Somebody once told me that Pokémon Scarlet and Violet would be the best game in the series if it wasn’t for the Nintendo Switch. I was dubious and downright rude about it. Where’s the heart? Where’s the charm? One bread-shaped dog isn’t enough to get me back in, not with those trees. But god, I was wrong. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been this wrong about a Pokémon game.
I’d fallen out of love with the series at Sword and Shield. The performance, the sparse world, the web of ideas that felt threadbare and incomplete; it felt like a personal wound. I know it’s nostalgia talking but I entered the series as a kid with Red and Blue, and going from those to Yellow, to Gold and Silver, then Crystal – the best one – felt like I was a frontiersman leading scouts into the new world. The world of Pokémon kept expanding and we felt like pioneers discovering new areas, creatures, and ways of interfacing with the world.
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From GameBoy to GameBoy Advance to DS, this world got wider and deeper. Whether it was Hoenn or Sinnoh or Unova, we sank our feet into the loamy earth of new countries and continents and started to dust off the mysteries of this near-real fantasy world. For me, it was the ship to France (sorry, Kalos) where I first started to sense turbulence: the 3DS games felt shallow, somehow, and under-baked, like Game Freak had bitten off more than it could chew. The sense of depth and lived-in-ness of its world was the first victim to a stuttering development pipeline.
By Hawaii (sorry, Alola), I was ready to abandon ship. The storytelling had gotten too infantile to me; I am in Pokémon for the sense of world-building and the battling. The narrative elements are fine as set-dressing, but if I want Pokémon stories, I’ll stick to the anime (or the incredible YouTube shorts Origins and Generations), thank you. Sun and Moon dialled the cartoon nonsense up, diluted the combat to trivial levels, and.