Pokémon Scarlet and Violet Review in Progress

I’ve been tearing my hair out for two weeks now over how conflicted I feel about Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. The thing is, discovering and catching all these charming monsters across an enormous open world with an actually good story is really fun… it just comes with far, far too many asterisks. I truly believe that the bold new ideas of Scarlet and Violet are fantastic, if unrefined – a belief I also held about Pokémon Legends: Arceus. But in both cases, so many of the pillars holding up those shining concepts – visual quality, open-world details, customization, and technical soundness – are seemingly unfinished or actively crumbling. It is completely impossible to play Scarlet and Violet and not notice at least some of its performance issues. Every minute I was happily running around the grassy fields of Paldea I was also actively cringing at a Pokémon stuck in the floor, wincing at some weird framerate nonsense going on with a nearby wild Pokémon, or groaning at another bout of crippling lag. And the promising online co-op play that could be the start of an exciting new era for the series makes all these problems significantly worse. As a decades-long fan, I desperately want better for Pokémon, especially given how clear it is that the design fundamentals are absolutely there under the surface. But if you’re devoted to this series, as so many are, know that the proper care we’ve all come to expect has not been shown here.

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Pokémon Scarlet and Violet's performance is so bad, it has people wishing for a Switch 2, or running it in emulators

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Pokémon Scarlet and Violet Review - IGN

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Pokémon Scarlet and Violet Review in Progress

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet Review (Switch)

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet Review-in-Progress

Performance issues mar Pokémon Scarlet & Violet's amazing gameplay