Chris Strain

I’m late to the game, I’m just playing scarlet now at the end of 2023. I’ll be honest, I knew the graphics were blah in places, but I bought it because lately I have been playing the original games (gen 1, gen 3 and FR/LG) so I was full of the nostalgia feels. Overall I’ve enjoyed it (I’m a good 20+ hrs in), but I’ll be honest, nostalgia is carrying like 70% of this game. Tbf I think the Pokémon themselves look great. I love the textures. But the human characters are poorly done. They look plastic-y and the animated movements are stiff and ugly with the faces having little to no character. Also the ground and mountains are literal step/repeat patterns. They don’t even try to hide how copy past the textures are. This makes for a very cheap and low effort look. Also I liked the catching animations but often when the poke ball lands, it’s floating mid air or the shadows are in the wrong places/don’t line up, making it look really cheap and poorly done. I like the open world, I don’t mind the departure from the completely linear path we’ve had on previous games. However I didn’t know I was going the “wrong” way. It was hard at first but I just thought that’s how the game was. Eventually I wound up in an area where I was completely outclassed. I had team star people I suddenly couldn’t beat, which was really frustrating. Then when I backtracked and “finished” the map, I was so over powered it was ridiculous. It made for uneven game play. The story line was meh, but that’s never been a strong point in most Pokémon games I’ve played. I love that we can see shiny Pokémon on the map but no audio cue is terrible considering how small some Pokémon are and how subtle the shiny colors can be. Overall I can accept that the small towns and flat npcs are on par for Pokémon games. I can even accept that the plastic look to the humans is a “stylistic choice” for the younger kids tastes. But the badly aligned shadows and the lazy repeat textures imo are inexcusable for a game coming from the world’s largest franchise. With how much money people spend on Pokémon the games should not look lazy or low budget. If you are like me and get high on nostalgia for the good old days, you can find enjoyment in this. But if this was the first time I had ever played a Pokémon game, I wouldn’t be impressed, especially when paying $60+