I wasn’t planning to talk about this one this soon, but I had been playing it and… well, read on…
So, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are the most recently released games in the ridiculously popular Pokémon series, and they released to a fair bit of shouting from the community. Their main point of contention? Uh, well, one of their main points of contention? Horrendous visuals.
Now, I’m certainly not a person who cares all that much about graphics. My favorite three games as of right now are Minecraft, Team Fortress 2, and The Binding of Isaac… three games certainly not renowned for their advances in graphical quality (at least not in the past decade in TF2’s case). HOWEVER…
During my playthrough of Pokémon Scarlet, I have seen some genuinely atrocious graphical issues that should NOT be present in a game of this caliber. At first, it was an occasionally low frame rate coupled with some… questionable… texturing, but nothing too insane. Overall the game still functioned fine and felt like a Pokémon game. Just a few short hours in though, my opinion changed wildly.
I found my immersion utterly shattered. The most glaring examples of which began in the desert area. For starters, the desert has sandstorms. Many, many sandstorms. Normally they aren’t much of a problem, but if you walk towards the town in the sandstorm (something you’ll probably do a few times at least), the game’s frame rate drops to SUB TWENTY.
In that same desert, I counted multiple instances of camera angles when talking to battle NPCs where your viewpoint glitches through the floor and into the void, showcasing the lovely expanse of nothingness underneath, and a few NPCs whose hair just clips into their faces when they’re performing very basic movements.
Now let’s talk about the texturing. I think some of the textures they used would look completely fine if used on something smaller. I mean, look at the stone texture used here:
Image Source: gamerguides.com
Can you see the seams where the texture repeats? Here, let me highlight it:
I may be imagining the horizontal line, but the vertical is there plain as day. The sand just looks bland. Of course, sand is bland, but this is a special brand of bland that really makes the land of sand look like it was matted down by hand.
Sorry, rhyme demon contained.
The desert I feel is one of the biggest offenders so far, but the game still has plenty of time to hit me with a real sucker punch. There’s quite a bit of broken immersion in other aspects of the game, such as the abysmally low draw/render distance for the overworld Pokémon, to the point that if you’re moving along fast enough, you’ll almost be encountering Pokémon you didn’t know were even there.
I really could go on for hours, but I don’t want to dog on this game any more than it has already been dogged on… even if it might deserve it… Even so, I probably won’t drop it. I’m a slave to the Pokémon Company after all.