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pokémon violet

I originally published this on a Wordpress blog called Blocker Trap on February 9, 2023. It has been only minorly edited for clarity.

Before I talk about this game, let me start with a little bit of my own history with the series. Like a lot of folks, I was all in on the Pokémon craze when Red/Blue dropped. I’ve shed a lot of relics of old-school gaming as I’ve gotten older, but one of the oldest and most sentimental things I still have is a clear Play It Loud! Game Boy that’s covered in stickers that came out of the Pokémon Official Nintendo Players’ Guide. My brother and I “drafted” the stickers, each taking one until there was no more room for any more on there.

Certified Pokéfreak seven days a week

I didn’t follow the franchise for a while afterward, but I decided to try to get back into it during the fourth generation. This was about the time when the series was at peak grindage, and some of the strategies required to find certain Pokémon in those games remain among the most byzantine in the franchise to this day. It felt like Pokémon had gotten really far up its own butt while I had been away from it. I put it down for good after two gyms, about which I remember absolutely nothing.

I gave it another chance not long after I got a 3DS and XY came out, and this time it stuck. Gen VI is my gen. As far as Pokémon goes, I’ll always have the softest spot for those games. I loved the region, I loved the new Pokémon, and I loved the robust dress-up options for Serena.[1] Ever since X/Y got its hooks in me, I’ve felt obligated to at least check out every mainline Pokémon game since, and I’ve enjoyed most of them enough to see them through to some kind of satisfying endpoint. I missed out on a lot from the early days, but the grind of the early generations is still fresh in my mind from semi-recently running Red/Blue through a randomizer, so going back to the GBC/GBA/DS days is not necessarily off the table like it might be for someone who came in once the mechanics had already been reasonably streamlined.

I went with Violet because it had a cooler box legendary, but after I realized I was going to be spending the whole game in the academy uniform and seeing what the ones in Scarlet looked like, I kind of wished I’d gotten Scarlet. Not enough for real buyer’s remorse, though.

Anyway, that’s about all the contextualization for my own experience I can muster. Since I’m doing a comprehensive write-up on what I thought of most everything in the game, there’ll be massive spoilers throughout the remainder of this, so if you haven’t played or finished the game and are interested in doing so, maybe hold off on reading it until you have.

the story

There are three distinct story arcs that run concurrently, which dovetail into one final arc once you’ve completed all of them. The first is the going concern of every Pokémon game, which is to defeat all eight gym leaders, earn their badges, and then take on the Elite Four and the Champion to become the very best like no one ever was. The second involves this generation’s Team (as in Rocket, Galactic, Plasma, et al.), which is called Team Star. Team Star comprises people who got bullied at the Academy, then decided to turn the tables on them, which worked out pretty well—too well, actually, because people started thinking Team Star were the bullies, and the administration made things worse by tampering with records, so now the founder of Team Star wants to disband the group, which can only be done by defeating each of the five leaders, who will be totally fine with it because they have a moral code that they won’t arbitrarily decide not to honor for any reason. And in the third, you team up with a guy named Arven after you’re saved from a Houndoom by a mysterious legendary Pokémon in his care that takes a liking to you. Arven is on a quest to find and defeat the five Titans of Paldea so that he can heal his aging Mabosstiff using the properties of mysterious plants known as Herba Mystica, and he suspects they might be able to do the same for the injured __raidon (Koraidon in Scarlet, Miraidon in Violet).

Something that’s really fascinating about the road to becoming a champion1 in this game is that it’s not the sole driving force of your quest like it is in other Pokémon games. It isn’t the be-all-end-all. It’s just one facet of a bigger journey. The unfortunate side of that is that it leads to the opponents on the allegedly tougher end of that quest maybe not providing as much of a challenge as they should.

I found Team Star a fascinating addition to Pokémon’s venerable “Team ___” pantheon, if a messy one. Their history of being bullied and then becoming the bullies, if more in terms of perception than actual fact, was told really well, and I really liked the wrinkle of the academy administration’s irresponsible actions making things even worse. Sadly, it rings all too true to the times we live in that oppressed people’s responses to their oppression is often considered as wrong as the original act of oppression itself. Unfortunately, though the personalities of Team Star were vivid and well limned, they kind of clashed against each other instead of complementing each other, and the cast was a little overstuffed to give the arc the space it needed to breathe. The captains of the teams also sometimes felt like they were only being used to build up to the person the game really cares about, which is their leader Cassiopeia/Penny.

For me, the comparison Team Star most immediately invites is to Team Skull from Sun/Moon: a ragtag bunch of misfits rallying around a strong leader (and former victim of abuse) who cared about them more than anyone in the establishment ever did. The only major difference as far as I can see is that Penny isn’t working for the bad guys. So after Team Yell just being a bunch of soccer hooligans following their favorite person around, this reads to me like sort of a course correction, going from something kind of facile back to an approach that worked really well. Pokémon is generally pretty decent at exploring the long-term ripple effects of trauma and abuse, creating some evocative and memorable characters from that mold, so I’m always down for them to do another story arc about it. This isn’t even their only one in this game, either.

While we’re talking about Team Star, I’ll give it up to Eri for putting up the single toughest fight in the game with her custom Revavroom. Shift Gear, Combat Torque, and Stamina were a deadly one-two-three punch that just kept building and building on each other. My team was well above hers in levels (about five more), but she came within one hit of making me black out. The only reason I didn’t was because she went with a not-very-effective move that gave me an in for the win, and I wouldn’t have even managed that had I not spent a turn using a Max Revive on the Pokémon who ultimately sealed the deal. Rough stuff.

I kind of thought at first that Arven’s arc was going in a sort of Shadow of the Colossus direction. Like, you end up defeating all these Titans for their Herba Mystica and it ends up actually being devastating to the ecosystem or something. Not so much. I can’t hate any character who loves sandwiches as much as Arven does. I don’t remember who said it, but I caught wind of someone suggesting that Arven was sort of like an updated Brock, and I didn’t immediately violently reject that possibility, so there might be something to it.

If you asked me who the best-developed character in the game is, there’s a good chance I’d hand it to Arven. It’s easy to see why he resents __raidon so much in the early going, because it’s this gigantic reminder of the work his parent has prioritized over giving him a good childhood, and every time it pops out of a ball during a conversation or eats someone else’s sandwich, he has to start back from square one on building up his good mood. So he pours everything into this sad ancient arthritic cataract-ridden woofed-out Mabosstiff and hoping against all odds that this Herba Mystica thing works, and you wind up hoping it does too, partly so that this kid will have just a little more time with someone who actually loves him, and also because you’re a little scared to find out what he might do if he loses that Mabosstiff, that one thread he’s hanging onto.

And with the professor being either Arven’s mom or dad, depending on which version you’re playing, I have to give Game Freak real props, because I can’t remember them ever going so far to make a professor such a complete garbage person as they did with Sada/Turo, and I have to say, I’m here for it. Making the professor a parent is already fairly novel compared to most Pokémon games. Then they make them a neglectful parent, which adds a potent extra layer. Then when you really find out what’s going on in Area Zero and the psychotic lengths they were willing to go to in order to keep anyone from shutting their dream down, that right there? That is pure chef’s kiss. The closest to “total dumpster fire” I can remember a professor reaching before this is “I don’t know if they meant to make him look this dumb and bad, but maybe they did,” when they had Sycamore handwave Lysandre’s eco-fash plan for total Pokémon genocide as just him being really passionate and hard for us plebeian smooth-brains to understand. If there are Pokémon games with professors that were complicit in war crimes or genocide or world destruction, those might be the ones I missed during the lean years. But all I’m saying is I would definitely be down for more trash professors in future installments.

the open world

Apologies to David Foster Wallace, but as much as I enjoyed it, Pokémon Violet is a supposedly fun thing that I don’t know if I could ever do again, and much of that is due to how overwhelming I found the size of the world. I don’t play a lot of AAA open-world games, so I’m not used to gigantic maps that let you go anywhere and do anything any time you want. I don’t really know what to do with myself when a game doesn’t give me structured objectives. That said, it was nice to be able to go where I wanted without being gated off by a part of the story I hadn’t completed yet. If I wanted to dip my toe in an area with level 50 Pokémon when my highest was 20, it would let me. Sometimes a few bruises are the best way to learn.

I beat the Bug-type gym first, which you’re pretty aggressively shoved toward so you can’t hardly not do it first, but after that, your journey can go completely off the rails, and mine did. I didn’t do it on purpose, but after the Bug gym, I got off the “main” path and never looked back. The table below shows what a hash I made of the prescribed gym order.

Brassius being the seventh gym leader I took on was especially wild. I think my Pokémon’s levels were in the mid-60s around then. At that point it just felt like bullying.

I didn’t realize until after the final gym that I could have had a flying taxi service take me places instantly without having to travel to them on foot or on Miraidon. This would have saved me a lot of time and grief in more than a few instances. However, it probably kept me more than properly leveled to do things that way, so I can’t be too mad about it. Also, I think I learned a lot from contending with the lay of the land exclusively on its terms. Since I don’t play open-world games basically ever, it was nice to be able to ease myself into the scope of them in a milieu I’m already predisposed to enjoying (i.e. Pokémon questing). It was also fun beating the Titans and gradually unlocking new abilities for Miraidon that increased my ability to navigate the landscape. By the time I learned about flying taxis, I could already scale 90° surfaces on my legendary Uber, so it was more entertaining to cross entire mountain ranges in a beeline than let the game handle it in one boring fade to black.

the gimmick

Since Gen VI (XY and Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire), each generation of Pokémon games has had its own marquee gimmick that makes a Pokémon more powerful for the duration of a match. In Scarlet and Violet, that gimmick is called Terastallization. Terastallized Pokémon take on a crystalline appearance and have a giant symbol on their head that communicates their Tera type. Most Pokémon you catch in the wild just have whatever type they are (or one of their two) as their Tera type, but you’ll occasionally see a Terastamon milling around and you’ll have to go fight it to see what its Tera type is.

I liked the wild Terastallizer fights because they got me to catch more Pokémon than I usually do in a quest. I’m definitely not a “gotta catch ’em all” type of person. Sometimes I’m lucky if I manage double-digit catches in a game; I generally know what I want my party to look like and I only set out to catch those and maybe the box legendary. But in Violet, I would usually throw at least a few balls at anything that piqued my curiosity, like, say, a Sandygast with a Grass Tera type. The nature of how Terastallized wild fights works also makes catching them easy; once they reach red health, their Terastal skin shatters and they go back to being their regular kind, and that leaves them with low enough health that all you have to do is toss a few balls of your choice at them, and Bob’s your uncle. I never found myself wishing I had a Pokémon that knew False Swipe. I wasn’t even sure if it was a TM in this game until I got handed some in the postgame.

Gym leaders always Terastallize their final Pokémon, as do the Elite Four and some people you fight recurrently throughout the game (e.g., your rival Nemona). I don’t think they used Terastallization very cleverly or interestingly in the gym battles for the most part. For their final Pokémon, each gym leader brings out a Pokémon that doesn’t appear to mesh with that gym’s theme, but then they Terastallize it into the type that matches that gym, so they end up TeChNiCaLLy having all Pokémon of their gym’s type in their party. You fall for it once, maybe twice, then you remember it’s a trick and to just keep rolling with whatever Pokémon has already steamrolled everyone else in the fight up to this point. The only time it was used really well was in the electric gym, when Iono had a Mismagius with an Electric Tera type, effectively causing it to have no weaknesses since its levitating body prevented it from being hit by Ground-type attacks. But as you can see from the handy-dandy table above, I was way overleveled for that gym, so it didn’t matter too much.

Terastallization kind of ties into the story, but not until much later on, and once you figure out what the deal with it is, you might start to wonder if they should really be allowing the use of Tera Orbs. There are more than a few things characters in this game don’t spend too much time thinking critically about that would probably cause Paldean society to come apart at the seams if literally anyone had the guts to start asking some hard questions, and the ethics of Tera Orb sourcing is one of them. I feel like Geeta has a lot to do with that. We’ll talk more about her later though.

the rival

Believe it or not, sometimes, legitimately, yes

Ever since Game Freak broke the mold on their first try with Gary Oak, Pokémon has had trouble conjuring up interesting rivals. Since I’ve returned to consistently playing new Pokémon releases, we’ve had:

Nemona is the rival in Scarlet and Violet, and I think the ninth time might be the charm. She’s already achieved the rank of champion when you meet her, so she has no reason to compete against you. She genuinely just wants a friend who can rise to her level. Her whole thing is hyping you up and making sure you get to a place where you and she can be true equals on the battlefield. She’s genuinely kind, and not in like an “it’s Pokémon, everyone who’s not explicitly evil is nice to each other” way. I also like how sometimes she completely misses certain nuances and interpersonal dynamics because she’s so excitable. She means well.

She’s no slouch in the battle department, either. She caught me off guard once because I forgot to Terastallize when she brought Quaquaval out. Usually that’s not a huge deal, but she kept spamming Aqua Step and kept raising its speed, and when I finally got her HP low, Torrent raised Aqua Step’s power, so my team of mostly tanks was at a huge disadvantage after just one small slip-up. I’m kind of lucky I made it out of that one alive.

I can see how some people might find her personality overbearing or “a little much”, but I thought they nailed it with her. You can very plausibly interpret her as having a crush on your character, and I’d even accept an interpretation that went as far as to ascribe non-violent yandere tendencies to her, but it’s not something I care to dwell on for too long at any given stretch.

the gym leaders

Sadly, most of the gym leaders didn’t leave much of an impression on me. Part of it is that it’s so easy to do them wildly out of order that you miss out on being able to tie their personality to their sense of place and tempo within the parameters of the usual road-to-the-Elite-Four quest. Another part of it is simply how bland most of them are.

The major exception is Larry. Larry is boring, but on purpose, which is crucial to how great he is. He is basically "what if Fred Stoller was a gym leader". At first, he kind of gave me vibes reminiscent of Nanu from Sun/Moon, but the drab gray aesthetic is about as far as the comparison reaches. Larry is a mess and I love him. We must protect Larry. He is precious.

You have two options: you can either think Larry is the best gym leader, or you can be wrong.

Iono was also a fun one. It was cool to see the embrace of streaming culture, and it was funny seeing her slip up and reveal she cares more about views than fans. It’s so wild to think how far technology has come since Red/Blue. It would barely have been possible to imagine a gym leader like Iono 25 years ago. YouTube wasn’t even around for the first three generations of Pokémon. Chew on that for a while. Also in the division of cool performers who were also fun to battle was Ryme. The double battles were a nice way to shake things up. More of the gym battles could have used something like that.

Ice gyms usually get the short end of the stick to begin with, but they really half-assed Grusha’s. It’s out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing, and I was surprised by how affronted I was by his attitude. Grusha acts like he’d rather be anywhere other than having a battle with you, which drove home for me how surprisingly important it is that every character in these games buys into how awesome Pokémon and battling and raising them and making them the fulcrum of absolutely every aspect of society are. Occasionally while I’m playing a Pokémon game, it occurs to me, “Good grief, is the brain of every single person on this planet consumed at all times with meeting the needs of either their Pokémon or someone else’s?” But it has to be that way for the world to work. I’ve long thought that an intriguing satirical take on Pokémon would be to make a game where either you play as someone who has not bought into monster raising the way the rest of civilization has and how you cope with that, or you’re on a quest to find that person and try to convince them to join the party. Unfortunately, I don’t have the technical knowledge or the wherewithal to make something like that come to fruition. But it’s something I’d love to see someday.

Each gym battle is preceded by a test you must pass before you can see the gym leader. These were mostly a waste of time. Just put anywhere from two to six trainers in front of the gym leader and let me take them on in a straight line. I don’t want to do quick-time events or rap battles.

The gym battles might have had a little more crunch if they had scaled with your level. I don’t know why they didn’t do this, especially because Nemona’s battles with you do. It would have been cool if fighting Brassius second and fighting him seventh, for example, were two completely different experiences, except from the standpoint of his level and team, not yours.

After the end credits, one of the postgame quests is to go back around to the gyms and do inspections on La Primera’s behalf, making sure they’re still up to snuff. A few are afraid they could get relieved of gym leader duty if they don’t pass muster, but there’s never any actual threat of that. I don’t think Pokémon really has time for that, but you have to admit it would be kind of wild if they left the firing up to you, and sometimes it resulted in a better fit for the role stepping in, and sometimes a worse one. Also, you could talk to the fired gym leaders afterward and see how they’re coping, like if they’re miserable now or if it ended up being a blessing in disguise because it freed them up to pursue something else they love. This sounds like an entire game all by itself.

Alas, the postgame versions of the battles aren’t much different than before. They have some different Pokémon and they’re at a much higher level now, but the Terastal climax is the same as when you fought them the first time, so this postgame bit doesn’t really bring anything new or intriguing to the table. The funniest part of them is how reactions range from bemused to annoyed that Geeta is making a kid do her dirty work.

the elite four + champion

For some folks, Pokémon games live and die on how strong or mediocre their Elite Four + Champion are. If you’re one of those people, you probably were/will be disappointed with Scarlet and/or Violet. I rolled through all of them without significant trouble. Every now and then one would trip me up for a second with an off-type move that happened to be a super-effective ‘nard punch, but I was overleveled enough to absorb surprises like that.

One of the Elite Four is a literal toddler. I have no idea why they did this. I can accept like Clemont or Sophocles, but I draw some kind of line at being asked to believe an actual baby is one of the top Pokémon trainers on an entire continent. I’ll let it go, however, because Larry is also one of the Elite Four. That’s right, our precious boy Larry makes an encore performance. This game knows how good Larry is. This game knows Larry is the best. They are correct in assessing this.

We’re … we’re all just … going along with this? No one has any issue with this? Seriously, just me?

Geeta/La Primera is more intriguing as a person than as a champion. In fact, she’s downright lousy as a champion. Kingambit would make more sense as her final Pokémon, since its Supreme Overlord ability would give it five Pokémon to draw strength from instead of two, and her final Pokémon, Glimmora, would make much more sense as the first Pokémon she sent out, since it’s best used in a trap-setting capacity with Toxic Debris. And while I appreciate the Gen VI love in her team, it’s wasted on two mid mons, Gogoat and Avalugg. I thought it was bad when Leon ran around bragging about his Charizard like no one in Galar had ever heard of rock types, but Geeta’s team is just pitiful.

It’s interesting to me that they made her unlikable in the specific way that they did. She’s only polite in a very superficial way. No one seems to actually like her. All the gym leaders think it’s weird that she palmed her inspections off on a kid (a very talented one, to be sure, but still). According to Larry, she docks his pay if she catches him lollygagging. And while having Glimmora in the Terastal slot is baffling from a tactical perspective, it makes more sense if you look at it as someone wanting to flaunt their privilege. Since Glimmora only shows up in Area Zero, making it her ace makes it look like a status thing, like, “Look at me, I’m one of the few people on the continent who’s allowed to go down into the crater. My team should reflect that in the gaudiest way possible.” So I think Geeta’s kind of a trash person, but in a way that rings true to how society is currently divided, where exactly half of everyone would be like “if you did your research you would realize she’s hot garbage” and the other half would be like “no way she’s awesome and you sound totally triggered”. She makes for a very meaty character study. I like that in a Pokémon character.

One shoe I was waiting on to drop that never did was that no one in this game ever used a Full Restore on their Pokémon. Pokémon games are consistently getting easier over time, which in some ways makes sense as it becomes less tenable to cram every single Pokémon ever created into one single game and they become more about their stories and character arcs than about raising monsters, but that nevertheless feels like a major threshold being crossed. It’s similar to the gradual journey of the Exp. Share from “late-game item that isn’t worth the hassle” to “built-in game mechanic”, but there’s something more subtly insidious about this development. I felt like I needed to say something whenever it didn’t happen. “Say, y’know, I didn’t OHKO your guy this time, so this would, uh, this would probably be a great time to heal, you think? … No? Not gonna? All right, your funeral, I guess…”

the glitches

This is the bit everyone was all up in arms about in the days immediately following Gen IX’s release. People say a product this buggy doesn’t deserve your money, and that if you vote with your wallet in favor of a product that doesn’t even rise the level of mediocrity, you’re part of the problem. I don’t think it’s very defensible to release a product in the less-than-optimal condition the final build of this game is in, mainly because it signals to corporations that they can keep getting away with it going forward, and it sets a precedent that will only make the gulf between how much you pay for a game and how broken that game is at release wider and wider as time goes on. That said, two points: 1) that brokenness as it manifests in this particular game rarely yanked me out of my immersion while I was playing, and 2) I suspect the developers were forced into a choice between technical optimization and strong story/characters, and they chose the latter. If they had all the time they needed, they would make it perfect. But greedy executives don’t care about artistry, and there’s no way they’ll willingly miss a Christmas release if they can throw enough dev crunch at the problem. So ultimately, I guess it is at least kind of problematic that I bought the game anyway. All I can say for myself is that I was lured in by the siren song of Pokémon. If it was a lesser franchise, I might not have gone for it, but who can say. I offer no excuses, only facts.

Personally, the most noticeable jank I saw came from the frame rate, with NPCs that are far away moving at what often looks like two frames a second. But I found that more amusing than offensive. The game did have a visibly hard time handling light effects in certain situations, most notably when you fight a Terastallized Pokémon at night. My game crashed exactly one (1) time, in the middle of Levincia, and I lost no progress because I had just saved over at the Pokémon Center. I’ve never really run into glitches in games, and if I have, I must not find them very memorable. I must just not have much of a base for what to look for here.

Past an initial eye-catching, I don’t generally give much notice to how a game looks, so I can’t speak authoritatively on whether the 3D models were good in this situation or bad in that one. I only care that it pleases me on a gameplay and sometimes story level. Pokémon Violet achieved that, so I was able to pretty easily compartmentalize whatever negative feelings I might have had about textures or pop-in or whatever. I hate knowing corporate executives will interpet my dollar vote as a signed permission slip to release games before they’re fully cooked if it helps fatten their bottom line, but except in the most glaring instances, it honestly never looked that bad to me. Shrug.

the side stuff

Every Pokémon game of at least semi-recent vintage has a ton of things you can do on the side that you don’t have to do. And if you aren’t required to do them, then by God I don’t. More power to the people who like to indulge in those parts, but I’m not one of them. I’m not into the competitive scene at all and I don’t care about anything that doesn’t immediately make one or more of my Pokémon better at pushing other Pokémon’s shit in. I am the mono-green deck of Pokémon trainers. (Or maybe mono-red.)

I absolutely could not have cared less about making sandwiches (unless it was Arven doing it for me) or visiting restaurants. I’m guessing it helps for Tera Raids. It had no impact on my completion of the main story, though.

I never once attended a class at the academy, because why on earth would you play a video game just to go to school, especially if you're currently in school (or, like me, you work at one). I suppose it would have deepened the lore to sit through a few of them and listen to some fun facts about Paldea, but I don’t think it would have been interesting enough to offset the time I spent not being out in the world completing my quest. Director Clavell is onto something with that whole learning-by-doing thing. I also didn’t do any of the friendship quests with the academy staff.

I did as much fashion stuff as I could, but the game doesn’t let you ditch the school uniform, so I had to settle for everything around it. I think I made do well enough, but that uniform was just a millstone around my neck (or I guess midsection).

I made it through almost the entire game without learning what Tera Shards do, which probably would have helped me make a more dynamic party, but I made do just fine.

other stuff that didn't fit anywhere above this

overall

In summation, Pokémon Violet isn’t too bad. Better than Sword/Shield, at any rate, which I abandoned after the fourth gym out of sheer boredom and significant irritation with multiple characters. I put about 45 hours into it, choosing to call it wrapped after the Academy Ace tournament, but I’ve since learned that Penny, Nemona, and Arven all have arcs that need tying up, so I’ll probably do that at some point, but for now I’m ready to move on to something else. It’s my favorite since XY, but doesn’t come close to surpassing it. It’s pretty good. 💘

1 Yes, a, not the. One neat difference between Paldea and other regions is that Paldea doesn’t merely recognize one single champion, but instead grants anyone who beats the Elite Four + Champion that rank.

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