Pokémon Violet Is The Worst Game That I

The discourse around Pokémon games has soured very significantly during the Nintendo Switch era. Whether it’s the fact that games no longer include the full list of creatures that have been created over the past 28 years or the disappointing visual quality, there’s plenty that people love to criticize about the newer games in the series.

But through it all, I’ve remained a passionate fan of the franchise, buying all the main series titles on the Switch. Most recently, I’ve been playing Pokémon Purple as I returned to play the recently-released DLC, and I can see a ton of ambition in this game. But while the concept is good, the execution is so bad in so many ways that it’s almost funny.

Why does it look like this?

These textures look like a Nintendo 64 game

First off, let me just say I’m not usually someone who cares about graphics very much. My primary gaming platform is a Nintendo Switch, after all, I think that’s a given. But Pokémon Purple isn’t just a game hamstrung by the hardware it’s on — it just looks bad. The best example is looking at any mountain in the distance. When flying over the game’s world, if you look at a cliffside, you’ll be met with an image similar to what you see above, and it’s kind of hilarious. And in general, the world just feels barren and artificial because of the low polygon count and low-resolution textures.

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The world of Pokémon Purple is very large, yes, but there’s no way you can justify having textures that look like this and such a low polygonal count. This legitimately feels like playing a game on the Nintendo 64 or something. I know it’s not actually as bad as a Nintendo 64, but seriously, how can it be 2024 (2022 when the game initially launched) and it’s still apt to compare it to a console released in 1996? It’s just baffling that this made it into a $60 game.

Something else that looks very jarring is any part of the world that has motion in the distance. When you’re close to objects, they run at their proper framerate, sure, but moving just a little bit further way cuts that framerate in half, and when the game runs at 30FPS (at best) that difference is very noticeable. It doesn’t take that long for these animations to play at like 3FPS, which looks more like stop-motion animation than anything.

One thing that looks fantastic in this game are the Pokémon themselves. When you look at each creature up close, they all have beautiful textures and models, you can see scales and metallic effects in ways we’ve never seen in a Pokémon game. But as soon as you move the camera away a little bit, those models are replaced by significantly worse versions to ensure the game runs (somewhat) smoothly. The best example is your ride Pokémon, Miraidon, which has two wheels as part of its body. But moving the camera away just a bit, those wheels no longer look round at all.

Yes, the Nintendo Switch isn’t powerful, but some of the best Switch games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom and tell me if you find anything nearly as jarring as this. Even if you get some examples, I can guarantee you’ll see them nowhere near as often, whereas they’re basically a constant in Pokémon Purple.

What’s up with this performance?

All those visual sacrifices aren’t enough

The sacrifices Pokémon Purple makes to try and run smoothly on the Switch are extremely aggressive, and you might think that at least ensures the game does run smoothly most of the time. But alas, despite targeting 30 frames per second, Pokémon Purple runs terribly far too often.

Flying over certain parts of the world causes the framerate to slow down to a crawl to the point where it feels like you’re watching the game in slow motion. It’s really strange, but it happens more often than you’d think. Just check out the clip below for an example, though it looked worse in real time than the recorded video shows.

But if you think that’s not bad enough, it gets worse. Pokémon Purple seems to hog so many resources on the Switch that everything else slows down, too. If I try to record a video clip of the game, it takes far longer than most other Switch games do to actually save. Saving a 30-second clip sometimes takes almost as long as those 30 seconds, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen. And if you want to go to the Switch’s gallery to check out that clip, that takes a while to load, too.

It gets better, though. At one point, I was playing a game while downloading a demo from the Nintendo eShop in the background, and here’s what happened:

Yes, that’s the game taking 30 seconds (or more) to load the NPCs on the map. You can see their speech bubbles floating, but the models just aren’t there. This caught me completely by surprise, which is why you can see me turning around suddenly near the start of the video, as I spotted the speech bubbles coming out of the ground.

Even basic parts of the game run poorly. Pokémon sprites in boxes take a couple of seconds to load despite being very low-resolution icons. The same goes for the icons shown in the Pokédex. It just feels like this game is holding on by a thread most of the time.

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Making an open-world game isn’t easy

You need more than just vast areas

Games are complicated pieces of software, and while it’s easy to judge from the outside, open-world titles like Tears of the Kingdom take an insurmountable amount of effort to deliver in a state that works as well as it does. Pokémon Purple has the vision for an open-world game, and honestly, it’s super fun. I loved exploring the regions available in the base game and the DLC, and for the most part, it felt great to have a world of Pokémon to do whatever I want in.

But there are a few things that just make it seem like not enough care was put into this game to make it what it was supposed to be. For example, I’ve had a few occasions where my ride Pokémon can’t land. Basically, it’s just floating above the ground because the floor below it isn’t flat enough to be recognized as the ground, so the game eventually times out and resets my position.

Obviously, it’s hard to consider all the millions of variables that go into an open world game, but you have to put in that effort if you’re going to make a like this. Situations like this shouldn’t happen during a normal playthrough, but they do here, and it’s just unfortunate. That’s to say nothing of the times I’ve run into invisible Pokémon inside walls or even had them stay invisible during a battle.

Another mistake this game makes is that yes, you can go almost anywhere, but the game doesn’t adapt to your choices at all. You can go to the last gym in the game first, but it’s still the last gym, so you;re going to have an incredibly hard time winning that fight. And then the rest of the game will feel like nothing because all the remaining gyms are weaker than the first one you played. The game needs to adapt to the level of your Pokémon in order for the open-world concept to work as intended.

I still love Pokémon Purple

All its flaws can’t ruin the fun

Even with everything this game gets wrong, though, Pokémon Purple is great, and I’ve had a ton of fun playing it. It’s not my favorite in the series (Pokémon Legends: Arceus still has that title), but it’s up there.

For one thing, while the execution is flawed, the ambition for an open-world Pokémon game is still here, and it’s just fun. This series has been with me for a very long time, and to have a world where I can roam around freely, climb up mountains, and surf the seas almost completely uninterrupted and find Pokémon in all those locations without having to be surprised by random battles… it’s great. It’s the kind of immersion I want in a Pokémon game, and something I think many fans have been wanting for a long time. It also learns some important things from Pokémon Legendslike being able to initiate a battle by throwing a Poké Ball at the wild Pokémon yourself, which can get you an advantage if you catch them off guard.

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The game also does a lot to improve certain parts of the franchise to make them less tedious. You can breed Pokémon almost anywhere now, you can easily remember old moves through the menus rather than travel to a specific place, and the idea to have online cooperative multiplayer is awesome, and executed a bit better than it was in Pokémon Sword and Shieldin my opinion. And like I said before, the character models in this game look great, so in the instances where the game isn’t freaking out, it’s really nice to look at them up close and see the best representation of these designs yet.

Just give developers more time

The Pokémon Company recently announced Pokémon Legends: Z-A with a release window of 2025, and it’s one of the few times you’ll see such widespread celebration that a game is coming out later than expected. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are turning two years old this year, and there’s no main series title planned for 2024, plus 2023 only had DLC being released, so it feels like the company is actually taking some time to breathe now. That’s a good thing.

Pokémon games have been released an an almost annual basis, and remember, three of them launched between November 2021 and November 2022, with all of them being criticized for various reasons. It’s felt like the developers are being stretched thin year after year to keep up with an arbitrary release cadence, so to see that the next game in the series isn’t coming any time soon is actually great news, and even fans know that.

Hopefully, this 2025 release window doesn’t turn out to be January, and the company isn’t afraid to really take the time to polish it up. If it can build on the foundation of the current games while polishing things up, it can only be a great time.