 Hey everyone, welcome to I guess what I'm calling the Nintendo Prime show and I want to have a conversation with you guys about Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, not because I played the games and reviewed them and have deep intimate knowledge of Pokemon, really don't, but because I feel like there's a false narrative being made today about these games and this narrative seems to be built upon, well, a long standing held opinion about the Nintendo Switch itself as a platform and while I agree in some regards about, hey, it would be nice to have a new Switch, I would like to see this become a pro, I would like to see this be upgraded, new hardware, more powerful, yeah, I've been talking about a pro for like two years, so of course it's something that I want. But Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are not the use case to argue for a new Switch and I'm going to explain in a moment, first, if you end up enjoying the show, I'm going to ask you guys to like and subscribe to the channel, I really appreciate it, also leave your thoughts down below on this topic. So throughout the day, we've been seeing a number of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet reviews come out and needless to say, the game's scoring around a 78, 77, it might go even lower, maybe it's a 76 or 75, this is significantly lower than Pokemon Legends, Arceus earlier this year, Arceus, Arceus, do we ever get a consensus on how you're supposed to say that? Either way, that game scored an 83. So to have Pokemon Scarlet and Violet come out, the next mainline games in Pokemon and have them score significantly less than a Pokemon game from earlier this year does seem concerning, but what's interesting are two things that I noticed in these reviews and I probably went through over 15, 16 reviews, I stopped keeping count after I got through the first dozen. And I noticed two things come up that's dragging down the review scores of this game. One of them is this repeated line in many of the reviews of this is a good start to something grander, this is a good start, this is a good start, I don't know what this is, this seems to come up in every single Pokemon review, there's some new ideas, some new fresh thing to do and they always say it's a good start instead of just saying what it is now. I hate the idea of talking about what something is starting and not just enjoying what something is. I think this is a flaw in how reviews are done, but that's a personal preference thing, it's whatever. If people want to use that terminology and keep throwing that out there, that's fine. What I actually want to focus on though is the second thing that's causing the reviews to really be well below and 80 overall. And that is performance. So the game has graphical performance, FPS issues, every single review, even the ones that give it a 90 or so, bring up these points. The game apparently has massive frame rate problems, especially once you get your rideable legendaries and you're flying or zipping around on the ground or in the water, just moving freely in the open world at a fast rate is causing significant frame rate drops that are extremely noticeable and kick people out of the game. It's one thing to have frame rate drops. It's another thing for it to drop to a point you're noticing frame skipping, that is exactly what you don't want to see when you're playing games. Now technically we did have some frame rate drops in Pokemon Legends, Arceus, but they were not as drastic because while the world wasn't as big. Frankly your open zone, there wasn't you know as much stuff going on in the zone, it just had less going on. This game has a lot more going on and as much bigger in terms of it being completely open world. So because of this, it's causing a lot of chugging when you're moving at a fast rate. It's even noticeable apparently when you're not moving super fast, especially once you get outside the towns, but it's really noticeable once you get moving quickly. And I've seen reviews that have essentially called this a perfect Pokemon game until you realize how bad the frame rate is. And I find this to be quite interesting because the other complaints about graphics and we all know that, let's just be honest, Pokemon games you know outside of like the snap series you know Pokemon Snap and New Pokemon Snap don't necessarily have the best visual quality. It's just not something that I think Game Freak and the Pokemon company have really prided themselves on. I mean I guess Pokemon goes all right, but again not made by Game Freak. So I find this to be quite interesting, but I'm, I can let the visuals go. Look Pokemon Legends Arceus is not a great looking game and I still think it's really good and it's still got an 83. So what is the problem here? The problem is that because of the low frame rate, it's starting to become a common thread. The Nintendo Switch can't handle Pokemon. Can't handle open world Pokemon. The Nintendo Switch is pathetic. The Nintendo Switch needs to be replaced. The Nintendo Switch isn't even powerful enough to run Pokemon. I find this baffling since the Nintendo Switch launched with one of the greatest open world games of all time in Breath of the Wild that both runs at a higher resolution, has much better textures, has way more going on in the world and as of today you can not only ride horses in it, you can ride motorcycles and you can glide all over the world without major frame rate issues. That was there at launch. So what does that tell you? About fast forwarding five, six years and we get an open world Pokemon game and it looks worse, has less going on and yet it chugs. What it tells you is the issue isn't the hardware, it's the developer. Now I don't want to go too hard at Game Freak. It's not always up to them but whatever engine they are currently using was not intended for open world games. I could just tell you that out the gate. It's not intended for open world games because if it was this wouldn't be such a problem. Breath of the Wild runs as smooth as it does on Switch because the engine that was purpose built for it was also intended to run well in these sort of scenarios. The Witcher 3 which cuts back on resolution and does some things chugs less on Switch than Pokemon Scarlet and Violet which looks significantly worse than that game. How can a multi-platform third-party triple-A game that's open world run better on Switch? I mean you could even argue Skyrim looks better than this and Skyrim has no such problems on Switch. People bring up Monster Hunter Rise. I think it's a little not really the same thing. It's not really even open zone. It's got lots of loading and it's corridor based. There's a little bit of open areas but they're very small. I don't know that Monster Hunter Rise is a good comparison but the point I'm trying to make here is the Switch isn't the problem. It's the development studio and the Pokemon company not choosing the right technologies putting enough development time in or doing what maybe they should be doing and getting help from the parent that owns the Pokemon IP in Nintendo. They could easily reach out to Nintendo and ask for help. Nintendo would likely be willing to offer that help considering how many copies Pokemon sells every time. Hey let's give you a little bit of help from our team. Let's work on Zelda. We're wrapping up Zelda. Maybe we got a few extra bodies. We can help throw a Pokemon. Monoliths off. We use them in pretty much everything that we do now. Anything that's open world has Monoliths off involved. Why don't we give you a team from Monoliths off here. They just got to see nobody Chronicles 3 out. Maybe they could take a small break and help you optimize your game to run best on Switch. And it's an exclusive. That's the big thing. Your Scarlet and Violet is a Switch exclusive. It doesn't have the excuse of being a multi-platform game built for better hardware trying to run on Switch. It's supposed to be purposely built for Switch and it does not feel like a game purpose built for Switch. Like look we got some FPS issues in Bayonetta 3 to be sure and people have used that to argue we need new hardware and maybe that's the case. I don't know. It's a Switch exclusive so I don't really find that to be an excuse. I feel like there's development issues but that being said, whatever the frame rate issues in that game are nothing compared to Scarlet and Violet at least according to the reviews. So even Platinum Games who doesn't work as close with Nintendo as Game Freak does hasn't been releasing oodles and oodles of games. We did get some Astral Chain of course being one of the notable ones. Yet a studio that works primarily with Nintendo's hardware has had access to Nintendo's hardware longer than pretty much anybody else. Can't seem to make their games and engine run well. Maybe it's time to go back to the drawing board, rethink it, get a new engine, use a pre-established one from Nintendo or some other company. I don't care if it's Unreal Engine because even Nintendo's done that for Yoshi. They use Unreal Engine. So Nintendo's not even opposed using outside engines if it suits their needs and just do something else. It's very clear that you might have a really damn good game in Scarlet and Violet that's being hurt by how it runs. And that shouldn't happen when you're an exclusive. This is not a hardware problem. And to everyone out there using this to hate on Switch, this is not a Switch issue. And you want to know how I know this isn't going to be a Switch issue? When people go to emulate this game, it's going to chug on PC too. In fact, it probably would chug on PlayStation 5. You want to know why? Because Game Freak doesn't optimize the games correctly. Its engine's not meant for this. They are pushing things beyond their capabilities. And I love the ambition. Open World Pokemon is what I want. And a huge reason I think that we're hearing a lot of, this is a good start. This is a good start because people can see a future where we get an Open World Pokemon game that doesn't chug, that runs smoothly. Heck, it runs even at 60 FPS. Unfortunately, that's not this game. So I just want to take a moment and say, hey, we don't need to maybe worry so much about what the Switch is capable and maybe put more pressure on the Pokemon company and Game Freak just to do better. If they can't patch this one, make sure this doesn't happen again next time. And I hope this doesn't discourage them from Open World Pokemon because I do think that this is the future of the franchise. Now that being said, I do want to thank one of the partners of the channel, Ewan Racing, for partnering with us. If you guys want to check out Ewan Racing's products, they got chairs and desks and everything. They got amazing sales going on right now. We have a code Nintendo Prime you can use a link down in the description, give you an extra 20% off already on sale items. Go ahead and get yourself a brand new office share today. Shout out to Ewan Racing. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. And you know what? We'll catch you guys in that next video.