Pokemon Scarlet & Violet really sucks – but if it’s really funny, what does it matter?

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet Here, that means yesterday the internet was full of critics, press and influencers who had their say on what is arguably one of the most ambitious and distinctive mainline Pokemon games ever made. the opinion of. The verdict was yes, but also surprisingly mixed.

As it stands, Pokemon Scarlet & Violet will go down as one of the lowest-scoring core Pokemon games in the franchise’s history. This Metascore of 77 isn’t terrible, but the fact that it’s lower than other comparable Pokemon games did surprise me – as I wrote in mine this surprised me since I posted a 4 star review on iGamesNews which basically The Web called it the best Pokemon game of the past 20 years, alongside Legends Arceus from earlier this year as a breath of fresh air challenging the status quo of the franchise.

But there is an elephant (Donphan?) in the room. As I said in my comment, it’s all about performance. Guys, this sucks. This is probably the worst performing AAA big-budget game I’ve ever seen. It’s even worse when you consider that it’s actually coming from one of the biggest franchises on the planet, a brand so strong that more resources could no doubt be devoted to fixing this.

Earlier this year, Nintendo also released Xenoblade Chronicles 3, a truly beautiful Switch-based adventure game that seemed to stretch the hardware to coveted levels, which probably also made things worse. Somehow, Pokemon didn’t just perform worse than Xenoblade 3 – it looked worse, too.it is best of both worlds. Honestly, it’s pretty shocking.

But… man, how much does it matter? For me it depends. I’ve had a lot of visual issues with Pokemon Violet, and this is a couple I’ve tested. The NPCs in the background usually animate at 5 frames per second, and the pop-ups are free (though, it should be noted that even on a PC with a $1500 graphics card and 64GB of RAM, it’s not as free as Sonic Frontiers ), frame loss occurs semi-regularly. Combat shots get mixed up and cut inside the world–a world that’s honestly rich in visual flair, but also struggles with detail.

But… none of this is technical. The game didn’t crash, and my experience wasn’t greatly compromised. I get dragged out of it from time to time, but crucially, this new vision of Pokemon is strong enough that I’m willing to forgive a lot of it and move on with it. There are certain types of performance issues that can affect how the game works, or cause the game to be less playable. But from my experience with the Violet, admittedly on the newer OLED model Switch, I haven’t encountered any of that.

The upshot for me is that Violet will never be a “perfect score” game, but I’m not willing to give up a game I really like because of technical issues that are negligibly ugly…but It’s just me. There’s no right or wrong answer here – it’s very, very subjective. And I certainly wouldn’t take the moral high ground willing to ignore these issues and enjoy the game for what it is. And no one does the opposite, choosing to skip it because it’s ugly.

But it does lead me to a question and an argument: where do you draw the line? Personally for you, in terms of these questions, how bad does a good game have to be in terms of technical execution to override the game’s goodness and make it off-limits for you? I wonder what the average is among people.

Game development is always a matter of give and take, balance – games that truly do everything perfectly are very rare. What level of balance, or lack thereof, is unacceptable? This is probably something that deserves more discussion in the game.