Iāve mostly been having fun with Pokemon Scarlet. After the utter disappointment that was Sonic Frontiers, I was fully expecting this to be yet another train wreck, and donāt get me wrong - the lack of polish is pretty absurd here considering even low budget indie devs have made prettier games that run better on the Switch, hell even the WiiU. Itās a wonder Iāve only had one crash so far and only very minor visual bugs. That all said, Iām pleasantly surprised itās the most fun Iāve had with the series since gen 2, in spite of more glaring flaws.
To put into context, Iām sure I have here before, but I beat Sapphire and barely have much memory of it due to disappointment with it, barely touched Platinum, didnāt play much else til X/Y or Moon and couldnāt be bothered to complete those either. Sword showed some promise but ultimately I felt tricked with all the talk of more open areas just to be railroaded on linear paths anyways, and for all the good the story had it seemed to go nowhere interesting. I straight up skipped Arcues because all the design decisions seemed terrible, and the overall performance seemed awful. The fact that S/V is even worse somehow did not bode well for it, but for whatever reason I felt compelled to try it.
So there are still a lot of issues with this game for sure so far, but the training wheels being taken off(a couple hours in) definitely goes a long way to making it a far more enjoyable experience just by itself. Iāve heard some talk of whiners being butthurt about lack of scaling but I liken it to Fallout 3 or New Vegas especially where you had to actually think about how and where you travel. Enemies that scale to your level would not only make leveling pointless but also make the open ended nature moot if everything was generally safe to explore.
Speaking of I swear there must just be a lot of asshat contrarianās because Iāve also seen complaints about some of the music, Toby Fox in particularā¦are we talking the same guy? The one whose games are, if for nothing else, known for their incredible soundtracks? To me the stuff heās worked on here stand out even among the other tracks. Iāve got so tired of the overly upbeat music from games in between and long for more unique and genuine stuff.
Thereās plenty of variety to choose from in regards to pokemon, and now I love to make entire teams specific to each challenge, though itās getting a bit tiresome grinding now towards the last third of the game. I suppose if thereās one major aspect I donāt like itās the lack of dungeons or much else to preoccupy ourselves with, nothing to functionally make the towns all that different. The new team is good and down to earth a bit but itās just a shame so far that their bases are really just short mini games.
Well Iāve got a bunch of things on Steam and Switch sales, but really should just focus on one game at a time before the end of the year. Need to finish Dusk Diver 2 but also want to try out Evil West.
