the highest level one you have.
01:55 So you beat this super gym leader who's "interesting" and he goes "Well done, Pokemon of level 20
02:01 and up will now obey" or 25 and up or whatever it is and you're going.
02:04 Okay so there is an open world that allows you to do it in any order but it's also clear
02:09 that there is an order to this and there's not a lot of incentive to break it.
02:14 The auto battling feature, what does that even feel like?
02:18 Basically as you're walking around you can summon the first Pokemon in your team and
02:23 it just wanders around you and it scoops up any nearby items and will auto battle them
02:29 in a snap.
02:30 Like literally they bump into each other, a couple of signs come up and your team gets
02:34 some XP, not as much as if you'd fought it properly.
02:37 Oh really, okay.
02:39 Yeah, but it sort of means you can just train as you go, you just walk around and it follows
02:43 you and tackles things of its own accord.
02:46 And there's clear types do matter, so if your Pokemon has a type advantage it has a much
02:50 better chance of winning, level advantage matters.
02:54 It's a very simplified, like, it's alright, it's kind of inoffensive because all enemy
02:59 trainers are optional now, there's a lot more reason to do it in that you just walk into
03:04 a crowd of wild Pokemon and just throw it out and it's quite efficient.
03:08 It gives good reason to do it as you're going, like if you're just walking somewhere.
03:12 So how is levelling up in general, do you get an EXP share in this game?
03:16 Yeah, it automatically, all your teammates get XP.
03:20 Crafting in the TM system, how did you find that?
03:24 To start off with it's a pretty small list, like early on I wasn't really doing it because
03:28 there wasn't much of a reason to.
03:29 That is probably the one area in which the open world makes more sense because if you're
03:32 going up against enemies who are tougher than you because you're choosing to go out of order,
03:38 it's quite nice to have a thing where you go like "right, fairy type stuff up ahead,
03:41 I'm going to go make some steel type TMs" and that'll help.
03:45 Oh that's really exciting, that makes complete sense.
03:49 I want to know all about the raid battles and the terastalizing, all that, what is it?
03:53 What is it about?
03:54 So terastalizing is the new mechanic where you can change your Pokemon's type.
04:00 So every Pokemon has it's standard type and it also has it's terror type.
04:04 Yeah and it adds to it right?
04:05 Yeah, so well it swaps to whatever your terror type is.
04:09 So let's say you have Pikachu which is electric, but it's terror type is water.
04:15 It's always electric but then you activate terastalizing and it becomes water type.
04:19 Is that additional to electric type or does it swap?
04:23 No it replaces it.
04:26 It also means that any moves your terastalized Pokemon has that match it's terror type get
04:31 a buff.
04:32 So I quite like it, it means you can exchange your weaknesses for other weaknesses and it
04:37 adds a little extra layer of tactical thinking and the fact that you can only do it once
04:43 per Pokemon sensor visit means that it's got to be a little bit carefully used.
04:47 So how do you get one of these terastalized Pokemon?
04:50 So any Pokemon can terastalize, very early on they give you the item that allows you
04:55 to do it.
04:56 Oh okay.
04:57 But for most Pokemon their terror type is the same as their standard type.
05:01 So most Pikachu you find will be terror type electric as well as standard type electric.
05:07 But there's special raid battles and wild Pokemon that are clearly marked, they have
05:11 a distant glow and their terror type is wildly different to what you'd expect.
05:16 So you might find a raid boss Pikachu that is poison terror type and then you can catch
05:22 it and add that to your thing and now you've got this sort of wild card element to play
05:26 with.
05:27 You can find about halfway through the game something that allows you to change terror
05:31 types like a service but it requires so much investment as to be borderline useless.
05:40 So what did you, first of all tell me what did you think of the team star path?
05:45 The whole framework of this game is that you are going to a school, you are at the Naranja
05:51 Academy.
05:52 Oh right yeah.
05:53 And for some reason they then go like right you've had about two classes now Pikachu!
05:58 Off into the wider world, we don't want to see you again.
06:02 Team Star are effectively the school bullies.
06:06 Basically they have like lieutenants dotted around that are sort of these optional hard
06:11 boss fights.
06:12 Okay.
06:13 And each time you beat one there's a little bit of story context as to Team Star and where
06:19 it came from and how it works.
06:20 So it is probably more nuanced than most of these sort of Pokemon enemy types.
06:27 Yeah they're fine, they do the job.
06:29 So your first gym leader was the hardest one and you beat it.
06:32 Yeah.
06:33 How did you do that?
06:34 A lot of grinding basically.
06:35 Again it's this contradiction as we mentioned where it didn't feel like there's any reward
06:39 for going for the highest level stuff first.
06:43 You kind of get rewarded the same whether you went for that or the easy ones.
06:47 So I did the highest level ones and I thought wow that's impressive that I managed to do
06:51 that.
06:52 And then there was just a sense of de-escalation as you do all the progressively easier ones
06:56 and you're going yeah I mean you know I guess this is a real sense of falling action now.
07:01 Yeah I guess there's no incentive if you've beaten the hardest one first.
07:04 Obviously you're reviewing it, you got it early, there's not many people out there in
07:07 the world that have it.
07:08 But did you get any sense of the co-op?
07:10 Nope.
07:11 No.
07:12 I would have liked to but we only got one code so we couldn't do local, online and servers
07:17 aren't up until launch day.
07:20 So physically haven't been able to try a co-op yet.
07:22 I plan to on launch day and hopefully we'll have some stuff written about it.
07:26 We can play together Joel.
07:27 Yeah exactly.
07:28 It's fine.
07:29 You hear me grumbling at the other end.
07:31 So did you get a chance to do any of the picnic stuff and play with your lovely little Pokemon?
07:36 I did and immediately had a strong sense to do anything else.
07:43 I mean you know it's the picnic thing from Sword and Shield but now there's a sandwich
07:47 building mini game that gives your team buffs and I guess it's worth doing because buffs
07:53 are helpful.
07:55 Make very rare special sandwiches and it boosts the rate at which you can find shinies which
07:59 I know will drive people insane.
08:03 Finally I think one of the things everyone is going to be interested in obviously without
08:08 spoiling too much is the Pokemon design.
08:11 I think they're moving out of the pets with powers remit quite strongly.
08:15 There's a lot of quite humanoid looking ones.
08:18 Oh no.
08:19 It's a bit Digimon to be honest.
08:21 Oh no.
08:22 I quite like the motorbike legendary on Scarlet.
08:27 It's a bit over designed.
08:29 Beyond that there's some that are very basic designs.
08:34 Again I don't think I'll remember many of them when the game is over.
08:38 It's a game I wish I liked more than I did.
08:42 Now that doesn't mean I hate it.
08:46 It's a real hand wave because it's got some really interesting ideas.
08:51 It's got some interesting themes.
08:54 The open world is good in theory.
08:59 It's just really struggling to stick the landing on a lot of these and the technical performance
09:05 as has been observed by everyone it's not good.
09:09 Okay so what is your score Joel?
09:12 A three out of five.
09:14 Okay well you could read Joel's full review of this up on GamesRadar.
09:18 Should be it by the time this comes out.
09:20 Thank you for chatting with me.
09:21 I'm going to go collect my thoughts and remember to like, comment and subscribe to GamesRadar's
09:25 YouTube channel.
09:27 See you all later.
09:28 [Music]
09:31 (whooshing)
09:33 [BLANK_AUDIO]