Pokémon Violet (2022)

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't have much to offer. The lack of polish is obvious; there are bugs and plenty of situations where you find yourself thinking, "That shouldn't be happening, should it?", which wouldn't have made it into the game had there been more development time. Even the open world doesn't have all that much to offer. There are interesting locations with a good concept, such as the Ten Wonders of Paldea, but nothing particularly extraordinary really happens there. Due to the lack of scaling in the arenas, the open world doesn't really work either, as the fixed levels mean there's still a fairly set order.

The cities look exciting from the outside, but they don't really offer much either, which makes them harder to remember. Even the story is told in a very childish way and doesn't offer much. It only gets interesting towards the end, after you've achieved the three main objectives.

One positive aspect, however, are the new Pokémon. I really like them, and the twist with old Pokémon that have been reinterpreted (not the regional forms) is really cool. I quite like Spain as the inspiration for the region, even though, as I said, there was plenty of potential left to make the world even more interesting. In the end, though, I enjoyed the game and I'll be doing some of the post-game content and playing the DLC. I'm still looking forward to that.

Pokémon Violet was definitely a huge shift from Pokémon Sword — and for better or worse, it tried a lot of new things.

Overall, Pokémon Violet had some bold ideas and moments of brilliance, but it felt like a half-baked experiment more than a polished evolution. I loved exploring Paldea and seeing the series finally break out of its old formula, but I really hope the next entry takes these ideas and gives them the time (and the performance lmao) they deserve.

What I Liked:

• The open-world focus. Finally being able to just roam around and catch Pokémon out in the wild felt amazing.
• The Paldea culture and general vibe were charming.
• The Gym Leaders — both their personalities and character designs — were some of the most memorable in the series.
• Riding around on a Pokémon everywhere never got old, lol.
• The final part of the main story with the whole past/future Pokémon twist? Loved it. Easily the highlight of the game.
• The new Pokémon designs were surprisingly strong this gen.

What I Liked but Felt Needed More Cooking:

• The music. Not bad, but kind of disappointing after Sword’s fantastic soundtrack.
• The open world, while ambitious, felt pretty undercooked. Exploring was fun at first, but the world often felt empty and lifeless.
• With the new wild encounter system, battles became faster (a plus!) but they also looked… cheap.
• The story. The characters were fine, if a bit one-note, but the overall writing felt childish and messy. I know we’re never getting another Black & White level plot, but this was rough.
• The academy system felt like filler — you go through classes and tasks for random items that barely matter.

What I Disliked:

• The pre-gym challenges were painfully bad.
• The Elite Four challenge was a total joke. The Pokémon League aesthetic lost all its charm — it looked like a boring corporate office building.
• Same goes for the gym designs, though I’ll give them a pass since most battles took place outdoors.
• The graphics were awful. I played it on a Switch 2, and I can only imagine how bad it must’ve looked on the original Switch.

Only recommended for true Pokemon fans, honestly.

Let's get this out of the way. is this game broken? graphically, yes. it can be a mess. the draw distance is terrible. graphics pop in and out. shadows and water render TERRIBLY. the animations stutter and chug sometimes. there are shortcuts in the design where a menu is inserted where an actual room should be. all around parts of the game seem rushed. All that said, it's not game breaking. It doesn't stop you from playing, or interrupt your experience really. It's mildly distracting at the worst. Should it be fixed? yes. A finished game shouldn't do this. oddly enough, with other parts great care is taken in the design. it's a confusing mix off low and high effort.

That aside, this game did something a pokemon game has not done in a very long time. It made me care again, like I did 20 years ago. Pokemon blue was the last time I sincerely wanted to catch them all and not just whatever ones I like to use on my team. This open world with wild pokemon visibly existing in it, not just kind of milling around like they do in let's go or sword and shield but existing, the joy of finding them while exploring this world reignited my passion for this series. I truly wanted to take my time with this game and explore. I really felt like I was in this world.

The open world design actually works out well. After some tutorial laying out the mechanics, story and activities you will do, the game lets you go. There is no gate behind some move or achievement. you can go where you want. that said, the game doesn't scale levels. There is a definite path that makes sense if you want the experience to balance correctly. But it doesn't force you. What's good about this is unlike other games, if there's a specific pokemon you want for your team right now, you don't have to make your way to when and where it's available by progressing the gyms. you can go there right now.

Quality of life improvements accumulated mostly from older games have made this the best pokemon, in terms of mechanical efficiency. The best of these is the auto battle ability. you can send your pokemon out to battle in the wild alone while you walk around collecting items or just standing there. It's the best thing to ever happen and it makes the game infinitely more fun and less tedious.

janky graphics and empty houses aside, the world design is pretty good. it works as an open space. it doesn't always render well but the lines are drawn in the best shape to make exploring enjoyable. The story and characters are good, actually. better than any pokemon game before. it's a low bar, and I didn't expect much, but I actually like the cast. No one is just a simple two dimensional cartoon like in past games. your rival, your allies, the "Team"of this game, they all have solid motivations, are sympathetic, are unique and interesting. It's a small victory but it's nice.

Is this an unfinished game? yes. it truly is unacceptable the way it was released. does that stop it from being very very fun? no. it's a good time. it's a good pokemon game. I'm confident the issues will be fixed but meanwhile i'm taking joy in this. What else do I want from a game?

The whole premise of this game is that you can do whatever you want whenever you want, but that, is a lie.

maybe it has some spoilers down here

Now let me dive into this, technically you can do the game in the order you want, but let's be realistic, you actually can't.

The game doesn't have level scalling, so, if you want to do the first gym (bug type), and later check the map to see where is the next one (if you are like me, you are going to be disappointed) there is a gym a little bit far from the first gym city and I asumed i could go there and fight the leader, I was wrong, the pokemon in the area and the ones the gym leader have are extremely over-leveled at the beggining of the game, so you actually can't do the leaders in order, yeah sucks, but ¿what do we have next?

At least i can still fight team star or titan pokemon ¿right? wrong, its the same situation in every instance of the game, even if you are leveled enough to fight team star or some gym leaders, you absolutely need the titan upgrades to progress in the game, making the game tell you that you can't do this if you haven't beaten "n" number of titan pokemon, so this way, I feel in the need to put titan pokemon above anything else, so yeah, this game represents de illusion of free choice. 3/10 in this aspect.

But then the story is good ¿right? I'll give you that, maybe not the general story, to be honest is kinda mediocre, but is better than arceus, the good thing about the game are the characters, the characters from this game are full of personailty, we have: the genki-girl, the one guy with daddy/mommy issues, shy hacker girl, cosplayer principal ("¿how do you do, fellow kids?"), dad/mom of the century, team star (a.k.a bullied people) and SOME of the leaders. they are a cast that is memorable at least, but maybe if we had a proper voiceover for them it would actually make the journey 10 times better. Later into the game every route converge and leads to the endgame, sadly most of the cast doesn't make an appearance (or even matter), but its alright since we can rematch them later and in the tourney, the endgame was giving me some final fantasy xv vibes, it was just, people being friendly and learning about everyone (if it wasn't for the fact that mountmon forced us to walk, I'd like for more time of bonding with nemona-arven and penny). 7/10 in this aspect.

What is next... oh yes, the music, almost every theme is a certified banger, damn, even toby fox is here with dope ass raid music+zero zone. yes, is great. 8/10 in this aspect.

The difficulty is "there", for me who has played every single game in the series and has participated in competitive years ago, obviously is not a challenge, I could say is between sw/sh and s/m, is not a bad difficulty for begginers (knowing pokemon is a game with a demographic oriented to childs) but it can be underwhelming for people looking for a challenge. 5/10 in this aspect.

And last but not least: The game is a technical disaster and the excuse for it being in a switch is not tolerable. There is plenty of footage showing bugs, poor quality textures, pop-in, framedrops and the only good thing about this is that good f* lord you can be Crazy Frog online with your mount, jokes aside, the game in this aspect is terrible, some people got to the point of nausea almost vomiting by experiencing extreme pop-in+framedrops, it is a shame that a company with the biggest IP in the whole world can deliever a game so poorly made, is sickening to think the staff only had some months to pull this up after the other disaster that was arceus, and is even a better game compared to this. 2/10 in this aspect.

So here it is folks, is my first review ever to be published in a site and english is not my first language, so be kind please, see you next if i have the motivation to write.

I don’t normally write things for Grouvee scores because when I want to say something about a video game, I can just write and shoot a proper review and put it on the site. But I don’t have the kind of time or energy it takes to spend hours upon hours writing a script and editing a nice tight review video right now. So instead, here’s some half baked notes explaining my feelings on Pokemon Violet.

This game is so fun to play. I had a great time going through the main game, exploring every nook and cranny of the world, looking at my new aminal friends. There are some really good an interesting design decisions made for an open world Pokemon game. When Arceus released, I thought that would be all I want from Pokemon going forward. But after playing this, I now know i want both types of games. I want to see another iteration of what SV does and take it even further.

That said, I think the main point of friction for me is the longevity. Not to say the game doesn’t have legs. I mean specifically the longevity of the game as it relates to my struggle with its technical issues. This game is busted, it’s no secret. The wild thing is that during my 60-70 hours playing the main game, it didn’t bother me that much. It bothered me enough to complain about it to friends. It bothered me enough to desperately want Game Freak to slow down their release cadence so they have more time to work on a game. But it didn’t bother me enough to hamper my moment to moment excitement for seeing something new. For riding my bike aminal across hills and plains and going “wow look at this”.

But once I started post game, that’s when I really had to wrestle with the technical issues affecting my enjoyment. Post game Sword for me was endless hours breeding, juicing up aminals, resetting spawns, all for the sake of doing as many raids as possible. I love raids. I was fully ready to do that all over again in Violet. But when all you have left to do is sit through broken animations, menus that take forever to navigate, a box that loads slower than molasses, net code that cant properly calculate health bars, and a battle screen that just becomes completely unresponsive multiple times during a raid, it really sucks a lot of the fun out of it.

The sense of wonder and joy of seeing something new is gone by this point. I’ve seen it all. There’s nothing there to cushion the blow of the poor performance. I cant just hand waive away frame rate issues in the overworld anymore because I was gonna stop every 5 meters to smell some flowers anyway. All i want to do is move to the next raid crystal, and it feels pretty bad doing that when the game slows down to crawl!

That’s what I mean by longevity. The game has all the pieces for it to have been as long lasting as Sword was for me. Unfortunately, they’re all kinda put together with duck tape and bubblegum so anytime i try to touch it, it feels like parts are breaking off. So at some point, like a certain Bakugo Nendoroid, you just don’t want to keep touching it anymore. That’s where I’m at. I’ll still play the DLC and hope the game performs a bit better by then. And I’ll still join raids if any of my friends are hosting them. But I don’t think i’ll be the one initiating any daily raid sessions this time around.

Hoo boy, this game. It's a mess, but I enjoyed it a lot.

The Cufant in the room is that this game runs like ass and looks like shit. Both of these things are absolutely true. The framerate is completely unstable, texture and asset pop-in reminds me of Mass Effect 1 on 360, the lighting and shadows are honest to goodness as bad as Unity guff on Steam, the art direction ranges from awful to great, the game is full of low-poly textures and basic assets...

But I would honestly say this is probably the best Pokemon game since Black and White 2 in 2012.

While the majority of the game is quite ugly, the Pokemon models - created by Creatures Inc., an external studio - look fantastic, with textures that are appropriately fuzzy or metallic or slimey in a way that makes sense for the Pokemon. This is a massive upgrade from Sword/Shield, where everything looked like it was made of plastic. A lot of the new Pokemon designs are fantastic too, with Flamigo, Rabsca and Wo-Chien becoming new all-time favourites for me.

The story is hardly compelling fare (for the most part), but the decision to structure the game with three separate and converging plotline with different gameplay mechanics in each was a marked improvement from Gen 8 in particular. Where the game really shines, though, is the last three-is hours of the main story... It may be some of the best Pokemon storytelling and set dressing the series has ever seen, and I would really love to see Game Freak go all-in on an ambitious sci-fi story for their next games. They keep hinting at it with both Sun/Moon and their Ultra versions (especially in Ultra where the best portion of that game takes place in an alternate Ultra dimension) and with Arceus, but I genuinely think we're long overdue to move past the quaint villages and into a much more ambitious sci-fi or sci-fantasy setting. The last bit of Scarlet and Violet show that such a game could be fantastic, and I hope the developers hear this loud and clear.

Mechanically, I think the series is the best it's ever been. While I find the Tera Type stuff superfluous and pointless, the meat and potatoes of Pokemon combat, training and evolution is polished to a mirror sheen here, abandoning a lot of the random chance guff in favour of more player control. Really excited to see how the meta game develops, because there's some really great changes here. Catching and evolving is good fun here too, and the choice to abandon tall grass encounters entirely for strictly overworld models is one I definitely support. The Tera Raids and Wonder Trade system also offer alternative means to obtain rare mons, in continued evolution of mechanics introduced in past generations.

The online component of this game is hot garbage, however, to the point where I have had rare encounters in Tera Raids completely soft lock my game. Getting into raids is difficult, because the lobby system they have does not refresh frequently enough... You will wait around 150 seconds (I counted) for the game to tell you you can't join a raid, and it takes around 5 minutes(!) before you even have the option to refresh the list. Absolutely absurd in 2022, to have online support this abhorrent.

This game isn't finished, and it shows. Nintendo and The Pokemon Company have demonstrated a clear disrespect for their customers, and even though I liked this game quite a bit, I am becoming extremely hesitant to buy any Nintendo products going forward. People online are blaming Game Freak, but the simple reality is that two AAA games in a single year is an insane demand of any studio, and especially egregious when those development deadlines are arbitrarily set to coincide with the release of toys and merchandise. If Pokemon Scarlet and Violet owners are not given an apology and free DLC as compensation for their time spent play testing a beta build, I am legitimately considering abandoning my support for the Switch entirely and just moving on. I cannot be the only one. This sort of corporatism offends me, and I'm sure the developers are burnt out and pissed off too.

Hopefully someone in the Pokemon Company management gets a kick in the ass, and developers and customers are treated with the respect they deserve going forward. But I'm not crossing my fingers.

Each picture is paired with a link to a short thought on the game.

On lifeless NPCs

On beautiful NPCs

On personal stories

On personal disappointments

On design big and small

On the clear motives driving Pokemon

This looks fun, based on reviews that I watched today. Seems like a totally fine new direction for the main series that may be enough to bring me back in. Definitely seriously considering picking it up this weekend or some other time in the near future.

Like Pokémon Legends Arceus its presentation also appears to be a bit of a technical mess at points, and to have a world that looks… less than stellar. It seems that Game Freak lacks the expertise, and more importantly the budget and time to make great-looking 3D games on the Switch.

Makes me imagine a world where they aren’t pressured to move into 3D at all and could just make a really nice-looking modern 2D game with these new game design ideas. This is not enough to turn me away from a fun-looking game, but it’s a shame to see this franchise pumping out releases in such a state.

Does anybody with an uncle at Nintendo know if these are the same product?

Amazon UK Dual Steelbook

Best Buy Dual Pack

I am very intrigued by the UK product but don't want to pay the extra shipping if it is no different than what I can get at Best Buy. And honestly, I will probably buy one copy physical and the other digital if I don't get the steelbook pack.