Pokemon Scarlet and Violet
While yes, we have reached a point in the lifecycle of the Nintendo Switch where the handheld console is roughly two full generations of tech behind its rivals at PlayStation and Xbox, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet’s recent technical problems can only partially be blamed on the aging hardware .
In reality, most of this falls on Game Freak, the stewards of Pokemon who have not figured out how to maximize the limited power of the Switch for the open world of Scarlet and Violet, and seem to be on too short of a development cycle for new games to really give them the care they deserve.
Various, technically broken aspects of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet have been going viral all weekend, though separately, a posting showing the difference between Xenoblade’s open world on the Switch and Scarlet and Violet is specifically striking:
Past that, here’s an animation of a character eating food in Scarlet and Violet, which is not a bug, just literally how it looks:
The bugs themselves, are…hilarious:
Not sure what exactly happened here:
Game Freak also appears to be inventing new bugs the likes of which have never been seen:
And then there’s the not-so-funny issue of the game just performing terribly in many instances with enormous frame drops, pop-in and other issues:
While most of the community is not a fan of the state of how the game launched, there are the usual Game Freak apologists saying that it’s their first true open world mainline game and they need some slack, but at this point, this is the most profitable video game franchise in history. There needs to be much, much more investment and care given to it. The game is already reviewing as the lowest scored mainline entry in the franchise, and Pokemon may lose its iron grip on the industry if Game Freak does not get a better handle on things.
The general consensus is that the game is, at its core, fun, but these technical limitations are so off-putting that it can sink the entire experience. While yes, it probably is is time for Nintendo to invest in some more powerful hardware, given that the Switch is five years old and hasn’t gotten so much as a single performance upgrade, many other series have done much better work on the Switch, and in this case, most of this falls on Game Freak directly. Hopefully they’re taking this to heart.
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