Mostly Normal Monthly #0015, March 2023
A Quick Review of Pokémon Violet
Nothing Like a Due Date…
By Chris Stern
The Prince of Procrastination Logs On
Pokémon Violet fills me with contradiction. The game’s delightful new Pokémon designs (all three starters are just *chef’s kiss*), flavorful characters, and lively music all stand out as high points. I’ve caught over 300 little buds according to my Pokédex, and have completed 85% or so of the main story so far. The game’s three story lines provide a variety of rewards and types of challenge that freshen up the long-running series’ pacing in an interesting and satisfying way.
The three plot-lines, “Starfall Street,” “Victory Road,” and “Path of Legends,” are parsed up into nodes spread across Violet’s open-world map, and, barring perhaps some mechanical limitations (I don’t actually know this for sure), they seem to be approachable in almost any order. The only real set of guardrails/barriers would be the level of the Pokémon you’d face in battle. Early on I did a bit of a pseudo-sequence break, completing the 2nd gym before the 1st and the 4th before the 3rd. Now… these gyms aren’t numbered or restricted by having to be completed in sequence, but there was an obvious backslide in the challenge level for the second and fourth gym I challenged. At first this made me feel like I was getting away with something. As I approach the end of the game, I get the sense that I’d have preferred a more linear path and tight narrative thread, even if they kept the open world format for the game.
Nemona, your rival for the “Victory Road” story thread has a big personality, and roots for you throughout the most traditional plot. We’ve all heard this song a number of times at this point—earn 8 badges by toppling gym leaders in Pokémon battles to earn the right to challenge the Elite Four and take your place as the Champion. But Nemona also has a dark side… this rambunctious and cool-as-hell teen seems to have a *VORACIOUS* addiction to Pokémon battles. She loves them *THE MOST* and it is both cute and kinda a funny play on people prone to min-maxing these games (looking at myself here). The other characters you’ll meet in the game have similarly big personalities and fun designs. I am especially fond of the gym leaders throughout the game. They all have separate professions, from plain Jane businessman, to streaming sensation, to pastry chef. Gym leader is more of a title that comes along with duties to their community, including getting their butts kicked by yours truly.
I do feel the need to mention that the game runs pretty poorly at times. Normally I am not the type to notice this, so believe me when I say they must be dropping pretty damn badly for it to be something that gets on my nerves. There are some glitches, but GameFreak has put out a few patches so far, and my understanding is that it is much more stable than initial release. The area where the games performance actually does feel limiting is the draw distance and pop-in. I wish I had a little bit further line of sight on wild Pokémon, items, and areas to explore.
While I am suffering from some level of open-world fatigue at this point, I do think Pokémon Violet’s world design can be quite satisfying. The map does a good job of circling back on itself, and smaller features like caves, lakes, and mountains all feel unique and thoughtfully designed. The cave designs in particular almost call back to the 2d/overhead Pokémon games of yore—some of these areas really wrap around on themselves in delightfully knotty ways. You meet the game’s legendary cover-Pokémon really early on in the story, and it becomes your companion/vehicle for the whole game. Basically GameFreak said, “Yeah, we are Freaks, and you know what’s freaky? A Pokémon that’s also a motorcycle and glider and jet-ski.” And you know what, they’re right, it is freaky. But it also makes for some really rewarding traversal, and provides a great incentive to follow the “Path of Legends” quest line to earn all the different traversal mechanics.
Overall, I find myself on the knife’s edge. I am at risk of tipping to the side of full-boar Pokémaniac breeding a competitive team, but I also have less patience for the grind than ever, and more of a desire to play through games that have been piling up on my backlog. Plus… we’re less than two months away from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom which is just going to ruin my whole life from what I can tell (did you see that 10 minute gameplay reveal? Because… wow!). Despite my hangups on Violet’s open world formula, it still captured my heart and imagination. It just becomes hard to evaluate because that’s happened with nearly every Pokémon game released since the very beginning. Pokémon Violet definitely feels at home in that lineage, and pushes things further in the open-world direction many players have been begging for for a decade plus at this point.