So this is different.

Yeah, one thing I was really excited for when I switched to Itch was my ability to compose longform reviews. This was undoubtedly not the intention of the site, but innovation doesn't come from doing things the right way.

So before we talk about Violet, let's talk about Pokemon.

Here's the thing. This whole review is coming from the hardest of hard core a Pokemon fan can be. There are things in this game I care about that you won't, and there are things in this game you care about that don't concern me. Ultimately, I've drawn the conclusion that everyone wants such dramatically different things from Pokemon that it's impossible to make a Pokemon game that will make everyone happy.

And the last couple Pokemon games did not make me very happy.

You were alive in 2018, you know the deal. For the first time ever, half the Pokemon in existence weren't usable in Pokemon Sword and Shield. The games were an unpolished mess, the cut Pokemon and rigid 20 minute battle timer made competitive singles impossible, and they cost 50% more than the previous generation while sporting less features. Pokemon Sword and Shield are an easy contender for the worst Pokemon games, and when I played them at release, I was so disenfranchised that I ended up forming an ultimatum: if the next Pokemon games weren't good, they would be my last Pokemon games.

You guys remember The Tree?

So, the next Pokemon games were Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. At the time, I had blamed Game Freak for how poorly made SwSh ended up being, so when I heard a different studio would be developing BDSP, I wrongly assumed that this would be the games' salvation. But, of course, BDSP somehow managed to lower the bar even further down. We're digging up bedrock at this point.

So that was it, right? I had pretty much decided I was done with the series. It could no longer deliver what I wanted. And yet, there's this funny thing about Pokemon, where the most passionate fans like myself just can't really stay away. And so when Legends: Arceus dropped, even when I told myself I wouldn't get it, I ended up buying it on day one anyway on a whim.

And I loved it.

It wasn't perfect, but it was a great sign for the direction the series could be going. It had some frightening flaws, a lack of multiplayer battling, a CTB battle system ill suited for the mechanics of the series, and honestly if this was the direction the franchise was taking, I was definitely going to hop off the train. But then only a few months after the game came out, a funky little announcement got made. 

You're telling me the next Pokemon game is called Pokemon Violet?!

See, for context, I've been naming my character Violet in every Pokemon game, and by extension almost every other game after, for probably half my life now. It became such a part of my identity that it remained my username pretty much everywhere until I started dropping the pretenses and going by my full name. So while the name of the game really shouldn't mean a whole lot, to me this sort of felt like some kind of divine calling. As if to say "this one's for you, Violet." 

And this one was for me.

There's this funny thing about Pokemon Violet to be honest, I completely overhyped it for myself. I would jokingly claim that it's going to be "the most Sawyer game ever" all while knowing it likely would not meet my standards. As is Pokemon tradition, I avoided all spoilers, including any and all trailers, so I had very little to go off of, but every once in a while a new feature would grace my sight and it would prove the game to be more and more appealing to my personal preferences. The mascot legendary is a giant purple Daft Punk penis dragon. The main gimmick mechanic entails your Pokemon transforming into a crystal. There were themes of the distant past and future, and I even caught wind of leaks of "Cyborg Pokemon" appearing in the game. At this point I was starting to actually believe the hype I had formed out of a joke, so believe me when I say that Pokemon Violet had a lot to live up to.

Okay, now let's actually talk about the game.

The big elephant in the room with this game is that it's a buggy mess. And, like, I can't excuse that, but ultimately it means very little to me. To me, a game's worth isn't about how much perceived "effort" or "value" or even straight content is in the game. It's simply about how much positivity the game brings to me, personally, and in that definition Pokemon Violet made up for its price in the first week. 

For starters, let's look at the new Pokemon

Violet introduces all sorts of unique and weird Sawyer-y Pokemon!

This game has it all! Blocky Minecraft monsters made of salt, a split-evolution that looks like a Netnavi from Mega Man Battle Network, complete with arm cannons, a weird wiggly variant of Diglett... AND DUNSPARCE EVOLVES INTO A BIGGER DUNSPARCE. The quantity of new Pokemon that appealed to me was relatively small (barring the aforementioned cyborg Pokemon which I'll probably touch on in a moment) but the level to which they appealed to me was awesome. I typically bring a variety of fond old Pokemon with me on my adventures, but this time around the selection of appealing new Pokemon was so vast that I couldn't even bring myself to justify keeping a Sableye on my team! In my opinion, a Pokemon game doesn't need to introduce an all-star lineup of amazing Pokemon; it just needs to introduce enough that appeals to my personal niche tastes that I don't notice all the other unappealing ones in the same roster.

Next there's the actual gameplay.

This definitely could have been a worry of mine if I hadn't gotten to play Arceus first. I've never been a fan of open world games and fought tooth and nail against people insisting that an open world Pokemon game would be a good fit for the series, but after finally tasting it... I was 100% wrong. I'm running 0-2 on my hot takes right now after they got rid of random encounters!

Violet is a completely open world game. In order to access the final area and beat the game, you do have to meet a set of criteria, but the time and order that you do those things is completely and utterly optional. You can ignore every story quest until your party is level 100 if you want. You can catch every available Pokemon on the map, with very few roadblocks in your way demanding that you progress the story as intended. In practice, the game does a good job funneling you into its main quests by offering unique rewards to expect: the Gym Badges all allow you to control higher level Pokemon, so you'll find yourself compelled to them every few levels. The Titan Pokemon grant your mount new abilities to traverse the world, so when you want to explore, they feel like a priority. And the Team Star missions... admittedly didn't offer great incentives in my opinion, and ultimately I ended up doing the bulk of them all in one burst out of necessity.

But the fact that I had the option to do that was a boon. The game never explicitly forced me into doing something I wasn't in the mood for, so the sense of freedom was extremely literal. I played through the game alongside my two roommates, and while all three of us beat the game at a similar pace, we had dramatically different experiences through the choices we made for what order we wanted to encounter the story.

And lastly, let's talk about competitive.

Prepare for Jargon.

So, Violet added a ton of awesome features. The big ones lie mostly in the new Pokemon. As is seemingly tradition now, the game focuses a lot on giving the new Pokemon very unique gimmicks through abilities and moves. The aforementioned Dunsparce evolution is basically just a straight buff to Dunsparce, giving it actual stats to back up its unique ParaFlinch strategies. Toedscruel, the strange mushroom cousin of Tentacruel, sports powerful moves like Spore and Rapid Spin paired with a crazy 100 Speed. We have a ghost dog that deals more damage the more of your Pokemon are fainted, and we even have a 1 PP move that revives a Pokemon! The new status quo is crazy cool!

Furthermore, the quality of life changes are, as always, fantastic. Now you can Hyper Train at level 50, and BP no longer exists meaning that all relevant items for battle ready Pokemon are available through ordinary cash (or the new LP currency which is just a secondary form of cash, feels a bit redundant). Raids even drop Ability Capsules and Bottle Caps, so we're at the point now where all you need to do is keep playing Raids in order to get everything you need to compete.

Which is a nice segue into one of the biggest issues I have with the game.

Pokemon Violet, for all its strengths, fails to really improve on a lot of glaring flaws the games have had for a while now. The 20 minute battle timer that murdered the Singles format is still present without any option to turn it off, which pairs egregiously with the continued dead air of long pauses between actions in the game (such as when a Pokemon is burned, it plays the entire brief animation of them flinching from their burn, and only after this animation is complete will the game open an unskippable dialogue box telling you the burn hurt the Pokemon). IVs, a redundant feature that make Pokemon objectively stronger than others without any sense of customization, are still present in the game despite how they detract from it. Furthermore, there isn't even any way to set a Pokemon to 0 Speed IVs, which is a necessity for certain Pokemon in the official VGC format. Pokemon have also lost access to a plethora of moves, likely for balancing purposes, but this turns the already neutered Singles format into a slog of transferring Pokemon with obscure Egg Moves and TMs into future titles.

And worst of all, the dex cuts in this generation are really, really bad. Something around 300 out of the 900 Pokemon existing have returned, and among them, very few of my favourites survived. Can this truly be the most Sawyer Pokemon game if I can't even use Porygon-Z?

I made a list of something around my top 75 favourite Pokemon, and among them very few have survived. I mean, look at this! It's downright tragic!

Ultimately, with the Dex Cuts, the continued presence of IVs, and the battle timer remaining at 20 minutes, it makes me really not eager to compete in this generation. I desperately want to find a workaround to all this, but Showdown just doesn't have the charm that makes competitive battling so fun to me, and VGC can be painful to prepare a team for, especially knowing that the later formats will allow unrestricted Legendary Pokemon which makes building a team extremely limited and unfun.

But knowing me I'll just keep playing the damn games anyway!

I guess it's also probably worth touching on the story. It's fine. Passable for the most part. It has some highs, an excellent climax (as Pokemon games have been great at doing lately) but it's ultimately still just a Pokemon story. I've believed for a long time that a game like Pokemon cannot have a strong narrative, but a game with similar limitations, Final Fantasy XIV, manages to have one of the best stories in this generation of gaming despite sharing the qualities of a silent customizable protagonist and an unknowably customized set of abilities. Violet does put in an earnest effort though, with one of the rivals proving to have an extremely strong arc throughout the entire story. The game is close to, if not better than, my personal highest standard for a Pokemon story, which was Pokemon Sun and Moon.

Oh and the music is amazing, but what did you expect?

Pokemon music has always been good, but now that Toby Fox seems to be composing a variety of tracks, the OST has been cranked up to 11 with some fantastic battle tunes, including one of the coolest final boss themes in the series. Most of the music in this game is dynamic in nature as well, with the battle themes being tense remixes of the field themes, and the music even swelling between different instruments as you perform actions like crouching or riding your Pokemon. The music in this game is a treat, and while other tracks in the series remain my favourite, Violet has the most consistently strong soundtrack to date.

I think that's more or less all I have to say.

The game is janky for sure. I hadn't even touched on weirdness like the annoying NPC hitboxes or the local wireless just straight up not working. There are countless bugs, and they're being screamed to high heaven on the internet right now. And yet despite its flaws, I had an amazing time playing this game. Pokemon Violet was one of the strongest entries in the entire series for me, and I can only keep optimistic that future patches and DLC will remedy the issues I have with it.