I did promise I'd write up my thoughts on the new Pokemon here, and i've been dragging my feet, but here we go. Serene and I played it very on and off from release up until completing the story last week, and Pokemon Violet was...... aggressively meh as a game. It started pretty slow, had probably a 20-30 hour stretch in the middle where it really hit its stride and was genuinely Doing It for me, and then the final 30-40 hours were sort of a hell of our own making (but also very much of the game's making). And I think ultimately it confirmed my belief that if I like an open world game it is very much an exception, because the way these games are structured kind of makes me play them in a really unfun way
I have no editor and no real plan for this, so only click read more if you really need something to waste time on, because I think the above pretty much covers it
Reward Systems
So how do I play open world games? Well, when I've got a giant map to explore, every hill feels like it could have something behind it, and that means the best way to see everything is to carefully comb every single inch of the area I'm in, find every single secret, and only then move on to the next area. And at the start of the game, that's actually fine. First areas tend to be relatively small, and will usually give an intro to pretty much all of the game's reward systems, which means that fully exploring the first few areas of the game will constantly hit my dopamine receptors as I find and engage with everything.
Now, when I say "reward systems," I'm talking about absolutely every reason the game gives you to explore the world map and engage in the main mechanics of the game, like battles. These can include money and experience gains, consumables, crafting materials, rare collectibles, and even area-specific gimmicks or small, cool spaces that make the world interesting to explore. Some of these are quantifiable and others aren't, but they are a big motivation to explore these huge games. For non-quantifiable reward systems, developers often acknowledge the player for finding or engaging with them using the other more concrete reward systems. A unique piece of armor hidden in a nook in Breath of the Wild or a huge pile of coins on top of a doorway you weren't supposed to climb in Super Mario Odyssey help tie the vague (but nonetheless real) satisfaction of exploring a space to the quantifiable, concrete economies of coin count. And ultimately, it feels good to do something challenging or even unintended and have the developers pat you on the head for it.
Pokemon Scarlet/Violet has almost none of these "soft" rewards. The areas look different, but they all play basically the same (roll through on your bike, catch any new Pokemon, ignore all others, maybe climb a cliff). Every cave is either utterly empty or has the exact same Pokemon as the area outside, or The One Set Of Cave Pokes. Ruins are kinda neat the first time you find them, but when the second one is exactly the same you never get excited by ruins again. Even the towers, while useful as fly points, don't have any of the grandeur of the BotW towers, which are landmarks you see from miles around that convey very useful map data.
But hey, there are still concrete rewards to find, and they'll even put them up on hard-to-reach ledges or small nooks, so can't that be a way to spice up exploration and even make pretty samey levels kinda interesting? Welllll, to talk about this we'll need to go over Pokemon ScaVi's concrete reward systems. In order of excitement:
- the Pokemon themselves (love those little guys)
- TMs (there's a nice gradient from bad boring moves to "oh shit that's Flamethrower" that really makes finding these exciting)
- Gimmighoul Coins (you know I'm right to put them here)
- Weird ground stakes (what could they dooo)
- Cool consumable items (I could always use another potion or more pokeballs)
- Money (I guess I could buy more consumables with this....)
- TM-crafting materials (crafting a TM will be useful to you mayyyybe 2-3 times per playthrough, more if you play competitive)
- LP (money++, functionally identical to money, why does this exist?)
That's a lot of different ways for the game to reward me! When I case the entirety of the early areas I end up with a bunch of bonus money, some potions and pokeballs that let me explore earlier, some TMs that are way better than the crappy moves my team has now, and so, so many Pokemon. And this is where the game really shines! Early on, every new area has a totally new cast of Little Guys, both cool new designs and old favorites, just wandering around everywhere, and the world feels really full and exciting.
But there's a fundamental issue with this. By getting absolutely everything I can out of these early areas, I'm basically eating through a finite pile of meaningful rewards much faster than the game expects. Inevitably, if I keep playing like this, my exhaustive treks through the later areas will feel worse and worse, because every single one of the above resources will feel less and less interesting to receive. Most open world games try to combat this by making exploration require the resources it gives you, so that exploring more saps away the resources you collected, keeping it exciting to find them. Even Pokemon Arceus has a materials to pokeballs/tools pipeline to help keep it fresh.
Unfortunately, in ScaVi none of the resources are meaningfully spent when exploring. Money becomes functionally infinite, and potions and pokeballs are lying around everywhere, so I'll max out my store of potions and pokeballs. I'll get too many of the best TMs to care about new ones (we used 30+ pokemon and still had pretty much every move we wanted on everyone by the 60% point). And as a consequence, once you catch a Pokemon, there is essentially no reason to ever fight it or engage with it again. This is probably the most disappointing thing about the game as a whole, especially coming off Arceus, which had an entire system to encourage repeat interactions. It means that every single time I catch a Pokemon, I'm basically making every area they exist in permanently less interesting.
So as you inevitably mine out these finite rewards, the whole map gets less and less interesting, even as you explore totally new areas. There's nothing in them you haven't seen before, so other than mindless collection, there's not really much to do or see on the world map except fight Pokemon. But, well, that kinda sucks too.
They Never Do Anything With Battles
The problem with fighting things in ScaVi is pretty simple: fights always happen on your terms. Sure, some Pokemon will run at you when they notice you, but if you're on your bike they'll never catch you unless they come from offscreen or run into you during another battle. Pokemon almost never set ambushes, or exist in interesting configurations, or even have any "aggressive" AI other than "run in a straight line at the player when you get in their sight cone." Pokemon trainers are purely opt-in, and while I get it, it again means you always engage with them on your terms.
And even worse, Pokemon spawns are structured so rigidly that you'll never get surprised by either level or bad matchups. Every area has a fixed encounter-list, and the areas are absolutely massive, so you can run for miles in any direction and all you'll see are the same Fletchlings and Lechonks that are all comfortably below your level.
And I'm not saying that Pokemon games need to be challenging, but it is one more place that they could potentially have made exploration the slightest bit tense or engaging, and they didn't.
Furthermore, the Let's Go mode is incredibly ill-conceived. Almost every Pokemon is so slow that you basically have to crawl around the map to keep them from going back to their ball, it's impossible to get them to properly target wild pokemon you want to fight, the resources you get will be worthless unless you're raising competitive Pokemon, and even the "1000 steps" evolution Pokemon feel like an annoying afterthought, trying desperately to give the Let's Go mode a reason to exist.
Ultimately, Pokemon battling has never been particularly exciting in the main games, but at least in older games there were times when you were poisoned and just could not run from another damn Zubat, or the final trainer in the cave before the next town was looking juuuust scary enough to make you wonder if you should go back and subject yourself to walking through the entire cave again. In ScaVi it's kind of just a thing you can do if you feel like it.
I Should Really Break Up With Open Worlds
There's so much more I want to talk about (evolutions feel like an afterthought when evolved wild Pokemon are everywhere, the main story quests are alright but not worth the gaps between them, the area-based spawning system that means I'll never find a cool Pokemon in one small corner, the Team Star Bases feel like an interesting ideas that need 3x the development time, hell, the fact that I truly love both Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild even though they are open world games), but this post is unwieldy already. Thanks for sticking with it!
Ultimately, I know these games aren't designed to be played like this. I know being so thorough actively diminishes the value of replaying it because odds are I won't leave some cool nook until playthrough 5 and make everything feel just as fresh, but at the same time, for any given 60 Hour Open World Experience, am I really going to ever boot it up again, or will this one playthrough be the only time I ever engage with it, so I may as well see absolutely everything I can the one time I do it? I know this "see everything" mentality makes these games worse, because I know these games aren't designed to reward you for doing this (they can't be), but it's just so hard to turn my brain off to it, at least over the course of an entire playthrough. When I open the map and see that I'm only like 40% through it, all I see is the threat of all the time I'm gonna spend on all those areas I haven't seen yet, feeling so unfulfilled. I should really just stop playing them.
But at the same time, man, ScaVi is bad at making me want to explore it.
