The second game I ever owned was Pokemon Silver. I won a Game Boy Advance that came with Super Mario Advance 2, and I trotted down to Birkenhead market to double my collection with a handful of silvers in my pocket. I knew all my friends were playing Pokemon, so I selected the one I could afford, a second-hand copy of Silver, and I played it until the clock ran out. That’s 999:59 hours of sweet Pokemon action, with my trusty Typhlosion, who I called Pkmn Pink for some reason, by my side for it all. I don’t even know what I did for all that time, but I certainly didn’t complete the PokeDex because all my friends had long since moved on to Ruby, and refused to dig out an old game for an old console in order to trade me Growlithe and Mankey.
Eventually I got Sapphire, and put a similar amount of time into that. I played the game to absolute completion, raised all my Pokemon to level 100 for no apparent reason (Rayquaza single-handedly defeated the League and exp share brought the rest along for the ride), knocked on Deoxys’ door every day to check if the spaceship was leaving, and completed my first ‘dex.
I haven’t played a Pokemon game like this since. I’ve gone back and played Gen 1, the Gen 1 remake, the other Gen 1 remake, the Gen 2 remake, and then powered through the rest of the games in pretty much release order, but recently I’ve found myself wearying of the series. I’m a man whose childhood was poured into these games. I have multiple Pokemon tattoos. But the trailer for the Scarlet & Violet DLC, The Teal Mask and The Indigo Disk, just didn’t interest me at all. Has the nostalgia simply waned, or is Pokemon doing something wrong?
For what it’s worth, I think the DLC itself looks alright. It’s a clever idea to introduce new biomes on a weird island and under the sea, there’s more Pokemon to catch (which is always nice), and more story content is the best hook that any Scarlet & Violet add-on could have thanks to the strides forward the base game took in that department. Game Freak has been clever to make the new areas appear as free and open as the rest of Paldea, and if you liked the base game, I’m sure you’ll like this.
That’s the problem, though: the base game was bad. Really bad. I was charitable to it at release, due to Arven’s heartwarming story, the fun characters like Larry, and the impressive scope of the ideas. But Scarlet & Violet didn’t work. The framerate chugged along at what felt like 10fps, the monsters popped in metres from your character, and those environment textures shouldn’t be given a free pass in any game, let alone one from a multi-billion dollar company.
The only thought percolating through my head as I was playing through the endgame was, ‘imagine if this looked good’. Area Zero is a great idea with the right amount of narrative importance, but it just looks bad. Those crystalline structures could have been saved with a unique art style or some basic direction, but Scarlet & Violet wasn’t afforded the time to do anything interesting with its good ideas.
That’s why I’m being uncharitable towards The Teal Mask and The Indigo Disc. They look like perfectly serviceable pieces of DLC, giving us more outfits, new Pokemon, and new stories. But I don’t want more of the same Pokemon Scarlet & Violet, I want something good. This is the first Pokemon game in Generations in which I haven’t completed the PokeDex, purely because I had no interest in returning to Paldea’s broken continent after finishing the story.
Pokemon is too big for its own good. It’s a global franchise now, and has to meet strict deadlines in order to release new games in time for plushies and TCG sets and events and movies. I never thought I’d say this as a child eagerly waiting for Gen 4 to hit the shelves, but Pokemon games release too frequently these days. There are too many of them, and the lack of time and care put into their creation means we end up with substandard titles that disappoint us all.
Is it fixable? I’d love for Pokemon to do a Zelda and spend five years working on the next instalment, and for it to be a mindblowing, genre-defining title that we’d play for hundreds of hours and talk about in revered tones. But it won’t happen. New Pokemon games sell millions and millions of copies despite their numerous flaws, so why would Game Freak slow down production? It has no incentive to do so. Unfortunately for players, that means we’ll have to get used to Scarlet & Violet levels of quality for years to come.