Pokémon Violet Review
The Newest mainline Pokémon game has been released. Pokémon Violate/Scarlett was released on November 18, 2022, and introduces the players to the new region of Paldea, inspired from Spain. This Pokémon adventure offers three great stories, beautiful scenery filled wild an amazing variety of Pokémon as well as new mechanics as well some familiar fan favorites.
Pokémon Violet offers three different stories; victory road, team Starfall, and the Titan Pokémon, which can be beaten in any order. To add to the openness of the game the player can battle the gym leaders, team Starfall leaders, and titan Pokémon in any order. However, there is a recommendation, but it is not required.
Pokémon Violate offers the player the option of complete open world exploration using the Legendary Pokémon Miridan. This Pokémon can be used as a cycle to travel on land faster as well as upgradable features. This will give it the ability to jump high, climb walls, swim, and glide. This feature is quite useful and adds to the exploration mechanic. There are many times where you will get lost in the scenery and landscape when climbing mountains.
The big new feature in this installment is the terastal mechanic. This allows your Pokémon to change types in battle to help gain an edge on the opponent. For example, in my party I had an Arcanine who has a ground terra form. This form makes weak and strong against that what is weak and strong against a ground type. This mechanic is super fun and creates essentially a limitless amount of terra type Pokémon to catch. This feature is a lot more fun to use in battle than the Dynamax which was used in Pokémon Sword/Shield.
To add to this new feature of terastalize, Pokémon Violet includes Terra Raid battles. These battles spawn similarly to the Dynamix battles in the previously mentioned title. This is one way in which the player can catch rare and powerful terra Pokémon. The player can battle terra Pokémon alone or with three other trainers to help defeat the Pokémon. However, this mechanic is quite buggy. When battling online raids, it is difficult to stay connected in battle which often leaves the player being kicked as well buggy battling moments. These moments will occur after the player attacks, the health will not go down or it will go down all at once, or the visuals of the attacks are skipped. This makes the game feel unfinished, but it is not the only part of the game that feels unfinished.
Mechanically, this game does not run as clean as it should being a mainline Pokémon title by game studios Gamefreak. There are many times during the battling and traversing around Paldea that this game feels unfinished, which is bummer because the studio needed this game to be released for the holiday season. During regular Pokémon encounters there are times in which the Pokémon will not spawn, or they will spawn within another Pokémon. Small little bugs like this make the game overall an annoyance at times, but other than this game is quite enjoyable when it's running correctly.
Overall Pokémon Violet is good where it needs to be, but mechanical issues are what hold this game back. It is difficult to say this game is great because it does not feel finished. Hopefully future updates will fix these issues.
