I have been a lover of the Pokémon series for nearly a decade now and I have played every games that has come out with the exception of the generation 3 games. I have enjoyed every single one I have played... but this one may break the streak. To begin, this game is incredibly fun. The core mechanics of the Pokémon series are still intact which is always fun to play, but this game also adds so much more to do. There is an entire massive open world to explore and it's so big that you probably won't be able to see all of it. The exploration of this game is what makes it so enjoyable, there is so much to do and I could go on and on about it but I think you get the point. The story is also great. I love the idea of having 3 different paths to take and each one will reward you with badges and one for each type. In addition, you can take on the story in whatever order you want which seems fun on paper but the levels of other Pokémon don't scale with yours making it really hard to beat the game with the path you create, there's already a set path that the game wants you to go... but I guess it was a good idea. But that's about where my compliments of the game end. This game has SO MANY things about it that I absolutely HATE. Lets begin with the graphics... they look awful. Honestly who thought this game looked polished? Pokémon are almost always in their low polygon models making them seem so much less lively and the environment all looks like really jagged rocks. Even the grass just looks like a green rock and it doesn't have any effort put into it. But it doesn't end with the graphics, this game has an endless amount of glitches. Pokémon get stuck in walls, sometimes your ride Pokémon will just fall through the ground or get stuck falling endlessly until you respawn it's a mess. I could making a list of more than 100 glitches in this game but that's not all that fun to read. But some notable ones are sometimes the game just chooses to crash. NPC's get stuck in places and then just disappear. Sometimes raid battle soft lock you after your beat them forcing you to close out the game and start from wherever your last save was so I hope you have autosave on. There is so much more to list but your get the point... this game is broken. Let's talk about the framerate. The game is always running at like 10 frames per second and it's a slog to play through. Imagine 50cc in Mario Kart... but slower. The game is struggling to keep up constantly and you can see things spawn in only like 10 feet away from you and it makes it incredibly hard to traverse to world, especially when you are running into Cubchoo's who just randomly spawn in on top of of you while riding around. But my biggest issue with this game comes with it's content. While it's an incredibly fun game, it's very lacking in things to do after you beat it. The only thing you can do after you beat the game is raids, catching the four strange legendries or the silly little Academy Ace Tournament which isn't that fun. And doing raids endlessly isn't all that fun either. It's basically just grinding and doing the same thing over and over again. Every other Pokémon game has had a decently big post-game with lots of fun things to do. Some let you explore space wormholes, or interesting islands that change every day. Including something like that in this game would have been so cool, but all we have to do is grind out the same raids over and over again unless you want to sit around hatching thousands of eggs for slightly different colored Pokémon. (Kind of off topic but this game also has the worst shiny Pokémon out of any generation). And the negatives don't stop coming, I have a glaring issue with this game which has made me really upset. This game is getting DLC, and not only does it look just as bad as the regular game, but they are charging MORE MONEY for it than they did for the pervious game's DLC. So instead of trying to fix their over 7 month old game that still doesn't work, their going to try and give you more of the garbage and make you pay more for it. But this is not where my frustration ends with the DLC. Pokémon really had no ideas for what to do for this games DLC so they though that it would be a good idea if they just gave us something that every other game in the franchise has had. From what I can tell 1/2 of the DLC takes place at the Blueberry Academy what is a fancy name for the battle tower. Every other game in Pokémon's history except for some of the first ones has had a battle tower of some sort in it and Scarlet and Violet are the first in so long to not. Pokémon realized this and though... Huh... I wonder if we could get them to pay extra for something that every other game has had? This frustrates me the most about this game's DLC and I honestly have no idea of what to think of Pokémon anymore. They've shown their audience that they don't care about what they are making as long as it generates money. Pokémon used to be a passion project made by people who care for this little world they developed and it's turned into a game series that is struggling to produce functioning games each year and is putting things out into the world without checking to see if it works or not. It's sad to see the state of this series and compare it to every other Nintendo franchise out there... And somehow it's the best selling one. If your are thinking of buying this game, the most I could tell you is that it is fun, but broken and lacking in content. I believe that you would have a better experience playing almost any of the other of the Pokémon games that already exist. Most of them look presentable at least and have things that can keep you occupied for a while. But this is a review written by someone who cares too much for this franchise and is disappointed to see the state of this game.
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