 Yeah, this looks bad. Yeah, this looks really bad. No, it's not what you think it is. Oh, it's not. It's just Pokemon It's just a heavy dose and nostalgia and copium I'm about to review the new Pokemon game and I figured without this stuff I wouldn't make it through so I you know I got hooked it up I mean the blood and all that is it's gonna work while they're still in the box. Oh, yeah Oh This is the Pokemon that I remember it's so good Wait, what's happening? Guess this stuff is stronger than I thought it was I Have to be careful When Game Freak revealed Pokemon Scarlet and Violet just days after Pokemon Arceus released It had the entire Pokemon community like After what feels like seven decades of begging for an open-world Pokemon game You're telling me that we're getting two in the same year Well stroke my Machamp and blow my Jigglypuff I had my wallet at the ready it should have come at no surprise though that a mega massive Corporation like Pokemon could afford and have the resources to make well as many games as they want it after all They are the world's largest franchise even above the likes of baby Yoda and like yes or so baby Yoda, so I don't really know what we expected, but It's sure it wasn't this Wait, what's what's going on? I'm a little confused here I mean we just had legends Arceus and sure that wasn't exactly something that Da Vinci would have hung on his wall proudly But at least was a competent video game visually and didn't have nearly as many performance issues Okay, I didn't say it was great But when this game came out everyone was complaining about it and yet now it's the new bar for Pokemon games And somehow we've fallen so far under that bar already. We've literally fallen through the floor So what went wrong in the last 11 months? Oh my god? Holy crap this game. That's what I want to talk about today. Why is this game so technically terrible? What is the cause of all these bugs glitches and crashes and generally just hidey is game design And is there a good game hidden there somewhere underneath at all? Well, not not that far underneath and with so many people pointing towards the switches hardware limitations being the issue I'm beginning to wonder if we've all fallen into a state of hive mind amnesia and forgotten about other games like I don't know Xenoblade Monster Hunter Rise and even the five-year-old launch title that was Breath of the Wild, you know, it's funny Sitting down to make this video. I couldn't help but feel like I was about to call CD project out for lying or something But the similarities are here This is the most botched state a video game has been in on release since December 10th 2020 if you remove all the glitches and bugs from cyberpunk It still failed to create even a halfway enjoyable experience in its underbaked and overpromised video game On the other hand Pokemon glitched and bugged still has a lot to offer players and yeah There might be the heavy dose of nostalgia and copium that's currently coursing through my bloodstream But I did manage to enjoy playing this game even if that enjoyment Often came from probably the wrong places The world of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet is made from dollar store colored paper stuck together with crazy glue This is the first true open-world Pokemon game We've ever had and Game Freak clearly struggled creating it I've said for years that Game Freak has a really hard time innovating in their video games both within the Pokemon franchise And then anything else they try to experiment with and we're not gonna be talking about any of those games today because nobody likes Having their dirty laundry aired about the little town So I do respect how bold Game Freak went designing this open world because it is truly Open you can tell they've been building towards this for a while now games like let's go Introduced actually seeing Pokemon in the overworld rather than just the RNG Rootin around in the grass for world people loved it and BAM BAM. Thank you, Pokemon. Here. We are in sword and shield and we got Pokemon in the overworld They added a wild area, huh? Pokemon Arceus was open zone Scarlet and Violet however Fully committed all of these aspects came together. You have the open world You have Pokemon as far as the eye can see assuming that you're nearsighted and not one not two but three Branching story lines that really is just a bunch of Pokemon battles as great as all this sounds in concept It begins to fall apart Immediately from the start with textures so ugly even your mom would be offended world design that appears more unfinished than Myzino Blade 3 review game coding. That's wetter than last night's spaghetti shadows and lighting that flicker more Constantly than a toddler that just figured out what the light switch on the wall does and overall just really an unpleasant and amateur Experience through and through and through. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god It's amazing. Oh my god Doesn't it look good? I have never seen a video game so rushed and just slammed out the door to meet a deadline since Well cyberpunk, but at least that game did a better job at hiding It's poorly stitched together seams Pokemon doesn't attempt to hide anything In fact, they even give you a tool to peer behind that very unfinished curtain by holding down ZL It allows you to snap the camera over to the side and look around with no restrictions It has no wall collision That means you can go ahead and look behind any of the walls buildings terrain the water even the ground This makes it really easy to see that the game is built in a way that resembles a preschooler's popsicle house I gotta turn this up a little bit just a bunch of flat textures barely connected to other flat textures The thin line between you and the gaping void That's just millimeters out of sight is why it's so easy to glit and fall through the floor or for Pokemon to Accidentally get caught in walls. They're told to spawn in certain places of the floor But because the walls were placed so hastily that's where you run into all these technical issues Most of them are easy to find even without meaning to like when you battle a Pokemon on an incline and the fixed camera Positions itself so you can see the everything or the nothing I guess underneath at first I gave Game Freak a pass for this because they're not gonna know where Every player is going to be battling catching or trying to evolve a Pokemon in this world that they built right But as it went on and on and on and on and on like a marathon I started to realize it was just too common of an experience to be forgiven It even happens at times that I have no control over and Game Freak have placed me here Themselves like this terror slacking who just always spawns right here and like me after Thanksgiving dinner Refuses to move from this one spot. They've decided is comfortable and yet every time I try to battle it Floor glitch Game Freak you put this here for me these examples and more highlight how Untested and rushed this video game was you know at first I thought it was nice that these trainers didn't always sprint after me and shake me down for my ten-year-old Pokey pocket money, but it became pretty clear pretty quickly that Game Freak did not want them to move at all But I love of God stay right there. This thing could explode at any minute But the rush design doesn't stop there in what has to easily be one of the laziest choices I've ever seen a lot of the textures and terrain in this game is literally just one tile that Game Freak has control seed and then control Vd. It's so Pathetically lazy and when you pair it up with the straight cut geometry that most of this game has it ends up Appearing more like a remastered n64 game than something new You know in my cyberpunk review I use other games like gda5 and red dead 2 to highlight how CD project could have done things different or possibly better But for this game, I don't even have to leave game Freak's own franchise I can just look at Pokemon Arceus. Who did you guys have design Arceus? And why did they decide to take their two weeks vacation and what I can only assume was the only 14 days You spent designing these games the terrain in Arceus I mean sure it might not have been the pinnacle of artistic achievement in video games But at least had purpose Sculpted and shaped mountains and rocks with easy on-the-eyes textures to say the least Scarlet and Violet's terrain appears more like Placeholder shapes to me like they just kind of threw some straight lines in and they said I will carve a rock out of it later And then I just never got around to it I feel like I bought a giant block of ice before a fancy sculptor came in and made a pretty picture with a chainsaw They just sold me the ice instead and said well Still cold And then weirdly there are some other nicer looking terrains around the world But when you walk near them they look like a popsicle melting in the summer heat They kind of a warp and twist around you Maybe it's the nostalgia kicking in a little harder or game Freak slipped something into my ham sandwich And you think all this is bad it gets even worse in the more hidden away areas around the world I guess game Freak figured that people wouldn't spend as much time here or maybe even find it I found this one cliff face that was essentially all but just a straight line across And then there was even a part with the grass texture and the mountain texture were clipping into each other or This part on a far away island that I found which has a weird overlap between the sand and the rock holding down ZL I could see behind and through that and they've actually tried to cover up a second worse looking wall What is going on here this entire game feels like a high schooler that had a week to clean his room And then last second just threw everything out of the closet I feel like I've made that joke before I also already mentioned the lights and shadows, but oh Lord These are completely broken I know we've all Experienced them trying to give us multiple sieges as we play and maybe this is a subtle little nod to that one episode of The anime, but the thing I find the weirdest in some of the battles You can play as God and change the lighting around the world by just bringing up and then closing the battle menu Oh, and then you get to the poppin. Yeah, we haven't even talked about this yet This game struggles to keep from crashing every second Which is why a lot of players decide to save and close out of their game every couple hours and load it back up to Kind of ease some pressure if you can believe that's a real thing it is and it actually helps Another way this game tries to ease pressure on its own is by popping out Everything that's not nailed to the ground every two seconds What makes even less sense is the characters don't even pop in and out like you think they would Usually it's just based on distance But sometimes while walking towards them you can make them flicker like Christmas lights or they won't even load in all their body parts I've seen floating heads and floating hair around the school while exploring the world literal huge Chugs of the terrain will pop in and out giant glitches will stretch the horizon Entire farmlands will plunge in the darkness like the end times are here You know I'm old enough to remember finding missing go in Pokemon red and I remember being a lot harder and a lot smaller Now I found the sweet spot. It happens every time now. It's by far the laggiest Framiest borderline unplayably as to video game. I have ever actually played It's like the frames never actually even hit 30 But it will constantly jump down to single digits and sometimes even just completely freeze for a moment or two The technical performance of this game really is as bad as everybody says it is and there is no denying it You know despite all these issues, there is fun to be found It is a joy to explore every new area and discover dozens of Pokemon running and flying and swimming The exploration path is very freeing after you get through the Mundine slug of dialogue at the start when you are finally Unleashed upon the land you can go anywhere you want right from the start There are some limits as to what you can accomplish though because it's depending on how far out you venture Pokemon levels will start getting pretty high and the gyms don't scale I was kind of hoping this game would feel more like the anime I watched as a kid You would think setting out in an open world and discovering these towns for myself would present a similar opportunity for excitement But honestly the towns are so void of life filled with lag and poltergeists and just a few stores that all boiled down to a JPEG menu But I just beat the gym and moved on out Oh and I said the same few storefronts because every town has the same like three or four shops And some of the bigger towns just fill gaps with the same store Like the very first town has three of the same coffee shop within eyesight And two of them are right next to each other Talk about cornering the market I'm not sure if it was ever planned to actually go into any of the stores But if you use the ZL tool you can look in them and in a couple of them I actually found things like this pot plant which makes me think maybe I mean they did build an entire subway eat fresh for this game But I guess they had to since the new mechanic was making ham sammies But they even did away with the polky centers and the polky muts And I kind of really loved going to those when I entered a new town Now they just boiled down to two people standing out in the cold wind rain and snow all day long Waiting for me to pop out and have a conversation with them for a second But everything was just stripped back to PNGs and JPEGs Uh, I'm gonna get a strawberry ice cream Hmm, dude I ate a JPEG You walk in You buy a couple pictures And then you eat them maybe You can eat the JPEGs, you think, oh You think, ah And then you just awkwardly load out of whatever store you walked into And by awkwardly I really mean it This animation of leaving a store is so clunky every time Every issue we have talked about so far is made even worse by the multiplayer Every new person you add into your game doubles the issues you're gonna discover All the way up to four people which can slow your game down to a crawl But you also get some fun glitches like this one Where Scoot somehow got tied to my bike And every time he tried to sit down on his instead we ended up grinding camel toe The gameplay is about what you would expect I mean The battles are the same as they've always been I think the UI looks kind of budget and cheap In fact, while I was streaming one night I decided to see how quickly I could do a mock-up of the same UI in Photoshop Do you guys want me to right now pull up Photoshop and remake that bar in 10 seconds? I'll see if I can speed run design Pokemon UI 3, 2, 1, again 17, 51 Are you 17 seconds? 17, 51 Oh my god, I got 17 seconds I wish they had kept the ability from Arceus where you could throw a Pokemon out to battle And still run around the world in the meantime That actually might have helped the fixed camera issues we keep having I also wish they had kept the ability to throw out a Pokeball to catch a Pokemon So I didn't have to battle it every time I mean, come on, we're going backwards here In place of that you have the let's go feature that lets you throw out a Pokemon It'll run around and battle a bunch of things for you And you can't run around freely but you have no control That is all auto now and you get much less experience for it So I never actually ended up using that feature I also never made a sandwich in my entire time playing the game I've made like two Finally, around the world you can find these dens or raids Where you can battle shiny Pokemon but not the good kind of shiny The what? Cheap knockoff Kind of shiny These are fine The only thing that frustrates me is just like the rest of the game They're very broken and buggy It doesn't feel so much like a fight between me and the Raid Monster But me and the battle menu Just trying to get it to stay on screen long enough That I can quickly and desperately select by attack I think every player sees something different Because I'll defeat a Pokemon several times And they'll keep gaining more health and a sick twist of hell Like get me out of this dungeon, when will it end? Also there's no ground in any of these Raid battles Has anyone noticed? The story is a tough subject to talk about You know, ever since it came out that Game Freak refused to pay any of its voice actors You know, I wonder if not boycotting this game Was the right move for all 10 million of us that boarded Think about that 10 million As far as this story goes, I'm a little hazy on the details This was the first Pokemon game I decided I just didn't care And I was gonna treat the A button like my worst enemy And just thrash it Like it owed me pocket Pokemon Sometimes I would spam that A button so much While looking at something else That when I finally looked back at the game I saw that my character had been teabagging the ground for the last 3 minutes My right hand might have carpal tunnel But honestly it was the right choice to make Because the story in this game doesn't f***ing matter Mum's House, Pick Pokemon, Gym Battles, Beat the Elite 4, Roll Ed Sheeran It's all so familiarly boring that they even named the end song after my sleepy time T There were very few moments I actually cared to pay attention And then right at the end, no spoilers shut up Go away, no spoilers shut up But right at the end, it got like good Game Freak You literally have Ed Sheeran money You can afford to pay regular voice actors In fact heck, you can afford to pay The Rock, Jennifer Lawrence, and Jeff Bezos To voice in your game if you want It is time to get voice acting Are you these 3 strainer? Everybody wants it Everybody's asking for it And everybody thinks moments like these are weird without it There's even a rap battle in this game And it's so embarrassing Nobody wants to see Charlie Chaplin's 8 Mile Look at us Who would have thought we would have got here, you know 30 minutes into a Pokemon review And we haven't even talked about the Pokemon If the new Pokemon in Scarlet and Violet weren't so f***ing cute I don't think I would have had as much fun Oh my God, what is that guy? Oh my God He's so cute Every new design is fun, fresh, and adorable In most other Pokemon games, I usually go for a mix of the newer Pokemon I like And some of my old favorites But in this game, I had a hard time keeping a team of 6 of just the new ones I like They botched the starters I'm sorry Spragato, Frecoco, and Quacksley, they're all adorable I loved them and they all evolve horrible ways They made my cat stand up and turn humanoid Don't like it, get it out of here They made Frecoco turn into a literal clown And Quacksley's evolution looks more like a Dragon Quest XI crossover But my man looked chunk Both the Mega Man, Master Chief, Mouse Hole It's like two mouse And then they get a little baby mouse There's like four Pokemon and the one Pokemon What? I want to keep this part short Because I feel like most people understand it's a silly argument to point at the Switch's hardware limitations As the reason why these games are so... It's silly Because we've already seen the Switch destroy these limitations time and time again I mentioned a few obvious ones earlier But Dino Blade III has a dense, lush environment 10 times the size of Scarlet and Violet Monster Hunter Rise is a technical marvel on the console Showcasing brilliant world design while still keeping great performance Then of course, Breath of the Wild Which both looks and runs better than these Pokemon games And this game was a cross-gen release on the Wii U Then you go down the long list of incredible AAA ports we've had over the years But nothing hits closer to our home than the literal other Pokemon game that released this year You'd think even that would be an open and shut case But then I saw this video This is footage of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet running on the PC Ryu Jinx emulator And as you can see, it runs fine It runs at a steady 30 frames per second Maybe the problem is the Switch's outdated hardware And somehow that caused a lot of confusion Because a lot of people can't seem to wrap their little jelly brains over Why a state-of-the-art PC can run this game better than the Switch That doesn't mean the Switch can't handle this game It can, and it proved it can, again and again All it shows is how incredibly poorly optimized and built this game is by Game Freak Which is something we can see in every aspect of the game Not just the performance And sure, you can boost this game up to 4K You can steady out the frame rates At the end of the day, who does that benefit? Not Switch players People have tried to emulate this game on a Steam Deck And it still chugs and runs at about 15 FPS So there goes the hope of getting it running on a Switch Pro So what do we need here? A $4,000 PC or a next-gen console to run... What? This game? Oh! Ha! Ha! Oh! Isn't this game Rocket Fit? I love it Oh no! Since I've been writing this video, Game Freak and Nintendo have issued statements Saying they're going to be working on patches for the game To be honest, though, the best they're ever going to be able to do here Is just smooth out the frame rates But even if they do that, we're still left with this bare-bones-roshed experience I can only speculate what went wrong since their last game Here's my theory, though Pokemon and Game Freak make a lot of money from their video games Like, a lot Let's not discredit that like some people try to People like to point towards the other Pokemon media and merch as their real money maker But Pokemon is the third best-selling video game franchise of all time Behind Mario and... Weirdly Tetris It makes more money than Call of Duty Which is bizarre Franchises like Call of Duty make all their money off the video games And they manage to make competent releases Okay, well that's probably not a good example But the point still stands Pokemon and Game Freak make an inconceivable amount of money from the video games alone But seemingly put very little back into them every year Why? I think I know Time and capability Let's start with time Because they do make a stupid amount of money from their video games But they do also make a lot of money from their merch Pokemon cards, the anime and so much more However, all of these mediums rely on the video games to continue Once the new video game is out They can start doing the new toys, the new cards, the new episodes If the game gets delayed, it all gets delayed That is a huge profit loss So they are literally forced to release a game on time every time And now usually they manage that Sword and Shield had its issues But for the most part it was a competent release So what was different about this development cycle of Game Freak Open out a new release every couple of years? Well, this time they crapped out too I think Game Freak might be so bored of creating the same thing every couple of years They wanted to make something different Something new and fresh But something they didn't have to make And I think that's the biggest difference They wanted to make Arceus They spent time and love hours building that game And then they released it And then they realized they had 11 months to finish a game they had to finish And even with all the crunch that they could possibly munch They just didn't get it done in time I mean, that's my theory, but I think it makes sense The other part is just capability They never really took that jump to 3D very well And they don't seem to want to ask for any advice or help from anyone else in the industry I think that's why they're filled with all these weird cheap tactics And slap together world design to keep the game running smoother than even then It's no secret that the best looking Pokemon games we've had over the years Weren't made by Game Freak And that is wild As I wrapped up the Elite Four and Pokemon Scarlet and Violet The game itself asked me if I even like Pokemon And I had to wonder for a second I mean, if this game wasn't a Pokemon game If it was made by someone else and called something else But was essentially exactly the same With different monsters I didn't grow up with and have no nostalgia for Would any of us even enjoy it? Or is it really only just the copium and nostalgia That keeps the cash flowing in Game Freak's direction? Like some Pokemon, I think it's finally time that Game Freak traded its development to somebody else Because at this point, that's the only way it's going to evolve Passy dress, haunted house, glitching, glitching, got a- Nope, this is a joke. I used to like Pokemon, man Aw, gee willikers, man Gotta glitch them all, this game sucks!