The relationships I formed with my teachers are all fine and well, but the bulk of the relationship-building in Scarlet and Violet occurs out in their open world, across three main routes.

We’ll dive into this aspect in the coming weeks. However, the online servers weren’t live for the review period, so we weren’t able to test these features with other players ahead of launch. One of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet ’s most notable additions is in cooperative multiplayer, which will allow up to four players to travel around the Paldea region together. However, as I ran, drove, and flew around Paldea, it became clear that much of this promise of freedom was a facade. This time around, the world is your Cloyster, and it purports to give you free rein to follow map-wide quest lines at your leisure. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet take pains to create a greater sense of freedom than the Pokémon series’ more recent mainline games like Pokémon Sun and Moon, and Pokémon Sword and Shield. But the actual doing of those things never quite sings the way it did in Legends: Arceus. Scarlet and Violet, on the other hand, go out of their way to make the modern-day Paldea region feel more lived in, and filled to the brim with stuff to do. To do so, it deployed fluid traversal and action-driven battle systems, and it shaped up into one of the most exciting experiences the series has yet to offer.

For all of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s stumbles in their attempts to usher the series into a new chapter, the most glaring among them is that a more convincing, ultimately superior blueprint was already laid for the series’ future 10 months ago with the release of Pokémon Legends: Arceus.Īrceus was dead set on making the world of Pokémon as compelling to explore in a mechanical sense as the series has always felt thematically.

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